Review: Yuri Wells
Written, performed and devised by Benedict Hardie
Director/Devisor: Anne-Louise Sarks
Music/performer: Stuart Bowden

Deceptively simple theatre at its eloquent best, Yuri Wells is a little fringe gem best discovered by accident, like a rusty sapphire broach uncovered in dead granny’s hidden shoebox or a late night black and white movie with the rain falling outside and your eyes too heavy to read.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about the actual content of the show, as I feel it is a disservice to the kind of ‘theatre’ the work itself is exploring. It’s not because I have any qualms with the content itself; just the opposite — I sat entranced, enthralled and genuinely moved by the actual story, in a way that I find often eludes me of late. Rather, for me, the highlight of this beautifully constructed work is the evocative blend of form and content, two ingredients of theatre that I find myself pondering a lot lately, and not just because I’m seeing a fair bit of theatre at present. And as happens round about this time every year I begin a month long inner dialogue about just what exactly the term ‘theatre’ is supposed to refer to. It’s like the word ‘love’; just one little word that is supposed to encompass a whole myriad of quite different things. But before I begin on a philosophical tangent, let me go back to my musings on content and form. It has something to do with the fact that often I find I’m intrigued by the form a theatre piece is exploring but left feeling cold and disinterested in the content, or I’m fascinated by the content but slightly irritated or underwhelmed by the form of the work itself.

In one way, I’m a sucker for form — I like innovative, contemporary, boundary-pushing  theatre; but not only. In another way, I’m all about the content — if the story grabs me, if I care about the themes or am being told something interesting, or captivated by a character, or am (oh, that dreaded phrase) ‘Learning something’, I’ll just about forgive anything form-wise.  But when form and content come together in a way that irreversibly meshes the two that magical thing happens; that elusive theatrical experience that takes you to that unnamed place where your intellect and your emotions are awoken simultaneously and you are transcendently “Moved” (capital M). And this is the skill that ‘good’ theatre makers have; they know how to best choose a ‘form’ for a work that will add to and work with the ‘content’ in a way that will reveal things you didn’t know were hidden. It is a skill that requires both learned knowledge and talent; knowledge as having witnessed and studied a vast array of theatre and theatre practitioners and learning a theatrical vocabulary to draw from, and talent as in an innate sensitivity to how best reveal information to illicit the optimum response from a listening (or watching) audience.

What struck me about Yuri Wells was the intricate interplay between form and content — what the story was and how it was told. The story itself is good: it’s poignant, and funny, and relatable, and intriguing and eloquent. The form it’s told in is good: it’s simple, and well crafted, and precise and demonstrates obvious theatrical skill. But together the work becomes bloody good: the form revealing deeper truths to the story, and the story in turn affecting the actual form itself.  It’s a very intelligent work, and subversively very sophisticated.

The opening of the work has little to do with the story itself, or so we think. Benedict Hardie and his mate, Stuart Bowden, kind of casually welcome the audience in. It’s a very unofficial welcoming; basically they chat to each other and to us while Stuart plays his little banjo-like instrument. Ben and Stuart smile and grin and it’s all very nice and oh!-so-friendly and open that you don’t want to just go for a drink with these guys, but rather go camping and sit around a fire and sing songs with them. They even invite the audience to add to the music by playing a plastic crocodile xylophone. They tell personal stories about meeting people in funny ways, and chat about the weather, and grin manically, and everyone has a lovely time. Eventually the door to the theatre is politely shut and Benedict politely removes all the objects that are on the stage (take note of them before he does, they are important) and Stuart politely exits the stage and the play politely begins. All this politeness aids well in introducing us to Yuri Wells himself, the sort of polite, caring, sensitive loner that automatically tugs the heart strings of a romantic like me. And then the story begins…

The play takes the form of a monologue performed by Benedict, and the monologue takes the form of part narrative, part acting out, and the narrative takes the form of part storytelling and part self referencing, and the acting out takes the form of….well, there are a lot of forms this piece takes and they all swim and dance around and with each other in a seamless fashion, never once taking our attention away from the character of Yuri Himself, but rather exposing in ever clearer fashion the exact nature of this sad, hopeful, troubled man.

It’s a beautiful performance by Benedict Hardie; precise, well-crafted, sensitive, connected, articulate, detailed, restrained and utterly engaging. And the writing itself is articulate, poetic, simple and full of subtle surprises. It reminded me of the work of Daniel Kitson, but where Kitson is a master story teller, Hardie and his collaborators are very good THEATRE makers and have utilized minimal set, lights and production elements to highlight the simplicity of a well controlled ACTOR’S body in space. The work has its flaws, of course, but as an interplay between form and content I thought the work really quite superb. It’s a wonderful show perfectly suited to the limits of the fringe festival and will no doubt grow and become richer as its season progresses. Very highly recommended, but try to stumble upon it by accident — surprises are all the better for being such.