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Fringe 2009 Reviews (12)
Austen's Women
By Jane Austen
Assembly Rooms
***
This charming concoction has the kind of audience that all producers
would kill for on a Monday morning, a sell-out. It is also unusual in
youthful Edinburgh for the proportion of Senior Citizens, which was
probably not far short of 75%.
For 70 minutes, Rebecca Vaughan charms them with short extracts from
fourteen of Jane Austen's female characters plus a narrator.
We see the women in their collective boudoir, Miss Vaughan starting
immodestly in merely her underwear but progressing to full ball-gowned
glory by the end.
Everything in this show is what one would expect and the acting, under
Guy Masterson's direction, is versatile and makes the most of the writer's
dry humour.
Starting and ending with Lizzie (Elizabeth) Bennett from Pride and
Prejudice, a veritable Beatrice railing against Mr Darcy's Benedick,
she progresses into some odd byways.
Indeed, one of the most welcome pieces is the least known, from a sample
of juvenilia called The Three Sisters. This features the priggish
Mary Stanhope, a younger version of so many of her spiritual sisters
of whom the funniest is the grasping Fanny Dashwood, a character of
a type that everyone watching will instantly recognise.
The collection shows every mood and behaviour imaginable from pleasure
and coquetry through fussiness and scheming to anger and distress.
The sad conclusion that one derives from this very pleasant performance
is that ultimately, women have only two desires, Love and Money. Plus
ça change, plus ça même chose!
Philip Fisher
Beware of the Dogs
Relentless Theatre
Laughing Horse - The hive
*
Often when a production has a powerful and important message to put
across to its audience, it makes a point of clarifying the meaning into
the most concise and intelligent manner possible. Either that or to
veil it in clever wordpaly, metaphor or visual allusion which will lead
the discerning audience to get a true feeling for the subject matter.
Beware of the Dogs, falls into the painfully student trap of
trying to do both and succeeding at neither. Then spending most of the
rest of the performance acting out barely comprehensible shadow-puppetry
and physical theatre.
The basis behind the play, as the audience are shown, then told and
told again, is the plight of a young woman, married off to an abusive
husband at the age of seven. He goes on to rape and beat her, causing
her to miscarry one child and to eventually immolate herself out of
utter despair. A bleak, poignant and powerful message in the right hands.
Sadly the result of this play is that after the conclusion of the first
scene; which was a Pythonesque piece of bizarrity itself, the audience
will already be checking their watches during the five minute dance
number. As it stands, there is simply nothing to recommend here other
than the genuinely good intentions of those involved.
Graeme Strachan
Woyzeck
Splendid Productions
Pleasance Courtyard
****
Georg Büchner's seminal play Woyzeck is given a bizarre
and beautiful turn by Splendid Productions. Opting to clear up the dubious
problems of the uncompleted manuscript by presenting the entire work
as a series of non-chronological vignettes interspersed with vaudevillian
musical medleys and cheerful chirping, the company have created what
has to rank as one of the most colourful and intelligent interpretations
of the work since Tom Waits and Robert Wilson go their hands on it.
Rather than dryly play out the admittedly dull story, they instead
make light out of hammering out the meat of the play with a deft accompaniment
of percussion and some excellent singing; including a moment of inspired
lunacy in encouraging the entire audience to sing along with a musical
rendition of the line "Stab, Stab, Stab the bitch dead."
As well as subverting the usual interpretations, Splendid tear down
the flimsy pretence of comedy subtly throughout the play as Woyzeck
continually wears away his greasepaint from a clownish palid face replete
with rosy cheeks to the grim harrowed face of a madman consumed by his
guilt. The repetition of the fatalistic murder scene never ceases to
be harrowing and seems to change in meaning throughout and gain resonance
from the surrounding scenes no matter how anachronistic.
For those looking for something intelligent and different, you couldn't
go far wrong with this production and those who think they know Woyzeck
should see how it appears after seeing it from a new angle.
Graeme Strachan
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