Jeremy Herbert and Gabriella Sonabend on Safe House at the Young Vic

It doesn't matter if you call it art or theatre — the innovative Young Vic has come up with an installation-cum-performance for an audience of one that is unforgettable, says Fiona Mountford
Safe as houses: the four rooms are a 'haven surrounded by chaos' ©Alastair Muir
Fiona Mountford29 April 2014

Feeling absolutely grounded and rooted in the moment — that's really hard to achieve. It's rare to sit in a room alone with your own thoughts, as in life there's a sense that you're always being observed, you're always interacting." Jeremy Herbert, multimedia artist and stage designer of international renown, wants to say something about our frantic modern-day state of affairs. To this end, he has teamed up with young artist/writer Gabriella Sonabend to take over the Young Vic's Clare studio and create the genre-defying Safe House, which is billed as an "immersive experience" and a "new sensory installation".

Herbert has flourished at the Young Vic previously, with design work including Michael Sheen’s memorable Hamlet, which was set in a mental institution. The trigger for this new piece, which appealingly offers free entry for viewers/participants, was a visit to an eerily silent, unlit burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. “For Safe House, I took everything out and then just injected very minimal sensory experiences back into it to create a sense of space, a sense of story. Something that is open but intimate, suspended in time but out of time.”

These are fine, high-flying words but the big questions remain: how does one break into this Safe House and what is waiting for us in there? Only three participants are allowed into the large wooden structure, which in turn contains four rooms, at any given time. The participant is issued with a wooden tag, akin to a room key, and enters a darkened foyer area where a giant yet silent wind machine blows. From here, you choose which of the four rooms to try, hanging your tag on the door and immersing yourself.

“It’s important that you’re in the space on your own, so you won’t be disturbed,” says Herbert, 53. The four rooms are, he suggests, a “haven surrounded by chaos, but it’s left as a very open agenda. It requires you to engage with it”.

These rooms, all differently lit, are spaces simultaneously redolent of everywhere and nowhere. “All of them slightly distort your sense of perspective and where you are in the house,” says Sonabend, 23.

One of them, for example, is bright and high-ceilinged, with sand on the floor; another boasts only a mattress and a blacked-out window. Significantly, you can’t see an outside from any of them. This minimalism is crucial, explains Herbert. “You forget where you are. You forget you’re in the Young Vic in the middle of London. By reducing everything to one or two senses, it opens up a whole richness of feeling.”

The rooms themselves, however, are only the half of it. Inside each we encounter the stories written by Sonabend, which are broadcast from a speaker on a continuous loop. The same four narratives — which Sonabend calls The Workshop, Voyager One, The Church and How Does She Traverse the Great Pathway? — are read by different actors (including Mark Strong and Nicola Walker, moonlighting from the Young Vic’s current five-star hit production of A View from the Bridge) in each space, at contrasting speeds and with a marked variation of inflection. I found there was a hypnotic quality to sitting all alone and listening.

“The point is,” says Sonabend, “that the voices are inhabiting these rooms, and whether you’re there or not they’re still telling their stories.”

Secret doors: Safe House Pic: ©Alastair Muir

Like the space itself, the stories are specific yet universal, providing an intense point of entry into an individual life, a gentle but profound examination of a sense of self. The Workshop features an increasingly hermit-like man enraptured by the inner workings of the many objects in his house, “the discovery of his microcosm”.

Voyager One, conversely, watches a young Englishwoman going out into the world, “displaced in a culture” in India, a “blank canvas awaiting projection”. We see this canvas gradually filled in as the years of her life slide elegantly by in 20 or so minutes, all while we sit by ourselves in a darkened room and listen carefully.

I was entranced by the stories, with their meticulous attention to minute detail, and by Voyager One in particular. The process of listening seemed rather similar to slipping gratefully into a warm bath at the end of a gruelling day. Cumulatively, they induced a pleasantly indulgent sense of melancholy, akin to standing alone in an art gallery surrounded by work that feels deeply personal.

Such cross-genre references are pertinent, as Safe House is sure to appeal to culturally inquisitive Londoners who have no qualms about mixing their disciplines. “Boundaries between theatre and art aren’t so strict,” says Herbert. “Safe House is what it means to you.”

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Safe House is at the Young Vic, SE1 (020 7922 2922, youngvic.org) until May 17. Admission is free and the audience is invited to enter individually for up to 20 minutes. Open Mon-Sat, 10am-7pm (last entry 6.30pm). No advance booking, but register at the box office on arrival.

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