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Fringe 2006 Reviews (79)
Cantata for Acquiescence
Directed and Choreographed by Mira Kingsley
CalArts Festival Theatre
Venue 13
*****
Brecht's play about resigning oneself to nothingness and the meaning
of surrender is brought to the stage in a new interpretation. Performed
with a terrifying abandon and a physicality that is both brutal and
hypnotic.
The role of teacher in this education was performed deftly by Jesse
Saler, dressed in the garb of some metaphorical apparition, both lean
and powerful, with one arm covered in writing. He dances round the stage
manipulating the other players both physically and through his words,
creating abstract situations, even at one stage being metaphorically
hacked apart for his own good. The cast is a revelation in movement
and suggestion; with intensely choreographed interactions, Saler physically
pushes and pulls them in what becomes a dance of violence and beauty,
managing to show through motion what it does not explain in words.
As this 'teacher' and his assortment of pupils move across the stage
they continue by addressing obliquely the nature of charity, selflessness
and the values of action and inaction, as we are led upon a journey
of exploration through our own understanding of the necessity of caring
about anything.
The finale and ultimate metaphor of death is shown to be just as the
title suggests, acquiescence, the act of letting go, giving-up and the
acceptance of defeat.
Graeme Strachan
Slap
Inside Leg
Pleasance
***
Musicals on the Fringe circuit can be doomed to a slow and ignominious
death with the sheer quantity of them and the usual lack of ability
involved.
Thankfully this was not the case as this farcical jaunt was in the
hands of enthusiastic and talented performers.
It follows two makeup artists, Betty and Rhian, called in last minute
to work on a high-profile boy-band's video shoot. Simultaneously, Divine,
a German hairstylist who invented the mullet,have is en-route to the
same shoot. They meet at the trailer in a stormy field and wait for
the band, as tensions and temperatures begin to rise, it transpires
that Rhian and Divine have some history between them.
The musical comedy is certainly fun, even if it does some major drawbacks:
the frenetic opening scene, which bombards the audience with information
in a near incomprehensible jumble of accents before leading into an
impromptu music video sequence, utterly fails to introduce the players.
As a result, the audience is left feeling out of the loop, and spends
the first half of the play trying to work out exactly who is who and
what is going on. To add to this, the character of Rhian is played so
arrogantly that she remains almost entirely unsympathetic for the majority
of the play, and in doing so the ending feels lacking in catharsis.
The musical interludes however are certainly worth seeing, and the
actors all acquit themselves wonderfully in their camp and varied roles.
Graeme Strachan
How to Teach the History of
Communism to Mental Patients
Open Fist Theatre Company
Southside Zoo
**
This overlong, highly pretentious play is a satirical look into the
mindset of the Russian people in the days running up to the death of
Stalin.
The programme for this play goes to great lengths to make clear that
the writer intended this piece to show that Communism is a flawed concept
and that he equates it with Nazism. This however seems to have been
done at the expense of any form of story development. The majority of
the production consists of dry passages of simplified political rhetoric
spoken in sarcastic tones by Jeremy Lawrence, playing the writer Yuri
Petrovski, sent by Stalin to a mental hospital to enlighten the patients
as to the communist ideology.
The rest of the play is made up of obscure moments that are neither
witty nor funny. In fact, the one moment of the play which showed genuine
promise, a story of a soldier crucifying villagers, was such a shift
in tone that it could have been from an entirely different play.
The cast is uniformly excellent, which is unsurprising seeing as they
are mostly members of Actors Equity. However this cannot get away from
the fact that this is an unsubtle, gloomy and preaching story, with
an ending that defies not only logic but narrative sense.
Graeme Strachan
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