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Fringe 2009 Reviews (52)
Cigarettes and Chocolate
By Anthony Minghella
Braindead Theatre Company
C Soco
***
This is a solid and confident staging of the late Anthony Minghella's
play about middle-class chatter and middle-class guilt. Gemma's friends
all have problems: adulterous partners, pregnancy weight gain, irritating
therapists. But Gemme herself has her eyes on something larger, and
so for Lent she has given up speaking.
Her friends and partner can only guess at her reasons, and as she sits
saint-like in her living room with choral music playing day and night,
they nervoulsy blurt out their confessionals. Some of these - her friend
is secretly in love with her, her partner is having an affair - you
would expect to be the revelations on which the plot turns, but whatever
she hears Gemma's face never drops its serene calm. She meditates on
a photo of the "beautiful self-immolator", the Tibetan monk
who burned himself alive in protest at his country's treatment.
It is hard to tell a story in which well-off people agonise about the
suffering of those less fortunate, but Minghella acknowledges this in
building his play around the idea that words are inconsequential and
silence may, in fact, be the only appropriate response to the reality
of things. There's good performances particularly from Clare Davis as
Gemma and Shoni Robertson-Finn as her motormouth pregnant friend; it's
a meditative rather than a revelatory piece, but very touchingly done.
Corinne Salisbury
Susie Baxter's Guilty Women
Birch and Baxter Productions
Assembly @ Assembly Hall
***
Skillfully playing an inventive selection of eight rather desperate,
almost housewives, Susie Baxter spins a yarn that keeps the audience
intrigued and entertained. All connected by their feckless cleaner Muriel
(who calls herself 'devoted to the discipline of failure') these women
find that crime doesn't pay, vanity gets revenged and even, in a lunchtime
lecture at their local community centre, that men are 'no longer required
for reproduction!' Such a revelation is this, that deceitful Rose takes
this matters into her own hands and plans a murder.
Like an Alan Bennett Talking Head with a multiple personality
disorder, Baxter smoothly slips from character to character, whilst
roaming about the stage. With her lively and engaging style Baxter presents
an enjoyable detective yarn for the rain soaked audience.
Sacha Voit
Audience - Michael Frayn
By Michael Frayn
Crash Bang Wallop Theatre Company
Sweet ECA
***
Faced with a three tiered rows of seats this audience is the performance,
in Michael Frayn's delightfully observed distracted audience. While
the writer sweats in the background, the spectators variously sleep,
arrive late, disturb their partners and generally lose the plot.
This young cast create an amusing atmosphere, with colourful characters.
While the production could have benefited from a more choreographed
approach when the audience do finally find a cohesive purpose, it is
still a very enjoyable production.
Sacha Voit
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