Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Lucinda France-Hayhurst, Daniel Baird, Jennifer Moule.
Language is perhaps the most important thing a human can have in its fight to remain individual but what happens when the boundaries become blurred and tainted when one particular person starts to try and sound as if they appealing to all, the loss of voice, the mark of individuality becomes lost and in that danger and even evil can be seen to take root.
Washing Line Productions and their play, I Blame A Culture Of Crisis, sees the wonderfully erudite script by Jennifer Moule play with words, their very meanings and the way they sound when put into someone else’s voice. The shock value of hearing the words of the 21st inner city desolated young, with their rich slang being transplanted into a world in which might not make sense to begin with but as the words become sentences, they take on a sinister tone, more terrifying in the hands of those who think they know the real power of words and what they mean.
I Blame A Culture Of Crisis plays on the fear of having your language, your words usurped by someone else. Whilst superbly wrapped up in a lexicon and tightly bound in a glossary of humour and absurdity, the very real threat of hearing a corporate woman suffering a crisis in which she blames everyone at a meeting for the national decline, saying words more keenly associated with the young of the city as they struggle to come to terms with what gets quaintly called a decline or crunch but perhaps more truthfully is the greatest depression since the 1930s, it’s no wonder the clichés start to hit their target audience with pointed barbarism.
Inside the back section of The Kazimier was the perfect place in which to hold this rather significant play, the close, confined atmosphere playing host in a way in which the lexes had nowhere to manoeuvre, no chance to get lost in an echo filled room. When the words, delivered incredibly and with frightening zeal by Lucinda France-Hayhurst, hit out they stayed, hanging in the air to be chewed, swallowed and digested as if believing to be gorging on a rich abundant diet of stylised prose but instead was the ramblings and empty hollow utterances of someone losing their grip and not making sense to even their keenest supporter.
I Blame A Culture Of Crisis is a well delivered piece, captured by Jennifer Moule in a way that Brecht would have stood and applauded at.
Ian D. Hall