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Fringe 2008 Reviews (21)
The Factory
Precarious
Zoo Southside
****(*)
Award-winning physical theatre company Precarious have a very distinctive
style and in this year's show Huxley's brave new world meets Brechtian
cabaret on the grotesque merry-go-round of modern consumer society.
The Factory is a scintillating and dynamic provocation for a
new generation of audiences who have grown up with media pulp and take
this sinister merry-go-round for granted.
It is a highly intelligent and entertaining take on the production
line that is 21st century life for most westerners. We are mechanised
human beings, conditioned into repetitive patterns of behaviour and
automatic responses. We are goaded on by the media to earn more so as
to spend more, to acquire more material possessions, to emulate celebrities,
to strive for perfection, to be high achievers, to have beautiful bodies.
Both work and leisure have become a treadmill. And we never stop to
question or doubt or even to consider who might be the ultimate beneficiary
of all this frenzied activity.
The Factory succeeds in both engaging and challenging through
strong visual imagery, a mixture of multimedia, installation and physicality.
The high quality of ensemble work reinforces the message that we have
become cogs in a machine and that conformity is individuality in global,
mass culture.
Precarious is a brave, new theatre company, showing the way forward,
creating a new style of political and interventionist theatre in an
age of increasing cultural banality. Their shows should be on the National
Curriculum!
Jackie Fletcher
The Fooligan
Al Seed
Pleasance Courtyard
*****
The Fooligan is a storyteller talking about storytellers; a
guileless raconteur with gargantuan paunch who has tumbled into the
lower strata of Dickensian caricature and can't find his way out again.
He doesn't know where he is going, because he wants to return to where
he came from, but can't remember where he's been. He is has a riveting
on-stage presence and is equally a metaphor for something much more
profound. His enigmatic tales are about power in many forms: the power
to disempower and imprison and the power to captivate with words.
Al Seed has a fine understanding of the semantics of physical expression.
Every movement and gesture, every twist of the mouth, flick of the finger,
turn of the head heightens our understanding of these grim and ambiguous
tales. The Fooligan transforms himself from innocence to evil, from
the menacingly bestial to the clown. He is eloquent and elegant, dumbstruck
and clumsy as he skips about and creates a one-man show within a one-man
show. It is a fine example of how richness and simplicity can combine
to stunning effect. The voice work alone is excellent; the lighting
used to create grotesque effect; the costume delightful and the white
make up allows Seed to transform his face from childlike wonder, to
confusion and fear, to the pomposity of power and to the devilishly
nasty.
Fringe First Winner and Total Theatre Award Nominee Al Seed is starting
more and more to resemble Jean-Louis Barrault, the granddaddy of Total
Theatre. The Fooligan has a richness of texture, a perfectly
modulated pacing and a seamless blend of the subtle and the grotesque
that can only be achieved by a performer who is a master in his discipline.
It is very encouraging therefore to see that in October Seed will be
taking up a position as Head Tutor on the very first full-time Physical
Theatre training course in Scotland.
Jackie Fletcher
Lies Have Been Told
By Rob Beacham
Assembly @ George Street
***
Philip York plays notorious Daily Mirror owner, the late Robert Maxwell,
and actually looks remarkably like him onstage and makes a good stab
at his growling voice.
The play is delivered as a monologue with a small amount of audience
participation and occasional interruptions from ringing telephones.
It puts across Maxwell's side of the story of his life, from being decorated
for bravery fighting for the British in World War II to the xenophobic
campaign to prevent the News of the World from passing into Maxwell's
non-British hands (it was instead sold to the Australian Rupert Murdoch)
through to his acquisition of the Daily Mirror and his mysterious death
in 1991.
The play does make Maxwell seem a little more human than some accounts
of his life as, despite him coming across as a bully and boasting constantly
about his money and lifestyle, we do get some insight into his past,
his family life and the work he put in to get to where he did. However
his justification for his excesses and his dubious business practices
don't convince, and his smile when he explains these things suggests
he doesn't even convince himself, but he firmly believes he deserved
what he had and was acting for the best,
There are some laughs and some interesting information on a man about
whom there is a great deal of misinformation (some of it from him) but
it does come across rather like a lecture about his life, with telephone
calls punctuating it to make it seem more dramatic. The general information
is delivered well, but emotional moments seem a little forced and false,
and the play itself is very uneven in tone, pace and chronology. However
it is certainly of interest to anyone who wants to know more about this
complex man than what has been reported in the press, even if it comes
from his own lips.
David Chadderton
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