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Fringe 2009 Reviews (45)
Ophelia (drowning)
By Daniel Marchese Robinson and Daniel Pitt after Deborah Levy and William
Shakespeare
3BUGS Fringe Theatre
Sweet Grassmarket Swimming Pool
****
The clear, rippling water - jets turned up high for maximum eddying
- is the source of some striking, moving visuals in this collage of
Hamlet, pop lyrics and Deborah Levy's Pushing the Prince into Denmark.
The trappings of marriage - white veil and bouquet - take on a gloss
of melancholy unreality when swirling, ghostlike, in the current or
lying on the bottom, visible only through a shifting, distorting lens.
Helen Morton's Ophelia is equally arresting. Her shoulders tense and
rounded, her voice as husky and tremulous as if something were tightening
around her chest, she avoids eye contact as Gertrude (Rose Walker) attempts,
through allegory and outright pleading, to persuade her to let go her
hang-ups and move on.
Though it dominates the space, the pool is more set piece than stage,
used more as a symbolic watery grave for cast-off props than for swimming
in. Other than at the very beginning and end of the play, the action
is mostly limited to repetitive circuits of the poolside, as Ophelia
and Gertrude debate in figurative and literal circles. Pete Wheller
as the Prince, the most frequently submerged character, puts altogether
too much effort into both his vindictive glowering and his enunciation,
in a contrast to Morton's more subtly studied performance. Fortunately,
the Prince spends most of the play in the corner cosseting his mocking-bird
Lover (Serafina Kiszko), allowing the far superior Morton the exposure
she deserves.
Matt Boothman
The Trial
Dominic J Allen after Franz Kafka
Belt Up Theatre
C Soco
****
It's often hard to see what's going on in Belt Up's immersive adaptation
of Kafka's absurdist work. You're blindfolded from the moment you enter
the C Soco squat; even once the blindfold is removed the space is thickly
hazed, and the action often takes place beyond or amongst your fellow
audience members. But perhaps this is for the best. There are monsters
in the smoke.
The unjustly arrested Josef K is the only recognisably normal person
in a world of grotesques. There's extremely exaggerated vocal and physical
work, a certain amount of sinister clowning, and one genuinely hideous
creature: a head coated in smeared greasepaint, spitting obscenities
above a monstrously obese body created from pulsating, ragged umbrellas,
lit from within by golden light. It's a bizarre, macabre, deeply unpleasant
but utterly convincing world.
The company skilfully exploit the audience's herd mentality to shepherd
them into becoming corridors, portrait galleries and crowds of waiting
defendants. But while the dialogue is always loud and clear enough,
there are moments where it's all too easy to get stuck behind two rows
of people and miss the physical action. This engenders some empathy
for K, who likewise is denied a view of the whole picture, but it's
still a wrench to miss a single eerie moment.
Matt Boothman
Crave
By Sarah Kane
Royal Holloway Theatre
C Soco
****
This is not art. This is suffering.
It is a diner and the ketchup and mustard squeezers are relics: spoilt,
dignified, on the brink of defeat. Like the writer. A man orders death
from the barman. The tone is set. Kane's painful beauty fills the diner.
No one gets what they want here. People order death and are served neurosis.
I did not enjoy, even for a moment, this galling and barbaric monologue,
divided, supposedly arbitrarily, between two men and two women. I entered
a Kane-virgin, aware only of her suicide and infamy. I left bruised
and spoilt. Like a mustard squeezer. This is beyond art.
The delivering company, given poetic madness to serve up to afternoon
punters, have done a fine job. The director has drawn characters where
perhaps there were not. She has established - if obliquely, of course
obliquely - a relationship between two of the characters, whose psychotic
and love-rich feuding is pierced and invaded by the other two characters,
who strike as representatives of consciousness.
See this, and wear protection.
Ben Aitken
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