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Fringe 2011 Reviews (11)
My Filthy Hunt
By Philip Stokes
Horizon Arts with Richard Jordan Productions
Underbelly
*****
Marvin is a good man, a metaphor for hope and self-respect. These two
qualities are sadly lacking in the Yorkshire town where Philip Stokes'
debut play is set.
It may be a little rough around the edges but if this is the future
of theatre, we have a lot to look forward to.
A cast of four disconcertingly start the hour by undressing to their
underwear. This is obviously intended to symbolise the way in which
they will unflinchingly relate their experiences to a voyeuristic audience.
All four are losers. What they have in common is redemption from the
depths of suicidal despair by Marvin, who is soon afterwards lost to
them all.
Led by Hayley Shillito, whose character suffers from beauty, they each
tell tales of lives barely worth living.
She merely has to put up with male assumptions. Kate Daley as her female
companion has had a bad home life that only gets worse when she marries
Johnny who eventually cruelly induces an abortion with his boots.
The men fare little better. Aiden Ross plays a weedy type who is always
the butt of jokes, while Lee Bainbridge portrays an over-sized sex pest
whose self-love is not mirrored by anyone else. He gets more sympathy,
following the pain of losing a close friend.
Between them, using naturalistic language, the quartet paints a depressing
but all too believable picture of the lives that deprived young people
experience in Britain today.
My Filthy Hunt may have a provocative title but it is a sensitive
play that asks existential questions and has the good sense to leave
them unanswered.
While the writing is fresh and exciting, what lifts My Filthy Hunt
to tremendous heights is the direction of Philip Stokes, who may not
always edit his own text assiduously but draws fine performances from
all four actors. He also mixes strong textual delivery with music and
physical theatre elements to ensure a great, if shocking experience.
Philip Fisher
Ten Plagues
Libretto by Mark Ravenhill, music by Conor Mitchell
Traverse 1
****
Ten Plagues is somewhere between a modern opera and a song cycle.
For an hour, audiences are regaled by sensuous singing from Marc Almond,
bringing back memories of his heyday with Soft Cell.
Under the direction of Stuart Lang, who also designed the evening,
Almond does more than just sing, moving around on the stage and giving
his all while conveying the horrors of a city suffering from the democratic
horrors of a plague.
He goes to great pains to make his audience realise how terrible a
plague is and, in particular, its sheer inevitability. In doing so,
he conveys both despair and reflection prior to an ending filled with
remembrance for the dead along with joy and hope.
Throughout, one is compelled to think of three different occurrences.
The title inevitably evokes the biblical variety, while the text and
costume are pure London, 1665. At the same time, there is little doubt
that both Mark Ravenhill and Marc Almond wish us to recall the AIDS
epidemic of the 1980s and beyond. Indeed, a series of film projections
leave little doubt.
Almond still has a lovely, plaintive voice and enunciates perfectly.
He is accompanied only by Bob Broad's solo piano playing that tends
to veer between Schubertian and funereal with something of the ghoulishness
of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.
This is an unusual Edinburgh Fringe show but thanks to the efforts
of all involved, proves to be both moving and thought-provoking and
as such well worth a try.
Philip Fisher
Audience
By Ontroerend Goed
St George's West
***** (after reading Public Health Warning)
Public Health Warning
Please read the whole of this review before booking tickets for
Audience. If you do not, BTG cannot accept responsibility for the consequences.
Antonin Artaud was instrumental in popularising the Theatre of Cruelty.
In that genre, people on stage pretended to be unpleasant to other people
on stage.
Under the direction of their founder, Alexander Devriendt, Ontroerend
Goed's 21st century version differs in that the Cruelty is perpetrated
by people on stage on members of the audience.
Ontroerend Goed is Belgian company that delights in performance pieces
such as Smile Off Your Face and Internal that expose us
to highly personalised experiences and this show possibly takes things
further than ever before.
On one level, Audience could be perceived as calmly sadistic
humiliation of innocents. On another, it is a fascinating take on the
audience experience and the way that we behave in the era of Reality
TV, where everyone is fair game.
It also adds something to the debate about phone hacking and privacy
when electronics have made us all potential victims of the kind of thought
crimes that even George Orwell didn't imagine.
The opening sections are frankly pretty boring. First, actress Maria
Dafneros delivers a long, tedious statement about how the audience in
a theatre is and is not expected to behave. This is followed by a long,
very slow camera pan across the packed, 200-strong audience, the result
shown on a big screen.
The excessive behaviour follows. Four beautiful Belgian actors, whose
American/Australian accents cover their origins only reasonably well
in some cases, begin to put words into the mouths of individuals picked
out by the camera. This is all still pretty harmless fun.
At the start, visitors were asked to check their coats and bags. These
became the subject first of a fashion show and then three bags were
emptied and analysed, down to the literature (Italo Calvino!), potions
and condoms, with enthusiasm and anthropological thoroughness.
The serious part of the hour began as Matthieu Sys from the stage began
to comment on what he perceived to the inadequacies of audience members
and their garb. This is still arguably fun and nobody seemed too put
out.
The really shocking element commenced when a girl (the term is used
deliberately) called Sarah, who cannot have been more than around 21,
was chosen for the full force of this presenter's charm. With the harshness
of a stand-up comedian, Sys proceeded to insult and humiliate her unmercifully
to the point where tears were on the verge of flooding.
This could have continued for hours but the actors were waiting for
a trigger. The resistance began when an older man started highly audible
coughing, then the representative of an newspaper ironically owned by
Rupert Murdoch but still extant suggested a mass walk-out.
Neither of these ended the bullying which only finished when a man
stood up and said "stop".
There then followed an apparently extempore but clearly scripted debate
between the actors about the morality of this kind of behaviour and,
by extension, show.
Finally, as a little light relief, the performers whipped up the audience
into some collective behaviour - waving arms, chanting and dancing -
perhaps just to prove their powers of manipulation.
Audience explores similar ground to Tim Crouch's The Author
but in a very different way. There is a real risk that at some point,
victims (and there is no other word) will take the insults too much
to heart. Twenty minutes after her ordeal, as the audience left the
theatre, Sarah was still being talked down.
The consequence of selection might be sleepless nights or tranquillisers
for the more sensitive. There is also a risk that therapy or even worse
might needed by the most vulnerable.
Having said all of that, Audience makes for compelling, if deeply
uncomfortable, viewing and asks some very serious questions about contemporary
society and the ways in which the public are being turned into performers
and sources of entertainment.
This will be the most talked about show in Edinburgh this year. See
it or not, you must choose.
Philip Fisher
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