|
|
|
|
The
Edinburgh Fringe
|
|
|
|
Fringe 2002 Reviews (10)Bounce Bounce at the Assembly Rooms will be this years breakout success. This American bred, multinationally cast piece is first a hip-hop show but has classically trained and multi-disciplined dancers doing everything from jive, lindy, swing, boogallo as well a the expected break dancing. To its laudable credit, it is truly a family show. It does play to the teen and pre-teen audience who know when and how to react; yell, clap, swing their arms in the air. The production values are top notch, no expenses spared. The choreography and execution by the dancers peerless. It is electric. Catherine Lamm Intimacy Theatre at its best should entertain, educate and engage. We should walk away glad for the time spent; even wishing for more. We should learn something about ourselves, others, and our relationships. We should care about the characters, what happens to them, and how we are like them or wish we weren't. Intimacy is that and more. It has the language that melts in your mouth and explodes in your brain. His precisely chosen words and phrases brring terrible recognition in us; Oh, I wish I'd said that. Jay (Riz Meedin) is running away, or trying to, from his family; Susan and their two sons. He is delivered up to us not only in the dialogue with Susan and his mistress, Nina (Mandy Gordon), and his dead father and three friends but more so in the monologues and soliloqiues. We learn what he thinks, feels, how he reacts, and what he does not know. It is these things which make his decision so painfully difficult. "I am leaving and not coming back." Obvious? "What do you take with you when you are never coming back". Apocalyptic! But he cannot tell Susan or his friends. "Words are actions; once out cannot be put back." He watches Susan tidying and sleeping and muses, "People are so innocent when they are not expecting to be hurt". Worse; "You are not prepared to miss the children". "Papa, tonight I love everyone." "Tomorrow I will do something..." The mistress wants him and makes him feel wanted. But is this all. "There is a popular theory one should masturbate before considering any woman. You'll know if it's just sex." But the end of "Intimacy" is not what is important, it is the journey. Jay tries to understand and so we understand. It is a journey that we have all taken. "Real love moves little. You go round and round. You go deeper." Well acted, well directed (Susan Pack & Olive Langdon) and - most especially - most painfully well written. Catherine Lamm Blood This is a two-hander about the wilder reaches of sex. A couple meet at a James Bond holiday resort in Jamaica and fall in love because they are the odd ones out who are there for more than just the sex. They decide to marry on the beach and are able to do so courtesy of a Voodoo priestess. For six months they are blissfully happy, this Black American man and Irish (-American?) woman. Then things go badly wrong until they get a very weird seven-year itch. This is brought on by the appearance of their priestess, now called Blood. It transpires that she is a succubus and can only be released from her hellish torment as a result of the retailing of the couple's sexual fantasies. The highlight of the show is the simultaneous haunting of the couple. Benjamin Brown and Sarah McGuinness carry this off almost to perfection. In the end after some considerable effort to please their succubus they manage to live happily ever after, too. Philip Fisher Those Who Live One of the most interesting plays at last year's Fringe was Like Thunder by Niels Fredrik Dahl. It won a Fringe First for Norwegian company Det Apne. They have brought that play back to Edinburgh together with Those Who Live. This is a Beckettian look at what appears to be life during a nuclear winter. Very little is as it seems. Smuck and Buss live in a type of igloo surviving on dry crackers and melted ice. Genders are blurred and the much more intelligent Smuck, played by Maureen Allen, is the one with a brain turned to chalk. These two talk, play cards and abide by an unstated but paramount set of rules. Their relationship is generally happy but can be strained. They are sustained by the smallest pleasures. An old tape on the radio cassette player, the appearance of a fly or in Buss' case, a mythical light. Into their household comes an outsider, Martin O'Connor's Grint. He wrecks their mini-community. He takes a shine to Buss and thereby usurps Smuck. The rules also cease to have any importance. He also brings giggling joy and release to Buss (Ian Skewis). This is not an easy play to understand but is an unusual adventure for those willing to consider what life might be like after life has ended for the world, and is chilling in an unstable political climate. The ending seems to offer no comfort, at all. In passing it may be worth noting that following Electra, this is another play that features music from Alina by Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt. Philip Fisher |
|
|