Water – Filter

Overview

'Water – Filter' must be near to the most boring link you'll ever click on, but that resounding prosaicness doesn't apply to the subject within, the innovative production Water by UK theatre radicals Filter. Anyone looking to increase the purity of what comes out of their tap, we're afraid Google has misdirected you.

Filter is a company of three co-artistic directors — Oliver Dimsdale, Ferdy Roberts, and prodigious sound man Tim Phillips — who are joined on stage this time around by performer Poppy Miller and who created this piece with the Lyric Hammersmith's David Farr (an accomplished director best known to Australian audiences for cowriting child-assassin flick Hanna). The group do a couple of things differently: They combine performance with text, image, sound, and technology to make their message, and they aim to lay bare the processes of the production, so the audience can see the performers, sound designer, and stage manager at work, making a big scene out of a small toolbox. Their methodology puts them at the forefront of contemporary international theatre practice.

For this show, they've addressed themselves to 'water' and everything that entails: the molecular composition of it, the destructive rise of it under the influence of global warming, the power of it to shield its greatest depths from our complete study, the echoey ping it makes hitting a saucepan placed under a leaky roof. With a cool blue-black set and a stage coated to appear slick, they conjure the feel of it in drips, depths, and concepts. Although LCD screens reconfigure to frame new scenes, most of Filter's effects are more down-home, using the kind of tactile, crafty approach that will appeal to fans of filmmaker Michel Gondry.

The result is highly involving to watch. So its unfortunate that Water doesn't quite gel when it comes to the biggest challenge for a devised piece, the narrative that drives it. Filter has its performers meet as a woman unable to commit to her relationship while fighting to achieve a binding climate change treaty, a deep-sea diver pushed beyond his limits, a groundbreaking climate scientist, and a man who crosses the Atlantic to bury a father changed from the man he knew. They all face the choice of whether to be right or to be happy, whether to change the world or to be comfortable within it.

Some of these are dry subjects that Filter should get points for managing to bring to life at all. It's how you want to see theatre integrating the personal and political, bypassing the didacticism, extended allegory, and sentimentality. But in this instance, the stories are not wholly engaging sketches that feel like they were the secondary consideration in putting this show together, which they probably were.

Go to Water for its remarkable vision and design. The whole thing ends on a spectacular tableau that will widen your eyes like a child's upon seeing their first magic trick.