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Fringe 2010 Reviews (21)
Marat / Sade
By Peter Weiss
ETB Productions
The Space Surgeons.
****
Peter Weiss’ Marat / Sade, or to give it the full title, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade isn’t easy theatre. Styled as a play within a play and featuring a cast made up of actors performing as a band of lunatics attempting to act, there is more than a little scope for the entire production to turn into something of a mummer’s farce. Luckily in the case of ETB Productions that hasn’t turned out to be the case. It merely relies on you having an understanding of 18th century French politics and the personalities involved.
From the depths of the asylum, the former Marquis de Sade and various other fellow inmates are putting on a production about the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, the pestilential politician during the french revolution. Under the watchful and often despairing eyes of the Asylum’s director Coulmier, we are presented with the play as is, breaking a 4th wall barrier.
Unusually, and quite effectively, the cast are all women save Sam Bright’s Coulmier, allowing him a further measure of separation from the events. Whilst he sits on one side of the stage alternating between fretting and struggling to retain his composure, Harriet Madeley’s de Sade mirrors him antithetically, with a sultry and delicious deviousness written all over her face throughout. Within these two bookends the lunatics act out the build up to Marat’s death at the hands of idealist Charlotte Corday. Each taking full advantage of their individual mental illness to either scream, fret, weep or in one case, fall asleep narcoleptically throughout. The players are resolutely exuberant in their roles, while the overall aesthetic, from Marat’s appearance based on the Jaques-Louis David painting to the contrasts between Coulmier’s finery and de Sade’s shabbily basic clothes, draws the audience into the depths of an darkly sadistic and enthralling world; where from the first bursts of hysterical laughter to the final derisory chuckling of the Marquis, you’ll be enticed, shocked and finally seduced completely.
Graeme Strachan
Anomienaulis
By Chris Chen
YAT-C
Augustine's.
***
Choosing to modernise and also to satirically bastardise Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, isn’t the worst idea in the world, and Chris Chen’s adaptation of the text into a curiously abstract and occasionally irreverent contemplation of duty and choice is a fair crack at the whip.
The basic story is unchanged as Agamemnon decides to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to make favourable winds for the voyage to Troy, but recants only to discover circumstances will make this all but impossible. The main difference between the original and this is the subversion of the usual conventions of Greek tragic characterisation. Achilles is cast as a childish spoiled psychotic with an unsettling taste for rape and murder, whereas Menelaus is somewhat uninterested in the entire affair and doesn’t really care about the war, repeatedly tossing a coin in an oblique homage to Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead. The trouble is that it becomes so bizarre and nonsensical at times that you begin to wonder if you’re watching something that Dario Fo might have written on a particularly irritable day.
The staging is intricate and nicely handled, with slow-motion fight scenes, dreamlike asides and moments of frenzied manic madness all tied into the meat of the dialogue. However the cast aren’t particularly naturalistic in their roles, which isn’t surprising considering some of the cumbersome and lengthy monologuing which stretches out interminably at times. It’s not to say it’s particularly bad, but when you find yourself looking at your watch more than once in one speech then the effectiveness has been lost somewhat. Despite this the overall effect builds cumulatively till the final moments where the tension truly does become tangibly strong, due in no small part to Holly Zolkower-Kutz’s portrayal of Iphigenia, standing apart from the madness, shocked and abhorrent at the fait d’accompli she is faced with. It’s only at those moments and her eventual moment of peripatetic acquiescence that the play really finds it’s gripping core.
Graeme Strachan
The Inconsiderate Aberrations of Billy the Kid
2headedpigeon Theatre Company
Bedlam Theatre.
***
Shock value should never be underestimated. Sometimes the sheer lunacy and horror brought on by seeing something unexpected and unbelievable can lead to more hilarity and enjoyment than you could ever predict. In this case, nothing can prepare you for the madcap hijinks that take place during Inconsiderate Aberrations. At the point where a guitar-playing aborted foetus turned up, this critic had long since given up worrying about common decency.
The deranged tale of a young boy who murders his mother in a fit of pique only to replace her with a pizza delivery girl before enlisting his complicit father, all the while his mother’s spirit is enlisting the help of lesbian feminist angels to seek revenge for her ‘patriarchal’ murder.
To call the production a little twisted would be an understatement, indeed this is a genuine case where the only terminology that can be correctly applied would be the old military acronym FUBAR. However the full musical accompaniment from a live punk band, is pleasantly original, even if the actual words were a little hard to make out. Most definitely a unique example of festival fare, if you can hold onto your dinner, then you could do a lot worse.
Graeme Strachan
Following Wendy
Jam Jar Productions
C Soco.
****
What if Peter Pan was a modern story? Would it have been some allegorical interpretation or a distinctly darker story than the original? Jam Jar productions have taken the concept and run with it in a uniquely stylistic and beautiful play, where the lines of reality and allegory blur into a strange and curious whole.
Wendy in this instance is a confident 17 year old girl whose best friend Sebastian wants to become more than simply friends; only to discover that her interests lie with a mysterious new boy called Peter. However the slightly trepidatious opening quickly falls from teen soap-opera to something altogether different when she is led away to Neverland and Sebastian finds himself under arrest and in the grasp of two police detectives being questioned on his involvement in what happened.
A mixture of physical theatre and skilful balletic movement helps to transform the concept of the play into a poetic and dreamlike symposium of grace and movement, combined with a pleasing contrast of the serious characterisation of Wendy and Sebastian against the phantasmal and childlike actions of Peter and Tinker Bell.
It’s an amazingly effective piece of theatre which will return to your mind in the days and hours after seeing it and will stay with you long after the final stage lights have twinkled out, taking a little piece of your heart with them forever.
Graeme Strachan
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