Tales of Other Minds Productions
The White Hotel, Salford
8th April 2025
In William Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Los – fallen divine and embodiment of imagination – says “I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s.”
Through four shattered manifestations of the male psyche, Charles Abbot’s theatre suggests that the masculine does what it always has done. Its first impulse is to struggle, to arbitrate truth in some scrambling for and against absurd obligation, to want to be the singular voice of reason in nothing but a quiet room.
In A Quiet Room, four people have been given a job: to remain in a room and watch and record any changes in the outside world. Observe.
There is a crisis in masculinity, so paid Telegraph commentators and active officers of the culture wars have opined. A Quiet Room mediates on this. A Quiet Room observes. A Quiet Room asks whether this crisis is a new phenomenon at all. Insistence on a present crisis would imply that there was a time before it. “The present is pure clattering,” the opening monologue bellows. “You are the camera. You witness and you hold account to relate what you see,” it directs the crowd as a cacophonous rush of strings descends and the actors take their place – Paddy Stafford’s Magill settling into an act-long, sprawled death on the floor.
“Nothing.” Ethan Simpkin’s Lav reiterates when asked what he had said by Tommy Garside’s Kit, in the first of many barrages of questioning marred by acrimony. “Nothing.” he complains in act two, is the root of their situation. Nothing is the point of contention between Lav and Nick Pearse’s Lucko, due to the latter’s long silence. Nothing is heard from the corpse of Magill until the second act commences. The backdrop to Kate Robinson’s set design – two walls dissimilarly decorated and leaning slightly inwards – serves to heighten tension and constriction, complimented by the droning sound design of Robert Banks and Samuel Price-Salisbury.
Can purpose be made from these four fragments of the psyche: villainy, victimhood, Machiavellian scheming, and silence? Each character demands the others’ implicit trust in their belief, but the play holds itself back. The audience is drawn into complicity by trying to forge their own truth in observance of events unfolding.
At the root of A Quiet Room is an existential angst: masculinity, fragility, nothingness, truth, belief, duty, fear of external and internal forces, and the hopelessness of events replicated – as suggested when Lucko confirms attendance in other rooms just like this one the characters find themselves in.
Like Blake’s Los and Simpkin’s Lav, I come away from A Quiet Room and must create a new system, a new truth, rather than live by another man’s. I have made the choice to observe, one spring evening at The White Hotel. Drama demands an audience and these exaggerated fragments of the masculine urge are exaggerated all the more in the washing gaze of the crowd.
The truth I’ve created following A Quiet Room is that the North West desperately requires more of this prescient, experimental theatre.