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Fringe 2008 Reviews (35)
Face in the Crowd
By Ben Clare and Matthew Dye
Kudos
Underbelly
***
This physical theatre piece starts and ends in a tube train. With minimal
speech, and much of that acting as audio wallpaper, it follows a typical
day in the London rat race.
By the end of a packed 45 minutes, we have witnessed pregnancy and
redundancy as well as lots of dating and mating - not always successful.
In the office and the disco, a French restaurant and Starbucks but
also on the street a large, young cast show how we live our lives today
at breakneck speed.
In watching Face in the Crowd, you begin to realise how heartless
and ephemeral we have all become but also get some laughs, often because
we recognise ourselves and our friends in the literally dozens of characters
portrayed often for only a minute or two.
This well-constructed meditation on the city experience makes a refreshing
change from so much text-based work and has clearly been better constructed
and thought through than much in Edinburgh this year.
Philip Fisher
In a Thousand Pieces
Devised by the company
The Paper Birds
Gilded Balloon Teviot
****
In a Thousand Pieces is multi-layered exploration of sex slavery
in the UK, particularly as it involves girls from Eastern Europe, using
text, verbatim theatre, physical theatre, music and multimedia. It was
developed partly in Poland where the company worked with Teatr Piesn
Kozla, Song of the Goat Theatre which has visited Edinburgh with great
success in previous Fringes.
The company of three women created the show from the experiences of
many of the women involved and also used vox pop, getting "ordinary"
British people to give their views. They used, they tell us, thousands
of stories to create the piece. The presentation, to an original piano
score played live, makes considerable use of physical theatre techniques.
It is, inevitably, impressionistic, although there is a basic storyline.
But that storyline is not the important thing: rather what matters is
the changing moods, from anticipation to despair and everywhere between,
and the narrative simply gives the piece a structure. Without it, it
would be very fractured. Which it actually is, to a certain extent,
but that isn't a fault but a reflection of the lives of the women it
portrays.
It is powerful and very moving with some extremely graphic images that
stick in the mind long after leaving the venue.
Peter Lathan
66A Church Road...
By Daniel Kitson
Traverse Theatre
****
Acclaimed stand-up comedian Daniel Kitson returns another with solo
performance to the Traverse Theatre, where he performed his previous
theatre shows C-90 and Stories of the Wobbly Hearted at
the Fringe in previous years.
Rather than his usual collection of interweaving touching and amusing
stories, 66a Church Road is a lament for the flat that Kitson
lived in in London for nearly six years. On a stage filled with suitcases
and his usual dim, yellowed lighting, he tells us how, after sleeping
on his friend's floor until long after he had outstayed his welcome,
he found his ideal flat, despite a few imperfections and some alterations
done by the landlord that were incompetent and possibly illegal. For
almost six years, he had many memorable experiences in the flat and
grew to love it so much that he decided he wanted to buy the building.
His landlord kept him dangling on the possibility that he may let him
buy his dream flat for years, but — well, I wouldn't want to give
away the ending, but you might want to consider whether a well-known
performer would want to advertise his current home address on posters
all over Edinburgh.
As he has done before, sections of his story are linked by recorded
voice-overs in his voice with little side stories, but this time they
are illustrated with some beautiful little illuminated miniature models
that appear in the suitcases from behind gauze panels or sliding doors.
He also occasionally uses the suitcases to illustrate other parts of
his story, such as his conviction that the sash window is the best window
ever invented.
The show is crammed full of Kitson's distinctive, wonderfully precise
but hilarious prose, but the story is not as enchanting as the quirky
lives of his fictional characters in previous shows. There are relatively
long stretches without laughs, but where in previous shows these sections
would be filled with great storytelling or lovely little touches of
characterisation, sometimes he seems to be using the platform of the
stage to rant about his landlord or other unfair obstacles to him achieving
his dream.
While this does not have the charm or the wonderful characters of his
previous theatre shows, Kitson's brilliance with words and hilarious
observations still shine through a script that could probably still
benefit from some trimming.
David Chadderton
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