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Fringe 2008 Reviews (34)
A California Seagull
By Alison Carey, after Anton Chekhov
The Red Chair Players
C
***
The Red Chair company already has two Fringe Firsts under its belt
and therefore was always likely to come up with something worthwhile
when it turned its attention to Chekhov.
As long as you are not too snooty about your classics and accept that
a cast aged from 15-18 will have mixed abilities, A California Seagull
should prove a delight.
Alison Carey has updated Chekhov's classic to the glitzy world of Hollywood
and its environs today. In doing so, she loses some of the Russian wistfulness
but replaces it with the hollow world of mega-movie makers.
Irene Arkwright, given great glamour, shallowness and an artistic temperament
by Annaliese Kirby, is a fine creation. She makes life hell for all
around with her meanness and insecurity.
Her highly strung, beachbum son, Daniel O'Neill's Cameron, wants to
be a filmmaker. His initial play performed by Nina (Emma Feivvel) is
unintelligible and its reception throws him into a depression that is
exacerbated when she falls for his mother's young lover, a blockbuster
movie producer called Taper, played by James Biondi.
This group, together with various unhappy minions, play out a modern
version of Chekhov that lacks a little depth and has the odd excessive
textual jump but is great fun and makes much sense in its new milieu.
By the end, you feel that Chekhov has been honoured and his characters
offered a fresh setting with good results.
Philip Fisher
Secret Agents
Apikoros
Pleasance Dome
***
If the Fringe is nothing else, it is a place where a writer or company
can experiment, playing with form or ideas. Apikoros do just that with
Secret Agents. It deaslw ith terrorism, the fear of terrorism
and the ways in which givernments and their security services make use
of those fears for their own ends.
Inspired by Conrad's The Secret Agent, the play deals with Britain's
most ineffective terrorist (who is also a jazz fan) who tries and dails
to blow up the London Eye.
However the play, although it does use a basic narrative structure,
plays with its subject matter ("But that isn't the real
story about..." repeats and repeats, giving us a multi-faceted
view) and the form (repeating actions and whole scenes), as well as
making a lot of use of film and a jazz soundtrack. The overall result
is that it does go on rather toolong so that the effect is diluted.
The three-person cast are excellent and the production values (in so
far as one can talk about production values at the Fringe where a 10-minute
set-up is the norm) are high, but losingabou ten minutes would strengthen
the piece enormously.
Peter Lathan
Histrionics
Baby Belly
**(*)
Set in 1702, this is described as "a bawdy, barmy tale" and
yes, it is a bit bawdy and a bit barmy, but much of the barminess comes
from the often (but not always) anachronistically modern language and
the deliberately bad verse, along with the fact that it uses caricature
rather than characterisation, best exemplified by the ghost of the main
character's mother being played by a man as an occasionally crude drag
act.
It wasn't helped by some pretty poor diction which rendered some of
the speech in some of the early scenes unintelligible. It was loud enough
but gabbled at a rate which did not allow for the echoing acoustic of
the venue.
Mildly amusing but there are a lot better shows around Edinburgh.
Peter Lathan
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