One Step Forward, One Step Back

Press reviews

****The Guardian review by Lyn Gardner, 12 April 2008

The man in the library is distressed. He arranges and rearranges the cut out words on the desk, trying to create sense out of chaos. From the fireplace comes a noise that sounds as if someone is trying to get down the chimney. Already I've encountered three angry Santa Clauses frantically typing Christmas lists, I've gazed up through the legs of shoppers in a supermarket, I've shivered on a snow-covered hillside and heard birds sing. Later, I will glimpse alphabets of stars peeping through an indigo night sky.

Dreamthinkspeak is an extraordinary company, creating site-responsive theatrical experiences that send the audience on individual journeys through buildings and make you feel as if the bricks are speaking to you. Inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, William Blake's poem Milton, and the city of Liverpool itself, this commission for the Year of Culture is architectural and meditative rather than immersing, as in the work of Punchdrunk, or narrative, as is often the case with Grid Iron. You bring yourself to it, your tarnished soul is gently massaged, and you emerge feeling shiny and brand new.

Ushered in small groups through a side door in the cathedral, you head off down dark corridors, surprised at every turn as you encounter tiny villages nestling on mountainsides, or glimpses of different kinds of paradise. From the top of the cathedral you gaze down on the city spread out below in all its ragged beauty. This is cunningly put together, always offering clues rather than answers. One scene or room almost always references another you will see or have seen; sound (ghostly church music and howling winds) and film are part of the textured fabric of the piece, and you must always look up and down as well as straight in front of you.

Perspective is used brilliantly. In the moment you look over the entire city you can also peep right inside a house. There is an extraordinary point when you emerge mole-like out of the dark into the great cavernous body of the cathedral, with its massive stained-glass windows. Below in the gloaming a Madonna-like angel walks, her dress trailing behind her like a puddle of spilled milk. The journey takes about an hour; it will sustain you for a lifetime.

****The Independent review by Lynne Walker, 14 April 2008

It might be going a bit far to compare One Step Forward ... One Step Back, the new production by the Brighton-based company dreamthinkspeak, to the magnificence of Dante's vision, but One Step Forward takes his Paradiso and brilliantly transposes its imagined journey from Hell to Paradise to the nooks, crannies and galleries of Liverpool Cathedral. Giles Gilbert Scott could scarcely have imagined what profound and whimsical ideas would one day percolate through his spectacular building.

Undaunted, given the scale of the architecture, by the prospect of creating a site-specific work, Tristan Sharps has been inspired by the endless possibilities of its shadowy corridors, endless flights of stairs and vast vistas. Every two-and-a-half minutes, three people embark on this strange, surreal and often moving hour-long journey of a show, their route indicated by silent guides along the way.

Encounters range from Victorians in book-lined studies trying to assemble the words of "Jerusalem", to film, installations, etched- glass panels and, finally, a panoramic view of the city from the top of the tower. There are spaces here that the public never glimpses.

The ideas and symbolism that Sharps and his company come up with in a hugely original production are superbly executed, the physical theatre choreographed to seem spontaneous. Fantasy mingles with fairy-tale as we are asked to consider what paradise is.

Thinking back to encounters on the way up – the supermarket scene, Santas busy at their PCs, the snowy plateau, the model of the cathedral on rubble, the cherry tree, the migrant soul waving from the nave, the illuminated figure in an alcove, the silent bell chamber – nothing prepares you for the breathtaking vision from on high.

The cleverest twist occurs at 331 feet, in scenes visible through binocular telescopes on the roof. Footsteps and whispers echo around the awe-inspiring space, diluted only by space-movie music, while local performers play their parts with commitment. A show of intricate detail and endless possibilities that merits close scrutiny.

****The Times review by Donald Hutera, 15 April 2008

It took 74 years for Liverpool Anglican Cathedral to be completed, versus a mere 18 months of preparation to realise dreamthinkspeak’s site-specific, multimedia response to it. Yet this carefully wrought, peripatetic performance by the Brighton-based theatre company is an indelible experience. Presented in celebration of the city’s status as 2008 European Capital of Culture, One Step Forward, One Step Back is a tribute to a magnificent building and a marvellous meditation on the modern metropolis in which it sits.

Founded a decade ago by the director and designer Tristan Sharps, dreamthinkspeak specialises in productions that draw out the poetry of settings or pieces of architecture. Here, Sharps and local partners, including the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, have trained their sights on Europe’s second-largest Anglican house of worship.

The cathedral is the evening’s main protagonist, with additional inspiration from Dante’s Divine Comedy, William Blake’s poem Milton and Milton’s Paradise Lost. But this is no high-brow literary event. Better to think of it as a journey of discovery that, in its cunning, playful use of proximity, distance and scale, might lead you to ponder your own definitions of past and present, Heaven and Hell.

Audience members are admitted into the cathedral at timed intervals, then are free to proceed at their own pace. (There is a lot of walking through narrow corridors and up and down stairs, so wear sensible shoes.) Our first encounter is with a man in period garb worriedly poring over a pile of musty books. Suddenly overhead appears a film of people seen from below in contemporary clothes, pushing shopping trolleys. From there we meet more anxious bibliophiles, perplexed consumers plus a handful of harried Santa Clauses clicking away at computer screens. We also pass miniature representations of anonymous tower blocks, some starry and alphabetised nocturnal skies and a couple of chilly but wondrous, snow-covered mountainsides.

Part of the magic of One Step is that those who created it never dictate what to think or feel, but instead rely on our openness to its ever-shifting perspectives and our ability to make associations between the stimuli they provide. In one unforgettably vertiginous moment we emerge unexpectedly high above the darkened nave, to gaze far down upon a saintly, slow-moving woman in a pale robe who turns and raises her arm until the brilliant shaft of light in which she is caught fades. There is also a chance to linger atop the cathedral tower where both a 360-degree panorama of the toy-like city and a sensational telescopic surprise await us. The performance takes about an hour, but in terms of impact and resonance it is transforming and timeless.

The Observer review by Susannah Clapp, 13 April 2008

Paradise regained in Liverpool. The only way is up as Dante and Blake occupy the city's Anglican cathedral.

The path to Paradise always was straight and narrow; the glories, of course, make the toil worthwhile. So it proves at the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, where the audience for One Step Forward, One Step Back pant up twisting stairs, squeeze through narrow corridors and stand giddily in high, hidden places before bursting out of the bell tower into the open air, to look down on the Liver Building, the Brookside estates and the Georgian terraces which make up the cityscape.

Commissioned as part of the city's year as European Capital of Culture, and drawing both on Dante's Paradiso and Blake's 'Jerusalem', this fascinating creation by the architecturally inspired dreamthinkspeak is infused both with ardour and irony. Within the gothic arches, silent figures, bent over biblical texts, sit in niches like 18th-century hermits, and point the spectators towards celestial bliss. Outside, the city's Paradise Street is about to become the centre of a huge retail development.

The difficulty and uncertainty of regeneration - physical, mental and spiritual - tumbles out in constantly morphing images. Things keep reassembling themselves in different forms: bigger, smaller, videoed, made into models, viewed from above or below, seen from within or without, looked at askance or head on.

Framed in the corner of a wall, like a miniature stained-glass window, is a model of the interior of the cathedral, with, at the centre of the chancel, the figure of a woman in an air-blue gown - Dante's Beatrice, presumably; the same figure who is later seen from aloft in the flesh, sweeping through the choir stalls and gesturing the audience through the secret recesses of the bell tower. Sunk in the floor of a darkened room is a maquette of Liverpool at night, with golden lights strung along Hope Street, the road which leads to the Roman Catholic cathedral. A cataclysmic vision of a house engulfed by snow is seen first at close hand and life-size, and later from a distance: a beautiful, melancholy scene shows an entire model village, set on snowy slopes, lamp-posts spreading light on the half-timbering, while above stretch range after range of fir-planted mountains.

The satanic mills of the 21st century - the supermarket - erupt rather excitingly into the sanctum: a glass panel suddenly lights up in a ceiling and shows customers in front of their trolleys, dithering beside shelves of crisps and toilet paper, gathering to peer down curiously at the upturned faces of the audience, as if they were biological specimens or denizens of a nether world. At the end of the evening, a line of telescopes on the top of God's house are trained on the windows of nearby buildings, to frame the same cast in other mercantile scenes, as if in a peepshow.

This is not an evening of conclusions; it's neither Christian nor secular, neither hopeful nor doomy. It's not even necessarily anti-shopping. It's a celebration of a city, which begins with a William Blake lookalike shuffling through the early verses of 'Jerusalem' and finding that it has no end, and which closes with dark screens lit by tiny lights. Some of these lights prove to be not so much stars as words - the words of Blake's hymn scattered in a Scouse sky.

The Telegraph review by Dominic Cavendish, 21 April 2008

How do you get to paradise? Ask anyone in Liverpool's city centre that question right now, and they'll probably point you in the direction of the new, emerging £1 billion shopping centre off Paradise Street.

This vast maze of steel and glass will be called Liverpool One, but it should probably be named the God Complex: reading the literature about it, you'd think heaven, and not mammon, had arrived on earth.

Away from the city's many building sites, up in the Anglican Cathedral - as monumental as a power station - dreamthinkspeak is asking some big questions. Is there nothing higher than retail to lift mortal spirits?

What happened to our search for salvation? It does so almost without uttering a word - besides the odd fragment from William Blake's preface to his poem, "Milton", best known to us as the lines of the hymn "Jerusalem".

Visitors to One Step Forward, One Step Back make solitary pilgrimages through a dark labyrinth of passages, chambers and stairways usually closed to the public. Squinting intently at antiquarian books in the gloom, ushers stare at you as you approach and silently indicate the path upwards, like beatific figures from old religious paintings.

The vignettes you encounter en route range from the quirkily entertaining to the ineffably graceful. Fretful in a book-lined alcove, a man in vaguely Victorian garb struggles to assemble paper cut-outs of Blake's words in the correct order.

In another room, a quartet of Father Christmases tap away at computer terminals, frantically dispatching merchandise. One particularly Kafkaesque coup de théâtre has you peering up through a glass ceiling at shoppers filling trolleys in a replica supermarket.

Director Tristan Sharps, employing a stirring astral soundscape by Max Richter, keeps playing disorientating tricks with perspective. You're given God-like vantage-points on model buildings and landscapes, and then made conscious of your own microscopic place in the scheme of things.

In the most astounding stop-off, the vast nave itself becomes a performance space, as you look down from on high at the faraway figure of a robed woman - Dante's Beatrice, perhaps, or the Holy Mother.

It's a testament to this show's extraordinary power that when I finally reached the bracing open air of the bell-tower's viewing platform and it suddenly began hailing, I was momentarily convinced that dreamthinkspeak had worked a miracle and made the heavens open. Dazzling.