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Fringe 2009 Reviews (40)
The Lover
By Harold Pinter
The Lincoln Company
C Soco
****
It's marvellous to see a performance that does justice to a master.
And involving no marionettes - apart from the human ones that is. Pinter's
tricksy tale of 1962 has a husband and wife coolly recounting the details
of their respective affairs. Gradually we begin to suspect it may all
be an elaborate role-play. Pinter's skill in dissecting middle-class
facades relies not so much on tearing them away as on keeping them intact
and parodying them. The husband and wife, addressing each other, are
so unerringly polite and banal that we wait tensely for an explosion
that never comes. "I am well acquainted with a whore," says
John Aspill's Richard matter-of-factly. "She's handy between trains".
Elsewhere, peculiar expressions are simply left to hang absurdly in
the air: Sarah's lover, for instance, describing liking fat women "like
great uddered bullocks."
Aspill plays all the various men: husband, lover, and the "mugger",
"gamekeeper" etc in the pair's acted scenarious that are more
obviously role-play. It's the dark desire to be transgressive and, more
importantly, to get one up on your partner, working away under their
civilised exteriors. Both performances are amazingly controlled - no
emoting, merely enunciation. It is very brave and very strong. Susie
Mower as Sarah does the unruffled poise and precision particularly well,
though she could have done with a spike of tartness as well.
Between scenes, iconic scenes of film romance are beamed in - Brief
Encounter, La Dolce Vita - to emphasise the contrast between
our ideas of passion, and this couple getting their kicks from a sort
of sadomasochistic restraint. It's a fascinating dance, alien but familiar.
Corinne Salisbury
Land Without Words
By Dea Loher
suite42
Just The Tonic @ The Caves
**
Dea Loher's thought-provoking monologue actually creates a connection
with its playing space, something of a rarity in these parts. The crumbling,
cavernous stone storeroom with high arched ceiling becomes the studio
of an artist whose material is mess and destruction as much as creation.
She wants to create perfect art - a painting, for example, that would
represent through colours a decomposing animal carcass, so viewers would
have an experience of looking at that precise object although they knew
not what the image was meant to be. Art, she thinks, should capture
the essence of experience without ever communicating it in actual facts.
But how does it communicate then - merely abstractedly? This is what
the artist asks herself on experiencing a Middle Eastern city known
only as K - the silent beggars who follow her down the road for miles,
the children drinking urine-tainted water from the gutter. Her art seems
inadequate to say anything at all about any of this.
Lucy Ellinson gives a rivetingly committed performance - dousing herself
with water, smearing herself with dirt from the piles spaced around
the stage. She presses a wad of clay to her face to make a rough mask,
seeming to want to press herself into the art, the art into herself.
It's a vital question - how can atrocity be represented, or talked about
at second hand? But the play does nothing more than pose it. It should
by no means come up with an answer, but should take the story somewhere
beyond the woman's frozen quandary, with which at the end we are still
stuck having got no further than when we started.
Corinne Salisbury
Oh My Green Soap Box
By Lucy Foster
Jumbled
Pleasance Courtyard
***
Lucy Foster's one-woman show uses a "presentational and autobiographical
style" to talk to us in bits and pieces about climate change. A
film shows her on Hampstead Heath in a bad polar bear suit talking half-heartedly
to passers-by about her save-the-world campaign. She builds the Arctic
with a white sheet draped over an arrangement of chairs. And she gets
an audience member to help her re-enact the drunken night of sex through
which she met her boyfriend.
For this is the global through the personal: a woman's desire to save
the world mingling and becoming inseparable from her love for one person,
and for every person she sees really. Foster is a funny, gentle and
warm performer: there's a nice moment when she evokes the sense that
caring about the environment may all come down to human connections
- in silence she gestures to audience members, we two will be lovers,
we two will laugh together, we two will fight. She understands the power
of silence, and of whiteness - the Arctic as the home of white, and
the prospect of a potential future where we have lost white.
She does well to avoid unbearable kookiness too.
It's a cute show, nicely scratched-together. However she is very vague
about what exactly she's planning to do or even what needs to be done.
The idea that her "love of the planet" is bound up with her
love of a particular individual, so to break up with him would bode
ill for the world as well, is a bit worrying in fact. Humane thinking
has to have wider vision than that. But Foster is, of course, just giving
us her personal perspective with all its flaws and irrationality: she
does so very well.
Corinne Salisbury
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