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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2000 Reviews (14)The Authorised Version Richard and David are brothers: Richard is married to Ruth and David is living with Gillian. David and Ruth were lovers in the past. David claims (with justice if we read the signs aright) that Richard, who is considerably older, virtually tortured him mentally when he was a child. As the play opens, it is Richard and Ruth's anniversary and David is taking the opportunity to attack Richard in a speech, and so get a taste of revenge. The Authorised Version is about relationships. The set consists of a number of boxes (which are used as seats and tables), which the characters arrange and re-arrange between scenes, symbolic of the changes in the quartet's relationships as the play progresses. This is a cleverly, even ingeniously, constructed play, which maps the changing relationships between the characters up to and after Richard's death, which gives all the signs of having been suicide, although this is left unresolved. The characters are well drawn and each has some claim on our sympathy - Richard less so than the others, for it becomes obvious that David's claim about the way he was treated as a child has more than a little justification. It is an enjoyable play, with some moments of rather bleak humour. Wake A miniature gem, only 25 minutes long but a tragi-comic delight which packs more entertainment into its short length than many a much longer show on the Fringe. It is Ellen's husband's funeral. She has taken herself away from the rest of the family - her in-laws, with whom she feels she has nothing in common - and is joined by Chloe, the teenage daughter of the funeral director (Chloe, she sugests, is short for chloroform). A conversation starts and a most unlikely short-lived (for it ends when Ellen leaves) friendship springs up between the two. The conversation is witty and moving, and the two actresses (Susan Bovell as Ellen and Nicola Harrison as Chloe) are totally convincing. The audience in Hill Street's small studio were clearly as delighted as I was. Venus in Furs In the bar after the show I was asked what I thought of Venus. I replied that I was unsure and needed time to think about it. I still don't know, not for sure. It is based on the famous erotic novel and, although I feel you get more out of a play (or film) based on a novel if you haven't read it, I wondered here if it would have been better if I had read it. The story is quite simple: a man wants to worship a woman. He can only truly love, he says, if she is far above him and he is totally subservient to her. Her inflicting pain on him merely increases her desirability. So she allows it. The reason I feel it would have helped to have read the novel is that there were sudden changes in the attitudes of both characters which seemed to me to have no justification in the text, which semed to come out of nowhere. And then these changes would reverse themselves.. Clearly there are faults in the adaptation: as I have said in another review, adapting novels for the stage is fraught with major problems, most of which are rarely overcome. Such, I suspect, was the case here. The production style varied considerably. The beginning, in which the man, sitting on a little child's chair with his back to the audience, digs his hands into a tray of soil and pulls out a small doll-like figure with which he plays (still behind his back), and then the woman, sat at a table, eats a boiled egg, was very reminiscent of a certain Eastern European highly symbolic style, whilst, later in the play when she whips him, it is remarkably realistic - we even see the red marks of the whip on the backs of his legs. I found it - well, "interesting" is probably the best word. I'm afraid that the eroticism of the original got lost somewhere in the translation to the stage. Next page - - - Index |
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