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Fringe 2007 Reviews (40)
England
By Tim Crouch
Traverse @ the Fruitmarket Gallery
*****
After he performed An Oak Tree at the Traverse two years ago
and My Arm two years before that, Tim Crouch's latest play, England,
is a semi-promenade piece at a small art gallery near to Edinburgh's
main railway station in the heart of the city.
The narrator tells us about the gallery and the current exhibition
and about the importance of art in general and tells us that "my
boyfriend" knows more about art and how to explain it and has quite
a collection of important pieces of his own. However our storyteller
is ill, but the power of money manages to buy a new heart and a few
more years of life. On the other side of the world, the recipient of
the new heart has travelled to thank the widow of its donor and to give
her a special present, but in return gets a very different side to the
story of how the heart was obtained to the official version.
Much of this story is pieced together by the spectator from the fragments
of information scattered through the text and none of it is told in
any conventional storytelling way. In the first half, the two performers,
Crouch himself with Hannah Ringham, move around the upstairs gallery
as guides but both apparently speaking as the main character in the
narrative, who is never specified as being male or female. For the second
act, the audience is seated in one of the small downstairs galleries
in a more conventional theatre configuration, and the two performers
speak the words of our main character after the operation and the translator
at the meeting with the widow of the heart donor Hassam (although each
performer doesn't always play the same person in the scene).
In the hands of many performers and writers, this could turn out to
be pretentious nonsense, but Crouch has produced a piece that is not
always easy to watch but is absolutely fascinating and draws the audience
into its stories even when they aren't always entirely sure where they
are being taken. For most of the time, Crouch delivers his lines with
a big, benevolent smile that is quite infectious, and Ringham beams
around at the spectators like a child who is pleased to have their attention.
The first act mostly consists of scattered information that leaves
its audience to assemble its own viewpoint and at times is quite funny.
The second act is extremely moving and though-provoking, leaving images
to haunt you and make you think for quite some time afterwards.
This unique practitioner has once again produced a unique piece of
theatre that is well worth seeing.
David Chadderton
Scarborough
By Fiona Evans
Northern Firebrand
Assembly Rooms
*****
Considering that its running time is under 45 minutes, Scarborough
is an amazingly intricate and multi-layered drama.
The storyline is not original but the staging and writing certainly
are. The audience of around 25 is crammed into a seedy Scarborough B&B
bedroom together with two lovers.
They are 16 year old Daz (James Baxter) and a woman almost twice his
age, Holly Atkins as Lauren. Ignoring the obvious difference in age
and outlooks, their primary problem is that she is his PE teacher.
This kind of story hits the tabloid front pages fairly regularly and
they always have a prurient field day attacking the evil teacher. Fiona
Evans makes us consider the human side to the stories.
Lauren is engaged to a man a generation older than she is, Geoff who
used to be her swimming coach. That would usually beg its own questions.
She is genuinely torn between the two men but knows in her heart of
hearts that an illegal relationship will never prosper.
Daz is both sensitive and immature, but as he says, he is supposed
to be the latter. As one might expect, he is more bullish, both about
the future of the affair and the odds of avoiding detection. Characteristically,
at times though, he is more interested in his new Nintendo than his
lover.
Deborah Bruce's beautifully-acted production is really claustrophobic,
the performers tripping over audience members and they in turn, feeling
embarrassingly close to both the high jinks and the explosive anger,
never better than when Lauren believes that the Headmaster is in town.
Fiona Evans has already won a Fringe First for Scarborough and
it is well deserved. This small play, which is performed three times
every afternoon, is both insightful and moving. Get in before word gets
around. This will be a sell out show.
Philip Fisher
Venus as a Boy
Adapted by Tam Dean Burn from the novel by Luke Sutherland
Traverse 2
****
As one has come to expect from any show with the National Theatre of
Scotland imprimatur, Venus as a Boy is a highly professional
and thought provoking solo play.
In fact, there is a second performer as the show's progenitor, Luke
Sutherland, provides musical accompaniment to Tam Dean Burn. He does
so using electric guitar and violin, plucking and bowing both to generate
an unearthly sound reminiscent of Jesus and Mary Chain.
We are asked to accept that what we see and hear was contained on a
series of minidisks delivered randomly to black Orcadian Luke Sutherland
by a skinhead in Soho.
The tale is a sad one. Cupid (or Desiree) grew up on Orkney and never
fitted in. Where the rest of his school companions liked boy things,
he preferred the company of girls - and their clothing.
The few friends that he made suffered for their friendship and gradually,
he moved further and further South, getting beaten along the route to
Soho, where he was taken up as a transvestite whore by sinister Romanian
fascist Radu.
Life in Radu's brothel seemed bearable, improving when transsexual
Wendy turned up and love blossomed. Nothing lasts and Cupid's lack of
trust and Wendy's of faithfulness led to a bitter break, with our hero
condemned to sex-slavery. Bizarrely, he then found final love with a
vicious skinhead, whose head he turned.
Tam Dean Burn gives a wonderfully sensitive but humorous performance
as this colourful character. He eventually dons all of the accoutrements
of a golden boy without a Midas touch in a spectacular finale to a touching
portrayal of an outsider.
Philip Fisher
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