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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Reviews 6Working and Bonking Well, the title worked! Any critic is going to be enticed by a title like that: what an opportunity for long discussions about derivativeness and jumping on bandwagons and so on. But it's not derivative - except in its title - merely bad. First, the play itself. Set in a college, it is about a student who is writing a screenplay on the theme of love at first sight. Then the screenplay somehow gets mixed up with his own life and.... Well, it starts to get a bit complex with video-style rewinds and replays, and fades and.... Well, no. It's not really complex, just confusing. Next, the acting. The actors do have some basic skills (I have seen worse in Edinburgh over the years!): they move confidently and you can hear them, but they don't convince. Of course, they're not helped by sloppily written dialogue and characters which are little more than caricatures, but they contribute their own failings. Timing is often off; there's movement for the sake of movement, with no real motivation behind it; each tends to get into their own pace and stick with it regardless of the scene: all the faults which we associate with those who are just learning the craft and have no grounding in basic stagecraft. The publicity tells us that the Oxford University Touring Company has been "formed from the most talented actors, directors and writers at the university." Hmm. Trainspotting I can't review this. The Edinburgh accents were so strong I understood less than one word in ten - I always thought I was good at accents - another illusion shattered! - and at least a third of the play was done on the floor of the stage so that all I could see, sitting towards the back of the hall, was the heads of the people in front of me. The characters were certainly convincing, but the director had clearly not considered the audience or the venue in which they were playing. Nor had (s)he considered the necessity to temper realism (and, of course, the language of the novel) with intelligibility. I have a sneaking suspicion that if I'd understood it I would have enjoyed it. It would be unfair of me to give it a star rating, hence the question mark. I had been looking forward to this one. So disappointing! Athena Live! The Oresteia presented as a TV talk show? In a comic vein? A recipe for disaster, surely? After all, The Oresteia, first performed nearly 2,500 years ago, is one of the masterworks of world theatre: a huge, brooding tragedy built around the story of the curse of the House of Atreus, bringing that story of horror to an close. It symbolises the ending of the rule of the old gods, of Gaia and Ouranos, Chronos and Saturn, and the ascendancy of the Olympians. It marks the change from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society. It is that point in time when vengeance is replaced by justice. Surely to turn this into a light comedy like Athena Live! is to trivialise it? Yes. But we need to remember that Aeschylus and the other Greek tragedians did not just write tragedies. Each trilogy of tragedies (in this case Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides) was followed by a "Satyr play", a broad comedy which looked at the theme from a different perspective. Only fragments of these Satyr Plays have survived, but we do know that Danielle Dresden's play follows in the ancient tradition. It's great fun. It entertains and amuses, and has a few timely digs at the likes of Jerry Springer. (Can TV sink any lower than Jerry Springer?) It sticks closely to the original story, even to ten members of the audience becoming the jury which decides the fate of Orestes. (In The Eumenides it is ten citizens of Athens who perform that function.) The cast of four play thirteen characters between them - or fifteen if we count the Furies as three characters, although played by one person (Donna Peckett) with a couple of extra heads fastened to her neck. Writer Danielle Dresden impressed in six different parts, all very different, as did Donna Peckett in four (or six if you count the Furies... etc. etc. etc.), whilst Matthew S. Nelson played three. As Apollo he did remind me so much of Julian Clary! Only Giuliana Miolo played one role, Athena herself, goddess and hostess of the programme. All in all a good eighty minutes of entertainment from material that looked unpromising! Next page - - - Index |
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