|
|
|
|
The
Edinburgh Fringe
|
|
|
|
Fringe 2004 Reviews (53)Moan Moan Moan The problem with devised shows is that what seems clear to the company can be totally obscure to the audience. There is a plot of sorts - they actually give you a complete synopsis with the programme - but the characters are so fey and divorced from reality that it's hard to work up the enthusiasm to care about what's happening. One review - which the company uses to publicise the show - makes a comparison with the inhabitants of Llaregyb. Gross calumny! Dylan Thomas' characters have a firm grounding in reality. They are recognisable, although exaggerated and, to an extent, romanticised. These aren't: they're just weird. If Crack Horse is, as I suspect, creating an imagined alternatve reality, they gave me nothing to provoke any sympathy for or even interest in it or its inhabitants. If that's not what they're doing, I retire defeated. I could make nothing of it. Peter Lathan 3hree I very nearly didn't get to see this. It was my last Fringe show and I was last in the queue. By the time we got down the steps, the show had actually started and there was quite a crowd standing waiting to get into the auditorium. But all the seats were taken. Others waved their tickets around, were told they'd get a refund. Then the house manager stopped the show! "Will all of those," she asked the audience, "who have tickets for Friday, please stand up." I was baffled: this was Thursday! Half the audience stood up and were told they would have to leave. They went - under protest - and we were allowed in. But they didn't start the show again, just picked up where they'd left off, so I am unable to review the first of the three one-act musicals, The Mice, because I saw only about a third of it. I have to say that the singers were good, but I'd only just worked out what it was about when it finished. The second, Lavender Girl, is a traditional story from many parts of the world, although this has an American setting. Boy nearly knocks over girl as he is driving to a party at the big hosue on the hill. He checks to see she's OK and they fall in love. They go to the party and have a wonderful time. He goes to her home the next day to discover that she has been dead for ten years, having been knocked down and killed at just the same spot as he met her the previous night. The two leads - Colin, played by Jon Nathan, and Lavender (Yanle Zhong) - were excellent, particularly Zhong, and if I have a quarrel with the piece it is with the book rather than the performances, for I thought the piece in the middle, in which Lavender is the focus of attention of Colin's friends, was a bit weak. The rest was great. The best part of the programme, however, is The Flight of the Lawnchair Man, inspired by the man who flew to 16,000 feet on a lawnchair and lived to tell the tale! It's hilarious and director Iain Davie squeezes every last drop of comedy out of it, ably supported by an excellent cast. The singing is of a very high quality - these are students on the Masters of Performance in Musical Theatre course - and they are no mean actors, too. They overcome - in fact, use to advantage - the odd shape of the venue and if they were using sound reinforcement, I, who have done not a little theatre sound engineering in my time, couldn't detect it. Flight is an absolute little gem of a show and they did a great job with it. I'm sorry, RSAMD, that I wasn't able to see and review the whole show. Blame that on the incompetence of your venue's front of house staff. I've certainly never seen anything like that mess in my eight years of Fringe reviewing! Peter Lathan Reflections If you only see one show in 2004 let it be Reflections. Tanya Khabarova's solo show is indeed 'a dance fable inspired by images of the Creation.' It is a stunning piece of visual theatre unique in its imaginative scope and in the sheer power of Khabarova's performance. It is a tour de force, utterly remarkable, like nothing you've seen before, though it echoes mankind's wildest dreams. Khabarova is androgynous and beautiful as with shaven head, painted white, and nearly naked, she transforms herself time and again into creatures great and small, mythical and magical, comic and tragic, sublime and lunatic. A punctilious priest performs his rites, a giggling Eve munches on the apple, an insect jerks and shudders, a statuesque centaur shoots an arrow and Icarus plummets to earth. Khabarova's exploration of movement takes her beyond any recognisable style, beyond clichés. She is genuinely pushing at the boundaries of movement as a means of expression and communication. She evokes primordial responses in our psyche and something akin to awe. The show in its entirety, sound, lighting, set, is a visual treat. It is calming and unsettling, endearing and startling. It has developed over four years and must now be close to all conceivable perfection. Don't miss it! Jackie Fletcher |
|
|