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Fringe 2005 Reviews (40)
We Love You Arthur
By Fiona Evans
Northern Firebrand and New Writing North
Assembly Rooms
****
A play about youngsters in the North East during the miner's strike
of the early 1980s - that rings a bell. We Love You Arthur is
a kind of distant, non-dancing cousin of Billy Elliot.
Lisa and Julie are fourteen-year-old Arthur Scargill groupies from
a pit village near Sunderland. Life is hard as the strike bites but
they are cheered by The Smiths and their dream of meeting the golden-(if
thin)haired heartthrob himself.
At the start, the girls seek far-fetched and occasionally tedious ways
to achieve this. Eventually, their idea of getting Maggie Thatcher and
Arthur Scargill to mate (or their doggie namesakes anyway) stumbles
as Lisa's dad (John Carter's Ray) gets his end bitten, as he is trying
to get it away.
The strong people in this family are the women with hard as nails Nana
and mum both played by the excellent Zoë Lambert. Indeed, it is
Ray's wife who gets a chance of fame, speaking at a rally that will
allow the two youngsters to meet Arthur at long last.
The path of true crush rarely runs smoothly and the death of Nana,
together with Julie's dad's decision to scab his way back to work, helps
the girls to grow up.
We Love You Arthur is a comedy that also has at least a measure
of political and emotional depth and an incredible feel for period and
location.
While Zoë Lambert is the pick of the actresses, Joanne Hickson,
who strives pretty successfully for the Britney look as Lisa and Ashlea
Sanderson as the homely Julie also do well.
Part of the play's attraction is the suspicion that at times it has
been constructed as an excuse for a nostalgic opportunity to support
a "Hits of the 80s" soundtrack. The combination of Billy Bragg,
The Smiths, George Michael, Sade et al with Arthur Scargill's
heroic last stand is seductive and could induce laughs and even a few
tears from those of the right generation.
Philip Fisher
Drowning Lilies
By Simon Bartolo
Aleateia Theatre Group
Pend Fringe @ Gateway
*****
Conjoined twins are exploited by their mother and a group of vampiresque
gawkers, and finally ripped from one another and their true love. Summed
up in this way, Drowning Lilies comes across as melodramatic
and tired - but nothing could be further from the truth.
Written and directed by Simon Bartolo, Drowning Lilies is an
extremely artistic and poetic work, so visceral and intense that I left
the theatre feeling physically uneasy. Littered across the piece are
haunting songs and poems by Chris Galea (who also plays poet/love interest
Edmund Zanter); they seem strange at first but their minor-key oddness
is soon revealed to be an integral part of the performance.
As the attendants at the freakshow that is Lily Fogli (Sephora Gauci
and Dorothy Baldacchino), Joseph Paul Vella, Veronica Stivala, Gilbert
Micallef, and Olwyn Jo Saliba are truly horrifying in their leech-like
admiration and desire for the money and otherness which the twins represent.
The four of them make a up grotesque chorus, each member more unsettling
than the last.
But it is Loranne Vella as La Signora Fogli, the twins' mother, who
really steals this show. Thanks to the stylization of the piece, her
acting is always menacing, never ridiculous - though at times, certainly
infused with black humour - and although her treatment of the twins
is disgustingly exploitative, Vella portrays the mother with such commitment
and passion that the audience can never wholly cease to feel for this
war-time widow whose sole opportunity to earn a living is by charging
members of the public to see her daughters.
Drowning Lilies is not for the faint hearted, and is certainly
not light fare. But it is a bizarre and wholly satisfying work which,
if it were not so intense and unsettling, one might want to see developed
into a longer piece.
Rachel Lynn Brody
Miss Julie
By August Strindberg
Act Provocateur International
C Electric
***
Patrick Marber updated Miss Julie to the middle of the last
century and it worked well. On this occasion, the modernisation by Victor
Sobchak has gone the rest of the way, to the extent that the heroine's
antics are fuelled by Vodka and Coke (the snorted rather than diet variety).
The story line should be familiar. Jan and Kristin are fellow servants
of a Count. They are preparing to marry when finances allow.
Into their relatively happy room comes the boss's daughter, the spoilt,
aristocratic Miss Julie. On a night of celebration, she has a drink
too many and falls for Jan's rough charms. After a one night stand,
the values of society have been violated and nothing will ever be the
same.
Miss Thielen is a highly emotional Julie who struggles with Shaban
Arifi's staid, unexcitable Jan. Their immorality is offset well by Aubrey
Woodruff, whose straight-laced Kristin remains dignified, even when
approached for a sexual threesome that was certainly not in the original.
Sobchak's main contribution is to rev up (and introduce) sex scenes,
in each case signalled by the use of very eccentric lighting.
In today's society, it is hard to accept that, even where there are
people rich enough to have a team of live-in servants, there would be
that much of a taboo about a drunken night of pleasure with the chauffeur.
As a result, this version has the feel of the original with only minor,
unnecessary concessions to modernity.
Philip Fisher
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