Safe House
28 April - 17 May 2014
Young Vic Theatre, London
Artists: Gabriella Sonabend and Jeremy Herbert
Featuring the voices of Danny Cerqueria, David Lan, Gabriella Sonabend, Mark Strong and Nicola Walker
'Exceptional' The Observer
"It doesn't matter if you call it art or theatre — this installation-cum-performance for an audience of one is unforgettable”
The Evening Standard
Safe House is a place stripped back to the most basic elements. Watch the changing light, feel the wind on your face, and listen to stories of home. Internationally acclaimed multi-media artist and stage designer Jeremy Herbert (Hamlet, The Glass Menagerie) returns to the Young Vic with an extraordinary installation created in collaboration with artist and writer Gabriella Sonabend.
“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…
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.”
Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard. Read the full article here.
