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DEEP END - www.blogcritics.org
The Marshall Street Baths were opened to "improve the health and wellbeing of the local people". It is no praise to our age that this wonderful facility, built to the highest of artistic and structural standards, has stood derelict since 1997, its fate undecided. But that has provided an opportunity for its use for a unique performance.
The visit begins with a "health and safety" briefing from an officious clipboarded man .... Then you plunge into the building's past, for an experience that covers all of its history and seduces all of your senses. At the top of the gorgeously sculpted, gold-railed staircase, you listen, as far below, water drips slowly into a galvanised bath.
You watch a wartime washerwoman, jauntily dressed in a mix of fabrics, as she labours over endless tubs of dauntingly white curtains, a strong, distinctive chlorine smell floods your nose.
Moving upward, a more modern age intrudes. Signs saying "karate", shouts of combat and the slap of bodies on mats.
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Through a corridor with a thick carpet of leaves, you step back in time, to a room where a lady dressed in fine underclothes sits brushing her long blonde hair as a maid trudges back and forth filling her bath.
Down a second staircase to the streets, befeathered cabaret "girls" preen and prance. A dancing dragon from a Chinese festival advances.
Finally you reach the grand centre of this building, the first-class pool. It looks as though it could be revived simply by turning on a tap, the white Sicilian and green Swedish marble walls in fine condition, as is the bronze dolphin fountain.
Elsewhere the building looks like the deserted old lady it is - paint flaking with sympathetic theatricality. The swim-suited figure climbing down the deep-end steps might participate in the sounds of splashings and childish shouts.
You leave past a mother with a fine fancy pram who sits waiting for the baby clinic. The nurse is not here; the urgently ringing phone will not be answered. The building can only wait now, silent except when revived by the art of the performer and the power of ghosts. Natalie Bennett
12/12/05.
next review...
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