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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2001 Reviews (3)Resolution Pip Utton's work (Hancock's Last Half Hour, Adolf) has been a favourite of mine since I first started reviewing the Fringe back in 1997, so a new Utton play had to be on my "must see" list. But there's always the worry that, perhaps, this time he may not pull it off, that the old magic won't work. No need to worry. It works! Resolution is a very different piece, a reaction to a newspaper story, and this time he plays two characters, the switch from one to another being signalled by a lighting change. The play is about two men: the father of a girl killed on her eighteenth birthday by a hit-and-run driver, and the driver. It involves love, loss, revenge, hatred, pity, remorse, and walks that indistinct line between tragedy and melodrama, between genuine deep emotion and sentimentality. The opportunities for the great emotional scene, the breast-beating and hair-tearing, are many, and Utton wisely avoids them all. That's not to say the emotions are not deep: there is agony and misery a-plenty, and we are given a taste of what could have become cloying sentimentality right at the start, but he invites us to smile at it. And so we do, before being drawn into the personal hell of both men. It would be wrong to say any more, for then we would risk giving it all away. Suffice it to say that Utton yet again proves himself to be a master-manipulator of an audience's emotions! Medea Liz Lochhead's Medea was the hit of last year's Fringe, gaining superlatives from all the reviewers (except me: I was too late to get a ticket!) and if tonight's audience is anything to go by, it's going to be a strong contender for hit of this year's Fringe too. So, was I thrilled? excited? overwhelmed? 'Fraid not. Yes, Maureen Beattie's performance was excellent and Duncan Duff was fine as Jason, but, sitting in the Music Hall's gallery, I found, at times, the minor characters unintelligible, due to a combination of a very flat acoustic, pretty thick Scottish accents and a lack of projection. If that was all, it would have been a fairly minor irritant, no more, but, for me, there is a fundamental flaw: the "Evening Standard" called Lochhead's version passionately human and herein lies the problem. In spite of his innovation and experiment, Euripides was not writing a modern, character-driven play, and he has still more in common with Aeschylus and Sophocles than with any of today's writers. And no amount of superb acting can give plausibility to Medea's decision to kill her children when the sense of tragic inevitability is missing, when the production is not firmly rooted in the ritual and traditions of Greek theatre. Don't misunderstand me: I wish to take nothing away from Beattie's performance, nor from Lochhead's attempt to find a contemporary relevance for the play (the plight of the asylum seeker, the stateless person), but something important has been lost here and that something is Euripides. Animal Farm Guy Masterson originally performed Animal Farm himself in 1995: this year it is performed by a young actress, Lizzie Wort, who graduated in 2000 from Bretton Hall in Wakefield. It's a very demanding piece, over an hour and a half long, and it's a lot to ask of one actor, to tell the story of Orwell's novel in lots of different voices, with a considerable amount of physicality, and at a cracking pace. Wort handles it well: she is ballet-trained and that gives her the physical resources necessary. It's a very impressive performance. It's a trifle too long, however. There was a little restlessness in the audience towards the end: nothing to do with Wort, I hasten to add, for her ebullience and enthusiasm carried us through, but it could do with a bit of cutting. St Nicolas Conor McPherson's St Nicholas consists of one character telling a tale to the audience. On top form McPherson is a brilliant storyteller, as those who have seen The Weir or Rum and Vodka can testify. Does he reach the same heights here? No. At least, not all the time. It begins well: the portrayal of the jaded theatre critic is beautiful, and when he lies to the director of a play about his review (before it's published, of course), it is really hilarious. Then his obsession with an actress in the play keeps up the momentum, but with the third stage, the critic's involvement with a group of vampires, he loses his way. The vampires and what they do to their victims, clearly, are a metaphor for the critic's life, and, as usual when ideas take over from character as the driving force behind a piece, the dramatic tension goes, and with it the audience's involvement. There were longueurs and I saw more than one head nodding, then jerking upright, in the audience. I don't intend this to detract one jot from actor Peter Dineen's performance. He was excellent, as one would expect from someone of his experience. Next page - - - Index |
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