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Fringe 2010 Reviews (24)
Lorca Is Dead
By Dominic J Allen
Belt Up
C Soco.
****
Of the eight shows that Belt Up are presenting this year in The House Above, their dedicated space within the crumbling, fire-damaged C Soco building, Lorca Is Dead is perhaps one of the more fully developed.
Written by Dominic J Allen, it had a thorough devising process and was on at York Theatre Royal in May. It’s a wonderful, manic, consummately theatrical piece. As with all the shows in The House Above, we begin to interact with the actors from the first moment – in this case, asked to produce an animal noise before we’re allowed through into the main performance space. Once in the space, we position ourselves around the edges of a small curtained-off area, on various mismatched squashy chairs and cushions.
The stage is the floor space in the middle, that the audience has left clear. And suddenly we’re in 1920s Paris. The story is of the famous Paris surrealists – André Breton, Paul Eluard, René Magritte, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali – coming together at a time when the movement was fracturing and numerous personal rivalries and clashing egos were getting in the way, to re-enact the death of Lorca. Only that happened in 1936. So we’re straddling a couple of different time periods; the time travel made possible by Antonin Artaud’s time-travel machine, which looks suspiciously like a piano.
The show could only work with the actors consciously acknowledging the wilful absurdity of it all, which they do with relish. It’s always good to see a show which interacts so playfully with its audience; but what’s more, this self-conscious style of performance chimes perfectly with the play’s exploration of the principles of Surrealism, with all its provocative, deliberately clumsy, genre-busting, audience-baiting artistic efforts.
To begin with there is much intellectual mucking-about – Magritte wearing a bowler hat and quizzically holding a green apple to his face; a re-enactment of (or flashback to, depending if you buy the time-travel conceit) a barmy anti-capitalist theatre performance at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during the early days of Dadaism. Then Breton suggests a play, telling the story of the life and death of Federico Garcia Lorca – to celebrate Lorca, yes, but also to use a play to catch the conscience of Dali, whom they feel has betrayed the movement.
Dali arrives, flourishing his wife Gala (whom he stole from Eluard). They dive into the play, which sees each of the actors taking brief turns to play Lorca, with a red scarf passed from one to another as each assumes the role. The story takes in his early days at university, his homosexual infatuation with Dali, his self-imposed exile in New York, and finally his time touring the Spanish countryside with a radical communist theatre troupe.
As the tale is played out, various audience members are enlisted to play certain roles, with their lines fed to them by an actor whispering in their ear. It’s remarkable how quickly we grow comfortable with the prospect of playing our own role in the performance: it’s testament to the anything-goes, freely collaborative atmosphere that the company are able to create. The show is very interesting, very engaged with the historical period, and the script shows such a depth of research, presented in a wonderfully easy, nonchalant way. Clever throwaway lines abound: the slight disdain of the intellectuals for the communists in the group; the word “bourgeois” constantly thrown around as the ultimate condemnation; the bizarre segment which sees the horrified group watch a screening of TV adverts which Dali has apparently made, lending his inimitable Surrealist style to commercial campaigns. (Dali did make a couple of TV ads in the 60s in fact.) Most of all though, the play manages to transcend its own intellectual playfulness.
The “play” the group perform, which was originally motivated by personal animosities, gradually becomes a thing in its own right, as the story of the death of Lorca takes over and puts everything else in the shade. Eventually, all larking-about finished with and all petty jealousies between the artists forgotten, they simply apply themselves to imagining the events of the night that no one knows the facts of – the night Lorca was taken by the fascist authorities and, it is believed, shot by firing squad. Perhaps he saw dark men coming towards his house on the Granada plain… After all the absurd, light-hearted shenanigans that have preceded it, this moment is finally allowed time to breathe; this story is allowed to be real, you might say.
It’s brilliantly entertaining and endlessly thought-provoking – a real achievement.
Corinne Salisbury
The Track of the Cat
Adapted by Chris Fittock from the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
Bearplate
C.
**(*)
This stage adaptation by Chris Fittock of the 1949 American novel of the same name by Walter Van Tilburg Clark doesn’t quite live up to expectations.
The story is of man’s confrontation with cruel nature, the clash between old mythologies and the modern world, and the decay of the American Dream. It follows the fortunes of the Bridges family, who are gradually being drowned by resentment and disenchantment on their remote Nevada farm, and are now being apparently terrorised by a mysterious huge black cat that is stalking their land. It takes us a while to piece together the setting and the story, because the entire cast consists of young white Scottish actresses, all wearing a different but equally smart knee-length black dress, and all with their hair down. There’s nothing at all in their appearances to distinguish the different characters in the tale, and almost all the cast speak in their natural accents, and show no distinctive characterisation. This means that we get no strong sense at all of each of the characters – Ma and Pa Bridges, their children Curt, Harold, Arthur and Grace, Harold’s fiancee Gwen, and the family’s Native American retainer Joe Sam. The staging is also awkward, with cast members not involved in each scene sat on a bench at the back of the stage; only from the bench they also occasionally speak up and take part in the scene. So once we’ve worked out who’s who, it’s still quite difficult to work out who is present in each scene and who is not.
This is a real shame as the story is still quite a compelling one. The beast stalking the land is almost mythical – rarely seen directly but leaving tracks and traces everywhere. Not all the family are sure it exists. But some sort of animal – at least that’s what they have to assume – has killed youngest son Art. So Curt, the alpha male of the younger generation, is goaded by Gwen (making the most of her power as a stranger in the house and a female stranger at that) into vowing to stalk and kill the cat. We follow Curt out into the wilderness to be confronted by his demons and his brother’s ghost. (One good touch of the production’s is to have an accordionist on stage, to provide swells of sound at key moments to represent the unknowable, threatening natural world.) We also follow the bitter developments at the homestead, where Pa Bridges is simultaneously attracted to and resentful of Gwen, the self-confident “new woman” who gives as good as she gets – until it comes to a head and he attacks her.
There’s a lot, too, about the dream-crushing nature of life on an outcrop like this; and a lot of racist taunting of Joe Sam. In the end, of course, Joe Sam proves to have a sort of mystical or talismanic power: it’s he that intervenes silently at the crucial moments, and proves to know far more than he says. It’s interesting that the actress playing him is the only one to put on an accent when she speaks – it makes the character stand out, yes, but it’s inconsistent with director Graeme Maley’s other decisions.
Nonetheless the cast all deliver the dialogue well. And the script captures a lot of the powerful lyricism of the book – particularly in Grace’s speech: not having married and had children, she’s assumed to be not quite right and a little wild, and finally she uses this to her advantage to speak the truth to her corrupt family. Her brother Art, she says, “always made little jokes that told the truth”, and they need that honesty like they need oxygen. I would have loved to have been told this story in a completely different way – to have been convincingly transported to the world of this family.
Corinne Salisbury
Our Share of Tomorrow
By Dan Sherer
Real Circumstance with York Theatre Royal
Pleasance Courtyard.
****
Before a beautiful, simple set design by James Cotterill, this touching story of drifting, getting lost and getting found unfolds. Cleo (Tamsin Joanna Kennard) is a teenager whose mum has recently died of cancer. With no one else to turn to, she’s befriended an older man, John (Toby Sawyer), who treats her with nervous, fatherly care. With John’s help she’s determined to track down the man she believes to be her father – who had an affair with her mother when they were both in their late teens. This turns out to be Tom (Jot Davies), a shy, reserved fisherman still living in the town he grew up in. So Cleo stumbles into his life, an awkward, difficult, needful teenager, and we follow the two of them start to get to know each other.
Dan Sherer’s script invests such time in the characters, that we are completely involved in all of their journeys. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t the most original story in the world; it’s beautifully written, complex and humane. We learn something of John’s story too – he’s an ex-soldier with a difficult past, haunted by his complicity in an act of sexual violation performed by a fellow soldier in Saudi Arabia 20 years ago. His regrets over his strained relationship with his own teenage daughter go some way to explaining his eagerness to help Cleo, and she picks up on this. He is excessively protective of her, his instinct for violence flaring instantly up when he sees her with Tom for the first time. There’s a sense that both men are simply in need of a woman to protect, or perhaps to save – as a sort of atonement. Tom for his part may be simply trying to make up for the opportunity he lost when he let Cleo’s mother Grace leave after their brief affair. Cleo listens to Tom eulogise her mother – the teenage Grace that she never knew – as Tom’s long-suppressed memories of their time together start to come back. There’s a great reenactment of a Monty Python sketch, which flies amusingly over the teenage Cleo’s head.
All three cast members are good; Kennard is particularly superb at capturing Cleo’s twitchy, self-conscious manner and stubborn defiance. And the production gives us a constant sense of the ocean beside which the events of the play take place: with all its symbolism as a place where old sins can be washed away, or as a means of escape. Sherer also makes symbolic significance of Cleo’s Irishness: she sings a song from an old folk poem, “I Am Stretched On Your Grave”, and so draws on centuries’ worth of emotion to express what she cannot with her own words. And the ending is both uplifting and quite terribly sad. A welcome, unshowy production of a play of solid quality.
Corinne Salisbury
The Second Star to the Right
Belt Up
C Soco.
**(*)
One of the shorter shows in the Belt Up programme is a strange, poetic riff on Peter Pan. Again it is intended to be an immersive experience, and so we are led into the space by wide-eyed young women, their faces painted white, whispering to us to be careful and to look out for Peter. In this curtained-off area, deckchairs and cushions line one side of the space; the rest is the playing area, with a bed on one side and a towering, twisted tree-like structure on the other. The whole space is shrouded in mist, lit in dull hues of blue and green, giving a thoroughly otherworldly feel to the proceedings.
There’s a bit of a thing for reinventing Peter Pan at the moment, with David Greig’s superb recent version for the National Theatre of Scotland, which made Peter’s arrogance and emotional underdevelopment a central theme. This new piece by Paper’s Weight, a young all-female company comprised of Belt Up members, is along similar lines, but conjures a far more wistful tone. It imagines the story from the perspective of the Lost Boys, motherless, bereft; in a way, forced by Peter to grow up too quickly, to fight pirates and never think about the past. But Slightly does think about the past, and recalls to Wendy his memories of the comfort of his mother’s presence when he was a babe. Wendy has mixed feelings about her transportation to Neverland, which in this version is more like a strange netherworld, magical but also disorientating and unknowable. “Neverland feeds on stories”, she is told, “look the trees are leaning closer”.
It’s as though the stories the children tell become their only reality. So when they are recalling the past, or speaking of an alternative present back in the real world, the Lost Boys must whisper conspiratorially behind Peter’s back. Peter appears only once, as a stern, commanding figure half in shadow. There are a few Midsummer Night’s Dream references – in this version, Wendy has been transported to Neverland by the juice of a charmed purple flower. So there’s an interesting suggestion of enforced enchantment, and Wendy must decide whether she will let herself be caught up in this world of eternal childhood, or return to reality. But to return to the real world carries the threat that she’ll be going back to boredom and loneliness. And lacing the whole play is an unnamed desire for escape, even for oblivion – of course they must quote the most famous line, “To die would be an awfully big adventure.”
It’s sophisticated in its ideas, but the piece is made up of a series of fragments – glimpses and flashes of emotion, which don’t quite hang together cohesively. The acting by the three-strong cast, who constantly flip roles, and the atmosphere conjured by the space itself, the smoke, the low lighting and the hummed singing which is the constant undercurrent to the action, are the best things about the production.
Corinne Salisbury
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