Links

Articles

News

Reviews

Amateur Theatre

Contact

Other Resources

Fringe 2010 Reviews (53)

Metamorphosis
By Franz Kafka
Belt Up
C Soco.
****

This is a revamped version of Belt Up’s production of Metamorphosis that played to acclaim at the National Student Drama Festival in 2008. It’s well adapted to the C Soco space: it’s possibly the most thoroughly immersive theatre experience of any of this year’s Belt Up shows. As we go in we’re plunged immediately into the swing of the birthday party that Gregor’s family is throwing for him. The company pass biscuits around, chat to us, pull us up to dance. And then, in a neat metatheatrical moment that recalls Filter’s Twelfth Night, Gregor comes home and he doesn’t feel like partying, so the revelry quickly breaks up.

Belt Up’s adaptation of Kafka’s classic tale of alienation cleverly makes the point that it’s not really, in the end, the transformation into a giant insect that is at the heart of Gregor’s loneliness. It precedes this event, as we see at the very start when he shuts himself away from his own family despite their best attempts to make him happy. The family’s problems were always there, just under the surface, what with Gregor’s father having gone bankrupt and Gregor now being the sole breadwinner, and feeling unthanked and taken for granted by the rest of the family. It’s the desperate quest for respectability that is really at the dark heart of the tale; so when Gregor has transformed, what the family worry most about is what happens if his employers find out and who will represent the family in the world of work now.

The company dramatise this absurdity beautifully. Gregor’s mother, father and sister Grete move from baffled disgust to frantic denial, eventually unable to bear to even acknowledge the presence in the house of the thing that used to be their son and brother. The staging is arranged so that again the audience are sat on odd cushions and chairs around the edges of the space (leaving the odd armchair free for the actors), while there is also a separate playing area at either end. One is the family’s dining room; the other represents Gregor’s bedroom. What it actually is though is a complicated rig of metal poles supporting a bed that’s tipped up at around a 60 degree angle facing us. This is where we watch Gregor’s transformation, as James Wilkes, playing him, climbs up and “lies” on the bed and writhes around. Then as the insect he has amazing physicality: he hangs upside down by his feet, he lifts himself effortlessly from ground to ceiling, he splays his legs out and grips with his feet the two poles that rise from either side of the foot of the bed. There are other good physical elements to the staging, such as when the story flashes back to Gregor’s time in the First World War: the entire company begins by charlestoning manically, and then is plunged into starker, dark blue lighting and their movements become slower, as though they’re underwater, and more nonsensical and repetitive. It evokes Gregor’s nightmares well, and also how he has had to suppress them for the sake of getting on with the business of life.

All the actors in the Belt Up ensemble are involved – meaning that those not playing the main family members share among them all the peripheral parts: Gregor’s boss, the lodgers, the cleaning lady. When they’re not doing that, they’re an anonymous chorus of invisible extras – there’s a gag near the beginning about Gregor’s “invisible friends” that he believed in as a child, with a nod and a wink to include us in that description too. The white-faced extras hang around the edges of the action, as though longing to be part of the story; they climb up and perch around the transformed Gregor, alone in his room, looking at him in silent sympathy. It sometimes has a whiff of being the only way that director Alexander Wright could think of to employ all of his large cast; but generally it works.

Three of the cast double particularly well as the vile lodgers that the family takes in to make ends meet: channelling Rik Mayall in The Young Ones, they scoff and flounce highly entertainingly. And the cast size certainly contributes to the immersive nature of the show – various actors are constantly taking up positions around the room, whispering confidentially to audience members about the action we’re watching. And the night-time scene when Gregor transforms is brilliantly done; we’re plunged into almost total darkness, audience members are asked to come and lie down to “sleep” in the middle of the stage, and actors crawl onto the cushions behind and among us to doze.

In an excellent company, Wilkes is particularly brilliant as Gregor; for the aforementioned physicality, but also for his understated pathos. He also makes great insecty noises, to give the sense of what his family hear when they try and communicate with him. It’s also Wilkes’s adaptation: it’s concise and faithful to the original story, and plays interestingly with a few novelistic elements – Gregor narrates his own story, and switches back and forth between the first and third person in referring to himself as though there are points at which he can only bear to tell the tale by distancing himself from it. This is a highly entertaining and moving piece of work, all its thought processes absolutely on song.

Corinne Salisbury

Oliver Twist
By Charles Dickens
Livewire Theatre Company
The Spaces @ Surgeons Hall.
****

An extraordinary company of youngsters tackle this new adaptation of Dickens’s classic with full-blooded commitment. Livewire Theatre Company have interestingly relocated Oliver Twist to war-torn Berlin in the chaotic, ruinous last few months of World War II. So Bill (Wilhelm) Sykes is a corrupt Nazi officer, Fagin is now Madame Fagin, a brothel mistress, and the traditional band of London pickpockets are now the collection of waifs and strays from the city, both male and female, that Fagin takes in. Some are simply orphaned and abandoned; many are Jewish children who escaped, one way or another from the Nazis’ clutches. And Oliver’s parents – as in the original, his mother gave birth to him in a convent and then died without revealing her identity – were May and Isaac Aaronovitch; she was English, he was a Jewish-German violinist. So it gives an unprecedented extra weight of poignancy to Dickens’s themes of vanished individuals and lost histories.

Fagin is as complicated a character as always: she cares for the children she takes in and has a keen understanding of their suffering. But at the same time she is brutally pragmatic and instils in her young female charges from the start that survival is the only aim they need have; and if prostitution is the way to survive, then so be it. It’s an often overlooked aspect of the original story that Nancy was one of these girls, recruited by Fagin at a young age and forced into prostitution. Livewire’s version makes this much more explicit and adds the twist that it was the war that destroyed Nancy’s life and forced her to this; she was a ballet dancer previously. She still has a heart – a distinct disadvantage in Madame Fagin’s eyes – and we watch her heartbroken compassion as she sees the girls younger than herself being groomed for the hideous profession. There’s a brilliantly jaded song sequence, once the Americans have finally taken Berlin, about how business will change little for the brothel – a soldier is a soldier after all, whatever the nationality.

Despite her essential good-heartedness, Nancy is lethargically resigned to the life she’s trapped in and it takes Bill’s final atrocity, the murder of a child, to shake her into defiant action. Again the play returns to the theme of lost children, those for whom there are no records who made so little mark on the world that when they disappear no one even notices. Names are hugely important – again it’s a nice link back to the theme of the original as Oliver of course finds himself when he finds his real name, rather than the one imposed on him by the workhouse authorities – here as well, there is a sense of the need to remember and record the true names of all the disappeared.

The production makes the most of its large and talented cast. The staging is very expressionistic at times; it opens with all the cast on stage in a frozen tableau, looking us squarely in the eye and proclaiming the decay of the world. The scenes are generally short and the transitions between them swift and confident, so that the story zips along with suitably Dickensian verve. It hops back and forth between a host of different characters, so we follow Nancy’s torment, Bill and Fagin’s plotting, and the story of the mysterious stranger who betrayed Isaac years ago and now wants Oliver dead. We also flit back regularly to Oliver’s great-uncle and aunt in England as they search for him: this isn’t quite as gripping as they’re often one step behind what we already know. But overall it’s a compelling production.

Most of the action is accompanied by a swelling orchestral score, altering to fit the emotional calibration of each scene; it’s the sort of device that the audience need to be on board with from the start or they’ll find it grating. But for me it fitted the heightened style of the piece. Some of the performances stray into melodrama a little, but the leads are generally very good; Nancy and Madam Fagin particularly stand out, each fleshing out their character with a deep sense of emotional conflict. The show also employs a fantastic band of child actors to play the refugee children – slipping in and out of the shadows, crouching at the front of the stage, exiting through the audience, they’re almost feral, and give a real sense of a broken city teeming with orphans in every nook and cranny. And it’s a great idea to split the Artful Dodger in two; the character becomes two damaged children, inseparable from each other, who have been so traumatised by what they have been through that they speak in strange, broken sentences, emitting only fragments of sense. But they have an unerring power to see and to know.

Everything in this production fits with the time and place to which they’ve relocated the tale: it’s a fine achievement, and it’s inevitably moving.

Corinne Salisbury

Bliss
By Olivier Choinière, translated by Caryl Churchill
Southampton University Students' Union Theatre Group
C aquila.
***

Caryl Churchill’s translation of Olivier Choinière’s surreal and darkly twisted dissection of celebrity culture, loneliness and obsession requires a strong stomach and an open mind. You also need to be prepared to go with the flow, as the piece plays fast and loose with narrative and the concept of identity. So it’s a brave choice for a student company; and credit to the performers here for fully committing to the extreme messiness (both metaphorical and actual) of the tale.

We’re in a world where the worship of a celebrity called Celine (a singer – her last name’s not given, but there’s only one person it could be) has reached stratospheric heights. We follow Celine as she gives a press conference announcing her (perhaps temporary, perhaps not) retirement from music, and her fans react as if they’ve lost a prophet. Then Celine retreats to her family home, with her supportive husband Rene, to rest during her pregnancy. Only it’s not quite absolute seclusion, what with there being a journalist there, and a biographer, and a photographer. All to make sure that no moment simply happens and then passes – everything must be captured for posterity. So Celine’s behaviour is increasingly fake, as she tries to keep up the pretence of happiness for the sake of her fans – while she suffers a miscarriage, and her loathsome mother, father and brother visit her and wreak havoc. It’s with the family’s visit that things start to turn deeply strange – the mother’s anger at small domestic imperfections in her daughter’s home turns quickly to violent rage, and the mother, father and brother have a brutal three-way fight in the kitchen. They each narrate their own actions as they play them out – “the father grabs the mother by her hair and rubs her face in the pieces of the broken plate”, etc – this is the style of the whole play, with even Celine speaking about herself in the third person, as though she’s her own biographer.

Then suddenly we’re not in Celine’s home anymore, we’re in Isabel’s. And the actress playing Celine has become Isabel. This is a girl who’s bedridden with illness, and a huge Celine fan; earlier in the story Celine read a fan letter from her. Isabel has grown so ill that her family have taken her to hospital, and cruelly dumped her in the hands of the doctors and nurses to fix her. Her “belly is hard and purple”. And then the illness explodes spectacularly, and Isabel turns inside out – vomiting up her organs, her bones, then her skin.

Finally Isabel, in her newly disfigured state, seems to get up and walk around – suddenly she seems to be a Walmart checkout girl called Caro. All the staff are assigned a number on their name tag, so her name tag says 31Caro – “oracle” backwards. Caro is delusional and another huge Celine fan. She’s mocked and reviled by her co-workers, and she lives in a state of permanent fantasy, dreaming that Celine comes to visit her at the store and tells her everything’s going to be okay. And then she reads in the paper about a girl called Isabel who was imprisoned in her room, strapped to her bed, by her abusive family for her whole life… Is Isabel Caro’s alter ego? Is Caro Isabel’s dream? Does Caro dream of being bodily mutilated as the way of winning Celine’s sympathy?

It’s impossible to draw a single clear moral – the play has such an air of a lucid dream. But it is not intended to be a mere absurdist fantasy. Rather it hints obliquely at the corrupting effects of celebrity culture. It’s especially concerned with the blurring of different levels of reality, and the blurring of individual identities – a comment, I suppose, on what happens when a superfan experiences the life of a celebrity only through magazine photoshoots and televised documentaries and takes those images as reality, and also projects their own wishes and fantasies onto the celebrity.

There’s a recurring image in the play about mirrors – each of the three women looks into a mirror at some point and says “I look through the mirror, you’re looking at me, I’m looking at you”. The women reflect each other: but also, it’s hinted, they and the audience could be mirror images of each other. The company could have brought this out a little more, allowed for a few more moments of quiet direct address to the audience. But they work well to achieve an air of constant action, a dream-like hallucinatory whirl, with some cast members playing the main parts and others in non-speaking roles, setting the scene changes and generally hovering ominously at the edges of the action. At one point two of the non-speaking cast members also sit downstage with two buckets of squelchy unidentified muck, one black one red, and repeatedly squeeze handfuls of it through their fingers. It’s suitably disgusting. There’s also a nice design touch whereby a black fabric backdrop carries a collage of celebrity images cut from magazines, but also, interspersed with these, words and images from the play – as though the play is bleeding over into the real world in random splashes.

Overall it’s a committed, visceral, but perhaps not quite intelligent enough production of an extremely tricky play.

Corinne Salisbury

The Love Story
By Freddy Syborn
Negative Capability
C Soco.
****

“How do people fall in love?” writes Freddy Syborn in the programme notes. “They tell each other stories. Each tells the other about a world in which that other did not exist; they make a new world.” Syborn’s play is an extended riff on the concept of storytelling and the use of language to fabricate a world of emotions. And by god it’s beautifully done. He takes as his inspiration the Keatsian concept of negative capability – the “state of not-knowing” – and in particular, how this concept is used in therapy, so the therapist approaches each session with an open mind, ready to hear the client’s story and make prejudgements about how the story will end. But more than this: the idea is that the story itself doesn’t matter so much, it’s the pure act of exchanging information that is the healing process. So Syborn takes this notion and applies it to a love story – a highly intellectual, postmodern, knowing love story, but a love story all the same.

Victoria (Giulia Galastro) and Ed (Patrick Walshe McBride) are young university graduates who meet when both are on holiday in Italy. It seems at first like a typical sort of meet-cute: she’s brittle and wary, he dances around her, offering her wine, charming her into answering. But gradually we realise that both are damaged in some way, and the dance they’re doing is not a light thing for either of them. He is there with his friends to commemorate the death of another friend of theirs; her mother died two months earlier. It’s a beautifully structured scene, where they exchange information in increments – gradually getting through each other’s defences.

It’s the most natural scene in the play, and the one where they’re most recognisable as regular people. From there, things take a more unusual turn, as we then flash forward to them in a supposedly fairly solid relationship. Syborn isn’t interested in writing either a romantic comedy, or a turgid Tennessee Williams drama of decayed love. He’s interested in what happens when two intelligent young people come together but cannot keep their minds from theorising; cannot cease to see themselves not as individuals but as archetypes or illustrations of wider ideas. Ed is an English Literature graduate, Victoria is studying postgrad psychology. The main conceit of the play is that it explores the idea of Negative Capability, a concept understood in both their disciplines. It’s the state of deliberate not-knowing – keeping yourself in that state, not constantly reaching after the truth – “knowing not to know”, as Victoria puts it; “knowing you can’t know”. Of course Syborn applies this idea to relationships, and the question of whether you can ever really know the other person – and should you even want to or need to. Can Victoria and Ed cope with the mystery of each other? Ed quotes John Donne’s famous “No man is an island” – “I am in the world, the world is in me” – taking it to mean that no-one is completely unknowable because everyone is part of the world. Victoria isn’t so sure. She’s based in Paris for her studies, they’re constantly absent from one another; when they see each other, they trace a complicated line through affection and frustration and misunderstanding. They’re very sexually compatible, but they struggle to trust each other and, especially, to be sure of their place in the other person’s thoughts. Ed at one point speaks bitterly of “The supernatural ability of everyday people to lie to themselves” – this is what they’re both consciously so determined to avoid, by scrutinising everything they feel and everything the other person says.

It sounds like it could be undramatic and somewhat exhausting to watch, but it really isn’t. This is partly due to Galastro and Walshe McBride’s superbly complex and subtle performances, and how carefully they articulate the hurt that lies behind their characters’ flimsy facades. But it’s also thanks to Syborn’s ability to flesh out these ideas through his characters, always relating every abstract theory back to the actuality of their relationship. Perhaps the key lies in something Victoria suggests – that maybe all language is artifice, that is, if you can articulate something, it means you’re not really feeling it. Where does that leave the two of them, with their constant articulation, both of their love for each other, and their manifold intellectual doubts. It’s as though they long for something carnal, visceral, inescapably real, and the play is quite frank about their sexual appetites – but this too is part of the complex stew of how they feel about each other.

At the same time, Syborn’s fully aware that his characters are exhibiting a fair amount of bourgeois indulgence. Victoria even admits as much in a monologue where she describes the many layers of her disdain for herself: “My bourgeois evasion. My contempt for people. My contempt for my contempt for people”. There’s some Stoppardian debating about the nature of art – specifically, about the topic of Victoria’s studies, whether there can be evil artists, whether truth equals goodness, whether art is always true – which while interesting, isn’t directly relevant to the plot. But overall it’s a riveting and moving story. It’s also interesting when Victoria brings in her psychology perspective on the relationship: negative capability is also a concept that exists in psychotherapy – the idea that the therapist shouldn’t be grasping after the truth behind the story the patient’s telling, they should just be listening and receiving, because it’s the act of talking itself that’s therapeutic. What’s being said doesn’t matter so much – “the performance is the cure”. So there’s the sense of Victoria and Ed as each other’s therapists, offloading onto each other; and it’s ambiguous whether this is a good and a healthy thing or not.

You might wonder why these two young people’s intellectual preoccupations should be inherently interesting; but there is the prospect of tragedy surrounding their personal circumstances, and it’s this that is really behind their desperate examination of the truth of their relationship. They’re constantly testing its strength, to determine if it’s the thing they’ll be able to cling to. It gives heartbreaking poignancy to something Victoria says in her monologue at the very start: “We love something because it has the power to destroy us.” This is an intelligent and in some ways revolutionarily sane drama of romance and reason.

Corinne Salisbury

Next page - - - Index

 

©Peter Lathan 2010