“Two men meet in a bar and have a conversation.”
With William Oliveira’s Time Bends, we do not merely watch the performance. The audience is immersed from our entrance into the theatre, seated with cocktail menus at candlelit tables, not just theatre-in-the-round but in the set itself, leaving us intimately affixed on each and every conversation.
The dejected and morose figure of Rufus Goodman’s David feels a world away from his wife. These initial conversations in the cinema bar were as harsh and brittle as they were twenty years ago, when he met the charismatic and mercurial figure of Michael (Noah Sarvesaran), who he has remembered ever since. As time warps and folds, in the margins the lights dim and a shadowy, incorporeal figure appears. Michael and David sit again and re-live their momentary connection of the past. Over chips, straight whiskey and black coffee, they ruminate on philosophy and film, literature and art, pulling ever closer to the central gravity of each other.
Have they met before? Has this conversation been played out a thousand times? Michael’s words ring in our ears: “love is a shining example of how little reality means to us.” As the time allows, Michael and David’s conversation comes to an end, and the whole world starts falling around them. So subsumed are we in their story, we are dislocated too, as the tables at which we sit are swiftly emptied, the menus removed, the candles snuffed out and phone calls from their future lives cut through jazz and leave a harsh and sombre reticence on the scene. David pleads, and with calibrated agony, Goodman shows the raw and powerful emotive intensity in begging Michael to stay.
And just like that, the moment is over. Time Bends, settles and straightens into linearity. The past is gone, the future untenable. “I would’ve loved you,” says David. The door slams behind him and as the lights go out, we know it to be true.
Image courtesy of Edinburgh University Theatre Company.