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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2002 Reviews (22)Electric Avenue This is a short play that attempts to address major issues of race and religion. It is centred on the year 1981 when riots took place in Brixton and Northern Ireland. The four characters represent stereotypes, the proud African, the Black American, the English policeman and a Northern Irish Catholic While the underlying sentiments may be worthy, the play fails to investigate them in any depth. Philip Fisher The Last Man in Europe - A Portrait
of George Orwell I admit to being a big fan of the one-man/one-woman show, at least when it is done well. It is a dramatic form both exhilarating and terrifying for actor and director. There is also something to be said for a passion for the subject material and solid playwriting. If it deals with historical and/or biographical fact, one is on very dangerous ground. It is easy to get it factually accurate but create a very bad or boring production. When it works, it can be informative and entertaining. Here Michael McEvoy examines one particular time in the life of George Orwell. Unlike many biographers, Mr. McEvoy is writing about a man in a time that we know little about. The script is extremely well researched and focused. Whether we accept that the details are accurate or not, we accept the production as dramatically sound. Catherine Lamm Victory at the Dirt Palace Shakespeare, of course, took the idea for King Lear from much earlier sources (King Leir) and made it his own, producing a play which, in the intervening four hundred years, has lost nothing of its power to shock, horrify and move. So why shouldn't modern writers or companies take the basic Lear idea and build their own play around it? Because they usually make an almighty hash of it, that's why! But not the Riot Group. They have not made the mistake of "modernising" the play or replacing Shakespeare's words with their own, but have created something new, which is, shall we say, informd by Shakespeare's masterpiece. They do use some of Shakespeare's words - including a brilliantly funny ending which had the audience almost cheering. Victory at the Dirt Palace is a satire on the television news industry in the US. The two major rivals for network news supremeacy are fronted by a father and daughter, bitter rivals for primacy. Each has his/her own PA and they form buffers between the two major characters, but they are not without their own ambitions and, like their masters, will not shrink from lying, cheating and back-stabbing in the pursuit of their ambitions. Delivered at breakneck speed but in language which is heightened and at times very poetic (occasionally Shakespeare's own words, although they do tell us that only 130 words of the original remain), the play exposes powerful emotions with a wicked humour. What can one make of a play which rolls Goneril, Regan and Cordelia into one character? One can give it five well-deserved stars! Peter Lathan The Blue Orphan Catalyst is a very distinctive theatre company. These Canadians provide a dreamy mix of music, exotic lighting and dark fairy tales. The Blue Orphan builds up the picture of a town filled with the unhappy, the lonely and the lovelorn. It is carried along by the narration of the orphan, Jonah (played by Michael Scholar Jr). and the ethereal, operatically-trained voice of Sheri Somerville as Papillon. We hear of an assortment of the town's characters, all of whom are connected by their links to different incarnations of the Blue Orphan butterfly and, in many cases, the local orphanage run by scary Sister Parnel. There are the Brute and his ward, the always cheerful butterfly vendor Hortense, played by Beth Graham. Her suitors are both remarkably unattractive, Jim Tibue (co-writer, Jonathan Christenson) who sells scrap paper and a weird voyeur, Harold. Finally, there is possibly the funniest, and sadly truest picture. This is the bitter Barefoot Claire who has a beef with the world and takes it out on everyone, even the audience. With effective lighting and a great, varied soundscape composed by the ubiquitous Jonathan Christenson who also directs, this is a very enjoyable, if slightly self-indulgent production. This mix of physical theatre and storytelling is quite unusual and all the more welcome for that. Philip Fisher |
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