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Fringe 2011 Reviews (64)
A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson
Adapted by Russell Barr, Ian Redford and Max Stafford-Clark from James
Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson and The Journal of a Tour to the
Hebrides
Out of Joint
Traverse 2
****
If you did not know that Dr Johnson had died a couple of hundred years
ago, it would be easy to believe that he is treading the boards at the
Traverse this week.
Ian Redford makes a tremendous fist of bringing "Dictionary"
Johnson to the stage, warts and all. The experience might not compare
with reading Boswell's lengthy Life, but as an overview of the great
man and his peers, it cannot be faulted.
While Johnson was a polymath, he was also an irritable, ugly man who
said what he thought regardless of the consequences.
The Doctor may have penned a variety of different books including the
epic dictionary but he would now be forgotten, were it not for his friendship
with James Boswell, a Scottish laird and rake.
"Bozzy" is embodied by one of Redford's co-creators Russell
Barr, who also gets the pleasure of imitating a number of other characters
including George III, Flora Macdonald, blind Mrs Williams, Joshua Reynolds
and Oliver Goldsmith.
The only two parts that he doesn't take on are Hodge the cat, unusually
played by a spaniel, and Trudie Styler's Hester Thrale-Piozzi, the society
hostess with whom the good Doctor fell in love but who could not be
prevailed upon to marry him.
Together, they tease out the story of this singular genius and enable
him to trot out all of his best aphorisms and definitions, much to the
delight of an appreciative audience.
Philip Fisher
The Table
Devised by the company
Blind Summit Theatre
Pleasance Dome
*****
"I'm a three-man Japanese bunraku-style puppet", says the
three-man Japanese bunraku-style puppet. "And these are my operators"
- and he introduces Nick who's doing his feet, Sean who's on his right
arm and holding his body by pinching his bum, and Mark who's on his
left arm and head, and doing his voice. This is meta-puppetry, you could
say; surreal post-modern puppetry; stand-up puppetry; and, in the odd
moment, it seems very much like improvised puppetry.
The puppet is on top of a table, and he rambles on at some length about
the dimensions of said table, how long he's been on it (40 years apparently),
and the techniques that his operators use to make him move realistically.
A latecomer creeps in, puppet stops and watches them pointedly, and
then suggests he runs through that whole last bit again. And then he
does so - a speeded-up summary re-enactment. This apparently ad hoc
little addition seems to make one of the puppeteers crack up. How the
hell is this possible? Only with the consummate skill of the puppeteers,
surely, and an almost supernatural unspoken understanding between them.
Blind Summit's show is on at 10pm at the Pleasance Dome, which by late
evening is normally almost entirely populated by stand-up. But I can't
imagine any comedy show being funnier, more profound or more enthralling
than this.
The company say they're influenced by Beckett and Sartre among others,
and you can see what they mean. Our puppet hero (never named), while
he goes on about this and that, loses his train of thought, starts again
etc, is really putting off what he told us was the main aim of his performance:
to re-enact the last twelve hours of Moses' life, in real time.
Of course he never gets round to doing it. But the meaning of the reference
gradually becomes clear. "Moses died alone after 40 years in the
desert", he mutters bitterly, and suddenly we have a glimpse of
his lonely existence, stranded on the tabletop for decades, unable to
summon the courage to move off it - dismissing the area underneath the
table (ie. the floor) as not worth his venturing into. There's this
sort of fug of existential malaise behind his chirpy showing-off.
Of course this sounds ridiculous, but that's the joy of the play: that
it gets us to invest in the feelings of the puppet, even while explocitly
telling us that it's absurd to do so. It is somehow simultaneously very
funny and profoundly sad. And that's not even mentioning the girl who
after a while comes and sits at the table and reads. And can't seem
to see the puppet, even though he shouts at her, headbutts her and stamps
on her shoulders. He's baffled and furious - she's interrupting his
show, her presence makes absolutely no sense - "You're dramaturgically
inconsistent!" he fumes. But when she eventually leaves he sort
of wants her back; she was some company, at least. And that maybe is
all the sense that we need to make of her.
Two further small pieces follow the opening mini-play with our bunraku
protagonist. In the middle piece - the strangest and most abstract -
a series of disembodied heads dance in strange formations behind three
picture frames. It's beautifully choreographed but seems to have no
other purpose than to display the puppeteers' skills.
But then the last piece is a worthy finale. A suitcase full of pieces
of A4 paper is set on the table; the first piece of paper brought out
of it tells us that this is going to be a demonstration of "Le
Marionnettisme Français" - French puppetry - and the four
performers all fix cigarettes in their mouths. Then they proceed to
take the pieces of paper out of the suitcase in a precise order and
float them through the air in appropriate movements: a picture of birds
flies up high, a picture of a car shoots towards a picture of an old
woman crossing the road… and we're told the thrilling story of
a hit-and-run accident that becomes a police car chase that becomes
a desperate man's last stand. It's so clever and so slick, with so many
hilarious touches of detail. And I can barely imagine the skill of the
performers as they move around each other, picking up each piece of
paper in perfect order within a fraction of a second. Well-drilled hardly
covers it. All praise to Mark Down, Nick Barnes, Sarah Calver and Sean
Garratt; and to Blind Summit for daring to do this.
Corinne Salisbury
Subsist
By JD Henshaw
DBS Productions
Sweet Grassmarket
****
Another post-apocalyptic zombie drama? It sounds like it'll be a cliché-ridden
gore fest, but by goodness this new play from JD Henshaw transcends
the limitations the genre can impose. It is a gripping, claustrophobic
account of the fraying psychologies of a handful of survivors of the
"virus", who have banded together in a loose alliance but
who each have one and only priority, to keep their own selves alive.
Large chunks of the play take place in disorientating darkness punctured
by the characters' terrified shouts, and our sense of being plunged
into an alien situation is heightened by the fact that we're actually
sat in a cramped, nondescript meeting room in a hotel.
But no - for the next hour we're in an isolated farmhouse in which
the survivors are holed up and beginning to dare to believe that they
might be able to build a life together. They don't know each other -
they just happen to have all run in the same direction from the last
zombie attack, and took shelter in the house together. But they make
shaky efforts to get on.
Only this is tricky, with one of the women (Susanna Mulvihill) a fussy,
faux-cheerful, mothering type who seems in complete denial about the
cataclysmic state of affairs, and the other a dead-eyed teenager (Lynne
Campbell) given to doomy pronouncements that cut far too painfully to
the truth of their situation. The men are a difficult pair too: one
(Iain Martin) constantly on edge, irritable and borderline-violent,
and the other (Paul J Creegan) a well-meaning peacekeeper who is trying,
and failing, to suppress his debilitating fear.
The play very interestingly explores the theme of survival tactics:
its main concern, as you may guess, is not how you survive a zombie
plague, but how you survive when thrown into close proximity with strangers
with whom you must communicate and co-operate, or else.
The most interesting conversations are between the two women. The older
woman, it turns out, has adopted a persona that she hopes makes her
seem likeable and somewhat soft-headed and vulnerable, to inspire the
protective instincts of others. It's seriously back-firing in the current
context though.
The younger woman by contrast makes no effort at all to make herself
socially acceptable, feeling that death is surely only ever round the
corner and so attempts to form human bonds are surely pointless.
Then a stranger (Calum MacKaskill) comes into this small world that
they have constructed. He's been with a stable group of people for a
while, but a sudden attack surprised them and now he is the only survivor.
But has he brought the virus with them…? He should be the potential
source of fear; but it is he who is scared of them, at their appalling
lack of human warmth towards each other, how they can't bring themselves
to say each other's names, how they "dissolve in front of each
other". His account of the group of people he was with before makes
us consider that the tense, icy cold relationship between the survivors
in the farmhouse is not an inevitability - it's their choice.
It's such an interesting spin on the genre, so tightly written and
chilling in its plausibility. Humans are the real danger, is the gist
of the message; potentially each other's salvation, but also potentially
each other's poison. A real surprise, this excellent piece from a small
company whose work I didn't previously know. It delivers one of the
most compelling uses of an unpromising space, that you'll see anywhere
at the festival this year.
Corinne Salisbury
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