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Fringe 2006 Reviews (75)
The Dumb Waiter
By Harold Pinter
The Trident Theatre
Rocket @ Roxy Art House
*(*)
Pinter's highly symbolic short play about two hit men awaiting orders
in the basement of a disused restaurant can be largely hit or miss.
The tension of the piece relies on the long silences and pauses in the
action throughout.
This production moved itself so slowly and with little enthusiasm or
measured pace.
The two gangsters begin to fret and panic, as the ridiculous situation
grows more steadily bizarre around them, but they utterly fail to engage
the audience with their laboured period mannerisms and heavy accents.
Although they remained very true to the material, the production never
managed to capture the subtitles of the script and translate them to
the performance.
Pinter's play could never be called the most exciting but this production
fails to elicit even the most rudimentary levels of tension from his
material and as a result leaves its audience baffled and uninterested.
Graeme Strachan
One Night at the Caravan Club
Corner House
Rocket @ Roxy Art House
****
A lonely young man in lipstick and eyeliner sits in his room and talks
about the lost love of his life. He leafs through letters and reminisces
on the lifestyle he lives, then leads the audience on a journey through
London's homosexual underbelly in the mid 1920s decadence.
Arron Wright makes for an impressive lead, as he flits between educating
the crowd on the practice of 'cottaging' and how to dress to impress
at the infamous Caravan Club, a bawdy club he frequents in the vain
search for love and affection, before returning to the inner monologues.
His scenes are atmospherically split by musical interludes from Woodstock
Taylor, resplendent as the chanteuse of a certain age.
The performance is touching and tender, with an ironic sense of bittersweet
humour.
Well worth seeing
Graeme Strachan
Retail Paradise Princess
The Alternative Stage Company
Greyfriars Kirk house
***
A young woman with a shopping trolley ponders the bleakness of her
life by numbly wandering round a supermarket where she copes with the
prison of her own insecurities and the pain of her life by likening
it to the experiences of modern consumerism. Through the course of her
story, she shoplifts, is almost caught and hides out in a semi-dreamlike
nightmare, pausing only to reminisce on the broken love affair that
left her in this state.
The subject matter at hand is all festival fare, isolation, and confusion
of reality with idealised concepts and metaphorical connections to everyday
things. Although the story is interesting it holds nothing particularly
new; the lead performs well but her tale seems clichéd from a
strange familiarity.
Graeme Strachan
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