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Fringe 2010 Reviews (37)
Letters Home
Ribcaged Productions
C Main.
**
It's unusual to see someone make a play out of the Falkland conflict, mainly because it's such a forgotten war. In this instance, Ribcaged have used the real letters from a pair of brothers who fought in different branches of the forces. Terry, is a Royal Marine while Gary serves on hospital ships in the Royal Navy. Each brother writes to each other and also to their mother, each telling snippets of the war which as a whole give a broader picture of the entire conflict.
There is an intense physicality to the piece, which sees the brothers running, exercising, fighting and drinking in and around a large rotatable prop which serves as jeep, helicopter, room, ship and wall at various points. It would even have worked as a projector screen had some technical error not stopped the picture from playing. The use of constant music was interesting as well, as period pop songs are pumped out as background. Unfortunately many of these were so loud they drowned out the lines of the actors.
The end result is a slow piece which is quite interesting but focuses too much on unnecessary prop and technical work when quite often the words would have spoken for themselves far better alone.
Graeme Strachan
The Degenerates
Ribcaged Productions
C Main.
*
It's not often that I'm warned by staff going into a show that there will be sexually explicit content. Considering the name of the show, I began to imagine that I was about to walk into some sort of Baise Moi style piece of skin-play that would assault my very sensibilities, or at the very least, my stomach. In the end they needn't have bothered, and in fact the 'explicit sex' consisted of an unexpected and very brief simulation of cunnilingus and a massively unconvincing under-the-sheets bit of bouncing about towards the end. In fact it was far more convincing and shocking when Sian Hill vomited as she entered the stage.
Bodily functions aside, there is actually a decent idea behind this play striving to get out from the slowly plodding conversations and the deliberately cryptic and unrealistic conversations. It's one thing to try and cleverly reveal an important idea piecemeal but quite another to make characters talk in a blatantly opaque manner to the point of ridiculousness. Having the two leads come into this laboratory bedroom with the express intention of having sex for reasons unexplained took all of 5 minutes to work out, as did the 'twist' ending. The best that can be said is that the actors were decent and tried hard and were brave enough to strip down to their underwear; beyond that, I'm at a loss as to any reason why anyone would want to see it.
Graeme Strachan
Mussolini: A One Man Political Farce
By Ross Gurney-Randall
Hill Street Theatre.
**
One man biographical shows are two a penny at the Fringe. Which means that often there’s a lot of chaff to sort through. Take, as a case in point, Ross Gurney-Randall’s take on Mussolini. Now there’s nothing particularly wrong with the show; Gurney-Randall is both charismatic and loathsome in his depiction of ‘Il Duce’, turning sympathies out towards Mussolini in early scenes of him failing utterly as a teacher and revolting the audience with his murderous hypocrisies.
The problem instead lies with the fact that it simply isn’t a particularly interesting story. Following fragments of his rise to power never draws the audience in as it would with, say, Adolf Hitler or Chairman Mao and the end result is you aren’t invested enough in him as a human being to really care about his downfall, neither are you offended enough to want to see him come to harm.
As a result the show drags on, and a continued return to a muddled portrayal of his final escape attempts from partisans feels more like a needlessly confusing and drawn out coda rather than the meat of the present moment.
Graeme Strachan
Bunny
By Jack Thorne
Nabokov and Escalator East to Edinburgh with Watford Palace Theatre and Mercury Theatre Colchester
Underbelly.
****
Bunny represents the perfect conjunction of forces. Jack Thorne writes excellent monologues, Nabokov have for long been at their best with this dramatic form and Rosie Wyatt gives a good performance as 18-year-old Katie.
The perky youngster is just completing her A Levels in Luton with the prospect of a degree course in Essex to follow. She may be no genius but is middle class and bright enough.
On the day that we meet her, Katie is picked up by her black boyfriend Abe, a man six years her senior and working in the offices at the Vauxhall car factory.
An incident packed day is set off by an ice cream and ends up in a car chase leading to the working class home of an Asian lad on the notorious Marsh Farm Estate.
Along the way, Katie and her creator disperse vast amounts of information about what winds up and excites youth today in a convincing monologue that balances serious issues such as racial stereotyping and unbridled violence with a great deal of humour.
As a bonus, Ian William Galloway has created a really special video design that recreates the streets of Luton in a kind of pen and ink style that is surprisingly effective.
Philip Fisher
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