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Fringe 2009 Reviews (97)
What Women Want
Citadel Arts Group / Workers' Educational Association
Directed by Liz Hare
Diverse Attractions
***
It's been almost a hundred years since the Edinburgh Suffragette march
of 1909 where legions of women demanding equality and voting rights
paraded down Princes Street, led gallantly by FionaDrummond, also known
as 'The General'. What Women Want led the audience through events
surrounding this event, fleshing out the struggle by showing snippets
of life from many well known figures of the time, illustrating the setbacks,
triumphs and hardships seen by those participating as well as, albeit
briefly, alluding to the feelings of the men and women who stood against
them.
The acting was well accomplished as the cast members acted their way
through a plethora of mostly real characters, with lightning-fast costume,
accent and dialect changes which were as suddenly and easily affected
as if they were their own. It's a pity about the technical malfunction
that led the slightly unnecessary projector display to fail repeatedly
and distract the audience with incorrect changes and blue-screens but
it's a testament to the play that the story being told held the attention
without such visual footnotes.
The only hampering points of the production were the slightly fragmentary
nature of the tale and the many parts played so that h it often became
slightly unclear who characters were until halfway through a scene.
There was also a sense that the play was preaching to the choir, with
no real sense of discussion of the reasons behind the Government's stand
against equality, at least not unaccompanied by sheets of booing. There
was also the bitter pill, regardless of the historical accuracy, of
the suffragette support for the First World War, which due to the nature
of the play's direction was looked at fairly uncritically, standing
out as a curiously bizarre mindset considering the fairly modernist
politicking of the rest of the play.
Graeme Strachan
Normal
Left Field Theatre Group
Directed by Bex Kane
The Space @ Surgeons Hall
****
Left Field Theatre group bring to the Fringe a production of Anthony
Nielson's 1991 play Normal. The play is based around a fictionalised
series of meetings between Peter Kurten, known variously as "The
Vampire of Düsseldorf" or "The Düsseldorf Ripper",
and his lawyer Justus Wehner.
The charismatic charms of the mass-murderer are used to corrupt and
confuse the naive young lawyer as he attempts to work out how he can
possibly save Kurten from the guillotine. Of course, the point of the
play is not a race to see if he can, as anyone with any knowledge of
serial killers will be able to tell you, Kurten went quite willingly
to his death after pleading guilty. Instead this is more an exploration
into the nature of evil and the societal abberrations that exist within
mankind.
The action is played out through a series of overlapping narrative
moments as the scenes segue from meetings between Charlie Hamblett's
Wehner and James Parris' Kurten, to Wehner's later meetings with Kurten's
wife, played by a hauntingly edged Leila Mimmack. These latter scenes
show the budding affair that grows between the lawyer and the wife,
mainly as a result of the perverted instigations of the Ripper himself,
toying with the world from inside a cage. The entire play is also backed
by a shadow-play screen behind the actors which creates an exaggerated
motif for several scenes, underpinning the twisted mental state of Kurten,
and later Wehner.
It's an interestingly conceived production and the actors manage to
bring depth of realism to the parts despite the lack of staging and
props. The play still unfortunately suffers from the fact that it begins
very slowly and radically alters with the introduction of Frau Kurten
as a full character halfway through. Despite this, there is some brilliant
work on display here: Parris especially shines through as the friendly
fiend doing his utmost to slyly corrupt the lawyer for motives as impenetrable
as they are vital. Equally Mimmack and Hamblett do what they can with
far less complex characters, and achieve a sense of heightened reality
that keeps the skewed manic psychopathy of the play from ever reaching
the point of ridiculousness whilst remaining slightly ethereal.
Graeme Strachan
Doctor Whom - My Search for
Samuel Johnson
By David Benson
Assembly Rooms
***
David Benson may be no James Boswell but he has something in common
with the Scottish writer of 200 years ago. The pair have an abiding
affection, bordering on passion, for the life and works of Samuel Johnson.
Benson seemed to be winging it in this new homage to the great man
of Lichfield, but such is his knowledge of the subject that this hardly
mattered.
In the last dozen years since the affair started, Benson has read vast
amounts by and about the creator of the first ever Dictionary of the
English language and happily shares his knowledge with a good-sized
audience for 70 minutes.
In that time, we learn not only of some favourite dictionary definitions
and epigrams but also the toll that this great work took on the genius
who managed in nine years what had taken 40 men 40 years for the French
equivalent.
The biography is fascinating, even to those who have read Boswell's
Life, and the performer helps us by becoming his subject.
This show succeeds thanks to the quirkiness of its subject (and one
suspects its presenter) and will provide pleasure to anyone with a love
of Doctor Johnson or words more generally. It should also achieve David
Benson's real goal by persuading his guests to leave the show and head
straight for a bookshop to pick up a copy of Boswell, the Dictionary
or perhaps Rasselas and become Johnson addicts themselves.
Philip Fisher
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