‘Abodes’, The Wanstead Curtain
Watching Abodes on 06/09/26 at The Wanstead Curtain was a truly surreal experience. Dubbed a ‘mystical journey’ in play form, the premise is loose and expansive: a child is lost in a foreign, mystical landscape and the audience, following him, are lead across this new world, encountering a host of creatures and characters - from a giant flying slug, to animal deities, to a great grandmother with a mirror for a face and many more. Rather like a dream, there isn’t really a sequential plot line to follow here, instead we meet with these characters, one after the other, and they each offer an anecdote on an aspect of the modern world. The only anchor supposedly being the lost child who appears every so often to remind us he is lost.
The melting pot of characters we are introduced to are varied and interesting. Their lines blend dark humour, fantasy, myth and philosophy and the script is surprisingly rich and full of wisdom. They ruminate on everything about contemporary life from spirituality and religion to fashion. The play has some pretty intuitive and bold things to say about how we choose to live our lives - preaching of self-love, self-respect, self understanding and self acceptance - and it is really quite remarkable on this philosophical front.
In a sense the plays feels a bit like a warped fairytale, heaving with insights on morality, lessons on how we live and how to live - as these characters recall fables, weave legends and spin yarns. Truly, one could pick out any number of lines from the show and print them on a poster or an Instagram page for inspirational quotes. A good way to sum up the sensation this generates is with a quote from the play itself describing one of the characters who ‘sees signs in everything’ (including something as seemingly insignificant and mundane as pasta salad), they make sense of things from ‘random nonsense’. Indeed, a lot of what we see here feels very obscure, but there is a potent sense that it is all richly symbolic. There’s a fine blend of personal history and belief, generational family knowledge and philosophy, mythologies, superstitions - melded together into one performance. It just goes to show the power of the human imagination to craft something like this. The most similar viewing experience I can think of is watching an episode of The Mighty Boosh.
Abodes is at times quite dark and disturbing, as things like ritual and superstition play a key role. There’s a fair bit of chanting mantras, talks of fears, sins, ambitions and the like. The audience is significant here too - from being invited on stage to hold hands and repeat phrases like ‘income tax!’ ‘What am I doing with my life?’ ‘Blackberry berries!’ - then passing round a magic family mirror as one by one we follow the ritual of closing our left eye, turning up our right eyebrow - with a promise that once we’ve done so everything will change forever. This, and so much more. It’s not the most delicate, light-hearted stuff for a Sunday afternoon.
Huge praise must be given to the costumes and set designers. There are stunning puppets, ornately intricate animal masks, tapestries and complex clothing. All strikingly detailed, they appear the product of skilled, devoted labour and are mesmerising. With their addition, this play is elevated - transcending into what feels like a real mystical experience. This artistry grounds the already vivid prose and the result is really quite intoxicating. At one point during the show, another company of actors accidentally stumbled into the theatre, and I can only imagine their shock at intruding on what must’ve looked like some form of elaborate ritualistic, cult practice. These are no small gods - they carry out their actions looking decisively pagan and ancient. Their nature, similarly, is very God-like - but more in the sense of the ancient mythological Gods - hardly omni-benevolent, they are neither good nor evil, just powerful. They offer sage wisdom via confusing, abstract strings of words - mostly in the form of odd fables with morals the audience is left to decipher themselves.
The play is in many ways a little unnerving and I wouldn’t say it is for all audiences. I do think the underlying theme of this strange theatrical experience lies in the the weird nonsensical way spirituality, mysticism and belief are navigated and negotiated in the contemporary world. Mediating and observing various elements of our daily lives, Abodes casts a damning eye on wellness and grind culture. It pushes us to consider our place in the world, how we treat it, how we treat each other and most crucially - how we treat and understand ourselves. The stories transposed here all refer to a sense of being in the world and acting upon it, just as it acts upon us.
What I found the most fascinating part of this production, however, is the way in which it presents elements of ordinary life as though they can be as strange and fascinating as myths and legends, for example a ritual involving checking into a Hilton hotel or a Sage offering you wisdom on the street before popping into Tesco. Yes, there are old-fashioned fantastical tales a-plenty, but they are served up to us here alongside seemingly ordinary stories. The script treats myth and fantasy in the same way as the mundane and ordinary, as though the two go hand in hand, as though to suggest there is no overlap would be a fallacy. If you are trying to piece together some semblance of sense as you watch this show - you could look at it this way: everything about life is weird. From what we consider the normal, day to day stuff, to the mystical and the mythological - it just depends on how you look at things.
In our contemporary times - myth, fantasy, superstition and old-world belief can feel external to us, something that belonged to our great-grandparents and those who came before them. Something that just doesn’t apply to the way we live now. However, this play challenges us to see how everything can be treated as spiritual with the right frame of mind. You just have to brew your Yorkshire Special Tea. I’ll finish this review with one of many poignant quotes from the play; ‘there’s nothing more valuable than the greatness of the human soul’. I do suggest you give this play a watch - if not for its weird and wonderful philosophies like this, then for the stunning costume and set design. But please mark my words - the only way to see this place is to just go along with it, with an open mind…