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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2000 Reviews (3)The seX Files Beware of plays which do funny things with capital letters! And definitely beware of plays which are described in this kind of way: What is a woman?Beware of them, for you are about to be subjected to a flood of cliches. And that, I am afraid, is what we got: the blonde who is so dumb you are surprised she can remember her own name; the young mother for whom love and family is not enough; the girl who cannot stop writing to the lover who has obviously abandoned her... Need I go on? There are ten different women into whose lives we peek briefly, lives which are in some way unfulfilled, in most cases because of men. Now I have no quarrel with the idea that men can blight women's lives; I have no doubt that there are women like those portrayed in this play (no, not quite: I cannot imagine anyone as dumb as this particular blonde!): however none of these women had any individuality. And that, surely, is an unforgivable sin in a writer: to reduce his/her characters to stereotypes. The four young actresses from the Vanya Women Theatre Company do their best with material which lets them down: their talent deserves better. Soho Story John Gay meets Steven Berkoff! This is a reworking of Gay's Beggar's Opera, set in Soho and Notting Hill in the late fifties and early seventies, the time of the emergence of "youth culture" and race riots. The MacHeath character is Max (Lee Beazley), a Jewish semi-gangster/Brian Epstein; Polly Peachum (Paula Simms), who likes a bit of rough, is the daughter of Lord Peachum, a newly-respectable gangster; and Lucy Lockitt is Josie (Sarah Niles), a West Indian covent-educated girl who comes to London looking for her saxophonist father, and who herself proves to have a superb voice. Making up the cast are the three members of Max's band, the T's, and Terry Kilkilly who plays Lord Peachum's oily, sinister butler, and also plays a wonderfully sickening Tony Blackburn character. Lord Peachum doesn't actually appear. This is a reworking of Gay's play, not a modern version. It makes no attempt to stick too closely to the original and is, I think, all the better for that. Certainly there is no need - as too often there is with modern "adaptations" of classic works - to know the original at all, but if you do, it gives the new version added depth. And that word "depth" is important, for this is a play with depth, depth about people and the way they think and react. The mention in all the publicity of the Notting Hill race riots would suggest that the play is about them and about the motivations of the those who caused them, but that is misleading. And I have to say that I'm glad it is, for that was my one reservation as I came to the theatre: it takes a great playwright to write about movements and the flow of ideas, and great playwrights are not common. But no, this is about the particular characters, not about ideas or movements. It's about human weaknesses and follies, and about strengths. Particularly about strengths, for in the end it turns out that Josie is far, far stronger than any of the others, all of whom, on the surface, have greater power than her. Another weakness of the publicity was that it talked about the music being a "pastiche" of the songs of the period. Not so! They are in the style of the period but are far from being pastiche - except when required to be so. But hang on! What's the mention of Steven Berkoff in the first papagraph all about? Just that, for me, there's a toughness and, at times, an almost poetic quality about the dialogue which reminded me, just occasionally, of Berkoff's East. In summary: a fine production, impeccably performed. See it! Hanging on Your Every Word One day writer Suze Allen came home and found her lover had hanged himself. To try to make sense of it, she spoke to and worked with suicide survivors and people suffering from clinical depression, and out of this came Hanging, a deeply personal piece. Since it was first performed, she has adapted it as an ensemble performance, adding dance, music and masks. Let me say straight off that the monologues are, to use the words of the publicity, gut-wrenching. They hit home, and they hit hard. Within the first few minutes I found myself near to tears. The mother talking about her dead son was particularly powerful. There was no attempt on the actress's part to pile on the emotions: she simply let the story tell itself, and intensely moving it was. Unfortunately the tears went away, returing occasionally but never so powerfully. The effect of the masks and the dance and the songs was, for me, to dilute the power of the play. This was partly, I have to say, because of the performances. The company is made up of advanced acting students from the Iambe's Bones Studio in San Francisco which is, so they tell us, dedicated to teaching actors and non-actors alike how to access their creativity and follow their artistic process. They would be far better off teaching a bit of voice technique! Even in the tiny studio space in which the play was performed words were at times inaudible and the diction of a number of the company members left a great deal to be desired. But there is no doubt that part of the problem is the structure of the piece itself. Such a shame! It began so well, recovered itself occasionally, but ultimately proved unsatisfying. Next page - - - Index |
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