|
Fringe 2010 Reviews (7)
Rachel Rose Reid: I’m Hans Christian Andersen
By Rachel Rose Reid
Pleasance Courtyard.
****
Reid is a professional storyteller, and this her new solo show is a loose, free-flowing piece inspired by the life of Hans Christian Andersen.
Part of its purpose is to question the very nature of myth and story, and so she interweaves factual accounts of events in his life with some of the more fantastical myths that have sprung up around him. She also segues from the story of his life to the stories he told in his life so smoothly that you don’t always notice at first that she’s now telling the tale of the loneliness of a shirt collar or the thwarted ambitions of a chimneysweep porcelain figurine rather than the loneliness or thwarted ambitions of Hans himself.
It’s a fine and subtle way to draw his life and his art together. Reid also brings in tales of her own thwarted loves and futile spinning of stories around men she meets – only for reality to eventually confound them. “Women who watch romantic comedies tend to lose men because they expect their partner to be able to read their mind”, she says drily.
So this is a story about the element of danger involved in storytelling – especially when we tell stories to ourselves. Although funny and believable, Reid’s tales of her own failed romantic encounters are perhaps not so riveting as when she’s talking about Andersen – because his was a fascinating life. She reads from the letters he wrote to a young Danish nobleman he was infatuated by; Hans’s eventual rejection by the object of his love propels him into a life spent travelling, always “hastening on to the next thing” and encouraging his imagination to cultivate belief in there always being something, intangible, glinting, just out of reach, that will complete him. It’s interesting to think of how his life influenced his stories, and especially how events in his life led to his work taking a much darker turn.
Reid’s approach is so personal, idiosyncratic and unpredictable that the play never comes close to being the straightforward, earnest biopic it could have been in other hands. It’s much more like Peter Shaffer reimagining Mozart – an artistic life retold, as the vehicle for another artist’s ideas and preoccupations. It’s marvellous. And her delivery is polished – her voice is a precision instrument and her sentences have a practised rhythm. She spins them long, without a breath, as if she’s getting carried away on them, until you wonder how her lungs can cope with it.
She’s also particularly great at flipping in a heartbeat from effusive to deadpan, or ending a rapt sentence with a suddenly downbeat conclusion; when, again and again, a story that begins in hope ends in disappointment. She pokes fun at the Disney retelling of The Little Mermaid, which insists of course on a happy ending – in the original story the mermaid didn’t get her love, and dissolved into foam atop the waves.
Likewise in the story of the shadow that escapes its human and leads a dark, amoral, successful life without him: there’s a cynicism towards the idea of having a positive outlook on the world; “you use poetry”, the shadow mocks its former owner, “to cover over the world’s misery with her honeyed veil”.
Reid uses her fair amount of poetry herself, at the same time as she frequently undercuts herself. A gem of a show, about how we see the world – that endlessly relevant story. And there’s some beautiful singing too.
Corinne Salisbury
Derelict
SJC Productions
The Zoo.
***
In an affluent part of London, a group of young people break into an unoccupied fourteen-bedroom mansion. They’re not there to vandalise or muck about but to live there – not temporarily but in a real sense, with electricity contracts and vegetable patches – and at the same time to make their living there a statement to the outside world. It’s a great idea for a play, and Stavrinou commits to exploring in depth the world of contemporary squatting – where various types of political activism, from protest art to green thinking to violent anarchism, come together.
She’s done her research, and to hear about the practical details of what needs to happen for a squat to come about – the factors that make it legal or not, the effort needed to secure a property, make it liveable and protect the inhabitants from eviction – makes the story more interesting, not less.
Stavrinou is excellent at embodying the different outlooks through her central characters. Est, in some ways the squat “leader”, is highly practical, efficient and uncompromising. She draws up cleaning rotas, she’s concerned about heating and security, she expects everyone to pull their weight. Her mate Joe is also practical but more kind-hearted. Dom and Bett are ruthless, hedonistic anarchists with a penchant for statement-making violence. Cynthia and Emma are sweet, dippy, animal-loving artistic types. And Viv is the newcomer – dressed, as Est points out mockingly, like a wannabe rebel on Camden High St, and with a backstory that doesn’t quite add up. The interaction between the characters is very well done: Stavrinou has such a good sense of how each person’s presence in the room impacts on everyone else, and she builds the tension between them well.
Director Lotty Englishby tries to make the staging as fluid as possible, and particularly nice are the bits of Chekhovian incidental action – characters simply hanging about being themselves, and conversations trailing off into inaudibility as the actors go off stage – that help us to believe that we’re watching them really inhabit this world.
Even the costumes are well thought through, with Est and Joe, long-time pals, dressed very similarly in practical jeans and jumpers, and Viv in ridiculously trendy faux-rebellious getup (jumper thrown casually over short black tassel dress) with huge red satin heels. Charlotte Band is excellent as Est, bringing such earthy believability to the character, and landing every one of her sarky responses perfectly. Rosanna Vize also stands out as sweet, vulnerable Emma; and EJ Martin as the flaky, insecure, eager-to-please Viv is really striking.
The writing sometimes over-emphasises its arguments, and there are times towards the end when the exposition is a little too obvious. But the debates, which are the heart of the play, are hugely compelling. Are they just scrounging off society, or are they trying to live lives which can be a beacon – show that you can live without over-consuming and creating more waste?
Should you be living this lifestyle just for yourself – because it’s the life you want – and perhaps leading by gentle example; or is it pointless unless you shout to the world about what you’re doing, and so ultimately change the world? Bett is all for direct action, violent if necessary, and there’s some good discussion of how useful this is – and whether people might have ulterior motives behind their desire to lash out. And ultimately, at what point does idealism stop: when do the ends no longer justify the means?
It’s also about myth-making and storytelling – Est’s dead friend Zoe is held up by them all and by many others as the beacon of activism and alternative living, and the stories around her life get exaggerated with every retelling. Interestingly, Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes In London also uses the idea of a girl who is a symbol, who might be the one to actually change people’s minds; as if it would take some sort of modern myth, some sort of folk hero, to inspire the minds of the general public in a way that all the hard-working political campaigners can’t. It’s an interesting concept, and Stavrinou nicely exposes the delusional elements to how her characters mythologise Zoe.
I’m not quite sure if one single political protester would be able to go down in history purely for their strength of personality – there are hundreds of such inspirational people. But perhaps she is only really a legend among this small band of friends, and they simply talk about her as though she’s important on a much bigger scale. This is a fascinating, multi-layered, and vitally contemporary story.
Corinne Salisbury
Flor De Muerto
Gomito Productions
Bedlam Theatre.
***
Gomito Productions present a warm-hearted story with a strong visual style.
It’s set on the 2nd November – the Mexican day of the dead. Gabriel is a boy whose parents both died when he was young; raised by his strict aunt, he’s grown used to closing himself in his room and burying himself in the world of comic books. Today especially, he’ll do anything to blot out the outside world – the sounds of the carnival, and the garish skeletons which decorate every inch of the neighbourhood, and thoroughly freak him out.
Javan Hughes is Gabriel, and Amie Burns Walker, Isabella Marshall and Sam Worboys form a three-strong chorus: they narrate the story, perform all the puppetry, and double up as various characters. This show relies heavily on its stagecraft for its charm, and there are some lovely moments: brightly coloured fabrics are draped on lines across the stage and pulled back and forth to suggest the various scenes; they allow for a sense of Gabriel being besieged, as figures and apparitions constantly jump out at him from behind the material.
The lighting is beautifully textured to suggest vision and memory, for example when Gabriel glimpses the girl next door and all we see of her is her shadow behind orange gauze, projected by a light behind her. The movement scenes are great, as Gabriel ventures out into the world to be jostled and cajoled and generally caught up in the dance of the fiesta. And best of all is the shadow puppetry, done behind a hanging red veil at the front of the stage, as Gabriel enacts an imaginary superhero story starring himself (we see the superheroes fight, complete with hovering sound-effect words), and then later, replays a real-life awkward conversation in an attempt to cast himself as a hero in the retelling.
Devised by the company with text by John Dumont, it has a host of casually lovely moments, and nicely avoids over-emphasising them. The moral is a simple one – that to embrace life involves embracing the memory of the dead – it’s touching but not too revelatory. All the fun is in the telling.
Corinne Salisbury
Do We Look Like Refugees?!
By Alecky Blythe
Assembly Rooms.
***
Alecky Blythe has pioneered what might be called ultra verbatim theatre. Not only does she ask actors to repeat the words of “real people” but she records the originals and plays them back using mini discs and earpieces.
This should provide an extra level of reality, although it can be hard to tell when the text, delivered by actors from the Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi, is in Georgian and Russian with surtitles.
The five performers, who also sing to the accompaniment of a pandury (which looks like a primitive wooden toy guitar), tell the story of displaced and dispossessed Georgians, stuck in a refugee camp close enough to smell home, if not visit it.
Georgia was hoping to join Europe but instead found itself becoming a Russian satellite with limited access and threat to life and limb for those who wished to visit the family left behind.
Aided by slide and film footage, the actors do a good job of depicting the harsh conditions of life and the contrast with the good old days only a couple of years before.
Philip Fisher
Next page - - - Index
|
