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Fringe 2009 Reviews (63)
My Life with the Dogs
By NIE
Pleasance Courtyard
***
Every few years, there are newspaper articles about children who do
a Tarzan/Mowgli and grow up with wild animals for a spell.
Ivan Mishukov is yet another in the line but his experience is altogether
more Russian. When he was four, the young Muscovite was finally driven
from his high rise home by a drunken mother and "Uncle" Boris,
who preferred their sordid nights of passion alone rather than invaded
by the lad.
After a brush with a generous paedophile, he was adopted by the city's
wild dogs and ran with them for a couple of years before being rescued
by a policeman.
Award-winning company NIE have dramatised the tale using live rock
music and physical techniques to bolster a story that can be told in
only a couple of lines to 70 minutes.
The inventive team under the direction of Alex Byrne, who also acts,
pull out all the stops. The comic highlights are human television and
radio, both of which are exceptional, together with the mangy human
dogs.
Even so, the material could have been condensed, perhaps by 15 minutes,
to considerable benefit.
Philip Fisher
Camille O'Sullivan - Dark
Angel
Assembly Hall
****
When she first appears on stage to sing a frankly rather bland ballad,
Camille O'Sullivan looks like a glamorous young widow, sad but demure.
In seconds though, she transforms into the Dark Angel of the show's
title, stripping off dress, hat and veil to reveal a tiny black number
and, more significantly, large areas of her voluptuous body.
From then on what she sells is sex, with deadly overtones, and she
does it extremely well. Miss O'Sullivan is far more than merely a singer
of slow ballads about death and rock songs about .... you guessed it
- death.
The raven-haired Irish performer comes from a sex-driven cabaret tradition
that requires her to seduce the audience as much as woo them with her
voice.
She mixes quiet ballads usually accompanied by her pianist and musical
director Fergal Murray with much livelier efforts pounded out by the
singer accompanied by the full five-piece band.
The highlights are a couple of Bowie hits from the Ziggy Stardust album
and a witty ditty, Kirsty McColl's In These Shoes about a bad
girl and her footwear - in this case red very spangly high-heeled numbers
that could seduce a saint.
Camille O'Sullivan might not have a perfect voice but the theatricality
of her show and the lady's personality ensure that the punters will
go home happy. Even better for her, CD sales are healthy and many visitors
will already be planning to see her again next year.
Philip Fisher
Two Loves
By John Martin Stevens
Dreamshed Theatre
The Space @ The Royal College of Surgeons
**
Two men and one woman in a triangular love story, with a bit of Shakespeare
thrown in to boot. Sadly when the actor tells us at the start 'the second
rule of drama is don't tell it, show it' and then precedes to present
the entire piece out front like a RP poetry reading, this piece seems
to have tripped itself up from the beginning.
Whilst all the characters profess to enjoying 'word games', this is
less 'banter' than self-indulgence. The characters create little sympathy
or warmth and therefore produce a disinterested, cold game of cat and
mouse, in which the audience have nothing to invest.
And what of the Shakespeare? When the Lady describes the Poet as liking
to 'show-off', it's a worrying description of why Shakespeare wrote
his sonnets, and indeed, perhaps of this play.
Sacha Voit
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