'The Events' - Play review

The Nuffield Theatre in Southampton is my 'home' theatre. I come from the Isle of Wight, but I've been going there to see plays since I first had an interest in theatre, and I have never been disappointed with what I've seen there. It's such an amazing theatre which always seems to attract such astounding shows - so when I heard there was a lot of fervour about 'The Events', which had won the Guardian's 'Best Theatre of 2013' and was coming to the Nuffield, I knew I had to see it.
I felt emotionally challenged by it. The play uses a different local choir in every night of the show, so the cast of two are greatly outnumbered by people who aren't actors but are encouraged by the script to take an active role in the action. This strange fusion of 'unpolished' and 'appropriate' just made the events more raw - this is a play about real, ordinary people. People who aren't actors, who don't know how to stand up on a stage in front of 70 people anymore than they would know what to do if a white extremist walked into their choir rehearsal with a gun. You are watching people who have been taken out of their normal routine and made to do something they aren't suited to - the Nuffield Fringe Choir being made to participate in the dialogue on stage are like the actual choir in the story being encouraged to talk about the horror they'd witnessed.
A particular moment of this which stood out to me, and still stands out to me the day after, is a man coming out of the choir with his script to tell Claire that he doesn't want to do the choir anymore. To you and me, he is anonymous. I have never seen him before, he is a shy man whose name I will never know - he is, to me, a nobody. And yet here he is centre stage, Claire has just collapsed with grief, he picks up his script and leaves the choir and suddenly he is part of this action, with a little microphone. In a quiet expressionless voice, a voice which sounded to me like it was genuinely reading the words on the page for the first time in his life, 'Claire, we don't want to do choir anymore'. A pause. 'It isn't fun'. Another pause. 'It's depressing. We like singing pop songs… and hymns.'
I know I should probably be talking about the actors in this review, but to me it was the choir of non-actors whose presence affected me the most.
Speaking of the choir, the music was beautiful. I think everyone in the audience was surprised when a play about a mass shooting started with a jolly choral rendition of 'Do You Hear The People Sing' from Les Mis, but it was lovely. I hugely admire Magnus Gilljam, listed in the programme as the 'pianist' - I assume he also wrote the music arrangements. He was never present in the action, more he conduct the choir into the events. The beautiful simplicity of the music and the playful piano parts jarred against the horror of the events, I imagine it as some metaphor for how the music was supposed to bring them together. I was always aware of Gilljam, half of my mind or the corner of my eye kept watching him though the action, how through a very fraud and emotional scene he would calmly gesture to the choir to stand or sit or hum or sing and mouth along with them to keep them in time together. I don't know why, but I kind of imagined him as music itself. An image which was shattered by his modest shrug in the bows, but a beautiful image while it lasted.

Before 'The Events' started. Those stairs are where the choir spent most of their time sat, and the piano got swivelled round 90 degrees anticlockwise to face the opposite side of the stage.

Derbhle Crotty played the main character, Claire, the leader of a multicultural choir group at a community centre on the side of a community centre. An unknown time ago, a crazed boy, a white supremacist, practised an ancient Viking ritual used to turn oneself into a berserker, got a gun and walked into the choir, shooting people to the very last bullet (which, it turns out, was almost for Claire). She did an excellent job of playing Claire, portraying not the emotions I would have expected from a victim of such trauma, but which seemed so very real given the circumstances.
The acting from Clifford Samuel ('The Boy' in the programme) was astounding. He seemed to truly transcend any singular aspects of class, gender, sex or race. He would just be going through a scene and I wouldn't be entirely aware of who he was, and then Claire would mention his name and I'd review everything I'd just seen and think 'oh of course he's a woman', 'oh of course he's a white supremacist'. He must have played at least 10 different characters, incredibly subtly, but as soon as I was aware of who he was supposed to be playing I got it from him straight away. My favourite scene of everything which involved Clifford Samuel and Derbhle Crotty was Claire's attempted suicide. The scene changed and I had no idea where we were. Samuel played an anonymous stranger talking to her nicely about how nice the view is, asking for her name and if he can hold her hand. Only when he grips her by the forearm instead and leans his body weight away from her did I realise we're on the edge of the cliff - and 'oh of course we're on the edge of a cliff'.
I think the most effective/affective/soul-destroying element of 'The Events' was that, it never was so lazy as to blurt things in your face, everything was a slow realisation. A slow realisation which suddenly kicks you in the gut.
A bit odd in a review about a play such as this to talk about the lighting, especially since I'm an actor and don't know two shits about lighting, but something about the lighting is it was never definite when we left the theatre and moved to the play and when we came back again. The house lights were all still up when the choir came on stage and never went out, just faded out slow through the first few scenes. At first these are two actors on stage and this is a choir from Southampton, and I don't know at which point I was suddenly very sure that this was no longer a choir of people I knew but a choir from a totally different place. Again, at the end, in the last rehearsal of the choir I became aware of the houselights coming up, and when Crotty came out of character to congratulate the Southampton Fringe Choir we were back in Southampton. But did we leave? If so, when, and when did we come back?
The transcendence of this play are what made it so phenomenal to me. The shooter was never named, not the politician, the town where it happened, even the country. 'The Events' could have happened absolutely anywhere and it seemed to have happened right in the Nuffield Theatre, right in front of my eyes. I'm giving this play a 9/10.