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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2001 Reviews (12)Innocent (when you dream) I'm always wary of devised shows: unless one person finally pulls them together (preferably a writer: Charles Chilton with Oh What a Lovely War!, for instance), they can sprawl and become very self-indulgent. In this case it was the director who did the pulling together, and this is a little less effective, for some parts were rather over-long. The piece was devised, we are told, over an intensive seven week period. The scene is a riverside at night. Eight people drift in and out: an insomniac, a would-be rent boy and his sister, a schoolgirl, a young woman and a man who is stalking her, a woman dressed in black and a man with memories of the place. Each has his/her own story and these gradually unfold, by conversation in the fleeting meetings that occur or through soliloquy. The soliloquies are delivered through a microphone in a single spotlight and so lifts them out of the action of the rest of the play, providing what we might almost call punctuation marks. At times there is an almost dreamlike quality to the piece: at times it is comic and at others deeply serious. It's an interesting experiment and generally works well, although it would definitely have benefited from the tighter construction that a good writer could provide. Hang Up Only twenty minutes long, this piece is a little gem: Minghella manages to squeeze more into those minutes than many a writer fails to achieve in an hour. The situation is simple: a man and his wife are speaking on the phone. He is at home, she is in a hotel, away on business. Gradually he realises that someone else is in the room with her. The staging is equally simple: the husband is at one side of the stage, the wife at the other. We see both, but not the details of the rooms, nor the man who is with the wife, so our attention is focused on the two people. The husband is played by Alex Parry and the wife by Laura Pennycard, both about to start their third year at WCMD - although you wouldn't think it, for their performances are thoroughly professional. The production is well paced and the emotional development subtly portrayed. Excellent! The Importance of Being Earnest I love Illyria's Shakespeare: they produce work which illuminates, amuses and excites. Their Tempest, which I saw in 1997, was superb. So I was keen to see what they would do with Wilde's most famous - and best - play. They turned it into a pantomime. It's a totally cross-dressed production with Lady Bracknell as the Dame to end all Dames and Cecily and Gwendolyn very reminiscent of the Ugly Sisters. As for the male characters, I expected Jack to slap his thigh at any moment! But I am compelled to ask, why? As with the Kaos Importance of 1999 which added both slapstick and song, I am at a loss to understand why they did it. The laughs were mainly for Wilde's witty comedy, not for the cross-dressing and I cannot see that the panto style added anything. Yes, it was very well done, but just because something can be done, and done well, doesn't mean that it should be. Perhaps - perhaps - it might make the play more accessible to some audiences, but certainly not one at the Edinburgh Fringe. Perhaps I'm too conservative, but I would have loved to see what Illyria have made of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is in their current season but which they didn't bring to Edinburgh. Shame really: great company, excellent actors but I just didn't like the approach. Next page - - - Index |
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