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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2002 Reviews (23)This Is a Chair This is a short play nicely presented by four students from Reading University. It is easiest to use analogies from the world of art to try to describe this oddity. Eight short scenes are played out. As in a post-modern art exhibition, each has a title that does not immediately bear any relationship to the piece. For example, "War in Bosnia" features a discussion between a couple about a double-booked date. "Pornography and Censorship" and "The Northern Ireland Peace Problem" are almost indistinguishable. Caryl Churchill does, though, manage to make political points in very oblique fashion. The final piece, "The Impact of Capitalism on the Former Soviet Union", makes a serious social comment and is absolutely hilarious. The action is interspersed with slow motion surreal dance that appears to be heavily influenced by the work of the Belgian artist, René Magritte. The four actors weave around in dark suits and bowler hats seemingly randomly choosing the grouping that will perform next. The staging is very effective and although some of the acting may not be of the highest quality, the company has achieved what it set out to do, a meaningful realisation of a difficult play. Philip Fisher A Cool Million: The Dismantling of
Lemuel Pitkin The original story on which this play is based was written by Nathanael West. One suspects that very little of the master storyteller's plot remains. There are good efforts from Chris Tester as Lemuel Pitkin, a boy who loses body parts as if they were going out of fashion, and Ben Mcleish as a former US President who mysteriously becomes a bank manager. The jokes tend to be infantile and often rather tasteless. There is also a massive amount of overacting which fails to cover the fact that the plot is thin. Philip Fisher Hyperlynx There is a slim line between political theatre and agit-prop and, to John McGrath's credit, he usually managed to stay on the right side. In a career of more than thirty years, McGrath was the proponent of political theatre in Britain and his The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil is still an object lesson to those who would venture into this notoriously difficult territory. Hyperlynx is his last play, completed just months before his untimely death in February this year. It was originally a one-acter and was given a reading at last year's Edinburgh Festival. Then came the events of 11th September and McGrath felt impelled to expand the play by the addition of a second act, which he completed in November. The first act is a monologue by a senior officer of MI6, played beautifully (as one would expect) by Elizabeth MacLennan, who, having previously run the Iran and Aghanistan desks, is given the job of organising the infiltration and monitoring of anti-globalisation protesters. Here she suffers a crisis of conscience: she has more than a sneaking sympathy for the protesters and a very healthy suspicion of the global corporations, which she sees as the enemies of democracy. As she works her way through her dilemma, she thinks of her husband, Tim, who was killed in the Sudan, of her son who has married a Sloan Ranger and of her daughter who is just leaving university and has been offered a job with an international management consultancy - £35,000 a year and a car. She's thinking about it. She looks back over her time at the Iran and Afghanistan desk, and at the mistakes the government made. She sees how the government has allied itself to international big business. She sees the youthful idealism of the protesters. She relates the career and personal choices of her son to the decision she has to make. And we listen and empathise and are moved. This is political theatre at its best and the round of applause that came at what we in the audience all took to be the end showed how effective it had been. But she returns to the stage and launches into the post-September 11th section and it is here that McGrath crosses the line and we move from political theatre into agit-prop. What had been a subtle interweaving of personal and political becomes what teeters on the edge of being an anti-American diatribe. As always McGrath's instinct is right and his heart is in the right place - we need to understand what it is that drives people to become suicide-bombers and mass murderers on such a scale; no one chooses to end their own lives and the lives of others for no reason - but in the second half the subtle interweaving of the personal and the political is lost and the piece becomes repetitious and we sense a tendency to rant. I like to think that, had he lived, McGrath would have returned to the second half and reworked it, replacing the underlying anger with the more subtle and artistic approach which characterises Act I. A flawed piece, therefore, but one which is flawlessly presented, from the performance by Elizabeth MacLennan through the direction of Kate McGrath to the beautifully realised design, lighting and sound. Peter Lathan Kiss of Life Chris Goode has the distinction of back to back Fringe Firsts from "The Scotsman". Last year, he wrote Neutrino for Unlimited and now he has won with a one-man show about love. He is not a standard type of stage star. He is very laid back and seems very self-effacing as he welcomes his audience into the theatre, chatting happily with them as it fills to capacity. He then launches into a tale about his job as a market researcher and the way in which this colours his view of life. After he loses the job in comic circumstances, he contemplates suicide and after a dip in the river is rescued by an anonymous person. Simultaneously, his cat and only friend, Nico, disappears, only to be replaced by a down and out, also appropriately with the name of Velvet Underground's femme fatale. Love blossoms as Chris takes in the second Nico. However, his guest is analytical and has a death wish that is only evaded by a Rasputin-like resilience to everything from bleach to 90 m.p.h. motorcycle accidents. Chris Goode is both a good(e) writer of a tender and funny story and a nice presenter. He avoids the rant that is so common on the Fringe and tells a moving story very convincingly. Whether the Chris of the tale is the one that sits in front of the audience isn't clear even at the end. In any case, it is obvious from his performance that Chris Goode is both a talented and a nice man. Philip Fisher |
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