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Faces
In The Crowd
Gate
Theatre January-February 2020
A woman who works as a
translator discovers the biography of an obscure Mexican poet and is so
fascinated by him that she wants to translate his poems. But finding few
if any, she writes her own poems in his style and passes them off as his,
going so far as inventing a fictional translator of the newly discovered
works.
Eventually she begins to take
on the persona of the poet, finding her imaginings of his life more real
than her own home life with husband and children.
I think.
Ellen McDougall's adaptation
of Valeria Luiselli's novel is certainly about the fluidity of reality
levels and individual identities, and I suppose a certain amount of
ambiguity and imprecision come with the territory. But what might work in
a novel is considerably less successful on stage.
There are two main reasons
for this. First, in theatrical terms, this can't help coming across as old
news.
Almost everything Faces In
The Crowd has to say was fresh and exciting when Pirandello explored it a
hundred years and more ago. But it has filtered down and been absorbed
into popular culture so thoroughly – think The Matrix, Face Off, any
number of identity-theft and what-is-real movies – that you are too likely
to feel that this play is working far too hard to say far too little.
And adaptor-director Ellen
McDougall has chosen the dangerous path of attempting to depict chaos
through chaos. As the main character's sense of who she is and what is
real becomes ever more fragile, so does the play's structure and simple
communication.
The admirable efforts of
actress Jimena Larraguivel and an underused supporting cast can't guide us
along a clear narrative line when there doesn't seem to be one, and by the
time we reach a Philadelphia bar (Don't ask) things have descended into
incoherence.
You leave Faces In The Crowd with a vague sense of what they were trying to do and with regret that they were not more successful.
Gerald
Berkowitz
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Review - Faces In The Crowd - Gate Theatre 2020