Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Reviews
EDINBURGH 2001
We reviewed more than 150 shows at the 2001 Edinburgh Festival and Fringe. Although originally on several pages, we've combined them for this archive. They're in alphabetical order, so look for individual shows or just browse.
Acoustic Strawbs Assembly Rooms
Crafting in-yer-face melodies with an alarmingly high
political content since the late sixties, folk-rock group The
Strawbs are now out on the road in acoustic form - which means
founder members Dave Cousins, Dave Lambert and Brian Willoughby
fronting a trio of guitars and the odd burst of dulcimer. Their
huge roster of songs cuts across all barriers whether it's
Cousins' soaring vocals or Lambert and Willoughby's duelling
cutaways. This is how their songs were originally written, and
in many ways it's how they sound best - sweet and raw. If you're
a fan, don't go expecting an array of golden oldies like Union
Man, just a confident band still pushing the envelope of music.
If they're undiscovered territory to you, hurry on down to
experience some of the most instantly accessible tunesters in
the business. An unmissable, magical evening. Nick Awde
Adult Child/Dead Child Gilded
Balloon
Claire Dowie's fringe staple is given a strong and
emotionally powerful reading in this performance by Lara
Marland, who captures all of the piece's poignancy and horror
through versatile and instantly characterising transformations.
The monologue of a woman whose loveless childhood led to the
creation of an invisible friend that eventually dominated her in
a schizophrenic embodiment of her repressed anger, Dowie's piece
requires the actress to show us a pain the child can't verbalise
while also gradually exposing the adult narrator's continuing
mental and emotional scars. Under Chris Garner's direction,
Marland uses her expressive face and frightened eyes to movingly
convey the confusion of a child whose normal behaviour is
labelled unacceptable by adults, and whose coping mechanisms
only carry her further away from any sense of control over her
fate. A battered steamer trunk serves as her only prop,
alternately a symbol of burden, entrapment and escape. As
expressive as Marland's performance is in the childhood
sections, it is when she shows us the adult struggling for a
mental and emotional stability which will always be only a
compromise with her demons that the most subtly moving moments
of her performance come. Gerald Berkowitz
Antigone Assembly Rooms
Jean Anouilh's 1944 rendering of Sophocles' tragedy is not only
a searing indictment of how history tramples the individual, it
also happens to be a damn fine play. Nowhere is this more
apparent than in this heart-rendingly human version from the
republic of Georgia. In stripping the story down, Marjanishvili
Theatre's production is all the more powerful for its
understatement. Nato Murvanidze's Antigone is a headstrong young
woman whose insistence on burying her slain brother pushes the
tolerance of her uncle Creon (Otar Megvinetukhutsesi). Usually
the villain of the piece, Creon is here transformed into a
fiercely private and domestic man who wants it all to go away,
while Gia Burjanadze's Chorus is now a supportive figure rather
than a herald of doom, retainer to a tightly bonded family
despite the terrible rifts. Handy headphones provide
simultaneous translation from Georgian, but really you don't
need them if you already know the plot. Just sit back and
appreciate the rich sounds of the language and seamless
performances. Although I must question the wisdom of programming
so dark a tragedy in a foreign tongue - the same cast doing
Romeo and Juliet would certainly carry far more international
currency - all kudos to the Assembly Rooms for again providing
an exciting opportunity to catch the cream of Georgian theatre.
Nick Awde
Brian Appleton - Let's Look at Sound
Pleasance
He wrote the first ever prog rock song three months before the
Moody Blues ripped him off, and he's been half-inched by every
star in modern popular music since, leaving him eking out a
miserable existence as a suspended part-time lecturer in media
studies. Ah, but Brian Appleton still has his first love, music.
And the means to produce it (tape-to-tape and digital). And so,
in between recounting the sorry tale of how wife Wendy is
leaving him for another man, he riffs through the intricacies of
the recording process, involving ditties of his own composition
and found noises generated from the audience. The unsettling
thing is that the facts that he reels off to make us laugh are
in fact just that, facts. Sound waves of seven cycles per second
really do kill people. There really was a French factory that
was uniwttingly emitting them. Twenty-seven really was an
optimum age for sixties rock stars to depart for the great gig
in the sky. It's even cleverer than it looks and is ridiculously
addictive. Approach with great caution unless in possession of
the Guinness Book of Hit Singles. Nick Awde
Penny Arcade Gilded Balloon II
The New York performance artist known as Penny Arcade offers a
program that is part stand-up, part reminiscence and part
Speakers Corner rant. The mixture is disconcerting and
disorienting, and only the fact that her soundman always knows
when to come in with the music cues prevents the suspicion that
she has occasionally lost the plot and begun to ramble
incoherently. The backbone of her piece is regret and outrage at
the ways Manhattan's sub-bohemian Lower East Side has become
gentrified, but this takes her from simple satire of airheaded
Midwesterners let loose in New York to real anger at the mores,
and particularly the political correctness, of a
neo-conservative younger generation. She jumps between topics
and levels of discourse without warning or transition, an
insightful deflation of Jack Kerouac's myth followed instantly
by petty complaints about dog owners, an extended monologue in
the voice of a transvestite heroin addict sandwiched between
slim jokes about alien abductions or the menopause. By the time
she closes with a 30-years-too-late screed of outrage at the
song Aquarius, any pretence of actually entertaining an audience
has long since been abandoned, as we have merely been held
hostage for an hour to her pet peeves and obsessions. Gerald
Berkowitz
As It Is In Heaven
Assembly Rooms
Arlene Hutton's lovely little play is set in the women's
quarters of a Shaker community, one of the religious sects based
on a simple life that flourished in 19th century America.
Between spontaneous bursts of hymn singing, the women go about
their domestic tasks with the joy that comes from the conviction
they are doing God's work. Most of the play is low-key and
gentle in its effect, as we get to know the women as individuals
and learn, for example, that many joined the community the way
medieval women joined convents, because they were widows or
orphans with no place else to go, and that faith developed
afterwards. We joy for an imbittered woman whose children had
all died, as she slowly comes out of her shell, and we take
pleasure along with a couple who indulge themselves by singing
in forbidden (because too ornate) harmony. A plot is generated
when some of the younger sisters start having visions,
threatening the complacency of the elders, but the crisis is
resolved (as it evidently actually was, historically) by
absorbing the new mysticism into the religion. A gentle, quietly
moving piece, very much an ensemble production, it is far more
satisfying than many more melodramatic works. Gerald
Berkowitz
Ay,
Carmela! Traverse
Excellent cast, set, production, play... what could go wrong?
Well, unfortunately the translation is leaden, one of the actors
has made the fatal choice to direct and the rest simply topples
into a well co-ordinated mess. Set in the Spanish Civil War,
this is a phenomenally powerful and yet exuberant story of a
music hall troupe summoned by the Fascists to give a final
performance for the Republican POWs they'll execute the next
day. It provides a grisly backdrop for unexpected humour and
great zarzuela routines. Yet there's little concept of thirties
Spain as depicted in Jose Sanchis Sinisterra's original, robbing
us of a denouement, while contrast dissolves between offstage
scenes and the show for the condemned men. The manipulative
Paulino is played like a bit-part from a bad Carry On and the
fiery Carmela becomes a drab kitchen sink monotone. Such holes
in characterisation mean that most opportunities for humour are
lost. About as informative as Franco's shrivelled bollocks and
about as Spanish as Ikea (funnily enough, if you close your eyes
it is a perfect radio piece). But this review is as futile as
Carmela's mad stand for liberty. The plaudits will rain in and
bums will eagerly fill seats to overflowing - because this is
precisely how Middle England/Scotland/wherever likes to see its
funny foreign plays done. Nick Awde
The Bald Prima Donna Komedia
Roman Eagle Lodge
Asylum Theatre Company reinvents Ionesco's classic of absurdism
into a two-handed tour-de-force of acting and direction that is
a total delight. The play itself offers the ultimately inventive
exploitation of language's ability to be divorced entirely from
meaning. Characters tell each other things they already know, a
whole family is named Bobby Watson, a couple struggle very hard
to prove logically that they know each other, and stories are
told that are grammatically impeccable but make no sense. To
this linguistic razzle-dazzle, director Ali Robertson has added
the wild card of having only one actor and one actress in the
play. The very British Smiths, the mousy Martins, the cockney
maid and the blokish fire chief are all played by Geraldine
O'Grady and Donal Gallagher, sometimes all at once, with instant
transformations and totally distinct characterizations that are
a marvel of versatility and of mutual trust and support. Those
who know the play will rediscover it in this new production,
while those who don't can still be thrilled by the performers'
high energy and total control. Of course all the fun ultimately
doesn't mean anything, but in the case of Ionesco one can
confidently assert that it isn't supposed to. Gerald
Berkowitz
BecauseHeCan Drummond Theatre
This is a really bad play, further evidence, if such were
needed, that Arthur Kopit was a one trick pony when he wrote Oh
Dad Poor Dad forty years ago (Well, maybe two tricks Indians
was OK). In this one a successful New York couple find their
lives taken over and rewritten by a vindictive computer hacker,
and that's the whole thing. We're not made to particularly care
about the couple, or to understand the hacker; and there isn't
much of a point beyond warning us of the danger that this might
happen to us. Aside from being a weak story, it's bad theatre:
we are told everything and shown nothing, with the majority of
the play devoted to simple exposition of a plot we never see
acted out. Meanwhile, there are obvious borrowings from a
variety of other plays, most obviously Zooman and the Sign, in
having the villain wander about the edges of the story
addressing the audience. Anyway, it's a bad play, and the
usually polished University of Southern California company can
do nothing with it, in a production that has no pacing, no
believability, no reality. A real one-to-miss. Gerald
Berkowitz
Bed Among
the Lentils
Pleasance
This revival of Nichola McAuliffe's performance in an Alan
Bennett Talking Heads piece, first seen in Watford last year,
is a rich and deeply satisfying late addition to the fringe
programme. McAuliffe has explored the role of the mousy
vicar's wife who gradually confesses both alcoholism and
infidelity so that she can now present every nuance of the
deceptively simple monologue's complex emotions. Starting from
a cheery irony toward her husband's stuffiness and various
colourful parish characters, she hints ever so slightly at an
underlying unhappiness, so that you could easily miss the
first mentions of visits to the off-license. A hilarious
episode of tipsy flower-arranging seems the exposure of the
play's big secret, making the second revelation of trysts with
an Indian grocer all the more surprising to first-time
audiences. The intimate setting of a fringe venue gives
McAuliffe the opportunity to employ much quieter and more
subtle acting than in a large theatre, as when she realises
that she has inadvertently insulted her lover, and her face is
a rapidly changing mask that flashes from shock to pain to
shame to deepest grief. In an entirely different league from
most fringe theatre, the play displays the outstanding
sensitivity and skill of both author and actress. Gerald Berkowitz
Bedbound Traverse
Enda Walsh's two-character play is extremely bizarre, so much so
that it could very easily alienate audiences or, when its pieces
finally come together, stun them to the point of not being able
to appreciate its considerable virtues. It is a remarkable piece
of work, emotionally draining and mind-bending, and also a
vehicle for two powerful performances. It is really difficult to
describe without spoiling its effect. In a tiny room, barely big
enough to hold a bed, we see a girl who seems either retarded or
mad, and an older man who is clearly obsessed. In alternating
monologues she describes a nightmare existence, while he proudly
tells of rising from stockboy to owner of his company. And
here's where I've got to get vague: he tells us things that make
us suddenly realise that she is not mad, but has been sanely
describing an insane situation that he insanely created. The
revelations, which may come in too much of a rush to be
absorbed, are really mind-blowing. Meanwhile, under the author's
direction, Liam Carney and Norma Sheahan give two intense and
overpowering performances. Gerald Berkowitz
David Benson - To Be Frank Pleasance
Dome
Like his earlier show on Kenneth Williams, David Benson's
exploration of Frankie Howerd is part imitation, part attempt to
understand himself through parallels to the late comedian. As in
the Williams show, Benson is at his strongest when talking of
himself, somehow channelling his model without direct imitation.
In this loosely-scripted performance, Benson invites audience
reminiscences of Howerd and uses them in his search for a point
of contact by which he can identify with the figure he can so
easily imitate externally. He finds it in the up-and-down nature
of both their careers, his own having languished after the brief
glory of his Williams show. And so, when he imagines his own
comeback at a gay benefit, we sense Howerd's unhappiness,
egotism, obsessive preparation and ambiguity about his own
sexuality creeping into Benson's self-portrait. Many performers
can do imitation-based tributes to others. Benson's special gift
is the ability to absorb his subject into himself, so that
Benson-being-Benson ultimately captures more of Frankie Howerd's
essence than Benson-doing-Howerd. Gerald Berkowitz
Berkoff's Hell and Dostoevsky's Dream of a
Ridiculous Man Hill
Street
George Dillon has made career choices, in his repertoire and his
performance style, that doom him to forever live in the shadow
of Steven Berkoff. It is almost as if a fine singer chose a
career as an Elvis impersonator, as one can hardly appreciate
Dillon's considerable talent when all one can see is B-grade
Berkoff. Without the open joy of performing that Berkoff brings
to his acting, Dillon is rather glum at best, and a programme of
two dark works about would-be suicides is pretty heavy going.
Hell, the monologue of a man sinking into the unbearable pain of
loneliness, is performed in near-darkness. Dillon sits in almost
motionless profile as his amplified voice seems disassociated
from his body, creating a portrait more of emotional deadness
than of unbearable anguish. The Dostoevsky gives him the
opportunity to be more active and varied in his presentation, as
this despairing madman has a vision that carries him through
renewed hope, sudden guilt and then renewed dedication to life
in a complex emotional journey. In both pieces, the intensity of
Dillon's performance is impressive, and were it not that one
always sees the ghost of his model doing it so much better (I
hate to keep harping on this point, but he does bring it on
himself), it would be overpowering. Gerald Berkowitz
Berkoff's
Women Assembly Rooms (Reviewed at a previous
Fringe)
Linda Marlowe, who has created most of Steven Berkoff's female
roles, brings two decades of experience and understanding to
this delightfully larger-than-life programme of excerpts. From
the uncensored sexuality of Helen in Decadence, its obscenity
purified by her innocent self-delight, to Clytemnestra pausing
in her murderous anger to weep for the victims of war, Marlowe's
instant characterisations are fully formed and overwhelming in
their intensity. All one's favourite set pieces are here - Doris
on family love in the cinema, the Sphinx spitting out her
contempt of men, Helen reliving a fox hunt. On a more subdued
note, the short story From My Point of View offers a sensitive
portrait of a woman who settles for a small life because that's
all that's on offer. Josie Lawrence's direction anchors the
characterisations in a realism that contrasts with Berkoff's
usual highly stylized mode, and thus helps give Marlowe's
performance a warmth and depth that are a revelation. Gerald
Berkowitz
Best of Scottish Comedy The Stand
With mediocre comics charging twice as much for shorter shows
elsewhere, the Stand's offer of three comics for £6 is definite
value-for-money. The mix changes from time to time, with MC Jane
Mackay the constant. A brassy, confident comic, Mackay quickly
gets the audience warmed up with a series of pro-Scottish and
anti-English jokes, establishing her north-of-the-border
credentials so she can later poke fun at Scottish targets as
well. Her subjects - fat, sex, drink and the boredom of highland
village life - may be predictable, but she attacks them with
energy. Frankie Boyle is a young comedian with a boyish charm
and cheeriness that immediately get the audience on his side.
Like many others, he picks on individuals in the audience, with
fast-thinking responses to hometowns and jobs, and insults that
never go too far. Prepared material includes a witty take on the
sex advice in women's magazines and the image of Geordie polar
explorers. The artist known as Vladimir McTavish has to work
somewhat harder to win the audience over, with fulminations
against immigrant beggars taking work away from Scots not quite
registering. It isn't until he gets onto safer, more
conventional territory like alcohol that he scores, though he is
to be commended for attempting riskier material with inventive
paedophile and IRA jokes. Gerald Berkowitz
Susan
Black - The World's Gone Mad! CO2
Susan Black's solo show gives the singer-comedienne the
opportunity to display both her impressive vocal range and her
seriously warped sense of humour to audience-delighting
effect. Presenting a string of characterisations, from addled
1920s movie star, through alcoholic 50s pop singer, to
Pavarotti-sized opera diva, Black displays a finely-toned ear
for parody along with a voice that is likely to leap an octave
without warning and the best falsetto tremolo since Tiny Tim.
She is also likely to take each character into an
unanticipatable direction, either comically or musically, as
when the film star sings of a sailor lover with an
inconvenient interest in wearing her clothes, or the diva must
convert a pruning fork into the tuning variety. Add in enough
elaborate wig and costume changes ("I'm heavily into velcro")
to turn a drag queen purple with envy, along with opening and
closing numbers that suggest Annie Lennox on some deeply
mind-altering substance, and this barely-describable show is
an hour you are not likely to forget. To tell the truth, I'm
not absolutely certain it's actually good - the free sample
drinks they were handing out at CO2 may have contributed --
but I know the fringe experience would be a lot poorer without
it. Gerald
Berkowitz
Adam Bloom Pleasance
He darts around a lot and he's a master of the mundane
observation. He plays the flute to a tape of his own routines
and got mugged earlier this year. Yes, Adam Bloom is truly a man
on the outside looking in, and Edinburgh's a funnier place for
it. Like a nervous tic he prods you into bemused laughter over
why gay men wear tight tops, how to edit out Eminem's homophobic
bits, plus a remarkable yet wholly plausible theory about the
singularity of willies. Mobile phone rings get rapped, and the
fact he was mugged of his own Nokia provides a handy vehicle for
a learning session on the inner workings of the comic craft. One
of the most infuriating comics around, because it's nigh on
impossible to spot which bits are scripted and which are off the
cuff, Bloom's leaps of logic can be mildly awesome - from foot
operation to God to masturbation. And he's always worrying the
edge of humour like an insane Jack Russell - if the joke doesn't
work, he'll come back to it from a zillion different angles
until it does. Much to his audience's bemused appreciation. Nick
Awde
Blue Remembered Hills
C Too
Dennis Potter's jaundiced view of the innocence of childhood,
originally a television film, is given an effective staging by
the Repton School's Rep Theatre Company. Potter's conceit, to
have adults play ten-year-olds, has some of the same effect of
drag performances since these are clearly not real children,
they become essence-of-child and thus more universalised. We
first see the 1940s boys innocently playing war games while the
girls play house, but gradually Potter's deconstruction of the
myth of innocence begins, with the casual cruelties of which
children are so capable, and a strict alpha-male pecking order
that could rival any animal species. By the end, when the
children take an irreversible leap into adult-style hypocrisy,
childhood can never look quite the same. This all comes across
totally successfully in the Rep Theatre production, which is
superior to some of the professional offerings on the Fringe.
Gerald Berkowitz
b9: clinch mountain lookout C
Underground
Imagine a family that owes its gene pool to Barbie, Ken and Twin
Peaks. Throw in a dollop of Third Rock from the Sun and you'll
get an inkling of what happens behind their lace curtains in
Wakka Wakka's disturbingly humorous snapshot of suburban
Americana. This nuclear unit of Mom and Pop and apple-pie kids
is right out of the catalogue. In their fitted kitchen they
gaily hold quizzes on world capitals, sing songs about John
Wayne, while the kids hide in disgust at the heavy petting of
their still affectionate parents. Everything's hunky-dory,
okey-dokey, a touch Rock and Doris - even when the kids beat the
crap out of each other. It's all jolly japes, or is it? Cut to a
decade or so later and they're now divorced burn-outs, with
S&M clones surreally on the doorbell and in the closet. A
timeshift deeper into Eraserhead territory finds them still
together in the decrepitude of their twilight years, albeit in
cantankerous conflict. Throw into the mix a blubbery bingo
caller, a louche cabaret crooner, whose inane songs function as
a chorus, plus an unhealthy obsession with cafetieres, and
you've got a remarkable yet demented piece of visual theatre -
or maybe they've simply watched too many reruns of Blue Velvet.
Nick Awde
Born African Augustine's
Zimbabwe's Over the Edge Theatre brings its group-created look
at the lives of contemporary Africans to an Edinburgh that has
been impressed by the company's work in past years, but may be
disappointed by this outing. Three actors - Kevin Hanssen, Wiina
Msamati and Craig Peter - play, respectively, a privileged white
man, a black servant woman and an unemployed coloured (i.e.,
mixed-race) man. The white, brought up in a particularly liberal
family, discovers how his culture and colour inexorably push him
toward unconscious racism. The black woman is burdened with a
son who drifts into violent crime, and can find comfort and
dignity only in remaining true to her own values. The coloured
man is forced to piece together a sense of identity and of
manhood with little help from his past or his culture. The three
actors also several subsidiary roles in each other's adventures,
but the whole thing is paced so very, very slowly (direction by
Msamati and Zane E. Lucas) that there is neither any sense of
urgency to the plots nor any joy in the acting transformations.
The pace also gives us too much time to be aware of the clichés
and soap opera elements in the plots - for example, the criminal
son attacks a man who turns out to be his half-brother by the
father who deserted his mother years ago and now encounters her
again - well, you get the idea. In short, the play is
well-meaning but barely adequate as drama, relying too much on
its audience's good will and political-cultural sympathy to
carry it over its theatrical weakness. Gerald Berkowitz
Broken Blossoms C Venue
From the Victorian story that served as the basis for one of D.
W. Griffith's greatest silent films, Negativequity have
formulated a physical theatre piece that is never as evocative
and effective as they would wish. In London's East End, a
Chinese labourer watches sadly as a Cockney prizefighter abuses
his daughter, while in flashback her unwed mother bemoans her
outcast fate. The four figures rarely share the stage and even
more rarely interact, significantly reducing the play's ability
to create character or evoke empathy. Instead, in isolated
monologues or mime sequences the Chinese character philosophises
in self-consciously poetic broken English, the father struts his
machismo in sub-Berkoffian terms, the daughter bustles about in
silent despair, and the mother compulsively re-enacts her
banishment in shame. Expressionistic whiteface and repetitive
stylised movements reinforce the reminders of Berkoff, though
without his obscene poetry or rhythmic energy. Even the few
scenes that would seem guaranteed to resonate emotionally, as
when the Chinese man gives the girl her first real doll, have no
evocative power (One can imagine what Lillian Gish must have
done with that moment in the film). There is undoubtedly much
skill and dedication in this company, but it has not been
channelled into an effective theatre piece. Gerald
Berkowitz
Scott Capurro
Pleasance
He's mean and he's lean (well, that's what a month in Edinburgh
does for you), and Scott Capurro's now unwinding in a couple of
late-night specials for the benefit of an adoring public.
Taxiing straight over after the curtain falls at his show at the
Assembly Rooms, the comic strolls onstage to launch into his
trademark tirade against lesbians, past lovers, Scotland, the
USA, the audience, himself, his gran (she died at last) and,
well, everything. It's funny, fast and furious. Never one to sit
on his laurels, Capurro's always inserting new material and
what's making his eyes water this year is the one-star review he
got from The Guardian for his main show F**king Our Fathers. The
fact that everyone else has wowed over his full-length play and
that co-star John Cardone has got a Stage acting award
nomination has totally passed him by. Hell has no fury like a
comic spurned and fuck he's funny when he's letting it all hang
out. One suspects the rejection will feature high in his
stand-up stuff for years to come. Jackie Clune should have been
on bill-sharing duties but her throat was feeling a little raw
(cue gentle, er, ribbing from Capurro) and she couldn't make it,
which was a pity, since their styles go down well together.
Anyway, that just meant we got double Capurro, which he was
happy to accommodate. So nice to catch him so relaxed.
Nick Awde
Catastrophe
Komedia St Stephen's
Three of Samuel Beckett's late short plays are brought
together in this dark and evocative programme directed by
David Lavender that is perhaps only slightly more
sentimental in its interpretations than the author might
have preferred. In Rockaby, Denise Evans plays the nearly
mute woman rocking while her recorded voice recites a
spiralling account of a soul gradually loosening its ties to
the world and giving itself over to death. The recorded
words are beautifully and delicately read, though the live
actress's occasional outbursts of "More!" as she
instinctively resists the end have just a bit too much
desperation in them. Ohio Impromptu presents two
identical-looking men, one (George Dillon) reading to the
other (Mark Hewitt) about a man reading to another, in an
image of the sterility of self-reflective self-absorption.
Again, Dillon gives in to the actor's temptation to make the
reading a little more actory and passionate than the
situation might warrant, but not to the point of warping its
effect. Catastrophe is Beckett's least characteristic play
in its overtly political content, as a prisoner is prepared
and posed for some sort of show trial or display. Dillon's
director is clearly a commissar rather than theatre figure,
and Evans's assistant a cool lab technician, both to strong
effect. Gerald
Berkowitz
The Chanclettes: Gone With The Wig
George Square Theatre
Improbably masculine Mediterranean gentlemen from Barcelona
transform themselves before your very eyes into dazzling divas
in a lavish, hi-octane celebration of "TV trash, glamour and
cinema cult-culture". I can see why the idea might not grab you
by the gusset, so all I can say is, "Go see it!" - you won't
regret a second. Dancing and miming to a montage of sound bites
and songs (itself worthy of an Emmy for its inventiveness) the
ladies not once drop a beat in this alternative camp hitlist
from the past five decades. The usual suspects - All about Eve,
Judy Garland, Ab Fab, Cher - are joined by boob babe trio Sam
Fox, Dolly Parton and Aretha Franklin, and a very bizarre Bee
Gees number. Wisely avoiding all the done to death cliches,
there's room for new additions to the gay pantheon, such as, er,
Prince Edward. Like Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the
Chanclettes reach out to one and all with a million routines and
even more changes of frocks. There's something for everyone,
even for those whose lives are untouched by sequins and boas -
they get to spot where the quotes and songs come from. Gorgeous,
glitzy, funny, and easily the best night out on the Fringe. Nick
Awde
Andrew Clover - Puppy Love Pleasance
Much as we reviewers try, we can't click with everything we see.
It might be a question of taste, ideology perhaps, or simply
last night's dodgy curry. My problem with Andrew Clover is that
I hear his audience laughing from the belly upwards and I don't
understand why. The theme is first love, which gives Clover
ample opportunity to spin out his tale of stumbling across his
childhood sweetheart in adulthood and making a go of it again
while plumbing the audience's own experiences. Although the
comic lost the thread about ten chaotic minutes in, he happily
stumbled across an American in the front row who proved a
goldmine of bizarre experiences, and was later upstaged by his
own puppy toppling slowly backwards down the back drapes. This
is potentially glorious, anarchic mayhem that mystifyingly
converts into Habitat humour - a sort of Mr Buffo the Clown for
adults, but I was obviously deprived since we never had clowns
at our kids' parties (we trapped pythons and scorpions instead).
Oddly endearing, if only for his psychic emotion-fest at the end
which guaranteed that everyone left loving each other and, more
importantly, Andrew Clover. Nick Awde
Closer Than Ever
Garage Theatre
David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr are the Rodgers and
Hammerstein of Off- and Off-off-Broadway, having written dozens
of small-scale musicals over the decades, along with their other
film, TV and theatre work. This plotless revue of songs possibly
is and certainly seems to be a collection of out-takes and
leftovers from their other shows and random songs with no
context. The general tone is bittersweet, with a touch of New
York hip cynicism. She Loves Me Not, for example, is a trio of
two boys and a girl, each in unrequited love for one of the
others, while One of the Good Guys is the lament of a loving
husband who never strayed, and You Want to Be My Friend? is a
woman's bitter reaction to a departing lover. The music is
clearly the work of a pro, sometimes (I Wouldn't Go Back) quite
complex, and only occasionally betraying the inevitable
influence of Sondheim (What Am I Doin? could be an out-take from
Company). The young performers from the University of Nevada are
all charming and talented, the clear stars being the two
graduate professionals among them, the macho-but-sensitive Todd
Horman and the sensual showgirl Chrissy Wright. Gerald
Berkowitz
The
Club Gilded Balloon (Reviewed in London)
David Williamson's 1980 portrait of an Australian football team
at war with itself is a comedy sadly lacking in laughs, at least
in this revival by John Thomas Productions. The club president
and coach detest each other, the players threaten a strike, the
star is a spaced-out pothead, the former coach resents everyone,
the club administrator is sneakily ambitious, and virtually none
of this registers as funny. There are hints in the script that
the author intended each character to be grotesquely eccentric
in different ways, so that their exaggerated bouncing off each
other would have escalating comic effect. But Jonathan Guy Lewis
has directed all but the laid-back druggie on exactly the same
single unwavering note of angry shouting throughout. As a
result, only the most extreme culture clashes, like the player's
dreamy admission that he finds football cosmically
insignificant, or the old man's reactions while smoking what he
doesn't realize is a joint generate any titters, and not even
the central running gag that has everyone swearing undying
loyalty to everyone else to their faces but plotting against
them the instant they leave the room has any comic snap. Gerald
Berkowitz
The Cocktail Party Greyfriars Kirk
House
T. S. Eliot's verse drama was commissioned for the Edinburgh
Festival of 1949, so it is nice to see a Fringe company finally
reviving it. It's not an easy play, and the young West Ten
Productions, made up of recent Oxford graduates, don't really
triumph over it. But it's a thought-provoking and intermittently
moving work, and I'm glad to have seen it. Eliot introduces us
to a group of upper-class Londoners whose lives seem at first to
be bound by the frivolous world of cocktail parties. Gradually
we discover that some of them are deeply troubled and that
others (and this is where the play gets a bit otherworldly) are
part of a circle of wise "guardians" who advise and manipulate
people into accepting their destinies. In particular, a woman
destined for sainthood and martyrdom is guided toward embracing
this path, while others are taught to accept their limits.
Unfortunately this production's limits are encapsulated in their
faith that a little talcum in the hair will make a 20-year-old
look 60. All the acting is external and signifying, all the
blocking is clumsy - and, in short, the play's virtues and
limitations come through despite the production, not because of
it. Gerald Berkowitz
The Comedy Zone Pleasance
This year's fab foursome for the wee hours is a cracking package
tour around comedy with something for everyone. On compere
duties and displaying a nice line in crowd control is Rob
Deering, who creates an impact - literally - the moment he walks
in. He peppers the proceedings with truncated songs by Madonna
and Dido - clearly the man has a bad case of guitarus
interruptus. Barely has Karl Theobald taken the mic and he's
already halfway through an epic shaggy dog ramble about the
absurdities of growing up, from the cradle to the grave, taking
in an infestation of celebrities in his kitchen along the way.
Under the gentle humour lies a surprisingly hard edge Next on
comes Francesca Martinez, greatly improved from last year. The
sweetest face in the business, she ruthlessly plunders her
disability (cerebral palsy) through driving tests, sex and
hashish in the carpet (don't ask). Her stature may be wobbly but
never the jokes. Closing is John Oliver, whose laconic if not
incisive trawl through British habits paradoxically makes him
all the more endearing. Inventor of the self-regulating heckle,
he addresses the implausibility of reality TV, a bad day on the
foot and mouth cull shift, and the precise sexiness of the
Birmingham accent. As I said, a cracking package. Nick
Awde
The
Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) Assembly
Rooms (Reviewed at a previous Fringe)
More than a decade ago, the three American guys who called
themselves the Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC, geddit?) put
together this pastiche covering - or at least mentioning - all
of Shakespeare's plays in 90 minutes. Those familiar with the
British tradition of university revues will recognize the format
(Americans, think Saturday Night Live with erudition and
literary jokes in place of the pop culture references) - a
string of sketches and stand-up bits mixing very clever verbal
wit with bawdy jokes and sight gags. So, for example, Titus
Andronicus, which climaxes in a cannibalism scene, is done as a
parody of a TV cooking show (gore-met cooking, geddit?). The
history plays become an American football game with running
commentary (Henry IV passes to Henry V...). At their best they
can be very clever, as when they blend all those interchangeable
comedies about mistaken identities and girls disguised as boys
into one all-purpose plot, Three Men and a Little Transvestite.
Even the groaner puns are worth it; Othello (who, of course,
gets a rap number), comes on with toy boats tied to him (he's a
Moor, geddit?). For my money, though, there's a little too much
reliance on easy physical humour, and a few too many pratfalls.
The two longest sketches are Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet, and
both are built on the sight gag of a six-foot guy galumphing
about in a dress and wig as Juliet or Ophelia. It gets a laugh,
but it's too obvious a laugh, and not up to the level of some of
the shorter bits. The original trio have cloned themselves a few
times and head various touring companies, so you're likely to
see one or none of them. By its very nature the show is uneven
(The sketches can't all be gems), but it does deliver what it
promises - 90 minutes of fast-moving light entertainment.
Gerald Berkowitz
Nina Conti - Let Me Out Komedia
Southside
Nina Conti (daughter of Tom) is a young classical actress who
recently began studying ventriloquism under the influence of
charismatic writer-director-performer and currently
ventriloquism enthusiast Ken Campbell. Now Campbell has written
her a play to show off her newly-acquired skills, and neither it
nor her performance is particularly impressive. What passes for
a plot has Conti experimenting with various dummies to find one
to adopt for her act. She doesn't move her lips, and she can
create different voices and personalities for a Scottish bear, a
method-acting snake, a gay monkey and the like. But she hasn't
mastered the B sound (or found a way to disguise its
near-impossibility), and she can't work with more than one voice
at a time or manage the transitions from doll to doll with any
finesse. And either through the fault of the writing or her
performance, the play just drifts rhythmlessly until it just
stops abruptly. Conti may have mastered some of the technical
basics of ventriloquism, but she is a long way from being ready
for performance. Gerald Berkowitz
Crash Pleasance
"I'm hurtful - that's my job!" sneers the local radio shock jock
in reply to a sympathetic caller he's just crushed verbally on
the turntable. But the following week the same nurse turns up at
his home. Trying to turf her out, the defensive DJ claims he's
pushing our collective envelope, but she wonders who is it
that's really getting hurt Marshall (Joshua Levine) and Carol
(Sarah Edwardson) soon find themselves warming to each other.
But after their first date they are disturbed by the appearance
of Vivian (Sioned Jones), whose overbearing familiarity with
Carol's new beau adds a palpable layer of tension. A triangle
evolves whose dynamics are determined by the emotional wreckage
of a crash from the past. Levine's near flawless dialogue finds
a good match in Simon Clark's direction and although a detour
into truth or dare territory means the play meanders for a
while, it soon gets back into the fast lane to complete this
compelling portrait of three burn-outs on the hard shoulder of
life. And so intense is the intimacy created by the cast, the
audience is almost made to feel intruders on these very private
lives. A perfect chance to catch great talent on the way up. Nick
Awde
Crouching Ferret, Hidden Beaver Komedia
Southside
The genius of the talented writers/performers we
know as Richard Dyball and Alastair Kerr lies in deflating
highbrow to middlebrow without insulting the audience's
intelligence. Even when the material's slight, they rarely miss
their mark and since they're gifted comic actors, there's none
of that off-putting cliqueness that surrounds stand-up comedy.
To set the mood, they bound on with a corporate presentation of
breakdowns of the comedy they provide per penny spent, before
launching into a brilliantly themed take on Edinburgh and the
Fringe. Even the book festival gets a rare burst of exposure
when an ousted sports pundit gives a reading of his disturbingly
effete memoirs. And topping the audience faves are the
fastidious art critic delivering a fatuous Guardian lecture and
a near wordless salsa number between two socially challenged
males. The characters are so real they're almost scary. There's
the half-talented but enthusiastic West country comic duo doing
a pub comedy benefit for a mate down on his luck - Dyball and
Kerr play the gig for real and so get double the laughs. Add to
this a Kirov Ballet pas de deux for football hooligans and
you've got as perfect a night out as your pennies will buy. Nick
Awde
Dahling You Were Marvellous C Belle
Angele
Steven Berkoff's show biz satire, being given its world premiere
by Wisepart Productions, contains recognizable flashes of the
author's wit and energy, and his well-known contempt for the
more commercial branch of the theatre. But it is ultimately
little more than an extended revue sketch, and not very much
more clever than a particularly bright undergraduate might have
written. In a trendy restaurant after a West End opening night,
luvies kiss air and stab backs. Everyone slates the show before
the stars come in and then praises them effusively. A Peter
Hall-type director pontificates, an American movie star trying
to jump-start his stalled career exposes his ignorance and
vulgarity, a fringe director brags of his low-budget commercial
failures while putting away the champagne, and so on. It's all
delightfully bitchy, all clever, and ultimately all predictable.
Under Derek Bond's direction, the young cast are all more than
adequate but lack the snap that would make this sparkle.
Gerald Berkowitz
Dance Like A Man Komedia St Stephen's
Concern over the transfer of culture in the India of today laces
this over-ambitious play about two generations of creative folk.
Two successful bharatnatyam dancers, husband and wife, are now
in their sixties and wondering when they should take a bow into
retirement. Meanwhile, their daughter is showing great flair in
continuing the family trade as her boyfriend, an outsider, looks
on in bemusement. An intriguing premise soon becomes a tale of
polemics and, despite excellent characterisation from the actors
and some nice flashes of humour, the story meanders into
indifference weighed down by too many ideas and not enough plot.
Admittedly the production is hamstrung by booming acoustics -one
of the best spaces in town for physical theatre, St Stephen's is
unsuited for plays. No idea what this was about - maybe an
examination of cultural differences, maybe one of generational
conflict. There are good ideas in Mahesh Dattani's script but it
needs paring by at least 40 minutes. The few seconds of dance
were tantalisingly brief and it would boost things excellently
to see more - and help it make more sense. Harsh words perhaps,
but since Prime Time Theatre has had this on its books since
1995, you'd think someone would have told them. Nick Awde
Dark Is The Night Gilded Balloon II
An enjoyably journalistic theme links this adaptation of two of
the tales that filled the pages of long-gone mags like Amazing
Stories. Kicking off as a prelude is the short but effective The
Night Wire, a slice of creepy hokum about a man-eating fog
creating deadline problems for an international news agency.
Manning the night shift are a pair of hardnosed editors
(Jonathan Coope and John Brenner) who idly debate the latest
Test scores from Australia until wire operator Philip Dinsdale
becomes the receptacle of a rolling news item that proves as
deadly as it is unexpected. Next dollop of horror is The
Waxwork, a longer piece which allows the atmosphere to get
really cranked up. A struggling reporter (Dinsdale) wants to
write a feature on how he spent the night in a waxworks museum.
He convinces the unwilling manager (Coope) and nightwatchman
(Dougie Arbuckle) that it would make great PR too. Of course you
know something's going to happen, particularly since the hapless
journalist picks the murderers' section - duh! The shocks when
they come make the entire hall jump. A great, great cast makes
excellent work of Paul Sellar's composite script, with spot-on
direction from Kenneth Bentley. Nick Awde
A Dark River Theatre Workshop
Uzma Hameed's self-directed play for the Big Picture Company is
an attempt to raise rather banal material to romantic tragedy
through the evocation of myth and the utilization of dance, film
and music effects. Two yuppie lawyers in London prepare for
their wedding when the visit of the groom's cousin leads to a
predictable triangle as he and the bride are magnetically drawn
to each other. Dance, film and dream sequences suggest that
something more than soap opera is at stake, and eventually a
supernatural element is introduced to explain and justify the
intense emotions. Unfortunately the explanation, even if
accepted, comes too late, and the clash between the mundane plot
and the frequent symbolic interruptions merely serves to
underline the dramatic cliches of the former. Anouska Laskowska
has the most difficult role as the dream-haunted bride who
cannot understand what is happening to her, while Ben Jones is
stolid and single-dimensional as the groom and Mido Hamada stuck
with little more to do than skulk about enigmatically as the
lover. Gerald Berkowitz
A Desire to Kill on the Tip of the Tongue
C Underground
Xavier Durringer's play, skillfully translated and Anglicized by
Mark Ravenhill, catches a group of young people in dead-end
lives at exactly the moment when they realize that's where they
are. We meet a cross-section of the twenty-something urban
unemployable class - a hotheaded ladies' man, an ineffectual
hanger-on, a calm slightly older guy, a gal-pal - spending one
more futile Saturday night outside a dance club. The stud has
seduced a married woman, and expects her to run off with him.
But her decision to leave both husband and lover for an
uncertain independence has reverberating effects. Friends turn
against friends, dangerous truths are told, some realize it is
time to move on while others face the degree to which they are
trapped. Very little actually happens, and indeed - as the title
suggests -- stasis and paralysis are central to the play's
vision. Under Richard Twyman's direction, performances subtly
capture the play's insights. Will Irvine, playing what at first
seems a simple hothead, lets us discover a stifled man whose
energies can only explode in violence or sex, while Taylor
Lilley gradually reveals that his character's calm disguises a
deep weariness in search of escape. Gerald Berkowitz
Diatribe of Love Assembly Rooms
Gabriel Garcia Marquez' only play is a monodrama for an actress
that covers familiar terrain with a satisfying number of subtle
variants, and Linda Marlowe uses the opportunity to display her
performing range. The monologue of a rich woman approaching her
25th wedding anniversary and facing the emptiness and deadening
compromises of her marriage is predictable in its broad
outlines: nostalgic for the breath-taking romance of her youth,
resentful of her husband's infidelities and even more for his
allowing their relationship to wither, and aware of her own lost
youth and lost opportunities. By nature a broad and passionate
actress, Linda Marlowe takes full advantage of the script's
seething and then exploding anger. But it is clear that her real
enjoyment comes in communicating the author's quieter insights,
such as the fact that she misses pillow talk more than sex, and
that her husband's ultimate betrayal was in choosing a mistress
uglier than she. The memory of one opportunity to stray that she
rejected is faced without regret until she suddenly realizes for
the first time that she could have taken that brief pleasure at
no emotional or moral cost. In these and similar moments of
quiet epiphany, Linda Marlowe raises her character well beyond
the conventional and familiar. Gerald Berkowitz
Dr. Bunhead v. The World's Biggest Bogey
George Square Theatre
Courtesy of Tom Pringle and Dr Bunhead's Science Education comes
this multi-themed barrage of hilarious contraptions and
experiments where the equation of successful kids shows,
poo/wee/bums, is totted up with bogeys and bottom burps. Each
proves a remarkable trove of scientific fact and an opportunity
to demonstrate all the fun things you can do with them since
they involve releases of energy, which means unlimited bangs,
crashes, booms and explosions. The scientific framework means
that Dr Bunhead can roll off irresistibly big words like magic
spells in a way that small ears find evocative, and so there's
nothing strange when he suggests that we look at the fun things
you can do with polymers. An experiment to create Mr Wippy's
giant whirling poo is my favourite, followed by using botty
burps as an environmental alternative for a cooker (don't try
this at home), which bizarrely but logically moves on to warts,
the expansive influences of liquid nitrogen on a hot water
bottle, cryogenics (don't ask) and Dr Molecule the Stunt Jelly
Baby. Explosive fun for all ages, and the only show I can think
of where a banana gets wild applause just for being a banana. Nick
Awde
Doctor Prospero Assembly Rooms
Gareth Armstrong follows up his award-winning Shylock with this
solo show, written by Stephen Davies, about the man who may have
inspired Shakespeare's Tempest. John Dee was an eminent
Elizabethan philosopher-scientist-astrologer who was in and out
of royal favour during his life, and famous enough for
Shakespeare to have heard of him. This solo play imagines a
direct connection, with Armstrong alternating monologues by Dee
with possibly related passages from The Tempest. His account of
his love of learning has parallels to some of Prospero's
speeches, for example, and his description of a treacherous
assistant jigsaws into speeches by Caliban. As clever as all
this is, the parallels frequently seem forced, and are rarely
illuminating, either of Shakespeare or of Dee. Indeed, the
program notes tell you more about Dee than the play does. Still,
Armstrong's performance is engrossing, and he reads the Tempest
selections well. Gerald Berkowitz
FareWel Traverse
In Ian Ross's play for Canada's Prairie Theatre Exchange, the
residents of a small Indian village lead dead-end lives
punctuated only by the occasional wake and the irregular
appearance of government welfare (or fare-wel) cheques. Their
days and community identities are divided between Pentecostal
Christianity, traditional beliefs and the paralysis of
dependency. One young man, fired with dreams of self-governance
and casino riches, tries to seize control of the tribal
government, but the endemic stasis is too ingrained. By the end,
very tiny steps have been taken toward community and cultural
identity, but nothing has really changed. By its very nature
more a character study and slice-of-life than drama, the play
benefits from an unquestionable authenticity but suffers from a
weakness in structure and lack of forward movement. Most of the
cast, including the author as an alcohol-befuddled former tribal
elder and Michael C. Lawrenchuk as a man out of step with his
neighbours just because he has ambition and a work ethic, have
been with the play since its 1996 premiere. Some of the other
performances are just this side of amateurish, and are not
helped by a sluggish and rhythmless direction. Gerald
Berkowitz
Fern Hill Assembly Rooms
Guy Masterson, whose solo recitation of Dylan Thomas's Under
Milk Wood has been a popular fringe staple in past years, now
turns his attention to some of Thomas's other works, in a
programme which is just as impressive and is likely to be just
as successful a touring piece. Masterson is a very dynamic
performer, with a style ideally suited for Thomas's
kaleidoscopic prose pieces, like Holiday Memory in which we see
an entire beach scene and population through a boy's eyes. With
something new leaping into consciousness every few words (Thomas
loves cataloguing lists of sights, sounds, smells), Masterson
instantly and briefly transforms himself into the person or
thing being described and just as instantly becomes the next.
While this occasionally comes closer to charades than acting -
"He walked [mimes walking] up [points up] the hill [gestures
diagonal]..." - it is both fascinating and very evocative of
Thomas's Breugal-like scenes. The similar Visit to Grandpa's and
Christmas Memory are equally alive and evocative in Masterson's
performance, while a selection of poems is recited more starkly
and simply. Thomas fans will be delighted, while newcomers will
want to run out and read the originals, with Masterson's image
forever associated with the words. Gerald Berkowitz
Fish Supper The Stand
It's a rare thing nowadays to be served up a straight-ahead,
no-frills, gimmick-free sketch review. Concocted by Julie
Coombe, Miles Jupp, John Littlejohn and Colin Ramone -
writers/performers who are bewildering fluent in every dialect
north of Watford - this is an hour that bubbles with a potent
range of ingredients. The funeral of an amnesiac family's
granddad on the day the son forgets he's getting married, takes
the scenario to its insanely logical conclusion where everyone
forgets that they forgot to forget what they'd already
forgotten. Shorter visual quips include the X-rated holiday
snaps viewing session and a request for directions to the
clitoris ("It's on the tip of my tongue"). The laughs can be
unexpectedly left-field, such as schoolboys debating Catholic
morals with a tarty nun and pervy bishop, in perfect verse. A
mere starter that went down a storm. Speciality of the house is
their no-holds barred take on politics. The disco-dancing
Islamic fundamentalists just about passes the taste barrier,
while the Ulster terrorists declaring their gaydom at a tarring
and feathering is riotous, particularly when they come back to
sing UDA! in Village People guise. And, a rare thing in live
comedy, the sketches just get better and better as the show
progresses. A prodigious talent. TV should snap this lot up. Nick
Awde
Foley Traverse
Michael West's monodrama is a very subtle character study, too
subtle perhaps to be a fully effective theatre piece. A man
(Andrew Bennett) simply stands there and gives a somewhat
rambling account of his life and his family. Irish Protestant
gentry, they come across as dour, lifeless and loveless, even as
he describes some satirically comic scenes drawn from his
somewhat unreliable memory. That unreliability the frequency
with which he must interrupt a narrative to acknowledge that
he's confused two events or got his chronology wrong is the
first clue to West's subject, though it is easy to miss it. What
dominates the monologue is the speaker's contempt toward his
family for their lifelessness and his anger at his Catholic
ex-wife for her triviality and vulgarity. Only very late in the
90 minute play do we realise that these judgements are undercut
by the unreliability of his account, and that what we are
actually hearing are projections of a self-hatred based on his
own empty and vulgar existence (which means that some of the
things he's told us about himself have also been misremembered).
This is in fact very sensitive and insightful characterisation,
but in theatrical terms it means that we do not know why this
man is talking to us or what the subject of the play is for far
too much of its length. Andrew Bennett gives a controlled and
moving reading, but doesn't help, as he should, by giving any
foreshadowing in his performance of the complexities to come.
Gerald Berkowitz
Four Dogs and a Bone Greyfriars
Kirkhouse
John Patrick Shanley's satire on Hollywood skewers all the usual
suspects with considerable wit, so that, while there are no
major new insights on offer, there's a lot of fun to be had
along the way. The producer of a low-budget film (Jay
Malarcher), a starlet clever enough to use her stupidity as a
tool (Aryn Kopp), a veteran actress who knows every trick of the
game (Kate Udall) and a screenwriter (Jerry McGonigle) who seems
at first a babe in the woods but who learns fast, take turns
manipulating, coddling, back-stabbing and generally screwing
each other. And Shanley, who's been there, catches it all with a
perfect ear for each character's particular style of doubletalk
and with wickedly delighted satire. The young American company
play it with verve and energy and, violating my general rule
that actors should not direct themselves, Udall and McGonigle
combine co-direction with the two most shaded and adept
performances. Gerald Berkowitz
F**king Our Fathers Assembly Rooms
Eminently offensive stand-up Scott Capurro has always had his
elegaic side - he just hides it well - and in this self-penned
play the provocation turns to provoking (as in thought) while
leaving the traditional walk-out factor commendably high (14 the
night I was in). Two ageing (that's late thirties) gay mates sit
in nappies at a bar and watch the prime of San Francisco manhood
pass them by along the yellow brick road. Eyeing up the talent,
Capurro lets slip far more than he intends about what he really
wants in a man - a "hot sweaty retiree" - a concept John Cardone
at first ignores but soon finds irresistible. The pair embark on
a close-to-the-knuckle quest for a father figure, via altar boy
antics, Colonel Von Trapp's greasy glove and a butt-nacked
shagfest on a lilo where the hickness of Cardone's younger
hooker reminds punter Capurro eerily of his dad. Things turn a
touch surreal when Father Time places an order for a cappuccino.
The perfect older man, naturally, and when was the last time you
saw a naked scythe onstage? Brilliant performances match
brilliant writing - a bit like Waiting for Godot played as
Waiting for Mr Right. From the recognition glimmering across the
audience, it's clear that this fable about growing up has
something for everyone. Soft maybe, never flaccid, this is
essential, rampant viewing. (The asterisks are in the title, by
the way.) Nick Awde
Gagarin Way Traverse
Gregory Burke's comic drama begins with an uneducated petty
thief wittily analysing the philosophical limitations of
Jean-Paul Sartre, and it never stops surprising with its
unexpected juxtapositions of genre, character and mode. The
title itself alerts us to an anomaly, a street in a small
Scottish town named after a Soviet cosmonaut, because of the
Scottish district's long communist sympathies. The
philosopher-thief, played with passion and intellectual
intensity by Michael Nardone, and a more straight-forward and
politically committed friend (Billy McElhaney) have decided to
kidnap and kill the head of a multinational corporation, as a
revolutionary gesture. But they get the wrong man, a weary,
locally-raised middle-management type (Maurice Roeves) who
vaguely sympathises with them but is older and wiser enough to
see the futility of their gesture. Add in a naive youngster
(Michael Moreland), and you have Shavian political debate,
gangster melodrama and low comedy in almost equal proportions.
The debate is good - engrossing and mind-stretching - while the
characters develop in complex and unexpected ways that engage
our sympathies. In all, one of the most thoroughly satisfying
plays in Edinburgh. Gerald Berkowitz
The Game of Love and Death
Rocket South Bridge
Neil Bartlett's updating of Marivaux' comedy of manners is a
witty and stylish 1930s social romance that virtually cries out
to be turned into a musical comedy, perhaps with a Cole Porter
score. While the basic premise is squeezed a bit awkwardly into
the updated setting, it is no sillier than most musical plots:
an upper-class couple facing a marriage arranged by their
fathers approach their first meeting with, unbeknownst to each
other, the same plan: each will trade places with his/her
servant, the better to observe the prospective spouse. The
result is absolutely predictable - both the supposed servants
and the supposed masters fall in love, all four thinking they
are crossing class lines to do so - but the inevitable
working-out of the dance is fun to watch, and there are witty
lines and strong comic moments along the way. Unfortunately,
this production by the young Short Back and Sides Company has
all the worst characteristics of amateur theatre: shallow
characterisations, gross overacting, funny voices and accents,
and a general clumsiness in moving about the stage. Gerald
Berkowitz
The Good and Faithful Servant Rocket
South Bridge
Joe Orton's short play is given a nicely-staged production by a
young student company. Always half social critic and half
propriety-shocker, Orton attacks most of the middle-class
protestant values in this look at old age. A man retiring after
50 years is fobbed off with worthless gifts and the warning that
he had better return his company uniform before he goes. A
chance meeting with an old woman recalls a brief tryst decades
ago and leads to the discovery of a grandson he never knew he
had. Meanwhile the grandson has got his own girl in trouble, and
the old man is farmed out to a hellish retirement home, and...
Well, you get the idea. Along with the farcical satire comes
Orton's patented moral comedy, as characters are repeatedly
shocked by one sin while taking another in stride. The
deliberately two-dimensional quality of all this is cleverly
captured in a production that uses actual pop art cartoons for
sets, and if things flag a bit toward the end, there has been
fun along the way. Gerald Berkowitz
Good Morning? Pleasance
Saturday morning. Three young office workers, destined one day
for dazzling careers in middle management hell, wake up on a
sofa in strange flat. Piecing together the events of the night
before, their hazy Q&A session to remedy alcohol-fuelled
amnesia becomes a fractious puzzle of missing wallets, stolen
phone number and absent workmate. Soon the accusations start to
fly in this wickedly funny farce for the Scooby Doo generation.
Writer Eddie Rosen died in 1999 only weeks after completing the
script at the age of 18, but what he left is an absolute gift to
actors Kali Peacock, Steve Chaplin, Edward Price and Jonathan
Tafler. Directed by Sonia Ritter, their characters are
unnervingly real, whose every gesticulation adds to the humour
levels. The show has its rough edges and begins to overstretch
its logic even before the weird workmate makes his appearance.
But it's a wonderfully simple concept - dare I use the word
Ortonesque? - and is even funnier for continually threatening to
slip into deliciously darker territory such as Buñuel's The
Exterminating Angel. Put this on at the West End -supporting it
sensibly long-term - and you'll easily attract a whole new
generation of theatregoers. Nick Awde
Gusset Komedia Roman Eagle Lodge
Walk around the crumbling garment districts of any of our cities
and you'll soon spot tiled into the facades of disused workshops
the word 'hosiery'. For long before Marks & Spencer, this
nation was a powerhouse churning out knickers to the world. Now
no longer and this has spurred writer/performer Elaine
Pantling's semi-autobiographical search for answers to life
through a gusset cutter's now redundant skills. Direct from
school to the factory, Leicester lass Paula Potter learns her
craft via initial humiliation under a German overseer to the
discovery that she has talent with the scissors. As Paula is
promoted from lowly overlocker to prestigious cutter, along the
way she describes the world of her workmates, her marriage and
the holiday fund. And like some miracle tree-bark from a
tropical rain forest, she has discovered that the gusset holds
many uses for the good of humankind. Not only does it serve as a
handy metaphor for life but it also has properties which are
therapeutic and practical - the red/green gusset, for instance,
serves as a handy marital'sex switch'. Gently poignant yet
always witty, unlike Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, the pathos
never once threatens to strip away the humour, and one wishes
there were more of the delicious humour of reported dialogues
with other characters. Knicker elastic for the soul with a
feelgood factor that rides high. Nick Awde
Rich Hall and Dave Fulton Present The Terry
Dullum Appeal
Assembly Rooms
"This isn't improv night - we've already chosen the disease!" Or
so say Hall and Fulton as they bound on stage to host their
benefit night for an 11-year-old boy and his sad plight. The
comics first met at a gun fair in southern Winsoncin, where they
also stumbled across poor Terry, whose affliction is not the
lobster claw hands visible in the towering publicity pic but
Tourette's Syndrome. Sadly, due to stringent UK food laws on the
movement of crustaceans, Terry can't be with the show, so his
bottler dad Earl (Canadian comic genius Mike Wilmot) has popped
over instead. Earl's sozzled, foulmouthed speech indicates that
his son's syndrome might be in part inherited. The line-up
includes WWF stars Rainmaker and Interrupter intoning the poetry
of Alaskan chanteuse Jewel through ill-fitting hoods as Hall and
Fulton take turns to rail against euros, global warming, Tom
Cruise and Bill Gates. Fulton's lay-in into Scottish mores is a
masterpiece of the now ritual harangue. Accompanied by a grungy
guitar and bass combo, Hall ends with an appropriately loopy
singalong about the moral duty to kill President Dubya.
Gloriously outrageous, something different is promised for every
night. As laughs per minute, easily the Fringe's best value for
money - whoever's pocket it ends up in. Nick Awde
Hamlet! The Musical C Venue
One of the sleeper hits of this year's Fringe, this pastiche
entertainment by Ed Jaspers and Alex Silverman is a spirited
romp that benefits from never taking itself, or its source
material, too seriously. This is Hamlet-lite, set to music
ranging from cod Mozart to cod Lloyd Webber, with stops along
the way for direct take-offs of a couple of 1950s rock classics.
Opening with a tongue-in-cheek plot-establishing "Danish Blues,"
the score's other highlights are the tango "To Thine Own Self Be
True," the play-within-the-play (The Mousetrap- The Musical, of
course) built on instantly-recognizable tunes from every musical
of the past 20 years, and the Les Miz-flavoured "To Be or Not To
Be." Very little attempt is made to set Shakespeare's words to
music, the clash of classic plot and contemporary slang being
part of the joke. Hamlet himself (Dave Dorrian) is chubby and
not very bright, Claudius' prayer scene is just an opportunity
for a sting of slapstick failed attempts at murder, and the
climactic duel involves hitting each other with inflated rubber
fish. An undoubted crowd-pleaser, this is still more a jeu de
spirit than fully developed show, though it has real potential
in the Return to the Forbidden Planet tradition. Gerald
Berkowitz
Kevin Hayes
The Stand
I attempted to review this stand-up comic twice in the course of
the Festival. Both times he refused to go on because the
audience was too small for his liking, and had the venue give
them their money back. Gerald Berkowitz
Hess - Prince of Spandau Komedia
Roman Eagle Lodge
It is extraordinary to remember that held in captivity right in
the heart of Germany until his death in 1987 was one of the
major architects of the Third Reich - Hitler's right-hand man
Rudolph Hess. In a bravura performance, Ricardo Pinto homes in
on the Nazi's unbelievably arrogant self-delusion as he recalls
in his cell the key events and players of his life. But while
director Catherine Jefford gives Pinto free rein where his
strengths lie, she should desist his dodgy German accent (more
Transylvania than Unter den Linden). Meanwhile, Helder Costa's
script pushes effect over substance - there is a whole
generation out there ignorant of who Hess was let alone General
Salazar or Hess Junior. And how many would get the oblique
reference to former UN chief's Kurt Waldheim's SS past or the
Nazi pagan ritual that begat it? Perhaps the point of it all is
the powerful closing speech about racism being the key to total
control of the masses, yet the play inadvertently shoots itself
in the foot when you realise that no one involved has offered
any idea of the true face of racism. Sorry about that, but it
has to be said. Nick Awde
Craig Hill's Wiz to Oz
Gilded Balloon
There is hardly a joke to be found in Craig Hill's hour of
stand-up, just the pleasant chat of a very pleasant fellow, and
if you fall under the spell of his considerable charm, that's
almost enough. This is less a comedy act than mildly engaging
table talk of the "Let me tell you what happened on my holiday"
sort, framed by a bit of production at the start and finish.
Opening with a gay-lyrics version of Over the Rainbow, Hill then
goes into a deliberately rambling account of his recent trip to
Australia (Oz, geddit?) to be part of the gay-themed Mardi Gras
parade. Digressions on his first-ever plane trip to Greece and
on a disastrous audition for Cats just add to the informal
raconteur effect, broken only by one more song and a closing
audience-involving mini-production number. If you find Hill's
mildly camp good spirits infectious, the hour can pass quickly
and pleasantly. If not, the thinness of his material is all too
evident. Gerald Berkowitz
Hipsters,
Flipsters and Finger Poppin' Daddies Gilded
Balloon
Lord Buckley was an American jazz monologist, a kind of ur-rap
artist who specialised in jive-talk riffs on classic tales,
bible stories and the like from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Musician Weston Gavin knew Buckley and obviously admires him,
but his attempt to recreate some of his classic monologues
falls flat on every count. Gavin has the air of a history
professor reporting on his research, reciting memorised
material he really doesn't understand. Though there is
occasional backing music, he completely fails to conjure up
the sense of jazz improvisation or of give-and-take between
music and voice. The image of the square-looking guy in the
suit jive-talking is briefly amusing, but Gavin is unable to
capture any of the rhythm or energy of the original. As a
result, his tales of "The Naz" and his miracles or "The
all-hip mahatma" and his role in Indian emancipation are
lifeless, while his reading of one of Buckley's set pieces,
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address translated into jive, is
embarrassing. Imagine a middle-aged white man attempting a
recitation of a Puff Daddy rap, and you'll have some sense of
this sadly misguided performance that is no service to Lord
Buckley's memory. Gerald Berkowitz
House of Deer Pleasance
Eva Magyar's dance and mime piece for the Hungarian company The
Shamans is skilfully performed but totally opaque in meaning
without external assistance. Appearing first in the guise of a
hesitant and uncomfortable Victorian actress, she makes it clear
through pointing at antlers and deer pictures onstage that they
are somehow the subject. What follows are alternating sequences
of dance, usually of high, celebratory energy, and of mime,
usually showing the actress's discomfort with the material. Some
but not all of them relate to deer, and one begins to suspect
that the piece is really about the pains and difficulty of the
creative process, until dances that don't fit this
interpretation appear: a mourning woman, a mother and child, a
bloody death. After the show, the press office gave me a press
release that explained that this was a dance interpretation of a
Romanian folk tale about a hunter magically transformed into a
deer, and that it has "an urgent message for Eastern and Western
audiences alike." Oh. Gerald Berkowitz
The
Hush C Venue
The group now calling themselves Hush Productions have been to
the Fringe before, with comic mime shows striving for the effect
of living silent movies in the Mack Sennett vein. If they're not
always fully successful, there's still some fun to be had along
the way. The convoluted premise of the current show has a
comedy-starved future cloning Charlie Chaplin to bring laughter
back to the world, only to have him kidnapped, so that a private
detective has to save him. So we get a series of slow-motion,
fast-motion and slapstick sequences of the bumbling detective
finding and losing the scent, coping with a femme fatale, and
the like. What keeps the show from success is a recurring style
of finding a comic idea - for example, a slow-motion fistfight -
and just extending it for a minute or two, with no real
development or transition into the next bit. If you dozed off
after the first 15 seconds (and you might be tempted to), you
wouldn't miss anything until a blackout or change in music
signalled the next self-contained bit. I can't help feeling that
there's a really great fast-moving half-hour buried in the very
uneven hour that The Hush runs. Gerald Berkowitz
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I Am Star Trek C Venue
Rick Vordran's short play is a biography, salute and expose of
the man behind Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, but I fear that all
but the most fanatic trekkies (and is there any other kind?)
will find it delivering a lot less than it promises. The play
traces Roddenberry's career, from the first pitch of the Star
Trek idea to Lucille Ball's company, through the three years of
the original series and the subsequent dark years during which
Roddenberry (and many of the actors) lived by whoring themselves
to trekkie conventions, to the first way-over-budget film and
Roddenberry's subsequent banishment (though they kept his name
on everything), to his being summoned back to run the Next
Generation series. Along the way, we get some quick
behind-the-scenes glimpses of his loyalty to colleagues and
later betrayal of them, of coping with the prima donna antics of
Nimoy and Shatner, of hints of sexual hanky-panky and of the
cold-bloodedness of Hollywood and TV executives. But there's
really little news to any of this, and the natural audience for
this show surely knows all this gossip and more. It's not much
of a play, either, with no real characterisations or character
growth, and nothing but chronology to drive it forward. A
hard-working cast double and quadruple roles as they race
through history, but capture neither good impersonations nor
dramatically interesting essences of any of the characters. Gerald
Berkowitz
Infinite Number of Monkeys Gilded
Balloon
Stuart Barker and Tim FitzHigham offer a fast-moving revue that
stands out from the run of the mill by actually crediting its
audience with a bit of intelligence and the ability to catch
jokes that go by casually or understand ones that require a
smidgen of knowledge, like King Solomon's boredom with
prenuptial stag parties or Bletchley Park boffins breaking the
Enigma code but unable to read German. Language is a running
theme of the show, from a defence of the football pitch and
double-decker bus as units of measurement through a sketch of
rival dictionary writers playing Scrabble. How Adam came up with
a name for his first-born, things that can't be said in sign
language, and what's really on new-age self-help tapes are among
the topics explored with wit and admirable brevity, as another
compliment to the audience's intelligence is shown by letting no
sketch linger on any longer than absolutely necessary. Gerald
Berkowitz
Clive James & Pete Atkin
Pleasance
The collaboration of lyricist James and tunester Atkin has been
revived by the timely relaunch of their albums over the Internet
this year. Back on the road, their new double act is a laid-back
recap of their adventures in the music business since the late
sixties when, as members of the Cambridge Footlights, they
forged a relationship that spawned six albums in the seventies.
Atkin sings songs on guitar and keyboards. In their acoustic
form, the songs fall between Pete Seeger and Alan Price, with a
smoky. Some are serious and some are funny, touching on Apollo
XIII, jazz pianists, westerns and one about gangsters, The
Joker, which wouldn't look out of place on a Scott Walker CD.
James intones poems on pieces of paper, with offerings that
didn't make it to lyric form, and even takes a stab at a vocal
number. The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered shows the
Australian wit in fine acerbic form, and there's a heartfelt ode
to Lucretius, but his Blade Runner elegy is excruciating ("Ned
Kelly was the ghost of Hamlet's father" anyone?). Intriguingly,
he reveals the same hankering for Americana that took Bernie
Taupin to the pop top. The real rapport still between the duo
means that the 2002 tour of this perfect remedy to chatshow
doldrums should be the sell-out it deserves. Nick Awde
J-Boys in Gay Samurai Revue
Garage
I sat in the back row between the usher and a Buddhist monk,
noting the burly, freshly scrubbed men of a certain age cramming
the front rows before the lights go down and the stage fills
with panda eyeliner and lithe bodies that strip to cloth thongs
in a kung fu routine. Gohatto may be in the cinemas but this is
in your face. And that sort of sets the theme for the rest of
the show... A bizarre bushido number with fans, audience
participation - helping the poor lads out of their thongs - an
improbable sword fight, again with fans, models simulate sex on
a table to the strains of Vangelis, a couple of choreographed
threesomes later on. Ricky Martin and Stravinsky complement the
soundtrack. Like the music, the dance routines are a strange
mishmash that is part Japanese, part Indian, part European. And
as spiritual lap dancing goes, it can't make up its mind whether
it's art or porn, but the boys wonderfully keep the ability to
laugh at themselves. After all, there are only so many ways you
can remove a thong. A production also of note for having a
scarier audience than the cast. Nick Awde
Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train Gilded
Balloon II
Two killers in the holding cells, overlooked by a good screw
(Salvatore Inzerillo) and a chillingly philosophical bad screw
(David Zayas). Angel (Joe Quintero) shot Moonie high-priest Kim
in the ass but now faces charges of first-degree after the cult
leader dies of complications. Fellow inmate Lucius (Ron Cephas
Jones) murdered eight men but only got caught when his victims
started turning white. Oz this is not - it's more Death of a
Salesman with a thoroughly contemporary twist where the Hispanic
and African-American need to first work through the overwhelming
racial baggage of what landed them in gaol before they can
examine the tortured souls underneath. Well-meaning middle-class
public defender (Mary Jane Hanrahan) can only get her fingers
burned. Director Phillip Seymour Hoffman's sole contribution to
Stephen Adly Guirgis' snappy post-Mamet script appears to be
whacking up the volume until it becomes one long shouting match.
Still, the performers attack their roles with boundless energy
and no one hogs the roles - it's a great ensemble - but in terms
of the life experience writer, director and actors bring to the
play, one walks away suspecting they know more about inner tubes
than inner city. Nick Awde
Joan C Too
An opening scene of writhing bodies drenched in bombastic
classical chords and violent red lights. God, did I want to hate
this. But a heartbeat later and I was hooked, so what can I say?
This is an amazing, brilliant show where every element has come
together in perfect alignment. Written and directed by Donna
Kaz, the story avoids epic overkill and goes straight to the
heart of the human behind the myth of France's answer to
Braveheart - "I'm 16, leave me alone!" the young goatsherd
prudently informs the saintly voices that instruct her to don
men's clothes and wage war on the English invaders. In a vibrant
blend of narrative and physical, where the grammar of movement
is as complex as the spoken, a flowing series of snapshots chart
the warrior maiden's journey to her doom, punctuated by
startlingly informative digressions, chorus-like, on dynasties,
weapons of war, the Inquisition and the siege of Orleans. Romi
Dias' feisty Joan leads a six-strong cast who deliver their
multi-roles with hi-energy sensitivity - pushing perfect script
and direction even higher. Oh, and best techno medieval
soundtrack of the Festival so far. Nick Awde
Journeys and Memories Komedia St.
Stephens
Theatre
Cryptic's offering is billed as "Music to be looked at, not just
listened to." In practice this means that for Steve Reich's
railroad-themed
Journeys
and Memories an onstage string quartet accompanies a music track
while a film shot from the front of a moving locomotive is
projected on a screen behind them and, as muffled words are
heard on the soundtrack, they appear, karaoke-style, on the
screen in short, about the level of multimedia sophistication
you might expect at a particularly modest school fete. At this
particular performance the film breaks down after 10 minutes, as
it would at the fete, leaving us with nothing to look at but the
musicians while the dimly-heard recorded voices move from modern
train trips to the darker journeys of the Holocaust. (The video
comes on and then breaks down again a couple of times, just to
reassure us that nothing new is happening in the projected
pictures and words.) The video works for Istvan Marta's Doom A
Sigh, offering unimaginatively literal images to accompany a
wailing song about losing one's parents: the words Mummy and
Daddy, two photographs, and the text of a poem on being an
orphan. For the Allegri Miserere, the musicians walk about
slowly while Claire Pencak offers a minimalist dance before the
blank screen. In short, the most uncreative and least evocative
visualisations of music imaginable, though the quartet plays
well, and would more profitibly
be encountered in a straight recital. Gerald Berkowitz
The Kaos Volpone
Theatre Workshop
Ben Jonson's scrutiny of greed is the latest classic to get the
Kaos treatment and no technique is spared to inject this farce
with the savage, dark comedy it deserves. Director and adapter
Xavier Leret has pulled off a stripped-down scissors job that
loses nothing of the original's wicked bile. Staged with all the
melodrama and accentuated realism of a silent movie, there's all
the trademark physicality here that characterises the Kaos ethic
- grand guignol, gothic poses and four-dimensional blocking.
Heading an appropriately manic cast of characters is Jack
Corcoran's Mosca, a demented Nijinsky faun who conducts a merry
dance of duplicitous double-dealing as the good burghers
stampede to be included in the will of his master, Oliver
Parham's hissing Volpone, who slithers over his great Nosferatu
tomb of a bed restlessly seeking more riches to feed off. But
don't let this eclipse the fact that the English here is some of
the best you'll hear declaimed on stage today, creating an
overall theatricality hard to better -in the process, language
magically becomes another segment of the physical vocabulary.
Humour is essential too, attested by scenes such as the a
cappella Pandora's box of the physician's roadshow or acrobatics
involving a ladder and full cast as the will is discovered. A
gravity-defying masterpiece of wit. Nick Awde
Dillie Keane
Pleasance Dome
After 20 years of being madly in love with her, like any other
intelligent man of my generation, I've finally figured out
Dillie Keane. The spearhead of Fascinating Aida, here appearing
solo, is actually a medium channeling the ghost of Noel Coward.
Both as singer and (with Adele Anderson, another third of
Fascinating Aida) songwriter, she has captured, more than any
direct imitation could, the essence of the Master's wit and
charm. Songs about being disconcerted by the range of diet and
sexual advice offered by women's magazines, or about waking up
and wondering just who that is on the next pillow, have exactly
the arch bemusement of Coward. And Dillie's singing style,
racing nonchalantly through the verse and then luxuriating in
the chorus, is the purest Coward. Even the more serious songs,
about dating again in one's forties, or reveling in late love,
consciously and unashamedly flirt with oversentimentality as his
did. Actually, Dillie does acknowledge her admiration for Coward
during the show, along with a somewhat more surprising passion
for Kurt Weill. Anyway, enough of this thesis: she's a
delightful comedienne-chanteuse who sings about internet
romance, condoms, the temptations of lesbianism (It would be so
much simpler), and the siren call of motorway cafes, and she's
funny, and the songs are great, and an hour is far too short a
show for her to offer. Gerald Berkowitz
The Kevin Gildeas Gilded Balloon II
You'll be lucky to stumble across a slicker, rougher, scarier
act than Kevin Gildea and his band in the comedy clubs and bars
either side of the Atlantic. The man emits pure comic gold dust
via a seamless stream of songs and stand-up that takes a
painfully funny trip to the dark side of the blues -laced with
his laconic Irish commentary. Best example is No No No, a
gut-chuckling tale of giving in to illicit carnal desires with
someone not your girlfriend, narrated in a delivery worthy of
the best beat poets. Other songs stray into further territory
such as pop or the Doors, although the odd concept falls flat on
its face - the futuristic Star Wars number is a stinkeroony.
But, refreshingly, each song gets a memorable tune as well as a
stonking groove, and the vamps that run under the connecting
monologues sizzle too. Don't let the humour fool you, since the
act rises far beyond mere pastiche. Providing a truly excellent
soundtrack for Gildea's smoky vocals and asides are drummer The
Goose and guitarist Dr Millar, who throws in rolling extra bass
lines as if there's a trio playing. Sound of the, erm, future. Nick
Awde
Lady Macbeth Rewrites the Rulebook
C Venue
In Renny Krupinski's self-directed vehicle for his young company
Broads With Swords, a Lara Croft-like computer game is somehow
jumbled into the complete works of Shakespeare, which is itself
jumbled so that characters and lines from various plays mingle
together. Encountering Ophelia, Juliet, Cleopatra and other
doomed heroines, Tara Loft (Amanda Hennessy) is enraged by all
the rampant suicidal impulses and iambic pentameter, and
browbeats the ladies into incipient feminism. But Lady Macbeth
(Sarah Desmond) joins forces with the computer game baddie
(Rachel Steggall) to seize control of all their plays, until the
three witches come to the rescue. The openly silly plot is the
excuse for two delightful romps of spirit. All the Shakespearean
action is accompanied by authentic dialogue, but assembled
randomly from the entire corpus, so that a single speech may
have lines from a half-dozen plays and still make sense.
Meanwhile, the author-director's experience as a leading fight
arranger makes it unsurprising that the all-female cast break
into sword fights, kung fu bouts, all-in wrestling and just the
passing punch-out at the slightest provocation. Shakespeareans
can play spot-the-quotation, while everyone can enjoy the
inventiveness of the absurd plot. And, without question, this
fast-moving hour provides what has always been missing in
Shakespeare, lots of chicks fighting. Gerald Berkowitz
The Lear Lesson Theatre Workshop
Steve Friedman's short play for New York's Modern Times Theatre
is a clever little black comedy that always has some surprises
up its sleeve. In some near future when theatre is a completely
dead art, an aged actor-director tries to resurrect it by giving
private lessons. Into his home comes a budding Shakespearean
actress who would seem to have some fairly significant handicaps
an extreme stammer, a tendency to become nauseous when
speaking Shakespeare's words, and a total absence of talent. As
an attempt to study and rehearse scenes from King Lear hits snag
after snag, what follows acknowledges a debt to Ionesco's The
Lesson and to the tradition of Grand Guignol, and may also nod
occasionally toward Rod Serling and Stephen King, but its darkly
ironic vision is ultimately its own. Under the direction of
Danny Partridge, the author plays the teacher with a sly
ambiguity that hints alternately at genius, charlatan or madman,
while Rose Friedman makes the student the essence of young
American blankness, and Zuzanna Szadkowski skilfully blends
warmth and sinisterness in the oddly intrusive housekeeper who
ultimately provides the totally unexpected key to the whole
puzzle. Gerald Berkowitz
A Life In The Daze Of Stanley Bishop
C Venue
The mid sixties. As the nation's headlines are emblazoned with
the Beatles, Profumo, and a certain final with Germany, Stanley
Bishop awaits instead the hangman's noose. Condemned to swing
for a crime he didn't commit (naturally), he embarks on a
musical review of the events that landed him in the frame. All
he did is sort out a bit of bother in the Soho nightclub owned
by gangland boss Frankie Biggs, so as a big thank-you Frankie
hires him as his minder. Gangland boss Kenny, Frankie's brother,
doesn't like Stanley but likes Frankie less, so he hatches a
dastardly plot to stitch up our innocent hero. Despite the
efforts of his golden-hearted moll, Stanley is doomed. The flyer
hails this is a "musical parody" but it's far more than that -
the original songs are vibrant, hummable and owe as much to
Lionel Bart and Hair as to the Small Faces or the Who. Most
impressive are the ensemble numbers such as Partners in Crime
and Better Than Working that mix soap opera humour with ripping
style. Great writing, phenomenal direction and choreography, but
the real stars are the brilliant 13-strong cast who act, sing
and dance their hearts out like there's no tomorrow (well, there
isn't for Stan, is there?). Nick Awde
Like Thunder Gilded Balloon II
Niels Fredrik Dahl's play is yet another domestic drama about a
family dysfunctional through inability to face and accept
truths, and while the writing never triumphs over its soap opera
elements, dedicated performances sustain your interest and
involvement until the excesses of cliched plot and overwritten
dialogue become too great a burden. A family gathers to deal
with the fact that the husband and father has been missing for
four years. One son is committed to the belief he is still
alive, another is sure he is dead, and mother just wants some
sort of arbitrary closure. Meanwhile, the brothers hate each
other, one has a bad marriage of his own, and the other is a
former criminal who has gone blind. Throw in a séance, a long
buried (but telegraphed far in advance) secret about father, and
a startling but ambiguous new revelation, and it really is more
than even the most skilled playwright could juggle successfully.
Under Franzisca Aarflot's direction, the cast of five treats the
material with total dedication, though the fact that the family
members all have different accents further threatens
credibility. Maureen Allen is most successful through quiet
underplaying of the mother, while Katherine Morley supplements
the role of the medium with an evocative violin accompaniment to
the action. Gerald Berkowitz
Lilia Gilded Balloon
Lilia Skala, Austrian-born actress with a long career in
American stage and television, is best remembered as the
forceful nun in the film Lilies of the Field. Her granddaughter
Libby Skala has written and performs this salute to Lilia, using
her special perspective to show us both the actress and the
woman. Speaking in Lilia's voice and occasionally her own, Libby
tells us of her becoming the first female architect in Austria,
but chucking it all for a career on the stage. Always modest
about her accomplishments, Lilia credits every breakthrough and
opportunity to God, though she is proud of her own courage in
resisting Hollywood's instinct to typecast her as a nun for the
rest of her life. At the same time she is a dedicated artisan
and strict teacher when her granddaughter expresses the desire
to become an actress, and she is not immune to the grandmotherly
syndrome of alternating smothering love with small cruelties.
Libby Skala captures Lilia's voice convincingly, though the
piece loses its momentum in the last quarter and begins to
meander shapelessly. A labour of love if ever there was one, the
performance is ultimately a celebration more of the beloved
grandmother than of the revered actress, and thus as much about
its writer-performer as about her subject. Gerald
Berkowitz
Lip Service Gilded Balloon
This short play about telephone sex line girls promises
titillation but actually delivers considerably more, as authors
Gary Humphreys and Philip Sington not only give us a peek into
the personal lives of the anonymous voices but also structure
plot and characters to offer a string of intriguing surprises.
Stephanie (Kiki Kendrick), who operates the small phone service
with her offstage lover, rather enjoys developing romantic
fantasies for her callers, and at the same time dreams of moving
up to operating a night club. New hire Lisa (Ellen Collier) is
considerably crasser in both her phone persona and her private
behaviour; she does not hesitate in bragging that she's stealing
Stephanie's man or in dismissing the adventure as a casual
fling. But neither woman, nor the situation, is exactly as they
appear; and just who is exploiting whom, and who is the
romantic, are questions the play takes us through several twists
before answering. Under Scott Williams' direction, the two
actresses are allowed to appear too one-dimensional in their
opening personalities for the complexities that develop to be
fully believable, and just a few hints of foreshadowing might
have enriched both performances. Gerald Berkowitz
Locking Horns
Hill Street
Christopher Walker's new play is an exploration of the
difficulties of being male, as its two characters must fight
their way through a series of false and regressive
self-definitions to discover their true manhood. While one could
debate his ultimate solution, which involves the camaraderie of
battlefield soldiers, and while the play runs out of steam a
little before its ending, there is much impressive physical
theatre along the way. Under the author's direction, Rory Eliot
and Dennis Antonakas play two variants of typical macho stud,
respectively the self-adoring sexual animal and the superior,
street-smart cynic. First encountered in a stylised street fight
accompanied by rhymed couplets, they move from this
sub-Berkoffian mode to more original imagery, as the author has
their strutting and preening repeatedly converted into
Neanderthal or animal parallels. The characters themselves are
vaguely aware of these brief transformations, and the
disorientation they cause is part of the learning and maturing
process. The play hits a disappointingly soft centre when both
men are given lengthy self-revelatory monologues to expose their
deeper sensitivity. Reducing or eliminating that banal
anticlimax would strengthen a work whose considerable virtues
lie in its high energy and inventive staging. Gerald
Berkowitz
Love and Other Fairy Tales
Pleasance
Scarlet Theatre offer a delightful Chaucerian romp in Nick
Revell's retelling of the Wife of Bath's Tale, capturing all the
spirit and comic energy of the original while infusing it with a
modern sensibility and staging it with spirited invention.
Cutting the Canterbury pilgrims down to six, Revell retains the
outlines of their original personalities and interplay. The
Prioress is still more of a grand lady than a nun, the Pardoner
is a slimy conman, and so on. But there are also new nuances -
most notably, Chaucer himself is a pompous sexist who needs to
be brought down a peg or two. So, when the Wife tells her tale
of a callow knight forced to learn and then internalize a true
respect for women, counterpointing it with her own celebration
of the sexual life, more than one of her listeners learn
life-affecting lessons. As directed by Grainne Byrne and
Katarzyna Deszcz, the cast of six double as pilgrims and
characters in the tale, subtly letting us see each of their
roles affecting the other. A generally bouncy spirit is
maintained - literally - by miming horseback riding throughout,
and only the most churlish of academics would even notice the
anachronistically egalitarian 21st century attitudes they have
infused into the text, so thoroughly enjoyable is the journey. Gerald
Berkowitz
The Loves of Shakespeare's Women
Assembly Rooms
Susannah York offers a programme of linked readings from
Shakespeare as part of a promotional tour for her book of the
same name. Every actor should have a solo show like this, that
they can trot out to fill fallow periods, and there is no reason
why York can't continue doing this one, on and off, for years -
no reason except that it's not particularly good. Her readings,
ranging through the usual suspects, from Juliet through
Cleopatra, are rather perfunctory and unevocative, playing
either like lifeless recitations or over-explicit audition
pieces, while the links are obviously sentences taken out of
context from the book, with abrupt and jarring transitions.
Above all, the programme fails my two acid tests for this sort
of reading: does she offer any excitingly new line readings or
interpretations, or does she make me wish I could see her in one
of these roles? The audience I was in was dominated by a coach
party of Americans, between their city tour and their afternoon
of shopping, and they applauded politely. I'm sure there are
plenty of people like this who will enjoy York's painless foray
into high culture, but I am not one of them. Gerald
Berkowitz
Lyrebird
- Tales of Helpmann Assembly Rooms (Reviewed at a
previous Fringe)
Tyler Coppin's solo salute to dancer/actor Robert Helpmann is no
overly-respectful hagiography, but it succeeds in making its
subject seem significant, fascinating and fun. Coppin's Helpmann
is a cartoon comic figure made up of vanity camp and inch-thick
makeup. He is also a thoroughly entertaining raconteur,
shamelessly waxing eloquent on his favourite subject - himself.
From his early days in Australia, which he professes to have
been bored with by the age of six, through a career in ballet,
theatre and film, Helpmann seems to have devoted himself to
self-promotion and self-enjoyment in equal proportions. He can
be bitchy ("She had a face like a bruised knee"), tellingly
critical, as on Nureyev, or lovingly appreciative, as when
recalling dear friends Vivian Leigh and Katherine Hepburn.
Always flamboyant and fun, Coppin gets an especially warm
response when he has Helpmann call himself "a skinny old poofter
having a hell of a lot of fun," and his closing is a declaration
of love for matinee audiences. Those attending this
mid-afternoon show cannot help but return the love. Gerald
Berkowitz
Man In The Flying Lawn Chair Assembly
Rooms
New York's 78th Street Theatre Lab takes the true story of Larry
Walters, a California truck driver who in 1982 attached an
aluminium lawn chair to some helium balloons and wound up at an
altitude of 16,000 feet, as the basis for an exploration into
the nature of American eccentricity and fleeting celebrity. In
the group-created piece, Toby Wherry plays Walters as an
innocent autodidact, who can honestly see nothing particularly
odd in his plan to fly, and who easily engages others in his
enthusiasm. Inevitably, he is unprepared for the 15 minutes of
fame that follow his exploit, able to think no further than the
glory of a brief TV appearance, and quickly reduced to a
third-string lecture circuit. By populating the play with other
eccentrics, from his girlfriend's cheerily oblivious mother to
the blissfully dreamy members of a California cult, the play
tries to suggest that only a nation that nurtures Jerry
Springer-level weirdos can also create the occasional genius or
adventurer. Unfortunately the play's superior, sneering attitude
toward the subsidiary eccentrics works against this theme and
leaves murky its view of its hero. Only in the very final
moments does a particularly inventive bit of staging capture the
glorious madness of Walters' obsession and of the spirit of open
adventure it represents. Gerald Berkowitz
Marilyn: I Want to be Loved by You
Komedia Southside
Helen Kane's salute to Marilyn Monroe is inventive,
frequently witty, and occasionally delightfully surreal. That it
is not a total success is the unhappy result of Kane being not
as skilled a performer as she is a writer. Kane's Marilyn is a
cartoon built on airheaded breathlessness. While the real
Marilyn may have been crazy, she was not stupid, but Kane
presents her as semiliterate, totally uneducated and lacking in
any sort of self-awareness. There would be attractive hints of
the holy fool in this characterization were it not mixed with
sudden flashes of sophistication. But those out-of-character
flashes are among the piece's high points, as when Kane comments
tellingly on the exploitation of Monroe's image by having
Marilyn turn the tables and do a Madonna impression, or sing
that Elton John song with the lyrics turned against him. Turning
Laurence Olivier into a ventriloquist's dummy or imagining
Monroe performing Berkoff are attractively surreal touches that
have little to do with the basic characterization. As a
performer, Kane sometimes seems to be doing an impression of a
drag queen doing an impression of Monroe, so totally dependent
on the cliched externals of the image is she. Gerald
Berkowitz
Ursula Martinez - Show Off
Assembly Rooms
Leaves nothing to the imagination but she's still elusive, is
Ursula Martinez. Is she a stand-up, queer comic, straight-up
monologuist or just a great show-off? Probably everything, to
judge from the wonderfully mixed audiences she attracts. This
latest is a step back to look at the performer. The magic
striptease opener lends an entire new meaning to The Vagina
Monologues, swiftly followed by a showlong Q&A session about
inspiration, performing solo, being half-Spanish. She interrupts
the audience chat to update a video diary, then cue cheesy clip
of a passionate Spanish love lament a la Martirio or Lola
Flores, smoky vocals courtesy of assistant and erstwhile
Freudian lover Carmen Cuenca, who reprises it live at the show's
end. The delivery's a little stilted, the script (written with
Mark Whitelaw) needs tightening, and perhaps the nudity is too
obvious for some, but this performer is also happy to eat a
whole raw onion. She connects with a trust the audience is dared
to reject, and as she sat naked, sobbing her heart out at this
predictable rejection, I so wanted to reach out and hand her a
Kleenex (for the chair of course). And I'm still kicking myself
for passing up the invitation to snog her onstage. Nick
Awde
The
Marquez Brothers Pleasance (Reviewed in London)
Yes they are real-life brothers - and lucky enough to share each
other's comic talent, so need for any sibling rivalry there. In
fact, one can only envy their rapport as they weave three sets
of characters through a series of interconnecting sketches
peopled by an achingly-observed array of no-hopers. Here life
revolves around the local football club and the momentous
nemesis of its annual disco and its aftermath. The show opens
with a bickering Spanish flamenco dancer whose naff macho
attempts ("You have to have BEEG bollocks!") at rousing his
timid guitarist fall flat. Later, when complaining about this to
his English, Arsenal-supporting cousin, a lesson in football
hooliganism turns into an impromptu class in the language of the
terraces. Add to these an oversensitive footballer, his
overprotective manager, a jack-the-lad and his dumb mate, and
you have an intriguing evening's worth of combinations thereof.
The proceedings take place against a blistering track of naff
dance tunes and torch songs a la Now That's What I Call Music
circa 1980s and early 90s.Although the structure is a well-worn
comic clotheshorse, it is one rarely employed nowadays with
success. Here it does have success, and the cream on top of the
icing is the fact that each section is a stand-alone piece, even
though los Marquez make it refreshingly clear that they do not
have to force a punchline each and every time - it is the
getting there that is the pleasure. Chracterisation is the key
to the success of these sketches, and although I do them a
disservice as comedians, these are first and foremost fine comic
actors. They require little or no props and the mere change of a
coat to transform convincingly from character to character. Any
hamming up simply adds to the humour since each character is
based on quite frightening basis of observation. The audience
found itself laughing in the most unexpected of places. A large
part of the audience's pleasure stems directly from the evident
pleasure the brothers themselves in their performance.
Brilliant. Nick Awde
The Matchmaker Assembly Rooms
This quasi-play created by Phyllis Ryan from the epistolary
novel by John B. Keane is the opportunity for some
thickly-spread Irish folksiness and two warmly engaging
performances. Keane's book is made up of the correspondence of a
self-styled village marriage broker, with various clients and
with his American sister, and the play sticks to that format,
with only a few brief narrative bridges. Des Keogh plays
ever-cheery Dicky Mick Dicky O'Connor, promising joy to all with
a nod and a wink to each individual's special needs, and also a
few of his male clients, notably a deeply lonely farmer and an
elegant but randy country squire looking for a nubile bride or,
failing that, a willing lad. Anna Manahan is Dicky's cheery
American sister and a few lady clients, notably one repeatedly
frustrated by the string of near-dead matches he keeps sending
her. There's a lot of fairly predictable blarney-flavoured
humour and the occasional touch of sentimentality, and both
performers are so clearly having fun that the spirit is
infectious. The hour is as fragile and transitory as tissue
paper, but thoroughly entertaining while you're there. Gerald
Berkowitz
Medea Assembly
Rooms
Liz Lochhead's Scottish-tinged adaptation of Euripides, first
seen in Glasgow in 2000, has returned to Edinburgh with some key
cast changes, but remains a powerful theatre piece and vehicle
for Maureen Beattie in the title role. Lochhead skilfully finds
a balance between classical characterisations and rhetorical
style on the one hand, and a thoroughly modern vernacular on the
other, so that contemporary obscenities and phrases like "bust a
gut" do not clash with the tragic material. As the wronged wife
driven to a horrible revenge, Beattie plays both tragic heroine
and soap opera character: she is first encountered as a
larger-than-life offstage voice screaming curses, but she can
also stoop to using her sexuality to manipulate men. Finlay
Welsh plays Kreon as a complacent burgher hardly willing to deal
with the trivial annoyance Medea represents. Duncan Duff joins
the cast as a blokish Jason who actually believes himself when
he smilingly assures his wife that he's doing her a favour by
leaving her, while Carol Ann Crawford and John Kazek, who
originated the roles of Nurse and Servant, return to bring their
authority to the portrayals. Kazek is particularly impressive in
a role that makes him swing from the fantasy that Medea is
seducing him to the reporting of murderous horrors. Gerald
Berkowitz
Sylvia Miles - It's Me, Sylvia
Pleasance Dome
American film actress Sylvia Miles offers a very informal show
of film clips and random reminiscences that will delight her
fans and provide some interesting sidelights on Hollywood and
Off-Broadway theatre for those who don't quite recall the name,
though they'll undoubtedly recognise the face on the screen.
Highlights include the entire six minutes of her performance in
Midnight Cowboy that resulted in an Oscar nomination, and a
comic poem that captures all the determination, foolhardiness
and frustration of a young actress in her first fringe theatre
role. Generally typecast by Hollywood as a loud, blowsy blonde,
Miles reminds us through her clips that she was also capable of
layered character roles, as in the 1975 Farewell My Lovely,
source of her second Oscar nomination and also the occasion of
uniquely being sung to by Robert Mitchum. She doesn't pretend
not to have been in her share of undistinguished B movies, and
even opens her show with a montage of clips less secure
actresses would have hidden, but she also reminds us that she
acted in plays by O'Neill and Genet Off-Broadway. A clip from
Andy Warhol's Heat tantalisingly suggests that there might
actually have been something of value in Warhol's cinema; and
anecdotes about Warhol, Tennessee Williams and others round out
the pleasant and unpretentious hour. Gerald Berkowitz
Tony Morewood - The Comedian's Book of the Dead
Komedia Southside
Tony Morewood
eschews jokes almost entirely in his stand-up show, choosing
rather to tell his life story in the faith that it will have
interest and meaning for others. The result is sometimes
evocative of time and place and sometimes interesting as
autobiography, but never the both at once. The first half of his
talk is devoted more to depicting the era of his youth than
offering personal insight, as he talks of a 1950s childhood and
1960s adolescence by evoking conventional cultural markers. Even
his account of an LSD trip and his glam rock and punk phases are
more generic than personal, and, with an audience for whom most
of this is ancient history, the general effect is of a
livelier-than-most classroom lecture, complete with arcane
references ("Morressey the thinking man's Barry Manilow") It
is only when he turns to the up-and-down arc of his comic career
that his personal story moves to the front, but oddly it is at
this point that he loses the larger picture, capturing none of
the atmosphere of life on the British and American comedy
circuits during their heyday. We are left with a rather pleasant
man nattering on about things that evidently mean a lot to him,
but that he can offer us no real reason to find interesting. Gerald
Berkowitz
Julia Morris Assembly Rooms
A while ago, Oz exile and ubiquitous entertainer Julia Morris
seemed, well, a little droopy in the material department while
her raucous delivery had expanded in the wrong directions. But a
nip here and a tuck there, and suddenly she's back, slinkier and
slicker than ever. Punctuated by an endless supply of
catchphrases and quirky asides, her Australian ingenue, fresh
off the boat, romps tongue-in-cheek through the greatness that
was Britain. Predictably the weather and shipping out the
convicts take a knock, but these are mere tasters for
mega-episodes such as mapping out London disastrous venue by
venue, or gatecrashing a therapy, ending with a dissection of
the dubious logic behind Dolly Parton's Jolene and getting back
her man. Somehow spun into all this is an account of her
membership of the C**t Club and dancing along to Dannii. The
surface may be pure stand-up, but underneath you can see
developing a nice line in the brand of social satire that
Antipodeans seem to have made their own (that's a la Clive, not
Rolf). Charmingly, infectiously offensive, Morris is the
sweetest motormouth in the business and bubbles all the way
along to her musical show-closer- surely the most inspired
moment of mimed madness since Wayne's World's Bohemian Rhapsody.
Nick Awde
Moscow Komedia Southside
A Fringe hit three years ago, this musical from Playwrights'
Arena returns to find new audiences. Nick Salamone (book) and
Maury R. McIntyre (music) imagine three very different gay men
in some sort of Sartrean limbo, in which the only way they can
keep themselves sane is by rehearsing a musical version of
Chekhov's Three Sisters one of them has written. A bit too
high-concept, you might think, but once you accept the premise,
it actually works quite nicely. The men's emotional adventures
feeling displaced, longing for a more familiar reality, yearning
for love, trying to find some sense in their pain are
legitimately paralleled with the Chekhovian roles they play,
enriching our involvement with both the inner and outer plays.
Under Jessica Kubzansky's direction, the three players make very
inventive use of the venue, moving the play out into the
audience and through the whole space. Nic Arnzen, Joshua Wolf
Coleman and Clay Storseth are equally excellent, and if there is
a weak link in the whole, it is in the songs, which are
generally rather dead prose set to minimal music, even when they
incorporate very strained rhymes. Imperfect, to be sure, and
that convoluted premise is a big hurdle to get past, but there
is clearly a lot of invention and real talent on display here.
Gerald Berkowitz
Moving Objects Brunton Theatre
David Mark Thomson's three-hander is a well-constructed,
old-fashioned play with a beginning, middle and end, empathetic
characters and something of value to say. That makes it almost
out-of-fashion by Fringe standards, but it is a credit to this
suburban theatre that it continues to support and present such
solidly professional work. An alcoholic woman played forcefully
by Molly Innes comes to an old Jewish pawnbroker (Gareth Thomas,
playing a type while resisting caricature) with her few items of
value, and something in her desperation moves him out of his own
emotional deadness. He discovers that she needs the money to
hire a hitman (Paul Samson, finding layers of complexity in his
character) to attack her ex-husband so she can get her daughter
back. The pawnbroker's kindly interference disrupts her plans
while also exposing the thug's unexpectedly deep emotional
investment in the project. Things work their way through several
crises to a moving and satisfying ending. Directing his own
play, the author walks a tightrope above a landscape of realism,
poetry and soap opera, always keeping his and the play's
balance. Ultimately a small play, on the level, say, of a
particularly good TV drama, this sticks in the mind longer than
most fringe theatre. Gerald Berkowitz
Munchausen Pleasance
Bootworks offer a salute to the legendary taleteller that
utilizes a remarkably inventive range of performance and theatre
styles, but all to no avail, as the company's oddly desultory
attitude to performance brings it all crashing down. The plot
has something to do with Munchausen in Germany discovering that
an English author is profiting from his fame by writing fictions
in his name, but it is just the excuse for the portrayal of
various of his tall-tale adventures, through puppetry, mime,
shadow theatre, models, masks, lantern projections and the like.
Each one of these episodes and modes has the potential for
theatrical wonder, but each is sabotaged by sloppy presentation.
Mime is not synchronised to sound effects, actors get in the way
of the shadow puppets, cues are missed, props are dropped.
Meanwhile, in the spoken scenes, the actors are clearly
under-rehearsed or under-directed, stumbling through lines,
breaking up the rhythm of scenes, utilizing funny voices
straight out of Monty Python, displaying no energy or commitment
- and, in general, giving the impression that they, like most of
the small audience, would really rather be someplace else. Gerald
Berkowitz
Phil Nichol Pleasance
There may not be any actual jokes in Phil Nichol's show, and
indeed it appears that prepared material makes up only a small
part of it. But he manages to generate a party atmosphere that
sends an audience out happy and fully satisfied. Like many,
Nichol begins by addressing and toying with individual audience
members, but he keeps this up longer than most, and seems almost
hesitant to get into the scripted part of the show. Even later,
he will frequently interrupt or abandon a bit to follow the
inspiration of the moment. There are real dangers to this
approach - on this particular night he lit a fire under a female
heckler and had a hard time controlling her for the rest of the
show, and there were lapses as inspiration waned. But for the
most part his high energy is infectious, so that he can make an
actual instructional recording on how to scare off grizzly bears
seem like great comic material. And by the time he creates a
makeshift band by bringing out various instruments and finding
someone in the audience who can play each, he has managed to get
both players and listeners into the same spirit so that the
joint actually rocks. Gerald Berkowitz
1933 and All That Rocket at Surgeon's
Hall
This recital by Anna Zapparoli of songs by Brecht, Weill and
others is all the more pleasant for being predictable - there
are few songs or poems that the fan will not have heard before
on similar programmes. But you can't hear Surabaya Johnny, the
Solomon Song, Pirate Jenny and the like too often, especially
not when sung with as much grace and intelligence as Zapparoli
brings to them. Less familiar songs, like the Brecht-Eisler Song
of the Nazi Soldier's Wife and a couple by Wedekind, are
particularly welcome additions, and backing by a small band led
by Mario Borciani is strong and unobtrusive. No credit is given
for the translations, which I haven't encountered before, but
they are good, combining accuracy with singability. Gerald
Berkowitz
Ross Noble Pleasance
One of the fastest-thinking, most inventive and totally in
control performers on the comedy circuit, Ross Noble returns
with a new show built, characteristically, on equal measures of
scripted material, improvisation and stream-of-consciousness.
Like many others, Noble begins by chatting with the audience
until he finds one or two people to tease gently. Then he segues
seamlessly into prepared material, remarkably finding ways to
slip in references to his victims of the night at regular
intervals. Meanwhile, he slides from subject to subject so
naturally and seemingly spontaneously that one can never be sure
whether a particular riff is part of the script or an
off-the-cuff meandering. His absolute control over the material
is proven, however, by the way themes or elements introduced in
passing at one point will reappear later in an entirely
different context. A bizarre routine on plastic surgery that
somehow involves drawing fluid from the eyes of owls runs its
course and is replaced by two or three other topics, only to
have a squinting owl suddenly show up in the middle of a take on
Pop Star auditions. A sequence on Star Wars may be more than a
bit outdated, but it is more than balanced out by surreal
sequences involving sombrero etiquette and imaginary monkeys
playing air banjo. Gerald Berkowitz
The Notebook Royal Lyceum Theatre
Wartime. A mother sends her twin nine-year-olds to the village
of their cantankerous grandmother, who wilfully neglects them.
Abandoned to their own devices and tapping into the adult storm
that wheels horrifically around them, Lucas and Claus turn in to
themselves to embark on a regime of self-education and
desensitisation in preparation for whoever and whatever the
future holds. Whipping each other, withstanding insults,
performing in bars, bartering books, discovering sex, arranging
deaths - all becomes fuel for the evacuee brothers' hunger to
learn. Although details are deliberately scanty in this
adaptation of Hungarian Agota Kristof's trilogy, this is clearly
middle Europe in the Second World War. But subtexts about
divided society and loss of innocence are wisely underplayed,
focusing instead on the paradox of how the boys are doomed
because they survive. Robby Cleiren and Gunther Lesage's deadpan
boys are chillingly comic, straight out of a juvenile Crumb.
Carly Wijs veers from the lunacy of the harelip girl to sexy
maid to sadistic cop, while Ryszard Turbiasz deploys demonic
nature in equal parts to grandmother, perve priest and demented
soldier. De Onderneming has stripped theatre to its purest
elements and then responsibly slotted in a good story, begetting
a powerful, self-devised, directorless production whose lack of
sentimentality made the lump in my throat at show's end all the
more embarrassing. I have no glib hyperboles to roll off in
conclusion, so I'll simply say this is the best work I have ever
seen. Not perfect, just the best. Nick Awde
The Notebook of Trigorin Drummond
Theatre
Tennessee Williams was one of America's greatest playwrights,
but he had the ultimate artist's misfortune of outliving his
talent, and his late works are uniformly disappointing. This
adaptation of Chekhov's Sea Gull is, alas, no exception. As
fascinating as it must be to fans of Williams and Chekhov, it
distorts and coarsens one of the most beautifully subtle plays
ever written, in predictable and unpredictable ways. In his last
plays, Williams had increasing difficulty separating his
characters from himself, so it isn't too surprising (though it
is a dramatic mistake) that he makes the successful author
Trigorin a homosexual driven not by the compulsion to write but
by the compulsion to meet his audience's demands for new work.
The other big change is a bit of a surprise, as Williams
repeatedly makes explicit everything Chekhov delicately alluded
to, and in the process coarsens the play. The fragile virgin
Nina now comes on seductively to Trigorin, the manipulative
Arkadina openly blackmails Trigorin by threatening to expose his
homosexuality, the quietly despairing Masha goes on at length
about her frustration, and so on, to the despair of any lover of
Chekhov or of Williams. This production by the University of
Southern California company is a mixed bag. In the central role
of the idealistic young writer Konstantin, Ariel Joseph Towne is
very fine, and may be a name to file away in your memory.
Jennifer M. Zallar captures Arkadina's gratuitous cruelty, while
Alan T. Lennick is a bit artificial as Trigorin but still holds
our sympathy. The rest of the cast range from barely adequate to
embarrassingly dreadful, and I will protect them by not going
into specifics, except to note that well-bred young ladies of
19th-century Russia should not sound like Valley Girls. Gerald
Berkowitz
Dara O'Briain Pleasance
Dara O'Briain's stand-up routine is based even more than most on
audience input as, after a few warm-up Irish jokes (contrasting
Irish and English attitudes to foot-and-mouth or Wimbledon), he
announces that he is about to turn 30, and wants suggestions of
things he should have tried or accomplished by that age. The
bulk of his show is then made up of responses to things audience
members call out. Obviously O'Briain has jokes ready for most
predictable suggestions, such as bungee jumping, seeing the
world or making a million. If the audience is not particularly
responsive, he is reduced to providing his own cues with "The
other night someone suggested..." and it may be that need to
play both sides of the verbal tennis match that gives the act an
occasional air of desperation. When the steam finally runs out
of that extended premise, he turns to a grab bag of other
material that seems dredged up from past shows, straining to
squeeze one last laugh out of the film Titanic or the dotcom
bubble. Gerald Berkowitz
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Off the Kerb Roadshow Pleasance
This
is a great late-night chance to catch a sneak preview of some of
the newer comics in one go. On compere duties is Jason John
Whitehead, a Canadian with a good line in audience patter who
throws in sharply observational gags, although his forays into
politics occasionally miss the mark. Opening is Angie McEvoy,
who swings from the hard edge to the soft in a series of
snapshots of life, the universe and everything, tinted with a
unique female perspective. While her suggestion for a National
Cunnilingus Day may not be to everyone's taste, her analysis of
weight loss a la Julia Roberts will probably go down nicely.
Next up is Mark Felgate, an unusual act in that he mixes
ventriloquism (no dummy required) with stand-up, resulting in a
string of shaggy dog stories punctuated by voices from nowhere
where you least expect them. Last on is Shappi Khorsandi, who
slips in and out of her routine as the mood - or the audience -
dictates. Whether the subject arises of male appendages, posing
nude, or the trials and tribulations of having an Iranian
family, all strangely acquire a common thread courtesy of this
comic's utterly deliciously dizzy delivery. Nick Awde
Deirdre O'Kane and Tara Flynn Gilded
Balloon Peppermint Lounge
Operating a refreshingly testosterone-free comedy zone that
still has balls are Deirdre O'Kane and Tara Flynn - they dance,
they sing, and funnily enough, they make you laugh. The duo's
main pool of inspiration is the world regurgitated through our
TV screens. A Late Show setting sends up Mariella Frostrup in
finger-licking form with a stable of cringe-making guests
including a dumb Dana and an even dumber Tom Paulin. Their
too-cool presenters for a Saturday kids' show send a shudder
down the spine with each fluttered "bless!" as they patronise
their youthful callers. Also attracting comment is the theatre
world, where fishwife actresses blame terminal resting periods
on the celebrities they desperately keep name-dropping. But,
like the Murphys... Not only are the girls spooky mimics, they
are also gifted with golden tonsils, and even when they sing a
song straight it still seems funny -their Carpenters finale sets
a mellow tone of irreverence while, contrarily, their girlie
band routine could easily go to No 1. Crap title for a show, but
that can't stop them being one of the best comic acts of the
Fringe. Now will someone please give O'Kane and Flynn their own
TV series? Nick Awde
Olaf Isbister - A Seaman's Tale Netherbow
This short play by George Mackay Brown, originally commissioned
for the Glasgow Year of Culture but never produced, is given a
loving premiere by Tweed Theatre that can only hint at its
potential charm. In the tradition of Sinbad and Marco Polo, Olaf
is a tale-telling seaman who recounts his adventures in a
Glasgow barroom. Growing up poor in the Orkneys, he naturally
took to the sea, but only after trying marriage and farming at
home. That period in his life is wittily encapsulated in one
late-sleeping morning, as his loving bride has three children
and turns into a harridan before he can drag himself out of bed.
Escaping to sea, his adventures tend to be of the amorous sort,
as he repeatedly meets desirable women and the opportunity for
riches - with a lovely heiress in Barbados and a bar maid in the
Australian gold fields -- only to be foiled at the last minute
when reminders that he already has a wife and family are
inopportunely delivered. Scott Noble brings roguish charm to the
role of Olaf, but the somewhat prosaic production is unable to
conjure up the air of romantic fable the play demands. Gerald
Berkowitz
O'Neill Triple Bill Scotsman Hotel
Before he wrote America's greatest realistic tragedies, Eugene
O'Neill wrote a lot of experimental plays. And before that, he
learned his craft through a few dozen short naturalistic pieces,
three of which are offered by Sofa Productions in this
disappointing programme. In The Web a tubercular prostitute and
an escaped prisoner dream of romantic escape, only to have it
thwarted. The Long Voyage Home shows a sailor looking forward to
leaving the sea for a farm life, only to be shanghaied onto
another ship. In The Movie Man a Hollywood crew is virtually
financing a Mexican revolution in return for the film rights.
None of the plays are masterpieces, though the second is a small
gem. But, with three different directors, all three are mangled
by the most amateurish acting and staging I've ever seen from
professionals. Neil Sheffield inserts incongruous silent movie
music and slow motion sequences into the first play, exposing
his total lack of sympathy with the material. David Shaw has
some sensitivity for the sea play, but is sabotaged by
embarrassingly bad acting, while Nick Cawdron can find no drama
or rhythm to the Mexican play. The actors, all of whom have
professional credits, should all be ashamed of themselves.
Gerald Berkowitz
Oram & Meeten Pleasance
"We went on holiday as boys and came back men!" Admittedly the
vacation to which Steve Oram and Tom Meeten found themselves
called was a week in a Swanage B&B. While this rite of
passage may not be transferable for the rest of us, the humour
certainly is. There's ping-pong one-upmanship to cater for that
mid-twenties mid-life crisis, countryside animal friends, a
provincial lad seeking his fortune as a drugs mule. Steve and
Tom then mix the Dorset adventure with a running commentary on
their own Fringe show. A stuck-up producer comes onstage to plug
his Kafka show at Hill Street, but attempts first a worthy rant
about arts funding. As stage fright takes ahold of his bodily
emissions, the result is retchingly funny. Less successful are
the musical interludes - Porto Stokes, the pyschotic Portuguese
check-out man from Somerfield, is a bit of a one-note event
despite the falsetto, as is the Wingnut pub band demo. The Enya
male tribute band Menya is a notable if resoundingly daft
exception. The duo blur straight man/funny man roles,
effortlessly matching the older comics' enviable telepathy. At
first encounter it looks as if they're stretching their material
to its limit, it then swiftly dawns that they're perched atop
that proverbial iceberg of ideas. Nick Awde
The Part of Bob Kingdom Will Be Played by an
Actor Assembly Rooms
Bob Kingdom has generated an enviable roster of one-man shows
from his many appearances at the Festival. In each show, he
says, "I look for the 'me' in them", and today he clearly has
enough of them to draw around as a mirror into his own soul.
Through a series of front and backstage conversations both with
himself and the audience, he constructs a bridge between the gap
that divides performer and writer. Truman Capote, Dylan Thomas
and Elsa Edgar (Hoover) leap from his imagination and are
assembled or disassembled with each costume change. An
invitation to look at the child behind the man leads to a guided
tour around the colourful characters that make up his Welsh
family. In between lies a highly perceptive analysis of the art
of the one-man show. Kingdom's a natural and knows his audience
inside out - a rapport is struck immediately and the resulting
intimacy is tangible. I must confess, however, to not warming to
Kingdom quite as much as wished. As with, for example, the
Gielguds and Williams of this world, I feel there are still too
many layers that give the lie to his well-crafted veneer of
candour. Nick Awde
The Philanthropist Crowne Plaza Hotel
Christopher Hampton's 1970 social comedy is given a
more-than-adequate revival by Context, a company from St.
Andrews University. Part expose of what academics sound like
when they're away from their students - he's got the mix of
erudition, vulgarity and one-upsmanship exactly right - and part
an answer to Moliere by studying a man totally at peace with
himself and the world, the play uncovers a bit of darkness
without ever losing its comic tone. Its central character is a
mild, ineffectual sort who, as he somewhat embarrassedly admits
late in the play, is generally quite happy with life, his only
stress arising from a desire to like and be liked by everyone.
The ways this openness affects others - confusing, attracting,
frustrating or enraging - are what generate the plot, which
involves a certain amount of bed-hopping among the academic set.
Performances at first smack of student theatre with too much
dependence on externals, like funny accents or voices, but
eventually settle down and let the play's virtues shine through.
Gerald Berkowitz
Pickups
and Hiccups Pleasance (Reviewed in London)
Working in the Chicago tradition of improvisational comedy, Seth
Meyers and Jill Benjamin of Boom Chicago offer a fast-moving if
inevitably uneven hour. The opening sketch builds on the usual
improv format, as they ask questions of various members of the
audience and then create composite characters out of the answers
for a scene of barroom chat-up. Some later sketches are more
adventurous, giving them less time to prepare or fit audience
material into an established frame. In one, the audience becomes
the third party in a conversation, with Meyers and Benjamin
reacting on the spot to shouted responses. Another brings two
people out of the audience to play a scene onstage with the
performers. The problem with this sort of improv is that, like
Dr. Johnson's dog on its hind legs, we are impressed that it is
done at all, and don't really demand that it be done well. Some
of Meyers and Benjamin's pieces, like the one in which she
leaves the room and then has to guess sketch elements provided
by the audience in her absence, operate strictly on the "See? We
pulled it off" level. Scripted bits, including a sketch about a
man who talks to his penis, are weak, perhaps because we expect
more of them. Both performers frequently strain to fit the
audience-proposed material into their sketches, as she in
particular repeatedly forgot elements and had to be reminded of
them. Both have limited ranges, with the characters in their
various sketches all tending to sound the same. Gerald
Berkowitz
Pigs
C Belle Angele
This 40-minute dance piece, produced under the umbrella of the
Hull Truck Theatre, is an inventive and evocative exploration of
the ethos of English football hooligans, made all the more
impressive by the fact that it is danced by women. (A brief note
for non-Brits: football - i.e., soccer - games in Britain and
abroad are routinely disrupted by organised gangs of toughs who
attend for the sole purpose of starting fistfights or worse with
the opposition's fans.) Working from evidence that most football
hooligans are in fact middle class white-collar workers during
the week, dancer-choreographer Lucy Cullingford sees the key to
their experience as frustrated machismo. She and her other
dancers - Tara Hodgson, Lucy Suggate and Amy Tomson - dance men
bound in by their jobs and offered no other release than
excessive drinking. We follow them on an increasingly drunken
ferry ride to the continent, where local women both entice and
reject them, leaving them buzzing with adrenaline and
testosterone that explode in random violence that is only
after-the-fact justified by team loyalty. To an eclectic score
compiled by Andy Wood, the dance draws on vocabulary as varied
as ballet and Broadway, to always evocative and visually
stimulating effect, while the image of women portraying men adds
both sexuality and ironic commentary. Gerald Berkowitz
Plano B Continental Shifts at St
Bride's Centre
This is a 'free' adaptation of a poem by Fernando Pessoa called
O Marinheiro, or The Sailor, which, the programme notes, "brings
three women, living together in a restricted environment, face
to face with the corpse of a maiden". So far so good. There
follows the usual bit about questioning the human condition. But
of course. The stage is a square marked by lines of petals and
duck feathers, so the action is pushed both inwards and upwards
into trapezes, ropes and frames. Like sirens bedecked in white
wedding dresses, the performers are more gymnasts than acrobats,
their bodies fusing and unfusing not only with each other but
with the set. The costumes are all lace and bloomers, that
alternately wrap or billow, envelope over heads or removed for
props. Integral to the action is Sergio Kafejian's evocative
soundscape, that constantly shifts like wind and waves with
music, voice and effects. Naturally nothing has the remotest
connection to the poem unless you already know it, and the
dreamy alternation between Brasileno and English is ultimately
confusing in whatever language. Devised by Linhas Aereas and
directed by Beth Lopes, this is a visually arresting, even
sumptuous piece, yet is let down by structurally flawed
narration. Nick Awde
Terry Ponzi Presents Gilded Balloon
Sex and drugs and badly fitting wigs. This spoof exposé
documenting the rise and fall of Bristol's most famous seventies
record producer, mogul and have-a-go svengali is one of the more
oddly compelling highlights of the Fringe. Sometimes
celebratory, sometimes regretful, Tony Ponzi recounts his tale
of hungrily leapfrogging his way up the music business corporate
ladder. His big break comes when he ousts loutish label boss
Barry Duncan and takes over his stable of stars, including lurve
god crooner Raymond Knight and his girl, equally naked in
ambition behind her Laura Ashley smile. But Ponzi's nemesis
appears in the shape of Raymond's cokefiend muso brother Titus,
and the rest is the sad history which Tony has now broken a
22-year silence to impart. The dialogue unashamedly samples
Naked Gun via The Likely Lads and The Godfather - a gift used
well by the cast who also make up the slick house band. However,
while Kevin Weeks' wimpy Ponzi goes down well he lacks the oomph
that a more focused performer could bring the part. And all
those years in the business should have taught him the folly of
putting a Fender Stratocaster through a Peavey amp. Gold disc
for effort, double-platinum for fun. Nick Awde
Pooh & Prah Komedia St. Stephens
Alternately known as Pookh I Prakh, depending on which poster
you see, and variously translated as "Dawn & Dust" or "Fluff
& Feathers," this performance piece by Russia's Akhe Group
declares itself as offering images arising "from organising
emptiness and creating zero actions" with "no messages, no
narratives just signs making obvious what is only assumed." In
practice, this means two men (Maxim Isaev, Vadim Gololobov) and
a woman (Yana Tumina) in ragged-clown whiteface performing a
string of random actions. Two of them stare fascinatedly at the
spotlights for a while. One drinks a beer. A gun goes off. A bag
of sand is spilled on the stage and then swept up. The broom
becomes a horn. Virtually none of the images is beautiful in
itself or evocative in any way. Although wearing the mask of
poor theatre, the production is actually very elaborate, with
smoke machines, flying props and an extensive music score. From
time to time what seem like themes float to the surface, as in a
sequence that suggests a developing relationship between the
woman and one of the men, but they are deliberately subverted
lest the programme accidentally wander into coherent meaning.
One can't escape the strong suspicion that the emperor is naked
or, at the very least, wearing clothes whose pattern is visible
only to him. Gerald Berkowitz
Popcorn C
Venue
Top movie director Bruce Delamitri is having a hell of a morning
from the moment he puts his key in his front door. Back from
celebrating his first Oscar win, he's pulled a stunning starlet,
but there's a surprise waiting him in the form of uninvited
houseguests, Wayne and Scout, aka the Mall Murderers -
trailer-park white trash who are on the run and armed to the
teeth. Oh, and Bruce's producer as well as his wife and kid are
also on their way to see him with even more bad news. The
resulting black comedy gets a little wordy but does throw up
some finely comic situastionsand slips in a fine argument about
the blurred boundary of galmorising violence and the price of
fame. Nice to see director/producer Benet Catty back in town
with another cracking production, although it is hampered by the
space's restricted views. And there is a palpable Mametisation
that may not be to everyone's taste - understandable, given the
company's penchant for the great man, and funnily enough the
play reads better, making Elton's insipid vision of America
snappier with added edge. It is to the credit of all involved
that they make it hot box office. Nick Awde
Postcards from Maupassant Komedia
Roman Eagle Lodge
Two Friends Productions offers this light-hearted collection of
short pieces adapted by Caroline Harding from the works of Guy
de Maupassant. Small truths are told about love and life in the
course of the hour, but it is the grace of the writing and the
performances - by Harding, Candida Gubbins and Dominic Taylor -
that makes the production work. There are five pieces in all,
each fragile and slight, and each played with a delicate
appreciation for its merits, as director Timothy Sheader wisely
does not attempt to make more of the material than it can
support. A straying husband returns to his wife, only to find
that she has learned some unexpected lessons in the economics of
love from his mistresses. A man provides an intimate service for
a woman he meets on a train, and then must face the
embarrassment of sitting together for the rest of the journey.
Three people are affected by the arrival of spring in different
ways. Nurses tending a dying man find ways to make the vigil
less onerous. Two strangers find that a graveyard meeting is the
starting point for a possible relationship. Each of the sketches
is essentially comic, while each has just enough of a hint of
character or emotional depth to keep the whole programme from
floating away Gerald Berkowitz
Private Angelo Valvona & Crolla
The adapters of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Mike Maran and
Philip Contini, have now turned their narrative skills to Eric
Linklater's novel about Second World War Italy. Regular bloke
Angelo is in love with Lucrezia who won't marry him until after
the war, and so he ends up drunk in a German pioneer corps
trying to desert to the Allied side. His break comes when he
frees a British officer trapped under a jeep and accompanies him
through the liberation of Italy. Through Angelo's eyes we get a
snapshot of ordinary Italians as their country is ravaged by
war. The picaresque format opens up a multitude of subplots: in
the contessa's castle there's a Rennaisance Madonna painting
hidden from the Germans, the comforting Lucrezia mysteriously
becomes pregnant whenever Angelo isn't around, while Angelo
himself seeks for the courage he so hilariously lacks. The
resulting culture clash pulls up an amazing array of comic
clashes not just of culture but also the sexes. Music comes in
the form of bouncy folk tunes from Dick Lee's clarinet and
Freeland Barbour's accordion which, aided by the odd burst of
opera and excellent visual gags from the hand props, round off a
piece of classic storytelling whose double delivery makes it
double the fun. Nick Awde
The Proof Royal Lyceum Theatre
The barbed wire dividing two anonymous European states is gone,
and flowing in the populations and politics across the
increasingly porous frontier is a 50-year-old man who claims
terminal illness. This is his final chance to see his hometown,
where clues may lie to the whereabouts of the longlost twin no
one believes existed. Thirty-five years after The Notebook left
off, De Onderneming's second instalment of its adaptation of
Hungarian Agota Kristof's novels revisits the twin brothers
whose dehumanised bonding was forged then split by the Second
World War. Things begin to crumble immediately. No sooner has
one fact been uttered than another appears to change or
contradict. In the long years of the aftermath of war and
partition, everyone hides a shameful past while history has been
rewritten so many times that truth shifts like time. Gunther
Lesage maintains a quiet dignity as Claus, surrounded by a
dazzling merry-go-round of characters created by Robby Cleiren,
Carly Wijs and Ryszard Turbiasz. All the elements that made the
first play a one-off wonder are present, but after such
underplayed genius it is inevitable the focus finds itself less
sharp, the characters less meaty, the exchanges less connecting.
Action, lighting and set become a little too European, all
disjointed stylishness. although there is a spark when
flashbacks to the adults' childhood dominate the narrative. But
my comparison is an insult to cast and production. This remains
a brilliant work and, I suspect, on an international platform it
will prove the more successful of the two plays. Nick
Awde
Raw Pleasance
Chris O'Connell's play Car was a fringe hit two years ago but
his follow-up, while well-intentioned, is not likely to be quite
as successful. A dark and ultimately despairing look at dead-end
youth, it covers essentially familiar ground with only a few new
illuminations or insights. A small gang of teen vandals is led
in their forays into graffiti and random violence by the deeply
disturbed Lex (Jo Joiner) who is given to uncontrollable fits of
vicious anger. An unmotivated and possibly deadly attack on a
random victim shakes up her followers, leading to the beating up
of one and an attempt to escape by another. Meanwhile, social
worker Rueben (Gary Cargill) shows an unusual interest in the
gang and its leader, gradually exposed as more than
professional, and leading to even further violent outbursts. The
image of young offenders stuck in a mode they can't escape,
either because of inner demons or inability to imagine
alternatives, is a strong one, but the play is unable to bring
us sufficiently inside the characters to see them as more than
sociopaths. So we leave as pessimistic about understanding or
helping these social cast-offs as we were when we entered,
neither enlightened nor enriched by the encounter. Gerald
Berkowitz
Reader, I Murdered Him Pleasance
There's enough invention in Sophia Kingshill's comedy for three
or four plays, and that is ultimately its downfall, as all three
or four vie for supremacy in what ends up a bit of a jumble. In
a remote moorside cottage live two modern women. Charlotte seems
to think they are the Brontes, and Emily is willing to go along
for the sake of peace, except that Charlotte keeps trying to
kill off the blind Mr. Rochester -- literally. When an actual
blind man goes missing, a police officer named Belle Acton (Cue
knowing smiles from Bronteans) arrives to investigate. Factor in
what may be a madwoman in the attic, up to three dead bodies, a
lesbian seduction, talk of masturbation and literary criticism,
recurring organ chords of doom and a convenient thunderstorm,
and the literary, theatrical and comic levels start bumping into
each other more frequently than the actresses bump into the
furniture on the cramped stage. There's a delightful Bronte
spoof in here somewhere, and a semi-serious study in sexual
energy sublimated into art, and some Pirandello toying with the
boundary between reality and illusion, and probably a few other
things I've forgotten. It is all done very well, and the cast --
especially Rebecca James as the blank-faced and blank-brained
Charlotte -- have a lot of fun with it. But if the author had
separated out the several strands she might have had three or
four fun plays instead of one. Gerald Berkowitz
Resident
Alien Assembly Rooms (Reviewed in London)
Quentin Crisp, who died last year at the grand old age of 92,
grew up as a flamboyantly effeminate homosexual in an age when
that was literally illegal in England, and the experience gave
him a philosophically detached view of life which he expressed
with aphoristic wit. (He once called himself "one of the stately
homos of England".) Since he earned his living as a nude model,
his 1968 autobiography was titled The Naked Civil Servant, and
it made him something of a gay icon, enabling him to live the
remainder of his life contentedly as a B-level celebrity, famous
primarily for being famous. Tim Fountain's play, based on
Crisp's writings and diary, is structured as A Day in the Life
Of. We meet Crisp in his cluttered New York slum apartment, as
he slowly dresses and makes up to meet interviewers (who never
show up). Along the way he pontificates wittily on figures from
Oprah Winfrey to Margaret Thatcher, and topics from politics to
housekeeping ('Never dust. After the first four years it doesn't
get any worse. The key is not losing your nerve.') Crisp is
played by another gay icon, drag performer Bette Bourne (not in
drag). The impersonation is pretty good, though the actor in
Bourne makes him unable to resist being far more animated and
actory than the laid-back Crisp. The result is an entertaining
introduction (for those who don't remember him) and a
sentimental revisit (for those who do) to a delightful and now
sadly missed character. Gerald Berkowitz
Resolution Assembly Rooms
As both writer and performer, Pip Utton's strength lies in his
ability to take us deep into the psyche of his characters, and
then make us discover unexpected and unsettling things about
them and, by extension, about ourselves. In his latest piece he
plays two roles in alternating pieces of monologue - the father
of a young girl killed by a hit and run driver, and the
imprisoned killer. The father is by far the more sympathetic,
torn apart by an unbearable grief that is compounded by the
added insult of the killer's obscenely short prison sentence.
But gradually, while the man's sorrow imperceptibly evolves into
a murderous anger, we are faced with the discovery that the
figure we have so sympathised and identified with is on the edge
of a dangerous madness. Meanwhile, against our wills, we have
been forced to recognise that the killer is suffering in ways
and depths we would not have guessed. Utton may telegraph the
tragic but dramatically satisfying ending a bit earlier than he
wishes, but that does not significantly impair the emotional
power of his complacency-shaking work. Gerald Berkowitz
Reworking Cassandra Gateway Studio
An actress stands on a ladder and makes gnomic pronouncements in
the persona of Cassandra, while being heckled by someone in the
audience (actually, the only other person there besides me). He
goes onstage and they mutate into a married couple who were once
on opposite sides in a war and now hate each other, since
they've worked out that he killed her family back then. They
take turns trying to poison each other. There are sound effects
of a party. He finds a mouse in his pants. They fondle a rubber
chicken and mime vomiting. He puts on a tiara. She tells of how
the dog bit her mother, and he gets aroused. They sing a country
and western song while waving hot dogs about. From time to time
she goes back up that ladder and says she's Cassandra again.
Coherent storytelling may be out of fashion, but it is simple
courtesy to toss your audience a clue now and then. Written and
directed by Kate Browne, and featuring Sarah Moore and Kevin
McDermott, with Anna Frazier as the puppeteer (although there
aren't any puppets), this is without question the most
pretentiously self-indulgent piece of totally opaque theatre
I've seen at this year's festival. {Actually, I wrote this
before seeing Pooh and Prah.) Gerald Berkowitz
Road Music C Venue
The Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club dates back to
1855, but even in more recent years it has had a strong record
of professional-quality productions. If this new play-with-music
by Alex Parsonage and Tom Perrin isn't the best thing they've
ever done, it's still a fascinating concept interestingly
presented. In 1967 the American beat poet Allen Ginsberg visited
the aged and discredited imagist poet Ezra Pound in his Italian
exile. The play imagines the meeting, as reported by a fictional
woman journalist who the authors have invented to be present. It
becomes a story of mutual blessing, the younger and in fact more
highly regarded poet still feeling the need of approval by his
idol, while the older man, withdrawn into the bitter suspicion
that all his work was worthless, is comforted by the sincere
admiration of his fan. In performance, Adam Tuck as Pound has
little to do but sit in silent bitterness, and thus must convey
the sense of Ginsberg's gift to him through subtle underplaying.
Mark Wainwright's Allen occasionally has a bit too much Woody
Allen in him, but he captures the sense of a truly holy fool
that was the centre of Ginsberg's charm. Interludes of jazz
played by the authors contribute to the dreamy, elegiac tone.Gerald
Berkowitz
Rough Crossing C Venue
The Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club offers the
delightful opportunity to watch Tom Stoppard adapting Molnar,
with more than a passing salute to Noel Coward along the way.
The silly plot of writers trying to complete a Broadway musical
on a transatlantic liner, while keeping the composer from
discovering that his beloved star is fooling around with her
co-star, is just an excuse for Stoppard's patented wordplay.
There's a character, for example, whose reaction time is so slow
that he's always answering one question behind what's just been
asked, to comic effect, while another man, trying in vain to
order a drink, keeps phrasing his request in ways that encourage
the steward to drink it for him. Stoppard is very much the star
of this production, with the student direction and performances
adequate without really having the style and snap that would
significantly contribute to the fun. Gerald Berkowitz
The Saddam Brothers Komedia at
Southside
Two Saddam Husseins bound onto the stage to compere a revue
that's "taking the friendly face of Iraq to the Little Satan".
Complete with Desert Storm fatigues, preposterous berets and de
rigueur moustaches, the dictators keep up a steady barrage of
audience-haranguing to a soundtrack of cheesy organ pop
classics. With terrible puns plundered from 'Allo 'Allo, Mark
Brailsford and Mark Katz reinvent the Iraqi musical and laze in
bed with a copy of New Woman squabbling over their sensitive
sides. Guesting with a patchy string of songs and monologues are
songstress Kate Van Dike and monologuist Carol Kentish. Since
they are, respectively, deadringers for Tom Cruise (far
fanciable as a woman) and Nicole Kidman (well, she's tall and
fair-haired), their Tom and Nicole divorce lament more than
makes up for any shortfall. Eric Page takes the mic for a
lengthy stand-up spot. He has an interesting trove of ideas but
took some time to warm up - hardly surprising since his tales of
masturbation, speed, gayness and more masturbation are totally
at odds with the cheeky slapstick of his Iraqi hosts. No Exocet
of a show, the writing needs to be tighter and the merest
flicker of direction would be welcome. A lot of the humour is
over-referential and there is the running problem of clashing
styles, but despite the chaos I emerged chortling all the way
down Southside. Nick Awde
St
Nicholas Assembly Rooms
Conor McPherson is a disgracefully young playwright whose works
have been quietly taking theatredom by storm like a latterday,
gentler Mamet. St Nicholas is very much in his mould - a long
rambling shaggy dog story which in the telling fires off round
after round of cracking humour while offering often unexpected
insights into what makes us all tick. This time we have the tale
of a jaded, maverick theatre critic (yes, I know...) whose
destructive mid-life crisis spurs him into a chance encounter
that takes him into a very different world. Quite what that
world is, you'll have to find out for yourselves. Making a
perfectly louche and world-weary Dublin critic is craggy Irish
actor Peter Dineen, a veteran of McPherson's mega-hit The Weir
and a performer of some presence. Diving deep into the
narrative, he surfaces with a pearl of a performance that may
not always milk the suspense but gets ten out of ten for
atmosphere. Storytelling as you'll rarely encounter. Nick
Awde
Schizophrenia/Sensitivity Hill
Street
Altitude North's offering for this year's Edinburgh takes the
form of two pieces that are different yet complement each other.
Experimental theatre is a handy tagword, or perhaps visual/tonal
poetry is more appropriate. In Schizophrenia, Oliver Renton
plays a man who imparts a message to the audience in jerky
movements that reflect the fragmented nature of his mental
state. Sensitivity, on the other hand, is a more lyrical piece -
as the title suggests - where Jonathan Robson uses the flow of
his body to examine his own masculinity. A particularly
effective moment is when he bandages his fists like a boxer's
yet is unable to keep up the façade. Adrian Smith's words for
both sections have a strident ring, although perhaps lack a
clear style to drive any underlying meaning. On piano and
composition, George Rodosthenous deploys a wide palette of
textures to create at times mellow, at times jarring soundscapes
- mixing shades of the likes of George Winston and John Cage -
aided by the able Jonathan Coates on tuned percussion and drums.
These are bravado performances all round. However, I am
extremely limited in any further response since I find the
subject matter a major stumbling block. The first piece in
particular is difficult to consider seriously, since society's
romantic intellectualisation of mental illness, along with
substance abuse and prostitution, really needs to stop. Unless
of course you're a schizophrenic. Nick Awde
Sealboy: Freak Theatre Workshop
Thrill as Mat Fraser shaves himself, ooh as he puts his trousers
on, wow to the sound of him sawing wood (and smoking a joint).
He can also flap and clap his hands like a seal - the
impersonation is a remarkable one since he's missing most of his
arms. Cue one of the best one-man shows in the Fringe as the
action seesaws between the memories of Sealo the Sealboy, a Deep
South freakshow performer, and Tam Shrafer, disabled actor of
today, moaning in his professional capacity about auditions,
agents, adverts and will he ever get to play the romantic lead.
Writer/performer Fraser draws you in to the world where he is
the one who is normal, and it works because he avoids kneejerk
politics or mocking able-bodied attitudes- although, as he can't
help but point out, it may be some time before we see a
short-handed Henry VIII since it's only recently black actors
have been allowed to do soap adverts. The American accent slips
and the drum 'n' bass closer is naff but aside from that, aided
by director Ewan Marshall, Fraser has created a brilliant show
that will continue to be thought-provoking entertainment long
after opera singers stop blacking themselves up for Othello.
Oops, a bit of politics there. Nick Awde
The Secret Love Life of Ophalia
Assembly Rooms
Steven Berkoff's fantasia on themes from Hamlet is a jeu
d'esprit that bubbles along quite delightfully for about half
its length, before going seriously wrong and sinking like a lead
balloon. Berkoff imagines events pre-Shakespeare, as Hamlet
(Martin Hodgson) and Ophelia (Freya Bosworth) meet at a party in
Elsinore and begin a secret correspondence that soon gets very
hot and heavy. He begins with a gracious welcoming note, she
replies a bit more effusively, he gets a bit intense in an
adolescent Shelley way, and soon their hormones are taking over.
A very funny pair of letters has them lapsing unconsciously into
sexual imagery (He: ride me like a horse. She: plow my field),
but that's just the warm-up for some openly sexual fantasising
on both sides that has the letter-writers squirming in their
chairs. (Incidentally, through all of this, Berkoff maintains a
recognisably Shakespearean style that becomes part of the joke.)
And then events catch up with the plot of Hamlet, and everything
gets leaden as he tries to change them into Romeo and Juliet and
only succeeds in making them soppy. The clash between the
sexuality and high inventiveness of the first half and the
dreary banality of the second is dispiriting, and not even a few
clever touches in his shoehorning of his material into
Shakespeare's plot can salvage it. A very few audience members
walk out about halfway through some performances, offended by
hearing their sweet Ophelia talk dirty; they don't realise that
they've already seen the best part of the show. Gerald
Berkowitz
Sex,
Drugs, Rock & Roll Pleasance (Reviewed in
London)
Eric Bogosian's string of monologues provides a dark, profane
and morally ambiguous composite portrait of the American male.
Written in inventive, evocative language, and delivered by Danny
Richman with a full appreciation of both the verbal music and
the psychological depth, the 90-minute programme is alternately
comic and horrifying. From persuasive street beggar to
too-smooth businessman, from raging madman to self-satisfied
rock star, Bogosian's portraits are all exposed eventually as
life's losers, sharing certain tragicomic qualities. Macho
sexism is a constant, as are very limited horizons of
imagination and a total lack of self-awareness. The rock star
has no idea how ignorant and self-contradictory he is, just as a
prisoner celebrating the gusto of life sees no irony in his
condition. High points include an extended comic description of
a stag party gone wrong, told by a participant who sees nothing
odd in the event's descent into violent, drunken chaos; and the
quiet menace of a self-styled artist driven to self-hating
madness by the elusiveness of riches and fame. That last piece
makes manifest another common thread, that in their various,
almost always unsuccessful ways, each of the figures was
questing after the slippery promises of the American Dream.
Though lacking some of the intense anger and implicit threat of
violence that Bogosian brought to his performance of these
monologues, Danny Richman achieves his own special scariness
just by making his monsters and madmen so very nearly normal.
Gerald Berkowitz
Shagnasty and Duck
Gilded Balloon
This new comedy by Rigel Edwards plays like a
better-than-average TV sitcom episode without ever really
transcending the genre. The title pair are a couple of life's
losers, hapless petty criminals who envision big time
opportunity when they get involved in a plot to import Thai
prositiutes to London. But raising the seed money involves
volunteering for various medical experiments and other extreme
measures. Factor in a tarot-reading Welshman, a WPC who has seen
the light and gone over to the dark side, and several
double-crosses of various stripes, and you get a sufficiently
complex comedy of criminal errors. Along the way as well are
several laugh-inducing comic images, such as an attempt to
smuggle cocaine in a funeral urn that looked a bit too much like
the one that held daddy's ashes, and a climactic stand-off
involving more guns in less adept hands than is exactly safe.
Kevin Hand gives a happily comic and appropriately touching
performance as the designated shnook of the group, the worm who
spends the entire length of the play gathering up his energy to
turn. But a general laxness of tempo and fumbling for lines,
along with one-dimensional characterisations, suggest
under-rehearsal or under-direction by Owen Lewis. Gerald
Berkowitz
Shakespeare for Breakfast C Venue
This fringe perennial returns with one of their brightest shows
in years. The idea of starting the day with a light,
vaguely-Shakespeare-based revue was exactly in the spirit of the
fringe, and the fact that they give you coffee and croissants
with your ticket is a delightful bonus. In the past, the revue
format was usually some variant on characters from various
Shakespeare plays getting together or rebelling against the
author. This year the young quintet present themselves as
scientists researching the arts of love, and offering advice,
some of it based on Shakespeare. So, for example, we get a
modern yob placating his girlfriend by reciting a sonnet, and
Kate and Petruchio's meeting as a sample pick-up method. But
some of the best material has nothing to do with Shakespeare, as
when a couple invite audience suggestions on how to help them
meet. And in the middle of it all is a simple, fresh playing of
the Romeo-Juliet balcony scene that is one of the best I've ever
seen - proof once again that Shakespeare, if you don't do him in
a heavily Shakespearean way, can always surprise and delight. Gerald
Berkowitz
Shaving and Plucking Komedia Roman
Eagle Lodge
To call Gisela Renolds' 40-minute play hair-raising would be too
easy a pun, so instead I'll say that, by forcing a
reconsideration of some fairly common sexual fantasies, it
produces a deliberately cringe-making and consciousness-raising
experience. The single character, played by Jayne Davies, is an
amiable housewife whose husband found her body hair unpleasant
and encouraged her to a course of extreme depilitation, so that
regular (and painful) pubic waxing became a prerequisite for
lovemaking and a happy marriage. At first willing to pay the
price, the speaker only gradually discovers that this seemiongly
mild fetish on her husband's part is actually part of a larger
need to dominate and control, and ultimately to sadistically
humiliate. Her growing awareness and her very appropriate
revenge round out a tale that has much to teach both men and
women. I see a long future for this piece at women's events,
psychology conventions and university theatres, though I can't
help feeling that the average fringegoer who wandered innocently
into this powerful show might have had an experience
considerably heavier and more mind-bending than was anticipated.
Gerald Berkowitz
Shy Shining Walls Komedia St
Stephen's
Two chairs, a woman and a man, a percussion track rocks from
industrial to primeval. Side by side as if on a rollercoaster
then riding in tandem, Sandra Trejos and Alejandro Tosatti make
the air between them dance in these extraordinary five duets
(aka Paredes de Brillo Timido) from Costa Rica's Diquis Tiquis.
While their bodies create fluid slo-mo riffs like the tide's ebb
and flow, it is their faces that narrate. As the music turns
melodic, the feel is freer, dreamier, jettisoning the chair
anchors. Personalities ripple in and out of each other to create
a near perfect wave. It looks minimalist but no two moves are
the same and the concentration of imagery is such that
'miniaturist' is more apt. Wonderfully tongue in cheek, the
result is too magical to spoil by worrying the programme notes
for their dry artistic exposé. For this work alone, which uses a
cracking soundtrack from the likes of Wim Mertens and Arvo Part,
Trejos is a choreography god. Sure this sort of stuff was awash
in the long-gone days of Merce Cunningham, but the movement and
narrative here look as if they were invented only yesterday.
Spellbinding, poetic, strangely and unexpectedly moving - just
as good music knows the value of silence, here beats the genius
of stillness. Nick Awde
Spiritual Nuggets Greyfriars
Kirkhouse
With the creeping if not rampant commercialisation of the
Fringe, this is a breath of fresh air embodying as it does that
original festival spirit. And spirits embody this gentle
romantic, post-Friends comedy, where a ghoul and her grumbling
apprentice observe the interaction of a group of three girls and
three guys over a couple of days. While there is not much of a
plot, there are witty snapshots of discussing the meaning of
life and the mundane, getting stoned, and the girls' objections
to Dreamcaster. Each seems on the verge of a great discovery:
maybe love is the answer, maybe it isn't, and what was the
question in the first place? Holding it all together is the
developing love interest between the sensitive guy and the
independent girl. The set consists of a simple yet effective
system of blocks that create a flat or park at will, lugged
about by the hapless ghouls. Alistair Logan's play is ingenious
in its own way and there are nice touches such as the tormented
but boring ghost. Not quite Wings of Desire nor indeed Angel,
but the characterisations are engaging and there's a heartbeat
in each story that draws laughs of recognition throughout. Nick
Awde
Swallow C Venue
The young company called Wicked Theatre makes a strong debut
with this play by 18-year-old Sara Doctors. A group of
twenty-somethings all connected in some way with the art world
take turns falling in love or lust with each other, in various
permutations and various mixes of gender. With scenes
overlapping, there is usually someone centre stage complaining
about being heartbroken while one or more couples are snogging
to the side. The culture of casual coupling and casual betrayal
is insightfully and incisively captured, and if the play doesn't
actually go anywhere, we clearly do have a writer-in-the-making
here. She's a shrewd observer of character, and once she masters
plotting and structure more fully (There is a story, but it
seems imposed on the characters, rather than developing
organically), she will be worth watching. Performances are fine
all around. Gerald Berkowitz
This Way For The Gas, Ladies And Gentlemen
Komedia
The Life and Death Orchestra offers a musical programme based on
writings from and about the Holocaust that is, as it must be, a
deeply moving experience. It is very much to the credit of the
creators and performers that it is also ultimately far more
uplifting than depressing. The six-piece orchestra is led by
Bill Smith, who set the poetry, letters and memoirs that make up
the text to music. He alternates vocal duties with Angi Mariani,
and while neither has a conventionally trained voice - he leans
toward Dylanesque nasality while she has a church singer's
tremolo - the roughness of their delivery gives some songs a
Weill quality and all a passionate sincerity. Texts range from
survivor memoirs to the works of poets like Zbigniew Herbert and
Czeslaw Milosz. The songs sometimes have the awkwardness of
literal translations or of prose shoehorned into music. But the
forced juxtapositions can prove very affecting, as when the mode
of a torch song supports lyrics about the ultimate separation.
Most movingly, the programme ends with a waltz and the
affirmation of love and life. Perhaps more appropriate to a
concert hall or church than a fringe cabaret, it is nonetheless
a fully worthwhile hour. Gerald Berkowitz
3
Dark Tales Assembly Rooms (Reviewed in London)
Comic physical theatre at its most high-spirited and energetic,
if not necessarily most original, is provided in this 100-minute
romp by Theatre O. While most of the young company's performance
techniques and styles have been seen before in other groups, the
eclectic mix is continuously entertaining. The action begins
with the adventures of a mousy little man, depicted in a mix of
mime, verbally-produced sound effects and a mostly gibberish
pidgin English. Terrorized by his monstrous wife, ridiculed by a
smug neighbour, bullied by his boss and set upon by teen
hoodlums, he takes comfort in fantasies of heroic and violent
revenge. Attention then shifts to one of his co-workers, an
attractive but repressed young woman who learns she has only a
short time to live and grasps at a last opportunity for the
pleasures and self-expression she has been denied. The style
shifts as well, to a surprisingly effective mix of slightly
heightened comic acting and evocative dance. Style and focus
shift once again to watch the nasty boss of the first sequence
go to pieces when his wife leaves him. This time straight acting
is combined with inventive and symbolic mime, the cast managing
to evoke, among other things, a smelly refrigerator and
exploding microwave. While none of the three tales is
particularly original, and stylistic devices can be footnoted to
sources as varied as Complicite, Trestle and music hall, the
cast of four - Joseph Alford, Carolina Valdes, Lucien MacDougall
and Sarah Coxon - prove extraordinarily versatile, playing
dozens of roles with instantaneous transformations and shifts in
style. Writing is credited to the cast along with Jon Rand, with
Alford directing. Gerald Berkowitz
Three Wishes Pleasance
Last April, as the records show, an astral cloud enveloped the
earth and for four weeks we all had the chance to make three
wishes come true. Since then, understandably, things have never
been the same. This romantic comedy tells the personal
experience of two ordinary people before, during and after the
event. George and Flip are a splendidly scatty, perfectly
matched couple who proudly announced their engagement the day
before the cloud came. Now they've got their wishes, what could
go wrong? Beautifully crafted vignettes relate their tale with a
neat narration technique, taking the concept to its logical
absurdities, and there are more a few laughs in the telling.
Aided by Erica Whyman's sensitive direction, Ben Moor and Janice
Phayre have a dreamy yet focused delivery that instantly
connects. From the moment they walk on, they make an endearing,
convincing couple you want to wrap up and take home with you. As
a writer, Moor's imagination occasionally oversteps himself, but
under the delightful dizziness lies a remarkably moral play that
tackles trust, as the characters question their expectations of
each other. In a funny sort of way it has shades of It's a
Wonderful Life, but more poignant. Nick Awde
Tiny Dynamite Traverse
Abi Morgan's play is about friendship, responsibility, and the
need to take emotional risks. If it ultimately goes soft and
conventional in its conclusions, it reaches them by new and
attractive routes. Two lifelong friends are on holiday, an
annual event during which the more stable one (Scott Graham)
attempts to clean up his disturbed drop-out pal (Steven
Hoggett). Both are fascinated by news stories of bizarre
accidents, using them as fuel for an ongoing debate over whether
life makes sense. Both are haunted by the suicide of a woman
they loved, and cannot face the emotional dangers posed by a new
woman (Jasmine Hyde) until they lay their ghosts. Imagery of
random accidents - literally, of lightning striking - and of the
excitement of challenging fate guide us to the somewhat
anticlimactic discoveries that the seemingly stable man may be
the more dependant, and that one cannot achieve love until one
is prepared to risk pain and self-exposure. This coproduction by
Paines Plough and Frantic Assembly draws on both companies'
commitment to new writing and visual theatre, the latter evident
in Vicky Featherstone's direction, which seamlessly moves from
the naturalistic to the stylised (There's a sequence of what can
only be called synchronised sunbathing), and in Julian Crouch's
spare but evocative design. Gerald Berkowitz
Tomorrow Never Knows
Pleasance Dome
This play with music, by Dean Collinson, Gene Jacobs and Mick
Walsh, is an attempt to raise what one must assume is
consciously banal material to tragic or at least highly dramatic
heights. It fails. In a plot that begins as sitcom and descends
into soap opera we are introduced to an unhappily married couple
living with his Steptoe-like father. She, we eventually learn,
is pregnant by a lover who has moved on to another girlfriend,
while the husband fights the temptation for flings with both
that girlfriend and a neighbour, who then dies after taking some
bad Ecstasy, and I'm sure I've left something out. The only
original and interesting element in this is a singing
narrator-chorus who comments on the action, much in the mode of
Willy Russell's Blood Brothers. While some of the songs have
dramatic or musical power, they do not serve the purpose of
heightening or universalising the cliched and uninvolving story.
Gerald Berkowitz
Too Late for Logic King's Theatre
Tom Murphy's 1989 play ends with a parable that too explicitly
spells out the moral that love, friendship, community can only
be maintained if the right balance of intimacy and independence
is achieved. The body of the play shows various characters in
the constant process of fumbling for that balance. At the centre
is Christopher (Duncan Bell), a philosophy lecturer who has
withdrawn from his family to focus on his career and the
pleasures of Schopenhauer. The death of his sister-in-law, and
the fear that his brother (Hugh Ross) might kill himself, drag
him back into the world, and he spends the play watching others
reach out to each other, realising the extent of his isolation,
and beginning his own awkward attempts at reintegration. There
is ultimately something soft at the core of a play that has its
hero find redemption through the rediscovery of the value of
love, and all the crispness of Patrick Mason's direction or
starkness of Francis O'Connor's design (towering sets that dwarf
the characters, furniture from the most sterile of offices)
cannot disguise it. Still, there are a number of strong scenes
along the way, as when Christopher's teenaged daughter (Jo
Freer) instinctively finds the right words with which to comfort
her uncle, or when a family friend (Juliet Cadzow) bubbles and
mothers too much, but with such obvious good will that she is
not intrusive. Duncan Bell makes Christopher's journey, with its
hesitancies, false starts and brief retreats, thoroughly
credible and engrossing, right up to and through its sentimental
conclusion. Gerald Berkowitz
Trev and Simon's Circus of Evil Pleasance
Trev and Simon are back, exposing their darker
side. Taking Denis Wheatley as their bible, and strewing the
stage with a proliferation of pentagrams, hounds of hell and
Darth Vader, they evoke pure, naked evil as this new show's
theme. Peeved at being banned from sacrificing a live lamb, the
duo descend into their usual mayhem, misunderstandings and
visits to the loo, and lead the audience in chanting
incantations from the Next clothing catalogue (you had to be
there) in a satanic ritual to raise the dead. There follows a
trawl through history's gallery of villains, including
unforgiveably Gallic Bluebeard, priapic Rasputin, cuddly Mother
Shipton plus witchfinder general, and, er, Eviel Knivel.
Dripping with resurrected seventies slapstick, there are
frequent sightings of the Crackerjack ghost. Frankly evil puns
snake through the ether. This is scrappy stuff and hardly
cutting edge, the humour hasn't grown while the expletives have,
yet Trev and Simon embody the power of good since in Live and
Kicking they had so much exposure they are now as much part of
the national fabric as the National Curriculum. And how many
other (legal) acts can you think of who can get an entire
audience chanting "Satan, Satan, Satan" with all the glee of a
pub singalong? Nick Awde
UberArmy C Venue
Ubersausage's latest round of mayhem is subtitled Natural Born
Grillers, a concept that clearly got canned somewhere in the
obligatory eleventh-hour rewrites. The only military references
are the cute army-issue T-shirts the comics don and doff
throughout the show as they do a cod rap about being ginger, the
young pregnant couple deciding to abort and raise a teddy bear
instead, and a mind-bendingly surreal giant fly. Out on the
perimeters, a sketch on the Wagon Wheel as metaphor for eating
babies' brains works, while the Anne Frank musical falls flat on
its face, despite the Hitler cameo. Punchlines are rare and the
material's nowhere near as offensive as they'd like to think
(quite cuddly in fact). But that's not the point. The premises
are original and there's a deeply satisfying hi-tech
uber-slickness. And underneath the gags and slapstick lies a
thoughtful team of writers and comic actors. Oh, and experts in
mass marketing too - along with director Rohan Achyara they know
which buttons to press. So Matt Holt, Andrew Jones, Ciaran
Murtagh, Tom Price and Beth Sheldon take a well-earned bow. An
infectious blend of laughs for belly and intellect, the ghostly
clown video sequence alone makes it worth the ticket. Nick
Awde
The Umbilical Brothers: Speedmouse Gilded
Balloon
II
It's a
packed house that wildly greets David Collins and Shane Dundas
like rock gods. And that's the cue for the athletic comic duo to
launch into a loopy intro session before announcing they have a
new concept of virtual reality comedy. That means they run
through the rest of the show as if it's on tape where every
scene, every routine, every movement or word can potentially hit
rewind, fast forward, slo-mo, tracking, brightness - basically
anything you can find on a remote control. Half the laughs come
from never quite knowing whose finger's pushing the button.
Their technique is a mindboggling whirlwind of clown, slapstick
and stand-up with dollops of ventriloquism and mime, rifling
through every trick in the book and making them seem brand new.
Like Ren and Stimpy on speed, they explode an invisible dog,
kill flies, swim under water with their sinister clown roadie.
And like jugglers, by the end they've woven all the routines
into one wild rollercoaster. To be honest, it all starts to wear
a little thin despite the frenetic pacing - particularly the
endless variations on giving each other the finger - but it's
still a magnetic, access-all-areas stomper. Nick Awde
Viva La Diva
Pleasance
Florence Foster Jenkins
was the William McGonnigall of sopranos, a singer who combined
complete absence of talent with complete absence of
self-awareness and an innocence that raised her incompetence to
high art. She was rich enough to subsidise a lifetime of
recitals in New York from 1912 to 1944, culminating in one
recording and a Carnegie Hall concert attended by legions of
fans who viewed her as a camp icon long before the term was
invented. Chris Balance's new play is a loving salute to
Jenkins' grand folly, and a delightful vehicle for popular
television actress Jean Boht. In their hands, and those of
sensitive director Chrys Salt, Jenkins is shown to be a woman
infectiously happy in her delusion, with just the occasional
fleeting hint, as in a flash of panic in the eyes before a
performance, that she might somewhere know the truth. Ian Angus
Wilkie provides fine comic support as the impoverished pianist
who takes on the job of accompanist and only then hears her
sing, doubling as her supportive companion-manager. We get to
hear Jenkins' actual recordings in the concert scenes, with Boht
comically lip-syncing (it turns out that her voice wasn't so
much bad - she managed to come close to most of the notes - as
totally untrained, with a screechy thinness), and in a lovely
climactic coup de theatre we hear what she herself must have
heard. A sweetly comic delight. Gerald Berkowitz
Wax On/Wax Off C
Venue
Hot Wax deliver a strip of extended sketches that smooth out the
extraordinary side of ordinary people - in the process
generating no small measure of unexpected laughs. The first
slice of life is a Geordie gender bender soiree which keeps you
pinching yourself at seeing two women brilliantly portray two
men badly playing women. Next up are the streetwise Maltese
carer who breezes round an old woman's flat, oblivious that her
employer's stone dead, and the Essex girl mum who has her 38DD
(slightly used) mammaries subjected to a bizarre series of
tests, thinking they'll get her a career in modelling but the
woman in the white coat has other ideas. Then there's the
busybody Irish mum who's "just popped by" and whose supposedly
innocent barrage of questions bulldozes through her daughter's
non-life as the humour factor soars as the depression plummets,
followed by the office bitch whose put-downs and penchant for
the Welcome Pack marks her as a serious rival to the League of
Gentlemen's Restart Pauline. Sarah Cakebread, Caroline Conway
and Finn Taylor acquit themselves well on writing and performing
duties. Neat character studies, unexpected laughs and some great
barbs underlie this deceptively gentle show. Nick Awde
Weekend in Rio Pleasance Dome
Sugar is mad as hell and bound for Rio in tourist class. Her
fellow passengers are stampeding to the loo to escape her bile.
Unbeknownst to her, travelling on the same flight up in first
class is her son, the object of her fury. She's chasing Chester,
who has absconded with cash from the family business and is now
headed for a weekend in the sun with white trash sisters Tina
and Jen. In the motormouth Sugar, Ellen Ratner has created a
magnificently larger-than-life comic icon: as her anger turns to
rejection, the resulting mid-air explosion instantly atomises
anyone within range. Later, at the first-class bar, after making
mincemeat of the miserable, menstruating Jen (a doe-eyed,
put-upon Sara Hammerman), Courtney Shaughnessy's Tina liberates
her devastating charm all over Cavin Cornwall's Ramone, who has
just paid through the nose to upgrade to safety away from
Sugar's attentions. Writer Steven Froelich has created an
irresistible monster of situational humour where the laughs are
further fuelled by the claustrophobia of the fuselage setting.
And as a production, this show is so airtight even the cramped
airline loos are the real thing. High altitude camp where every
line keeps the laughter soaring higher. Nick Awde
Weirdass
Rocket South Bridge
Chicago-based Stephnie Weir and Robert Dassie collaborate in a
short improvisational revue that differs from most improv in
only invoking audience input once. They open by asking for a
theme (e.g. food) and then go into a string of sketches, some of
which are connected to the theme, while others are clearly
staples of their repertoire - I would guess, for example, that
the used car salesman and the doctor panicking a patient find
their way into every show. It is clear from the fact that they
both know exactly when a sketch ends that the bulk of their
material is pre-scripted. The improvisation comes in choosing
which sketches from their repertoire to use and in what order,
and one may not know until the other makes a transition to a new
bit exactly where they're going next. There is evidently also
some improvisation within the framework of each sketch, as they
challenge each other with ad-libs. The result sometimes feels
more like a rehearsal exercise for their benefit than a
performance for an audience, and the show is neither fish nor
fowl, not sufficiently polished for a prepared revue nor truly
enough off-the-cuff to be satisfying improv. Gerald
Berkowitz
White Van Man
C Underground
It's a funny thing to find yourself in a theatre laughing at
someone you pass a hundred times in the street each day for
free. It is the hallmark of classic comedy that you are stopped
in your tracks and have a good giggle. Dave is that man in the
white van, the tool of his trade. On the road for four years,
he's got nine points on his licence to show for it. An honest
man doing a dishonest day's work, there's nothing he won't
deliver, clear or fix. Yes, Dave likes life in the free lane
where he's his own man, because here, in between breakdowns,
roadkill and the cross-channel booze 'n' fags run, he can hold
forth on everything: mobile phone monopolies, wife Mitsi, other
drivers, garden gnomes, Disney and the tabloids, and remarkably
little football. Nothing new here, but writer Martin Beaumont
and director Oliver Langdon have created a disturbingly
heart-warming slice of life where the humour is unexpectedly
gentle, separating lovable rogue from the bigot - a spot-on
portrayal by Andy Spiers. And it manages to be well topical
without dating the script, hitting the comic mark with incisive
regularity. Just the tinest of quibbles about the accent, which
tends to veer all over the place, innit. Nick Awde
The Whole Shebang
Assembly Rooms
There's a scene in the film The China Syndrome in which Jack
Lemmon, attempting to convey essential technical information
while over-excited, becomes tragically incoherent. Jack Klaff's
current solo show has much of the same quality. Klaff has
something very important and exciting to tell us about modern
science, but he doesn't seem quite sure what it is, and very
little that is clear survives his confused and passionate
intensity. Klaff spent two years as the resident humanist in a
cutting-edge scientific think tank, and discovered things about
science and scientists that excite him, things that amuse him,
and things that appall him, and he wants to tell us everything
in one unstructured and under-rehearsed rush. He jumps
frantically from topic to topic, from personal anecdote to
technical explanation, sometimes in mid-sentence. He passes
around a couple of glasses full of something without making
clear what they're supposed to demonstrate (and, besides, it's
too dark in the audience for us to see whatever we're supposed
to see in them). He tells stories that have no point, promises
revelations that never come. Part WI lecture, part Speakers
Corner rant, this unfocussed, un-thought-through jumble is far
from the polished theatre pieces audiences have come to expect
from Klaff. Gerald Berkowitz
The Whore Whisperer Gilded Balloon II
Australian stand-up comic Meshel Laurie worked for three years
as a receptionist in Melbourne's legal brothels, and offers this
behind-the-scenes peek into the world of the working girls.
Unfortunately, lack of preparation and polish make her one-hour
talk a considerable short-changing of those expecting a
professional performance. Though there is some titillation in
her unsentimentalized accounts of the businesslike atmosphere of
the business, and of its participants' total contempt for their
customers, there is little in the way of news here. Nor are her
brief impressions, of various types of "mugs" (customers) and of
girls and "trannies", more than fleetingly comic. Despite her
stand-up experience, Laurie is not a polished performer, with
little stage presence or sense of delivery, and her presentation
meanders rhythmlessly in what seems a stream-of-consciousness
way. Half-hearted attempts at audience involvement fall flat,
and she seems to lack the basic performance skills necessary to
carry her through such lapses. Her lack of preparation was shown
in the first performance as she lost her place in the script,
and had to call for prompting, at least a half-dozen times.
There may be a future for this material in table talk and pub
chats, but neither it nor Laurie's performance is yet up to the
minimal standards for a ticket-buying public. Gerald
Berkowitz
Wiping My Mother's Arse Traverse
Iain Heggie's new play is a TV sitcom with pretensions. An old
woman in a nursing home bonds more closely with her gay nurse
than with the son who rarely visits and who is displeased to
discover that the nurse is his former lover, especially since he
is currently wooing a woman. Meanwhile, someone - son or nurse -
has been stealing from the old lady's savings account. Most of
the action is strictly sitcom - the old lady's mood swings and
lapses of memory, the nurse's camping, the son's embarrassment.
When the play decides to seriously be about something, it is the
son's fecklessness, probably the least interesting strand, and
one that drags it down somewhat. And everyone gives more-or-less
generic performances, except for Jill Riddiford, who has a
really original character in the girlfriend - a hard-nosed
realist who knows what she wants from life and what's she's
likely to get, and is prepared to compromise to get it - and
runs with the role inventively. Gerald Berkowitz
The
World of Spencer Brown Pleasance
Spencer Brown is living proof of the fickleness of
success - and how a conducive venue and packed house are as
much part of a comic's art as the material. He is hardly the
most structured of comedians, but watching him work a tiny
crowd in the Pleasance Downstairs (read: small dank cellar)
makes you wonder what he could do with a good dose of
location, location, location, since you'll catch far worse
acts selling out the plush Cavern on the other side of the
courtyard. Subjects range from the loneliness of the
long-distance stand-up to sexual inadequacy via the odd bit of
spoofed magic, but promising punchlines are lost in the
absence of a truly unifying concept for his show despite the
surface schmaltz. Brown works incredibly hard and rarely
misses a beat - if a one-liner or visual gag founders he's
straight on to the next before you've noticed and the result
is a gentle build-up of affection until you're willing him to
make you laugh regardless. This is a brave man, a fearless
man, in whose vocabulary you will search in vain for the word
Œdying'.
Nick Awde
The
Year of the Monkey Komedia at Roman Eagle Lodge
(Reviewed in London)
Claire Dowie combines the smoothness and audience rapport of a
stand-up comic with the hypnotic intensity of an inspired
storyteller and the inventiveness of an insightful and sensitive
author in this engaging and moving programme of monologues. With
virtually no set or production support, Dowie merely stands on a
bare stage and offers a quartet of alternately (and sometimes
simultaneously) comic, moving and frightening character studies.
Two short pieces combine comedy with touching emotional warmth,
as a young child develops a comforting magical explanation for a
beloved grandfather's descent into Alzheimers, and a
neighbourhood of OAPs pooling their hobbies and talents slip
imperceptibly into a self-sufficient commune with revolutionary
overtones. These are bookended by two longer and darker pieces.
In the deceptively innocent-seeming opening, a woman's cheery
simplicity is gradually exposed as the morally blinkered
self-confidence of madness, as memories of The Man From Uncle
are used to justify serial murder. In the powerful closing
monologue, a mother finds her daughter's wedding the catalyst
for accumulated anger and despair over a life of emotional
emptiness. Sprinkled with flashes of high comedy and coloured by
the author-actress's own engaging personality, this is the very
model of a thoroughly satisfying solo performance. Gerald
Berkowitz
You've Been Wonderful C Belle
Angele
When the leader of a barbershop sextet dies, the remaining five
try desperately to keep their careers alive in this show biz
satire that quickly breaks down into a series of independent
sketches. Now, before continuing with this review, I really have
to pause to point out that there is no such thing as a
barbershop sextet (They only come in packs of four), that they
have confused a cappella doo-wop singing (Goodnight Sweetheart)
with barbershop (Goodnight Irene), and that they've got the
wrong sort of hats. (Things like that really do matter if you
want your show to have any credibility.) Anyway, there's a very
funny speech by an Old Girl revisiting her posh school, and a
rather sweet dance of a guy trying to lure a girl out of her
mourning. There's also a clumsy satire of Steps-type
choreography, a totally incomprehensible mime sequence involving
a letter, another opaque one somehow about paper dolls, and a
sketch about a pathetic pub act that goes on too long for its
joke. The show is evidently group-created by this company from
the University of Warwick, and one can applaud their ambition
and attractive performances while wishing they had had better
writing and direction. Gerald Berkowitz
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(Some
of these reviews appeared first in The Stage)
Reviews - Edinburgh Festival - 2001