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Fringe 2005 Reviews (20)
Chatroom
By Enda Walsh
Zoo
***
Under the direction of Robert Hersey, Newcastle-based Nightingale Productions
have a good reputation for drawing fine performances from young actresses.
This year their brief Edinburgh sojourn features a new play written
for them by Enda Walsh, who is best known for his unforgettable Disco
Pigs.
Chatroom takes us into cyberspace and the murky world of teen
chatrooms. It is the story of 15-year-old Jim, played by Natalie Banks.
His father is long gone and he is having pubertal problems that require
some serious support and, ideally, a girlfriend.
What he gets though is a couple of cyber friends from hell. Emily Bierne
plays William, a boy with a streak of cruelty that almost persuades
Jim to commit hari kiri in McDonalds. It could be argued that all he
really needs to do is eat the food.
At the last, as the play moves on to a video screen, saving angel Laura
(Helen Hardy) breaks her own rule, overrules William and Jenny Smith's
Jack and steps in to ensure that everyone in this parable lives happily
ever after.
Hersey creates an authentic atmosphere of teenaged bedrooms and a great
punk-oriented soundtrack. Following a nervous start, the acting is strong
with Emily Bierne and Natalie Banks the pick.
One area of confusion is that the company is entirely female and makes
no effort to hide the fact. It therefore takes a little time to work
out that three of the attractive young ladies in front of you are actually
nasty spotty boys. On the other hand since this is cyberspace, perhaps
they are girls pretending to be boys who are girls. All sounds a bit
like a Killers song!
Philip Fisher
The Found Man
By Riccardo Galgani
Traverse 1
****
An in-house Traverse production, The Found Man is a subtle,
allusive play that has an almost biblical quality. It takes place in
1859 in an insular Scottish community cut off from the world by the
sea.
Director, Philip Wilson has designed the sparest of sets and asked
excellent lighting designer Neil Austin to minimise the illumination
on the wooden stage. This creates a haunting effect that matches the
subject matter.
At the start, the inhabitants are waiting for the arrival of Sinclair,
a rich, Godot-like man who will save the community from poverty.
Bombastic Rafter (John Stahl) is insistent that everyone must work
to ensure that Sinclair will be welcome. This doesn't please Liam Brennan's
Moffat, a carpenter who has his own secret but lives for his innocent
daughter, significantly called Agnes.
The other residents, simple John and his bullying wife Mary (Michael
Moreland and Molly Innes), try to get by on their one borrowed field
and a life close to slavery.
Everything changes after a storm that may have taken Agnes at sea.
A man is washed up on the shore and after his maltreatment, everyone
is implicated in an unwitting conspiracy that explores the nature of
evil and the capacity to hide from one's responsibilities. It also goes
a step further as the inhabitants begin to understand what they have
perpetrated and the need to behave differently in future.
This kind of Scottish drama featuring the cream of home-grown actors
is what the Traverse does best and deserves to be seen widely.
Philip Fisher
Enola
By Al Smith
Kandinsky
Baby Belly
***
Enola Gay was the name of the aircraft which dropped the first atomic
bomb on Hiroshima: it is also the name of one of the characters, the
daughter of one of the men who built the plane, in this new play about
the Manhattan Project and the Hiroshima attack. There are numerous strands
running throughout the piece - the building of the bomb and the attitude
of its makers, morality and political expediency, the Catholic Church's
attitude to suicide - and we learn a little about the principle behind
atomic fission, about the effects of nuclear radiation on the human
body, about the devastation, even about Legrange points.
The problem is that the numerous strands don't always fit together
terribly well and Enola Gay (the character who goes from 8 years old
to adulthood in the course of the piece, not the plane) is little more
than a linking device. In particular the suicide of her mother (also
an Enola Gay) and the reaction of her father to the priest's refusal
to allow her to be buried in the churchyard, whilst an effective little
cameo, does not sit easily alongside the rest. You know why it
is there but it is an intellectual rather than a dramatic or emotional
link.
There are very effective moments and the performances are generally
of a high standard but the structure needs tightening up and the links
between the various strands strengthening.
Peter Lathan
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