REVIEW: Hampstead Road, Camden People's Theatre

A peek into the partially blacked-out windows of Camden People’s Theatre a couple of weeks ago would have provided an unexpected sight. Fragments of past rooms, evenings, lives, suspended in space as though thrown from their positions by an explosion, and then paused.

Artists Elinor Brass and Emily Orley have been collaborating for two years, and this is their fifth project. Their site-specific works, which in the past have been inspired by the Pleasance Theatre in Islington, Hoxton Street and the Mayfair Library, always begin with a flurry of historical research: trawling through archives, plundering libraries and poring over maps. Their research into the history of this stretch of the Hampstead Road yielded rich associations, which went on to influence the found objects used in this installation.

A reservoir, trees, lush tea gardens, a tavern, a medieval palace, a large manor house, a bare-knuckle boxing school, a gothic style church, a seedy cinema… the commonplace and the surprising sit side by side in the history of the site, and Orley and Brass have called them all into being with immediacy and careful thought.

Teacups, glasses, combs, bottles, doorknobs, rags, unidentifiable shards – and more – hang at different levels in the whitewashed space that usually functions as a studio theatre. Dipped in white paint or plaster, the objects look as though they have been excavated from a frozen landscape. There is something incredibly theatrical about it, but it is also hauntingly beautiful and calm, despite the stories, lives and actions that each suspended item evokes.

With this installation, it feels as though the artists have scraped back the layers of history to reveal it in all its diversity, vivid yet temporary. The accompanying soundtrack gives the entire room an almost spectral feeling. Spending time in this visually arresting space left me with a sense of the fleeting nature of a million lives touched by the site, in all its incarnations.

The installation was also fleeting, and was only in place for three days at the end of March. More of their work, a video this time, could be seen on 19 April as part of Mediatised Sites Performance Festival in Newcastle. Log on to orleyandbrass.com, to see their online project, meme, a visual dialogue between the two.

mediatisedsites.net