Biting Point: ‘A play that asks questions, and you can’t help but do the same’
ACCUMULATING STRESS: Anita and John in Biting Point. Pictures by Tom Arran
By Vicky Foster
Last time I saw a Middle Child production, it was staged around a wedding in a marquee on the edge of the Humber. Their latest show, Biting Point, is similarly spectacularly set, this time on top of a multi-storey car park, offering amazing views across the city rooftops and the river.
The sense of occasion and excitement begins long before the show starts, as you make your way up to the eleventh floor, with crowds of people weaving past homebound workers retrieving their cars.
People arrive early to be given headsets – through which the live speech of the actors is broadcast alongside an accompanying soundscape – and to take their seats, set in the round, with a raised abstract stage in the centre.
There are free cups of tea, a specially produced zine, volunteers and Middle Child staff on hand everywhere to make sure you’re comfortable and have everything you need. There are even blankets on seats and sunglasses and suncream, should you need them. They’ve thought of everything, and it’s gorgeous to take in the views and transformed surroundings while you wait for the action to begin.
But, as anyone familiar with Middle Child will know, they don’t choose a setting just for spectacle. It helps tell a story that hinges on tension building around a road-rage incident. At times it’s hard to distinguish whether the background traffic sounds are real, from the roads that ring the carpark, or whether they’re part of the soundscape playing in your headphones. This only adds to the strength of the script and the depictions of the two main characters – John, a White British man in his thirties, played by Marc Graham, and Anita, a British South Asian woman in her thirties, played by Katie Singh.
As we watch them working through their day, in and out of their cars and vans, in and out of traffic and meetings and interactions, we’re there with them, amongst the concrete and fumes, beneath the accumulating stress and the wide sky.
Sid Sagar’s writing switches between the two characters, with flashbacks and monologues that give us an insight into their lives. Additional characters are not physically present, but their voices play on recordings in the headsets, creating a sense of intimacy and interiority with the characters we can see – as though we’re inside their heads. This, with the rhythm of the language and deft use of repetition and imagery, all helps build a rising sense of claustrophobia and underlying feeling of losing control.
The mundane swerves into the sublime, big feelings crashing out of descriptions of tedium – from worrying about parking on double yellows, the coffee shop order never being right – straight into a brusque contemplation of the idea of losing a parent, the sense of helplessness and rage. Or heartbreaking depictions of experiences of racism, punctuated by Monster Munch and Lynx Africa. Sagar finds a way to make us able to identify with both characters, leading us towards a final scene that is therefore even more disturbing and moving.
He shows us, in devastating detail, how both characters are struggling, how the odds seem to be stacked against them, how they’ve been shaped by their childhoods and the attitudes of places they’ve grown up. But there is humour in the characters too, and self-deprecation, and warmth. We feel like we know them, though they don’t know each other, as for most of the play they circle each other without interacting. It is the final scene that brings them together, and it is at this point that Biting Point goes deepest into ideas of class and race and what might be driving the current growing divisions in the communities where we all live.
In a city now known partly for the riots of last summer, and for the infamous Ronnie Pickering, Hull might be a perfect place for this show to debut, and the final scene couldn’t be more fitting.
This is a play that asks questions, and as you watch things develop, you can’t help but do the same. How can two people who seem to have so much in common be suddenly divided so dramatically? What drives people who, in other areas of their lives, seem rational and caring, to become racist? As John puts it: “I saw red and then brown, but I’ve helped the homeless. I’ve helped refugees.” And as Anita says: “We’re basically in the same boat for ninety-nine per cent of the time, but there’s that subtle, shitty one per cent…what was the bloody point of that?”
Again, the setting comes into its own as the play ends with its final set of questions, both actors set against the backdrop of the darkening sky, the rooftops and river. John looking out and Anita watching him.
Anita: What did you think?
John: About…?
Anita: When they rioted?
John: It was sad. I was sad.
Anita: Who for?
John: This city… It isn’t that.
Anita: What is it then?
Biting Point is being staged at Fruit Market multi-storey car park until Sunday, May 18. It then goes on tour, including shows at Flemingate car park in Beverley from June 12 – 15. More information is available here.