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Fringe 2010 Reviews (13)
Deepchurch Hollow
Slippery Rock Theatre
The Space @ Venue 45.
**
There’s a bit of a thing for scary theatre just now, what with Ghost Stories terrifying punters in the West End every night. It’s one of those genres where innovation doesn’t really pay off – the traditional techniques that have always been used to make us leap off our seats grow no less effective with time, and even when our rational minds can see the shocks coming we still can’t fully insulate ourselves against them.
This show by American company Slippery Rock takes full advantage of that fact; the script is unsubtle, the production values basic and the acting fairly ropey, but still, we’re in a dark room in Edinburgh being told ghost stories, and so inevitably some of the stage effects are going to hit home.
Alice Deepchurch is a teenage girl who has been in a mental hospital for the last few years; she’s been disturbed ever since she was a child, when her older sister locked her in the secret room in the depths of their old Gettysburg house, and she had a terrifying ghostly experience. Both their parents are dead now, and Alice’s grown-up sister just wants her to be in the hospital being treated – and out of her hair so that she can shake off the constant sense of guilt at having caused Alice’s mental illness. But is Alice really ill, or is she psychic? Her therapist thinks she’s been telling the truth about the ghosts, so breaks her out of the hospital to return her to the haunted room for one night, to uncover the truth of the place.
Cue lots of strange creaking noises, ghostly voices caught on tape recorders, and us being plunged into darkness and characters then waving torches around shakily while apparitions loom behind them. Like I said, it’s traditional but effective. The ghost story, when it finally comes out, is a pretty over-the-top Gothic concoction featuring tortured soldiers and a vengeful wronged woman during the Civil War. All the boxes are ticked, even down to the obligatory mention of an ancient Indian burial ground.
While the play delivers the scares effectively, it tries too hard to deliver constant tension in all of the character interactions – Alice’s therapist and the hospital’s chief psychiatrist argue about the best way to treat her; Alice’s therapist and her sister argue about whether she’s abandoned her. Most of the characters seem to be on a default setting of prickly sarcasm; all their back-and-forth is not actually engaging to watch, but rather frustrating as it just gets in the way of the story that we’re wanting to hear. But the two young Civil War reenactment nuts, with their dopey Bill-and-Ted-style double act, are good fun.
Corinne Salisbury
The Changeling
UAL Drama Society
Underbelly.
***
This new devised piece is not, as you might assume, a version of Middleton and Rowley‘s Jacobean play of the same name. Rather it’s an adaptation of a short story by Rana Dasgupta from his book of short stories Tokyo Cancelled – a “collection of folktales for the age of globalisation”. This goes a long way to explain the otherworldly tone of the piece.
It’s London in 2020, and there are changelings in the world among us: immortal beings who take temporary human form for the space of one lifetime. Like some masonic sects, they tend to help each other out while on Earth and often achieve uncanny success. But if they die while in human form, that’s it – no more immortality.
Bernard is a changeling – he lives a normal human life, flies high as a city banker, but his secret identity makes him terrified of illness or injury. He gets married and eventually feels he must reveal his true identity to his wife, who promptly throws him out. So we follow him as he walks the streets of the city, searching for meaning or redemption in his human life.
He meets a man who’s seriously ill with nowhere to go, and in an act of random kindness, puts him up in a hotel and stays with him there. Here the folkloric elements of the tale kick in: the sick man, Fred, explains that his illness takes the form of a plant that is growing inside him and gradually choking his insides. And what if it were possible to find a word, one that no one has heard of yet, that would make sense of life and death, and love, and would bring past present and future together. Bernard, longing for a purpose, sets out into the world to find the word for his friend.
It’s a little hard to reconcile the strange, ethereal turns that the story takes, with the realistic contemporary setting – I feel it may work better on the page than on stage. The production doesn’t make it sufficiently clear from the beginning that this is an elemental story we’re watching, and so not quite set in our reality but in a sort of parallel, simplified world.
However the other side of the story – what is happening in London in the near future – is pretty compelling. A malignant strand of smallpox has broken out, London is being quarantined and divided into guarded districts, with travel between them forbidden; and mob hysteria is taking hold, people suspected of having contracted the disease are being burned while they sleep. Through this disintegrating world wanders Bernard, searching for the word.
After a number of encounters, he finally has a conversation with a man who, in entrepreneurial spirit, is pushing a coffee cart through the near-deserted streets the morning after a riot. They chat about all sorts; the meaning of life and so on. And it’s this simple human connection that persuades Bernard he’d rather live a human life, appreciating each individual moment, than be condemned to changeling immortality. It’s a touching scene, but unfortunately the play then proceeds to labour the same point, in an overly poetic ending which stretches the metaphor of Fred’s plant-illness – organic connections binding people together – as far as it can possibly go.
Lots of clever design touches help to create a world in a small space, and good projection work gives us a strong sense of the alien city. There’s also good work from the on-stage musicians, Bryn White and Zoë Klinck, who provide percussion, guitar and low tuneful singing to accompany much of the action. They also mess around a lot, tinker about with their instruments, interact with the actors, and sometimes silently join in the scenes (crane to the side to watch TV with Bernard, etcetera). This all goes completely unremarked upon, which is nice. Perhaps they’re an ever-present reminder of the world of easy human interaction of which Bernard longs to be a part. And in a good cast, Thomas Bennet particularly stands out, playing the narrator and the coffee cart owner among others.
Corinne Salisbury
The Cardboard Metropolis
By Hannah Tottenham
Freshblood Theatre
C aquila.
**
It’s another dystopian future world. After a while I long for a utopia, if only for a change. But no – writer/director Hannah Tottenham imagine an unspecified time in the future, or perhaps an alternative present, where drought has taken hold, and a shady company called Corporation Incorporated now provide all purchasable goods. Their only aim is to convert every individual into a consumer, and they have an almost religious fervour for the task. Then they find Troy – a boy who seems to live on the street, cutting and pasting magazine advertisements into a sort of collage of perfection he has created on a canvas of old cardboard. He speaks in nothing but garbled advertising jingles, and seems fully subscribed to the idea that advertisements sell happiness. But he doesn’t buy anything; for him, creating his collage is an end in itself. So along come Jim and Vanessa, advertising executives from the Corporation, to try and persuade him, with a mixture of sugary-sweet words and slimy bargaining, to become a consumer.
So the play sets up a potentially interesting idea, and then takes it nowhere. Troy doesn’t develop as a character, so the story merely follows Jim and Vanessa’s increasingly desperate attempts to convert him. They never have any sort of epiphany moment, they merely continue to toe the party line. So the main message, of the corroding nature of consumerism, is established within the first few minutes, after which there’s nothing much more for us to gain from the play.
There’s also a strange street-sweeper-cum-philosopher character, Mr Z, who wanders around Troy trying to protect his soul, I suppose, and dispensing abstract wisdoms on crumpled bits of paper. Vanessa constantly intercepts the bits of paper he tries to give to Troy – as in, wisdom, or a different perspective, are dangerous things. And there’s a nice gag where Mr Z tries to explain the concept of Schrödinger’s Cat, only to come up against Troy’s incomprehension – “I know a Felix cat and an Iams cat but not a Schrödinger’s cat…”
Tottenham sustains the conceit of Troy’s garbled language throughout the piece, which produces a couple of gems: “I’d rather have a bowl of ‘not talk to you’ if that’s all right“; “we should bury the hatchet”, says Jim: “What hatchet?”, says Troy. “Is that your product? If you can bury it, you should advertise that as a feature”. He doesn’t understand metaphor or abstract concepts; he automatically relates everything to what can be physically bought and consumed. But it does all beg the question of where he comes from; where are his parents; does he actually live on the streets, and if so how has he seen so many televised adverts? The play’s not prepared to go into specifics, and this is a shame, because there was a compelling story in here somewhere.
Corinne Salisbury
Just Macbeth
By Andy Griffiths
Bell Shakespeare
Assembly Rooms.
***
This must be the first time that anyone has suggested that the Scottish King is just.
Fresh from the Sydney Opera House no less, the inventive Bell Shakespeare Company bring their own fresh approach to the play that cannot be named, at the same time making it accessible and enjoyable for children of all ages.
As such, this might prove a perfect introduction to the Bard for any but the very smallest.
The play is framed by a mini drama of Australian schoolkids. Andy is a bit of a wimp, Lisa bossy and Danny, to be frank a little dim. You can guess for yourselves which of them is magicked into the parts of Macbeth, his wife and Banquo.
The company mix the two stories cleverly so that at no point do we lose the sense that these are children but at the same time, Shakespeare’s drama and poetry are never far away.
There are witches and swordfights, lashings of blood and the world’s whole supply of tacky tartan clothing. However, there are also shadow people and animals, marshmallows and cod heroics.
Led by Patrick Brammall and Pippa Grandison, the cast work their socks off to keep even the smallest of visitors entranced and with a little help from the man from Stratford, succeed nobly.
Philip Fisher
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