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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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1998 Fringe Reviews 10
Stand (Stand received the judges' award for Outstanding Production at the 1998 National Student Drama Festival, where it also received the 1998 Sunday Times Playwriting Award and two Performance Awards.) Relationships, football and a good drink: Phil and Kev are football fans, ex-hooligans (although Kev still hankers for a good fight after - or during - a match). Kev is married to Tina, but the relationship is rocky to say the least, while Phil is living with Janet who has just discovered she is pregant. Kev fancies himself as a hard man and slaps Tina around a bit, but Phil is the genuine article but with a soft centre. Kev doesn't want things to change: at the match he's dying to join in any trouble, and he wants Phil to persuade Janet to get rid of the baby. Phil is growing up: Kev isn't. A slice of life from the world of the football supporter is, perhaps, the best description of this play. As such it is well-observed and well-written. The characters are totally convincing and the performances uniformly good, but the feeling we are left with at the end is "So what?" This is why I can't justify four stars, in spite of the quality of both performance and writing. The characters don't change or develop. There is no resolution of any of the conflicts within the characters or between them, and that, ultimately, makes the play rather unsatisfying. A Wife out of Flowers The Celtic fringe! The Company of Strangers take a Welsh myth from the Mabinogion, the great epic of Wales, and present it in a mixture of storytelling, traditional and original music. It tells the story of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, son of Gwydion and nephew of Math, King of Gwynedd, for whom his father and uncle, great druids, made a wife, Blodeuwedd, out of flowers, and how she betrayed him. The music is largely traditional Welsh, and is played on small organ, guitar, keyboards, electro-harp, harp, boran and penny whistle. It's an interesting experiment in a rather different kind of theatre, but it doesn't quite come off. One reason is the performance: the storyteller made a number of slips (the kind that would be unforgivable in an actor) and the lead singer tended to sing sharp in the upper register whilst, in the lower, she had that intense vibrato which I, at any rate, associate with the pub singer! The last song, written by the storyteller John Hartoch, was an exhortation for us to get back, as it were, to our roots. It's a kind of "back to nature" call, which does seem somewhat dated today, particularly in view of the fact that the bulk of the music was played on instruments which are very much the product of modern electronic technology! The Square Root of Minus
One Set in a boys' boarding school in 1950s America, this is a powerful picture of adolescent confusion and anguish. When you start to think too much, all the good things start to look bad, and all the bad things start to look.... interesting.So says the leading character, Dewis, a star maths student, who becomes involved with two others who are obsessed with power games. Homosexual sex, power over others, mathematics, breaking the rules, all combine to drive him into what is almost a nervous breakdown. I don't really see the point of the fifties setting, to be honest. The programme talks about the play being set against the background of the McCarthy witchhunts, but, again, this seems to be an irrelevance. What is happening to Dewis is deeply personal and could take place at any time or in any place. The relevance of the title, however, is clear. The square root of minus one is an imaginary number, it cannot exist, and this infraction of the rules of mathematics adds to the disorientation of his life. The performances are good - I have been fortunate this year in that, in most of the student shows I've seen, the acting has been of a very high standard. It can be abysmal! - and playright Peter Morris shows great potential. The Oxford New Writing Festival was set up to try to counter the domination of Cambridge in the public perception of student drama. As a Cambridge man myself, it hurts to admit it (after all, Oxford and Cambridge are great rivals in just about everything!), but they're maing a pretty good job of it! Once A standing ovation at the Fringe is not a common occurence, but Derevo got one for Once, and thoroughly deserved it. This is physical theatre, but physical theatre from the mime/clowning end of the spectrum, although, as the programme says, no one style has priority on stage. It is superbly done, and hilariously funny. Once is a fairy tale about unrequited love, a tragic story played out by clowns. All kinds of theatrical artifice are employed - mime, clowning, dance, knockabout comedy, brilliant staging, visual jokes - and these diverse styles fit together seemlessly. There's a strong Commedia dell'Arte influence which underlies the whole thing, but we could talk influences for hours and it still would not give a real flavour of this Russian company's self-devised piece. Just the right sort of show for a late night production!
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