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Fringe 2008 Reviews (80)
Hamlet: (Chamber Shakespeare
Cycle Part 1)
Chamber Shakespeare Company
Hudson Hotel
****
Hamlet forms the first part of the four tragedies that the Chamber
Shakespeare Company are performing here at the Festival. Director and
protagonist William Mann assures us it's the 'lightest' of the four.
With just three actors and using only scarves, staffs and cloth as props
and costume changes, the Chamber Shakespeare Company distil Hamlet
down to exclusively the Danish Prince's experience and perspective.
While the performances alone are easily worth five stars each, this
Hamlet does require a good knowledge of the text, which will
make it inaccessible to Shakespeare novices. However, Hamlet
aficionados are to be hailed from all corners, for this is a performance
you won't forget. While Mann's Hamlet is absolutely enthralling, even
tritagonist Christopher Lynch's Gravedigger reflects Hamlet's madness
and word play so well that you'd like to see him play the Dane too.
I am yet to see their Macbeth, but I await it with great anticipation
and can't recommend this psychological Shakespeare experience strongly
enough.
Cecily Boys
Baldanders
Kompania Doomsday
Hill Street Theatre
***
This production is saved from its dangerously metaphysical script
- which claims to chart the relationship between a caged beast and his
master, but seems more to allude to notions of control between puppet
and actor - by fantastic puppeteering.
Following five (or four and a half) vignettes enacted by Marcin Bikowski
in a theatrically draped box-stage, and presented by the two-headed
figure (Marcin Bartnikowski) who sits outwith the stage realms, the
same point seems to be harped on in all of them how can we say
what is real in a ficticious world? The dialogue is heightened for the
most part and, unlike other purveyors of existential notions such as
Stoppard, seems to have no direct point of access perhaps something
has been lost in translation from Polish to English.
However Bikowski, as he creates dark and sexual encounters with a bare-breasted,
deathly-faced woman, presents a box of chattering heads, and argues
with the hag costume he is wearing, is a one-man tour de force
of puppetry. He holds several characters in his head at once, wrestles
passionately with their own sense of self and then at times bitterly
mocks them, with complete conviction. For anyone with an interest in
the use of puppets for adult theatre, don’t go to see the play
but to see the performance.
Lucy Ribchester
Mime for Laughs
Mono-Mime Comedy Theatre
Hill Street Theatre
****
I defy anyone not to come away from this daft show, full of simplicity
and masterful buffoonery, in a good mood. Ireneusz Krosny is, as well
as an accomplished mime artist creating whole worlds out of nothing,
an engaging, elastic-faced clown, cavorting through a series of sketches,
many of which are based on the same kind of hair-brained schemes and
awkward situations that Mr Bean might find himself in.
It is a testament to Krosny’s talent that he can have an audience
full of rational human beings squirming and giving a collective ‘ewwww’
at the thin air as his wacky surgeon pulls a string of non-existent
entrails from a non-existent patient. Equally delightful in its absurdity
is the gusto with which, by the end of the show, we applaud his non-existent
orchestra, wildly cheering a black square of curtain. But that’s
the beauty of mime its ambiguity means anything can happen. A
knight at the top of a flight of stairs can find he has another, and
then another, and then another to climb. Playing the cello can slide
into sweeping the floor and a fly’s appetite for honey can turn
disastrous. It’s a concept which Krosny exploits to its full potential.
On Saturday night, as Japanese, Spanish, Polish and English (amongst
other tongues) rattled round the auditorium before the show, Krosny
gave us a comic language everyone can understand.
Lucy Ribchester
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