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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 1997 Reviews (12)Road Rage *** K & B Productions Andrew Loudon's play has been well hyped as the ecological play of this year's Fringe. It isn't. The ecological trappings are just that - trappings - and are quite irrelevant to the basic story. And what is the basic story? It's Oedipus Rex. The main character is even called Footie (the name Oedipus means "swollen foot"). We even have an approximation (a very approximate approximation) to the chorus of a Greek tragedy in the characters Ratty and E, who tell the story by means of flashback. So what has Loudon done to the story? Well, he's set it in the tunnels and tree-houses of an anti-road protest; he's emphasised the "road rage" element of the killing of the Laius character; he's reduced the Sophoclean universality to the story of an individual. For all that, it remains a good piece of theatre, although far from the great one that is the original. There is a certain misdirection at the beginning, that makes us feel that this is going to be a politically committed piece (as I suspect a lot of the audience expected it to be), but, for me at any rate, the realisation, when the piece was well under way, that this was the Oedipus myth, destroyed the dramatic tension that had built up and had me wondering how Footie would learn that he had killed his father and was sleeping with (in fact, had made pregnant) his mother. (Much as in the original - a gradual dawning - is the answer.) There were some nice production touches. The misdirection was reinforced by the way in which the Police and security guards harangued and threatened the audience even before we entered the theatre, and by the advice on how to react given to us by the cast. These created a mood and a sense of expectation. However the ending was less (much less!) successful. Why on earth, after the final revelations and their results, did the play not finish? Why were we treated to a display of rope acrobatics that had nothing to do with what had gone before and simply diminished the ending? Afterthought Glimpse consists of four short plays, written by Thomas Everchild and performed by Philippa Hammond over two nights, two plays per night. I saw An Honorary Man, about Hypatia, director of the Library of Alexandria in AD 415, and Turning the Handle, set in the 1920s. This is a sort of Talking Heads, but with characters rather diferent from those who inhabit Alan Bennett's world! Hypatia is "an honorary man", and for that she is accused, by the Christians who are now the power in the Empire of Rome, of being a whore. In Turning the Handle a very proper gentlewoman "of a certain age" talks about her early experiences as an actress in "mutographs". It is only slowly we realise that these mutographs are not early silent movies, but the What the Butler Saw machines in fairgrounds and that what she was actually doing was appearing in Edwardian pornography. Two contrasting pieces which Philippa Hammond handles very well, expressing the pain of Hypatia and revealing the total innocence of the Edwardian lady in an entertaining and amusing way. Not great theatre, by any means, but well worth a visit.
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