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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2000 Reviews (1)The Donkey Show The Donkey Show is A Midsummer Night's Dream - donkey... Bottom... ass's head... get it? Or, at least, it uses the plot of Dream. Or bits of it. It's like this, see. There's this guy Oberon, who owns this club, Club Oberon, and like it's far out, man. It's got like four speakers, like quadrophonic sound! And he's like gone on this Tytania chick, an exotic dancer, right? And then there's this drug pusher Rollerena (Puck) and these four four guys Dimitri, Sander, Helen and Mia.... You get the idea, I'm sure: it's the four lovers, the Oberon/Titania quarrel (but no indian boy), and Bottom (here presented by Vinnie and Vinnie with huge afros). The rest has gone. No Theseus or Hippolyta, no angry father, no play within the play.
Actually, what we've got is a (to use the modern terminology) multimedia experience based on a idea by William Shakespeare. It begins before we enter the disco (for it is a disco, not a theatre) with an altercation between the two Vinnies and the bouncer. We enter and there's the full disco atmosphere: the lights, the smoke, the (seventies) music, the dancers. In fact, quite some time is spent establishing the atmosphere and getting the audience in the right mood and onto the dance floor, and then the performance starts. The story is told through the music with just a little (very un-Shakespearean) dialogue, and takes place all over the dance-floor, on a small stage, by the DJ stand and on wheeled blocks. In fact, it's a kind of promenade theatre without the promenade, because the dance floor is too crowded to move easily. (They got that right, didn't they?) Performances are excellent: smooth, slick and, as the situation requires, broad. The audience loved it! I confess that my first thought afterwards was "Bob Carlton on speed", but the more I think about it, the less appropriate that is. For a start, the choice of songs is not always completely on the nail, but the biggest difference is in the words. Carlton uses Shakespeare's words cleverly and with wit: here the words are just a means of carrying the action forward when there is no appropriate song. It's a fun show, a bit of enjoyable fluff. I can see how it has achieved cult status in New York since it opened there in 1998, but its appeal is more nostalgia for the seventies disco scene than anything theatrical. For undemanding (except on your feet: you're going to have to stand the whole time) enjoyment, The Donkey Show is perfect - as a piece of theatre, I hope I'm going to see many more better shows than this in the next couple of weeks! Graft - Tales of an Actor George Dillon, Steven Berkoff's "disciple" for more than twenty years, tells the story of Harry, an actor, from his first audition for a local authority grant, through the highs and lows of a long career, to its end. And a fine performance it is, an object lesson to Harry who never had Dillon's talents or skills. He doesn't hold the stage for an hour and a quarter: he is the stage on which Harry's life unfolds, sweeping the audience along with irresistable force. The text is Berkoff at his best: insightful and tightly written. It is good to see him getting back to where we are used to seeing him, after the dire Massageof '97. In Graft we see the real Berkoff. The play should be compulsory viewing for all who want to take up an acting career, for nothing could be more calculated to put them off. Harry's life is a sad one: yes, it provides us, the audience, with some very funny moments but, even in the (very) occasional high spot, a sense of futility and sadness pervades the story. But above all else, excellently written though the play is, it is Dillon's performance whch sticks in the mind, a virtuoso performance to cherish and a standard for the rest of the Fringe to live up to! Molly Bloom - A Musical Dream Based on the last chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, this one-woman musical piece (which, incidentally, the estate of James Joyce tried to ban) has Molly Bloom in bed (a grand piano here) reliving the adventures (some of them very scandalous indeed) of her life, from her childhood and youth in Gibralta, to her present. Her stories are told through words and song, and she moves seamlessly from one to the other, with musical themes signalling a particular story, so that the music and the text merge. This is not an "easy listening" musical - it requires more of the audience than that. Both lyrics and music are cleverly and intelligently written, and Anna Zapparoli gets the best out of them. In her performance Molly Bloom's strange blend of world weariness and almost ingenuous enthusiasm come over clearly, but - and here, I think, is the weakness of the piece - the audience's response is intellectual rather than visceral. A near miss for four stars as far as I am concerned, but the miss is due to the piece itself rather than the performance: a four star performance in a three star play! Next page - - - Index |
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