From Morning To Midnight

From Morning To Midnight had received mixed reviews online. I had preconceptions about the surrealism we would witness as I often find surrealism a little hard to place. We can draw an endless list of what we THINK it means, but we never really truly know what it is supposed to represent. FMTM was different for me.

It was intelligent. The production began with a perfect symbol of a life ruled by the clock as the entire centre of the stage was revealed as a revolve, spinning round as we hear loud ticking sounds from the clock. It gradually speeds up so that the repetitive actions of the cast, especially that of our protagonist, the clerk, begin not only to represent the hours that are whizzing by, but actually begin to tire us out. 

We watch as all grinds to a halt as a pretty young woman enters unknowingly, ending up DS left as though she appeared from nowhere. Everything stops for her. The clerk serves her in the bank and overhears the men in the bank talking about her as she leaves. With that and the recent payment of 60,000 Marcs, he seems as if from nowhere, to abandon his post and begin a journey to wealth and power - the beginning of everything that ends badly.

We watch as the clerk climbs out of his cage and run free. He is taking more breaths than ever before, stretching his legs further, opening his eyes wider but all the while shrinking his own morality and loyalty. 

He springs to the heels of his newfound 'love' whom he assumes will fall madly in love with him immediately. We are presented with some truly comedic repetition of scenes firstly played out to the imagination of the clerk and then immediately brought back down to earth with a bump as we see the reality of each encounter. For example, we see the lady speaking with her son, who places his jacket on the sofa before leaving to bargain with the landlord about a painting of 'Adam and Eve'. The clerk approaches and enters the room, as the lady is flushed and gasps flatteringly. He then grabs her twirls her around and falls onto the sofa and just as she lowers her head to his crotch, the lights go out. 

The clerk is back outside the room knocking timidly. He stutters and stumbles on his words, whilst Unreeling his plan to become a rich man, both financially and socially. She turns him down and he leaves dejected. With this the set is manipulated once again. This time as if gravity itself has diminished. The wall of the house lifts into the heavens as the postman enters, almost falling through the doorframe to his death. Left stranded in the doorframe raising ever higher, it is surrealism at its best. We suddenly begin to see the existence of an unstable climb towards the top of our 1920 German hierarchal system. Tipping this way and that, the clerk has his mind set on self-improvement, regardless of what life may lay behind him and indeed, what quarrels may lay ahead.

Perhaps the greatest example of surrealism followed this. As he stumbles across a snowy

Photo: National Theatre Blog

plain, he suddenly realises the potential that wealth has given him. What follows is a self-indulgent monologue among some truly inspired physical theatre and choreographed movement. A parachute-like white cloth is pulled tight across the stage by the ensemble and taking it in turns, they crawl underneath to create obstacles and mounds in the snow. A particularly effective moment is when the clerk is overly excited, almost manic, and he climbs high and topples, only to be caught by the surging power of his own indulgence. The cast create a wall under the snow, catching him as he falls in an attempt to reflect the instability of our clerk's new social position at the top - a rather tenuous one at that. The scene is filled with the existence of vivid deadly warnings in the form of skeletal women, that foreshadow what is to come. 

Photo: National Theatre Blog

Photo: Paul Taylor - The Independent

He takes this feeling of indestructibility back to his family home, where he crosses his next barrier - to leave them behind. Surrealism creeps into their 'normal' family life, as the train that takes our clerk to his new beginnings steams through the front room as the family of girls scream. Some truly great scene changes saw the walls of the living room become the carriage of the train as it speeds into the city.



There other instances that wowed us too. The opening to the second half saw the clerk in a

Photo: National Theatre Blog

surrounding far removed from anything in his usual daily life. He arrives at the bike race, where he marvels at the ridiculousness of winding your legs round and round on a metal frame for glory, not realising that it could actually be used as an analogy of his own feeble attempt to ride to the top of society. The cyclists lean this way and that in slow motion, with shadowed grimaces upon their faces as the stage once again rotates to show the passing of time.

Photo: National Theatre Blog

As he throws more and more money into the race, the stakes grow and we watch as the excited crowd turn into puppeteered savages. A choreographed routine of jerking movements from the crowd and the rotation of the set again and again reflects how, purely with the arrival of money, the world has turned completely on its head. It turns almost grotesque as the ensemble appear through the grandstand with naked torso's, wearing clothes meant for a different sex and backing towards the audience with bare breasts... Which leads us to the next level of this coil of descent.

The clerk's next destination is to a renowned 'adult entertainment' venue where he is

filled with lust and confident of wooing a sexual encounter with his money. He purchases the best champagne in the house after an embarrassing conversation with the waiter who mocks his unfamiliarity with the types of beverage - another fallacy in our clerks new financial fantasy. We watch as his lust grows as Lycra clad men and women re-enact the extremely 'flexible' passion of Adam and Eve. We see him attempt to woo our first performer, then Adam and Eve and our third performer, a dancer dressed as a clown. As his attempts fail he soon realises that perhaps, the life that he admired in the lady from the bank, will only ever be a fantasy. His expectations of the life he envisaged, only leave him disappointed with his reality.

From here we reach the final part of our journey of destruction: salvation. The clerk, finally giving way to the disappointment of what promised to be a lavish lifestyle, is confronted in a church by poor people. However, when it comes to confessing their sins and sharing their paths to salvation, we quickly realise that these are not just characters, they are embodied

Photo: National Theatre Blog

projections of the clerk's inner voice. They torture him. If I were to fault the production, it would be on this part alone. I feel that after the first two 'confessors', (regardless of the unique visual image as we watch from the clerk's own perspective) the audience understood that they are representing the clerk. However, we were given another two characters to allow us all to catch up. It was felt quite broadly that this was unnecessary and it was the only part of the production that I struggled to stay engaged with. 

The finale of the show sees the clerk finally come to terms with the terrifying outcome of his financial change. His own gratifying salvation is found in a manic explosion of gold as he gives up on his devotion to climbing the social ladder. The poor, once again become savages and scatter in the madness, their morality left diminished. A figure then steps from the shadows as the clerk fears that he will be held accountable and have to face all those he left behind before becoming a 'money launderer'. He panics and with all that he once was in tatters, he climbs to the top of the balcony CS, where the clock from scene 1 has returned, runs to the crossed-shaped light representing salvation and us electrified. Well... I did say money was the beginning of all unhappy endings!

FMTM is one of the best examples of physical theatre I have seen in a very long time. The last example was a one woman show who seemed to be making love to her cloth, hanging from the ceiling - so it wouldn't take a lot to top it. However, the execution of such inventive and symbolic physical theatre made the experience entirely engaging throughout. The acting wasn't bad either. Our clerk's physicality, the jolly ignorance of the bankers, the upper lip of our first class lady, the effort of our cyclists and drunkenness of our clerk's desirables, all showed the calibre of the cast among an array of fantastical imaginary symbols of a life in  jeopardy. 

Photo: Johan Persson

A truly wonderful few hours at the Littleton Theatre! 9/10!