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Fringe 2010 Reviews (38)
Jacobite Country
By Henry Adam
Udderbelly Cowbarn.
*
This eccentric comedy might owe a great deal to Samuel Beckett in its impenetrability but seems keener to emulate some popular movies.
Its two central characters, Haggis McSporran (Sarah Howarth) and Craitur Face (Fiona Morrison) appear to regard themselves a Scottish reincarnation of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The setting, a mental hospital where it isn’t always easy to tell the staff from the patients, is pure One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with the silent, bagpipe playing Uncle Angus (Annie Grace) very much like the Indian.
The characters say vast amounts of nothing at great speed, clearly attached to their Northern Scottish homeland. However, without Beckett’s poetry and sensibilities, the struggle for meaning is likely to defeat a fair proportion of any audience.
Philip Fisher
Pedestrian
By Tom Wainwright
Underbelly.
****
Tom Wainwright takes us on a surreal 70 minute journey through contemporary life in the company of a goldfish named 125 but also two different sets of filmed images, one for him and one for 125.
Wainwright is talented both as a writer and performer and benefits from the guidance of director Amelia Sears, who keeps him on the straight and narrow.
Much of what a man named Tom discusses with an unknown interlocutor could be mundane without his creator’s generous dose of wit.
Pedestrian might otherwise have been as tedious as the experience of trying to get past the chuggers (charity muggers) who plague city dwellers trying to guilt them into making donations to charity (presumably to pay the chugger’s salary) and are excellently satirised by this representative victim. Instead, it is as lively as the clubbing soundtrack and exciting graphics that illuminate the story.
The point of the play is to investigate common happenings. For example, we share the disaster of approaching a woman outside a defunct branch of Woolworth’s and enjoy the categorisation of lunchers, whether at their desk or chosen sandwich emporium, which will undoubtedly be met with nods of recognition.
However, there are also more unusual elements which suggest that this might be a dream. Since when did well-dressed giant goldfish drink soya latte?
Not everything that Tom Wainwright tries works but enough does to showcase an unusual talent to fine effect.
Philip Fisher
An Evening With Elsie Parsons
By Richard Cameron
White Crow Theatre
The Dome on George St.
***
This plush hotel at the nice end of town plays host to a quirky and original, if a little tonally uncertain, new play by Richard Cameron. Sat on two long rows of gilt chairs in one of the venue’s posh chandelier-laden function rooms, we become the direct audience for two cheerful spirit mediums, Laura Barnes (Lorraine Chase) and Neville Bayliss (Mike Burns), who explain to us, in an earnest but cosy and affectionate manner, about the existence of the spirit world. They take an object from the audience and seem to perform a sort of psychic trick, with the aid of a spirit guide apparently.
The show then floats from one small segment to another; a mix of the two performers speaking to us in the present, and delving back into their own pasts, as well as recapping the chequered histories of some of their spirit guides. Lorraine Chase is in particularly good form when she becomes “Florrie”, one of Laura’s regular spirit sidekicks, a spunky lower-class Victorian girl who was made pregnant by a lord. The small section of the show devoted to her story is actually quite moving, as Florrie tracks down her unborn child’s father, turns up at his stately home and is summarily turned out by him.
Neville’s spirit guides aren’t quite so convincing; he claims Ivor Novello as one of his regular acquaintances in the beyond, as well as a child called Tonto who he says embodies the joyfully mischievous spirit of humanity. Things turn interesting when another of Laura’s spirits makes herself manifest – this is Elsie Parsons, a fearsomely intelligent, no-nonsense woman who does her best to deflate all Neville’s pretensions. She suggests that the medium act is more like split personality disorder than genuine supernatural ability, and that she herself is simply a hidden facet of Laura’s personality, which Laura created to deal with the trauma of what she went through as a child. When Laura’s haunted by children it’s really the ghost of her own younger self that’s stalking her.
And the same might be said of Neville with his “conversations” with the child Tonto – is this child really as carefree as Neville would believe; and isn’t Ivor Novello simply a manifestation of Neville’s desire to be somewhat suaver and more successful? But after Elsie has said her piece, the play just moves on to exposing what Laura suffered as a child, and providing her with the emotional resolution she needs. This seems to be achieved through genuinely communing with the spirits, but is that just what Laura would prefer to believe? Maybe it’s up to us to decide.
The problem I think is that we’re offered a rational explanation, and it’s quite an appealing one. But that somewhat defuses the enjoyably creepy, loaded atmosphere that the play has created up to that point, through its gentle exploration of the possibility of a spiritual realm existing. Cameron throws in some interesting speculations: about poltergeists being built-up reserves of emotion, specifically anger, and especially anger brought about by blocked love; about emotions residing in materials and particularly buildings; and the idea that objects might hold sounds and therefore meaning in their very grooves and texture, in the way that the legendary Biblical pots supposedly recorded the words of Jesus in their grooves as the potters listened to him. But we’re not sure what to do with all these suggestive ideas, when the reliability of the two mediums, and thus of everything they’ve been saying, is ultimately undermined.
Towards the end Neville argues that “It only takes the discovery of one white crow, to prove that not all crows are black”; i.e. if even only one medium is genuine, then they can’t all be assumed to be frauds. It’s a fair point – that cynicism can be dogmatic too. But the main thrust turns out to simply be Laura’s emotional journey, rather than the play resolving any of the metaphysical issues it’s brought up around what may and may not be true.
It’s a pretty unforgiving space, a long thin room which opens out into larger, darkened spaces at either end – more like a corridor than a contained playing space. This may be the intention, and it’s certainly lit quite starkly, as though to feel deliberately uncomfortable. But in that case I wish the play had been a bit more site-specific, and explored more the implications of this in-between place, an anonymous function room in a hotel. Mediums touring their shows around the country must exist in such places for most of the time; as well as it of course representing the metaphorical twilight worlds they apparently inhabit. This could have been brought out a bit more. The play is simply not quite sure whether it’s a comedy, a drama, or a meditative philosophical piece. Saying all that though, it’s engaging, very well performed, and certainly rich with themes.
Corinne Salisbury
Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You
Molly Naylor / Escalator East to Edinburgh / Apples & Snakes
The Zoo.
***
This fine spoken word show is accompanied by a programme which is a sort of lo-fi graphic novel, a brightly coloured cartoon strip illustrating the events of a segment of the show itself. The story is of Molly Naylor just wandering through Hackney one night, going to a grimy party, watching the sun rise. Not a blockbuster plotline, you might think, but what’s great about this show is how it takes the most mundane events and makes them the focus, and makes the beauty and strangeness of life show through them. It’s what all good poetry does. Naylor does especially well in crystallising the feel of the city, all its dirt and sprawl, and the experiences of the young and lost in it.
A young Molly flees from her native Cornwall to the big city, desperate for adventure. She falls into working as a barmaid at a pub with an eclectic international staff, all of whom have far more of a need to keep their jobs than she does. She’s trying to find herself in her new surroundings; and then the 7/7 bombings hit. Naylor nicely sidesteps melodrama or hand-wringing by simply describing what unfolded in her carriage after the explosion sounded and the train jerked to a stop: her fellow passengers stopped being strangers, they swapped stories, they shared one person’s floor-length scarf to breathe through and avoid being choked with dust. Eventually they face the long walk through the pitch-black tunnel, back to civilisation. Naylor describes the feeling of terror that accompanied her wherever she went in London after the attack, how she could not, like other Londoners, claim to be defiantly “not afraid”. And so she got out of the city, in an attempt to re-start her life; and, eventually, went back home to find that everything looked different, she was looking through a longer lens.
The show offers moving, Daniel Kitson-esque glimpses of life, both in Naylor’s words and in the segments of music and projected animation that break up the story; images of the cityscape by night, as though done by a child: touchingly simplified. In the end it’s not nearly as much about the bombings as it is about the recovery, and the endless onward movement of the city, propelling its inhabitants forward whether they like it or not. Naylor has great, natural rhythm to her delivery, and turns a good phrase; she makes all the small things in life matter, and that’s an achievement, and lovely to watch.
Corinne Salisbury
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