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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 1999 Reviews 3Mainstream In the programme (£1.50 for a Fringe show programme: sheesh!), director Graham Eatough writes, "We often get asked, 'So, what's your show actually about?' With Mainstream, this question has seemed unusually difficult to answer." It's equally difficult for a reviewer to describe. To begin with, it's an exploration of the connections between acting out roles in everyday and theatre performance. It's about two people who are in a particular job/assessment related situation. An A & R (Artiste and Repertoire) person from a music recording company is being interviewed in a seaside hotel by an employee of a personnel consultancy, brought in by the music company to advise on perrsonnel matters (although just what these matters are is deliberately left vague). The whole play is about the way the relationship between these two people develops and the roles each play. However there are four actors, two men and two women. They take the two roles seemingly indiscriminately, and each scene performed on a small platform of a stage is mirrored by the same scene being performed without speech in an off-stage performance area. And the various scenes are performed on a number of occasions with differing combinations of actors, sometimes word for word, sometimes with a different development. There is also a soundtrack which consists partly of sampled and altered conversation, partly of specially composed music. Confused? Baffled? So were some of the audience! Some, however, were quite clearly following, whilst many were probably in the same state as me, having some glimmering of what was going on but needing a little more time to work it out. I find myself in something of a quandry. I can see how some reviewers will probably wax quite ecstatic over the piece - The Times has called Suspect Culture "the most adventurous in-tune-with-the-times theatre company in Britain." I can admire the cleverness of its construction - Graham Eatough writes, "The development of the show's structure has often felt more like a mathematical exercise than a creative process", and I can see that! It is also at times quite amusing, even witty. However the more I think about it - and yes, it did make me think, which is a plus - the more the image of a play vanishing up its own rectum (if, indeed, plays can be said to have rectums) comes into my mind. Theatre is a pretty broad church and has room for everything from No Sex Please, We're British to King Lear, from Cats to Look Back in Anger, but this sort of theatrical navel-gazing does leave me totally cold. No. Sorry. Not true. It gets me bloody angry, primarily because it is just the sort of thing which attracts funding for being "experimental". In fact, in 1998 Suspect Culture became the only new touring theatre company to receive fixed term funding from the Scottish Arts Council. But this isn't experiment, it's masturbation. It's theatre playing with itself. A review is one person's point of view, and that point of view is bound to be influenced by personal beliefs and experience, so I make no apology for dismissing this piece. I've given it three stars because in every technical aspect it cannot be faulted: the production values are very high, higher, I have to confess, than in probably 80% of shows on the Fringe. As to whether it is worth the expenditure of the effort (and cost) that went into making it (it was a year-long process of devising and writing)... well, I would have thought that you'll have worked out my opinion by now! Howie the Rookie If Mainstream is intellectual, Howie the Rookie is visceral and packs quite a punch, right where it hurts. Two Dubin lads (yobs actually), the Howie Lee and the Rookie Lee, talk directly but separately to the audience, both telling different parts of the same story. The language is strong, almost every other word an expletive, and their lives consist of little more than sex, drinking and fighting. What family life there is is dysfunctional and everything centres around the self. In other words, we are presented with a group of characters (for they bring a range of characters to life through their narrative) who are, in the main, deeply unattractive. It is a tribute to the power of Mark O'Rowe's writing and to the performances of Aidan Kelly (The Howie Lee) and Karl Shiels (The Rookie Lee) that not only are we moved by their fates but we also find the two main characters likeable. There is humour there as well. The audience laughed a lot, which just made the tragedy (in the everyday, not the literary sense) stronger. Everything does, of course, depend upon the performances of the two actors, and they are in a very demanding situation: each talks directly to the audience for 40 - 45 minutes. This has its advantages. There is plenty of time to establish both a character and a rapport with the audience, but it is also very easy to slip into a narrative, third-person style, becoming detached from the character. Kelly and Shiels maintain their characters throughout and draw us into their world in a way which is non-judgemental. For me, Kelly had the edge, managing to make us warm to a character who is fundamentally violent and extremely selfish, but both impressed. A fine piece of work, with fine performances, but for me it just fell short of the full five stars - just! O'Rowe was a joint winner of the George Devine Award this year for this play, and also won the 1999 Rooney prize for Irish Literature. Next page - - - Index |
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