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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2004 Reviews (57)Mad Margaret's Revenge Ripley Theatre is marketing three short plays by Lesley Ross as ‘The International Festival of Lilliput.’ I only got to see one of them, Mad Margaret’s Revenge, though I have seen one of the others, Madam Butterfly’s Child, in the past. Mad Margaret bears Ross’s trademark fascination with storytelling and fantasy. The play opens with an intense discussion between two women in nylon overalls about the sexism of Hollywood and the difficulties in particular of women directors. It takes some time before you realise first that this is a metaphor for something else and second that the relationships between the characters is not at all what it seems. The play characteristically moves from high minded abstract discussion to the bathos of personal lives. The failure of Margaret to become a major Hollywood director is, for example, put down to a childhood trauma: she was excluded for being fat from the role of angel in her infant school play. (Mary had to play Mary because then the boy who played Joseph wouldn’t forget what she was called.) The comedy spins out from this tiny beginning, dealing with dreams and fantasies. Margaret (played with immense gusto and presence by Jane Hill) constructs endless film versions of her life; Gemma (an eager wide-eyed Sophie Hobson) is her sidekick, frequently getting so carried away as she listens that she joins in and elaborates the story - only to be slapped down. A sofa and a chair. A speaker and a listener. Sparkling dialogue. Brilliant audience control. Rescued from its occasionall sentimentality by self-mockery. I loved it. Jeni Williams I Licked a Slag's Deodorant This tastefully entitled offering deals with Jim Cartwright’s customary bleak territory, though, as an early comedy, it hasn’t the ferocity of better known pieces such as Road. Loneliness, abandonment, theft, pimps, drugs, violence, dirt: in this play all the materials of misery lead to an oddly satisfying happy ending - of a kind. There are no names, just ‘Man’ and ‘Slag:’ a loser and an addict respectively. As this anonymity suggests, it’s a cartoon world, for you couldn’t possibly laugh if you felt their pain. It’s also in some way about the practicalities of survival. These characters accept what is happening to them and get on with it and part of the play’s pleasure and the actors’ skill is that they draw you into doing the same. The writing is splendid. In an elegy for an inmate found dead and covered in dust in his lodging house, the man explains that ‘I liked him because he was sadder than me’ and describes the dead man as ‘looking like diarrhoea – all brown.’ When the Man turns up in her room again, despite being fleeced twice, the vulnerable Slag is delighted: ‘he’s come back, he must be a friend!’ Guto Humphrieys’s set conjures a sleazy rented room, with a battered put-up bed, a naked light bulb and a wardrobe pasted with giant tabloid horror stories. The befuddled Man, introduced with a hang-dog expression and his trousers round his ankles, is played by a lanky deadpan Craig Gazey, so ground down he seems hardly able to unfold himself into an upright position, getting furtive pleasure from licking stolen deodorant. It’s a beguiling performance. Gazey plays with the audience his eyes flick shyly into the auditorium as he watches a strip show, pocketing a shabby white bra and sneaking licks on the deodorant. The play starts off with what seems to be a monologue of his sad and lonely life but it’s interrupted by Ffion Williams’s twitchy, strapping Slag. The cartoon quality is highlighted by as she drags his passive body around the stage – a kind of off-kilter wonderwoman with a worm. A lot of the comedy lies in this physical mismatch. Lovely moments: opening the wardrobe to reveal a smashed mirror glittering in the coloured lights of two rotating disco balls; an allusion to American Beauty as red rose petals rain down onto the Man when the Slag wants to go to his place. He ends up living under her bed amongst the balls of fluff, used condoms and the snowflakes of Uncle Crack, their relationship not based on sex but something gentler: ‘She pokes me and I sing to her.’ Very enjoyable Jeni Williams
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