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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2004 Reviews (34)One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest This troubled production, now directed by Terry Johnson, was the hottest ticket in Edinburgh before the first four performances were cancelled, while Christian Slater recovered from chicken pox. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is best known for Milos Forman's film of the Ken Kesey novel. That starred Jack Nicholson at his best and Louise Fletcher, and comparisons are inevitable. The play's success really rests on the performances of the two leads. Happily, Frances Barber as Nurse Ratched excels and Christian Slater as wild man Randle P. McMurphy is nearly as good. Miss Barber combines the sweetest seductive smile and a coaxing voice with a fist of iron. Her character represents the political repression that Kesey, through his great creation McMurphy, wished to rail against. The mental hospital is clinically clean and the inmates, mostly voluntary, moan a great deal but accept their lot. That is until McMurphy, a man who may have got himself committed to avoid hard work, arrives with a mission. He immediately wages war on the nurse, pronouncing her name with two determinedly split syllables. He does more for the other patients' mental health in days than years of internment have achieved. He also ends up in an escalating Cold War that ends inevitably with a victory for conservatism. In addition to the two leads, there are several other performances of note. The supporting actors are almost all comedians, many of whom appeared in Twelve Angry Men last year. Owen O'Neill as Harding does well in a tricky part and, after an inaudible first speech, Irish mountain, Stephen K Amos renders a fine effort as the chief. Add in The Office's Mackenzie Crook as stuttering Billy and there is a recipe for success. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is not quite perfected yet following all of its production problems but the audiences are already seduced by the hype and the performances. It can only get even better by the time it reaches the Gielgud Theatre in London in the autumn. Philip Fisher Amajuba Amajuba - Like Doves We Rise is one of the most moving shows in Edinburgh this year. It features testimonies about their own lives in South Africa townships delivered by five actors who are also talented singers and dancers. After an introduction that sets a scene in which the actors explain how their pasts haunt them, each individual tells the story of their growing up. Every one of them contains horrors that could never be forgotten. There are tales of near starvation, parental desertion, prejudice and above all, deaths and disappearances. There are also happy moments, often derived from the poorest of materials. Amajuba is a play that draws on a deep African tradition of story telling. It is well presented by director/compiler Yael Farber, with a good mix of happy and sad, speech, music and dance. The team really throw themselves into these stories of tragic lives and indomitable spirits. Best of all, by doing so, they seem to have reached a stage of symbolic cleansing which will give them an expiation of their pasts. This is a compelling show that should be seen by all, both for its entertainment value and the depiction of a terrible society in which lives were dirt cheap. Philip Fisher Andromache This stripped-down German version of the tale of Andromache, with English supertitles, lasts only an hour. It is very much an exercise in theatre technique, which requires and receives amazingly disciplined performances from the five actors. The tone is set by the opening curtain, which takes a minute to rise, initially revealing a stage strewn with bottles, broken and whole, symbolising the recent destruction of Troy. Yvon Jansen's Hermione creates an immediate dramatic impact smashing bottles, the sound amplified by microphones. On a raised podium, the five actors pose, as if for an old master. They remain on high throughout, rarely moving and showing minimal emotion as the story is played out. Pyrrhus (Mark Waschke), having killed her husband, offers the red-headed Jutta Lampe's seated Andromache marriage and, to sweeten the pill, the life of her son, already condemned by the people. There is also an added dimension in that Hermione has long been engaged to Pyrrhus and, in turn, Orestes loves her. The drama is always played down with movement kept to a minimum and conveyed with artistic poses. The speech is therefore all. While the Percevals' production is striking on the eye, the form is so rigid that it becomes the sole purpose of the exercise, to the detriment of the drama. The main distinguishing characteristic is the fine acting especially from Mark Waschke and the two women. The final curtain call is worthy of comment, in that to protect themselves from glass, the actors are obliged to take it wearing wellington boots or galoshes. Philip Fisher |
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