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Fringe 2009 Reviews (15)
Barry Pull Your Finger Out!
Footlights Harry Porter Prize Winner
Underbelly
*
"You'd have to be very lucky to get some sort of happiness out
of a stunt, like this but I'm having a go." The lead character's
words could not have more precisely articulated my feelings as I watched
this woefully ill-conceived, pointless "comedy". Garry and
Barry may or may not be living parallel lives. One of them might or
might not be dead. We might or might not be intrigued to find out at
the end. We weren't. What was certain was that both characters' painful
attempts at word-play presented two such inadequate, boring individuals
with so many 'cringe comedy' pauses that, at this point, having lost
the will to live, I can hardly manage to write this review.
Sacha Voit
The Sound of My Voice
By Ron Butlin, adapted by Jeremy Raison
Assembly Rooms
*****
Far too often, when a novel is adapted for the stage one wonders why.
In this case, as the viewers are both shaken and stirred by what should
be an award-winning performance from Billy Mack, the translation to
the theatre is fully justified.
The novel by former barnacle scraper and current Edinburgh Poet Laureate
Ron Butlin, is adapted and directed by Jeremy Raison, Artistic Director
of the Citz in Glasgow. He knows his stuff, asking Mack to give his
all as Morris Magellan, an alcoholic workaholic with a love of classical
music and the kind of liver that men dream of.
However, after two decades of abuse, his Mephistophelian pact with
the bottle is about to fail. This king of the biscuit business and loving
father of two may start the play on top of his own little world but
his descent down the ski slope of alcoholic degradation is fast.
In no time, his wife is despairing, the children whom he describes
perceptively as "the accusations" live up to their name and
his colleagues call time on his drunken excesses.
In an awesome performance, Billy Mack fully inhabits this sad character,
getting fine support from Michelle Gallagher, who plays all of the other
roles in a memorable drama that deserves to be a sell-out success.
Philip Fisher
Dawn of Quixote: Chapter The
First
By Juli Crockett
CalArts
Venue 13
**
Of course the 10am slot is never easy - but to fill it with an hour
of densely winding, contextless intellectual debate seems taking too
much of a risk. The Californian company, transposing Don Quixote
to the stage, have decided to take all of the philosophy and only a
sliver of the narrative. So the two main themes the book is famous for
- the delusional knight wandering the countryside acting out ridiculous
charades of chivalry (whence the saying "tilting at windmills"),
and the master-servant relationship - are entirely missing. The characters
not even identified, we must simply deduce that one man is the knight,
the other his servant, and Lisa Dee a sort of narrator/mediator guiding
them along.
They perform energetically and in another context the combination of
philosophical sparring and literal swordfighting might have worked nicely
- eg. the Don quoting Hegel for his winning thrust. But to simply launch
unprecedently into agonised questioning - the nature of the self, the
psychology of memory, the "idea as the absolute" - while we
are still blinking away the morning crust makes it pretty difficult
to engage. Any emergent profundities are also undermined by the comedy
posturing of the actors' style: intended I suppose to inject the entertainment
factor, but in fact showing a lack of faith in the ability of the ideas
alone to hold our attention. In a radically restructured format they
could have done so.
Corinne Salisbury
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