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EDINBURGH
2001
We
reviewed more than 150 shows at the 2001 Edinburgh Festival and Fringe.
Although originally on several pages, we've combined them for this archive.
They're in alphabetical order, so look for individual shows or just browse.
Acoustic
Strawbs Assembly Rooms
Crafting in-yer-face melodies with an alarmingly high political
content since the late sixties, folk-rock group The Strawbs are now out
on the road in acoustic form - which means founder members Dave Cousins,
Dave Lambert and Brian Willoughby fronting a trio of guitars and the odd
burst of dulcimer. Their huge roster of songs cuts across all barriers
whether it's Cousins' soaring vocals or Lambert and Willoughby's duelling
cutaways. This is how their songs were originally written, and in many
ways it's how they sound best - sweet and raw. If you're a fan, don't
go expecting an array of golden oldies like Union Man, just a confident
band still pushing the envelope of music. If they're undiscovered territory
to you, hurry on down to experience some of the most instantly accessible
tunesters in the business. An unmissable, magical evening. Nick
Awde
Adult
Child/Dead Child Gilded Balloon
Claire Dowie's fringe staple is given a strong and emotionally
powerful reading in this performance by Lara Marland, who captures all
of the piece's poignancy and horror through versatile and instantly characterising
transformations. The monologue of a woman whose loveless childhood led
to the creation of an invisible friend that eventually dominated her in
a schizophrenic embodiment of her repressed anger, Dowie's piece requires
the actress to show us a pain the child can't verbalise while also gradually
exposing the adult narrator's continuing mental and emotional scars. Under
Chris Garner's direction, Marland uses her expressive face and frightened
eyes to movingly convey the confusion of a child whose normal behaviour
is labelled unacceptable by adults, and whose coping mechanisms only carry
her further away from any sense of control over her fate. A battered steamer
trunk serves as her only prop, alternately a symbol of burden, entrapment
and escape. As expressive as Marland's performance is in the childhood
sections, it is when she shows us the adult struggling for a mental and
emotional stability which will always be only a compromise with her demons
that the most subtly moving moments of her performance come. Gerald
Berkowitz
Antigone
Assembly Rooms
Jean Anouilh's 1944 rendering of Sophocles' tragedy is not only a searing
indictment of how history tramples the individual, it also happens to
be a damn fine play. Nowhere is this more apparent than in this heart-rendingly
human version from the republic of Georgia. In stripping the story down,
Marjanishvili Theatre's production is all the more powerful for its understatement.
Nato Murvanidze's Antigone is a headstrong young woman whose insistence
on burying her slain brother pushes the tolerance of her uncle Creon (Otar
Megvinetukhutsesi). Usually the villain of the piece, Creon is here transformed
into a fiercely private and domestic man who wants it all to go away,
while Gia Burjanadze's Chorus is now a supportive figure rather than a
herald of doom, retainer to a tightly bonded family despite the terrible
rifts. Handy headphones provide simultaneous translation from Georgian,
but really you don't need them if you already know the plot. Just sit
back and appreciate the rich sounds of the language and seamless performances.
Although I must question the wisdom of programming so dark a tragedy in
a foreign tongue - the same cast doing Romeo and Juliet would certainly
carry far more international currency - all kudos to the Assembly Rooms
for again providing an exciting opportunity to catch the cream of Georgian
theatre. Nick Awde
Brian
Appleton - Let's Look at Sound Pleasance
He wrote the first ever prog rock song three months before the Moody Blues
ripped him off, and he's been half-inched by every star in modern popular
music since, leaving him eking out a miserable existence as a suspended
part-time lecturer in media studies. Ah, but Brian Appleton still has
his first love, music. And the means to produce it (tape-to-tape and digital).
And so, in between recounting the sorry tale of how wife Wendy is leaving
him for another man, he riffs through the intricacies of the recording
process, involving ditties of his own composition and found noises generated
from the audience. The unsettling thing is that the facts that he reels
off to make us laugh are in fact just that, facts. Sound waves of seven
cycles per second really do kill people. There really was a French factory
that was uniwttingly emitting them. Twenty-seven really was an optimum
age for sixties rock stars to depart for the great gig in the sky. It's
even cleverer than it looks and is ridiculously addictive. Approach with
great caution unless in possession of the Guinness Book of Hit Singles.
Nick Awde
Penny
Arcade Gilded Balloon II
The New York performance artist known as Penny Arcade offers a program
that is part stand-up, part reminiscence and part Speakers Corner rant.
The mixture is disconcerting and disorienting, and only the fact that
her soundman always knows when to come in with the music cues prevents
the suspicion that she has occasionally lost the plot and begun to ramble
incoherently. The backbone of her piece is regret and outrage at the ways
Manhattan's sub-bohemian Lower East Side has become gentrified, but this
takes her from simple satire of airheaded Midwesterners let loose in New
York to real anger at the mores, and particularly the political correctness,
of a neo-conservative younger generation. She jumps between topics and
levels of discourse without warning or transition, an insightful deflation
of Jack Kerouac's myth followed instantly by petty complaints about dog
owners, an extended monologue in the voice of a transvestite heroin addict
sandwiched between slim jokes about alien abductions or the menopause.
By the time she closes with a 30-years-too-late screed of outrage at the
song Aquarius, any pretence of actually entertaining an audience has long
since been abandoned, as we have merely been held hostage for an hour
to her pet peeves and obsessions. Gerald Berkowitz
As
It Is In Heaven Assembly
Rooms
Arlene Hutton's lovely little play is set in the women's quarters of a
Shaker community, one of the religious sects based on a simple life that
flourished in 19th century America. Between spontaneous bursts of hymn
singing, the women go about their domestic tasks with the joy that comes
from the conviction they are doing God's work. Most of the play is low-key
and gentle in its effect, as we get to know the women as individuals and
learn, for example, that many joined the community the way medieval women
joined convents, because they were widows or orphans with no place else
to go, and that faith developed afterwards. We joy for an imbittered woman
whose children had all died, as she slowly comes out of her shell, and
we take pleasure along with a couple who indulge themselves by singing
in forbidden (because too ornate) harmony. A plot is generated when some
of the younger sisters start having visions, threatening the complacency
of the elders, but the crisis is resolved (as it evidently actually was,
historically) by absorbing the new mysticism into the religion. A gentle,
quietly moving piece, very much an ensemble production, it is far more
satisfying than many more melodramatic works. Gerald Berkowitz
Ay, Carmela!
Traverse
Excellent cast, set, production, play... what could go wrong? Well, unfortunately
the translation is leaden, one of the actors has made the fatal choice
to direct and the rest simply topples into a well co-ordinated mess. Set
in the Spanish Civil War, this is a phenomenally powerful and yet exuberant
story of a music hall troupe summoned by the Fascists to give a final
performance for the Republican POWs they'll execute the next day. It provides
a grisly backdrop for unexpected humour and great zarzuela routines. Yet
there's little concept of thirties Spain as depicted in Jose Sanchis Sinisterra's
original, robbing us of a denouement, while contrast dissolves between
offstage scenes and the show for the condemned men. The manipulative Paulino
is played like a bit-part from a bad Carry On and the fiery Carmela becomes
a drab kitchen sink monotone. Such holes in characterisation mean that
most opportunities for humour are lost. About as informative as Franco's
shrivelled bollocks and about as Spanish as Ikea (funnily enough, if you
close your eyes it is a perfect radio piece). But this review is as futile
as Carmela's mad stand for liberty. The plaudits will rain in and bums
will eagerly fill seats to overflowing - because this is precisely how
Middle England/Scotland/wherever likes to see its funny foreign plays
done. Nick Awde
The
Bald Prima Donna Komedia
Roman Eagle Lodge
Asylum Theatre Company reinvents Ionesco's classic of absurdism into a
two-handed tour-de-force of acting and direction that is a total delight.
The play itself offers the ultimately inventive exploitation of language's
ability to be divorced entirely from meaning. Characters tell each other
things they already know, a whole family is named Bobby Watson, a couple
struggle very hard to prove logically that they know each other, and stories
are told that are grammatically impeccable but make no sense. To this
linguistic razzle-dazzle, director Ali Robertson has added the wild card
of having only one actor and one actress in the play. The very British
Smiths, the mousy Martins, the cockney maid and the blokish fire chief
are all played by Geraldine O'Grady and Donal Gallagher, sometimes all
at once, with instant transformations and totally distinct characterizations
that are a marvel of versatility and of mutual trust and support. Those
who know the play will rediscover it in this new production, while those
who don't can still be thrilled by the performers' high energy and total
control. Of course all the fun ultimately doesn't mean anything, but in
the case of Ionesco one can confidently assert that it isn't supposed
to. Gerald Berkowitz
BecauseHeCan
Drummond Theatre
This is a really bad play, further evidence, if such were needed, that
Arthur Kopit was a one trick pony when he wrote Oh Dad Poor Dad forty
years ago (Well, maybe two tricks Indians was OK). In this one a successful
New York couple find their lives taken over and rewritten by a vindictive
computer hacker, and that's the whole thing. We're not made to particularly
care about the couple, or to understand the hacker; and there isn't much
of a point beyond warning us of the danger that this might happen to us.
Aside from being a weak story, it's bad theatre: we are told everything
and shown nothing, with the majority of the play devoted to simple exposition
of a plot we never see acted out. Meanwhile, there are obvious borrowings
from a variety of other plays, most obviously Zooman and the Sign, in
having the villain wander about the edges of the story addressing the
audience. Anyway, it's a bad play, and the usually polished University
of Southern California company can do nothing with it, in a production
that has no pacing, no believability, no reality. A real one-to-miss.
Gerald Berkowitz
Bed
Among the Lentils
Pleasance
This revival of Nichola McAuliffe's performance in an Alan Bennett Talking
Heads piece, first seen in Watford last year, is a rich and deeply satisfying
late addition to the fringe programme. McAuliffe has explored the role
of the mousy vicar's wife who gradually confesses both alcoholism and
infidelity so that she can now present every nuance of the deceptively
simple monologue's complex emotions. Starting from a cheery irony toward
her husband's stuffiness and various colourful parish characters, she
hints ever so slightly at an underlying unhappiness, so that you could
easily miss the first mentions of visits to the off-license. A hilarious
episode of tipsy flower-arranging seems the exposure of the play's big
secret, making the second revelation of trysts with an Indian grocer all
the more surprising to first-time audiences. The intimate setting of a
fringe venue gives McAuliffe the opportunity to employ much quieter and
more subtle acting than in a large theatre, as when she realises that
she has inadvertently insulted her lover, and her face is a rapidly changing
mask that flashes from shock to pain to shame to deepest grief. In an
entirely different league from most fringe theatre, the play displays
the outstanding sensitivity and skill of both author and actress.
Gerald Berkowitz
Bedbound
Traverse
Enda Walsh's two-character play is extremely bizarre, so much so that
it could very easily alienate audiences or, when its pieces finally come
together, stun them to the point of not being able to appreciate its considerable
virtues. It is a remarkable piece of work, emotionally draining and mind-bending,
and also a vehicle for two powerful performances. It is really difficult
to describe without spoiling its effect. In a tiny room, barely big enough
to hold a bed, we see a girl who seems either retarded or mad, and an
older man who is clearly obsessed. In alternating monologues she describes
a nightmare existence, while he proudly tells of rising from stockboy
to owner of his company. And here's where I've got to get vague: he tells
us things that make us suddenly realise that she is not mad, but has been
sanely describing an insane situation that he insanely created. The revelations,
which may come in too much of a rush to be absorbed, are really mind-blowing.
Meanwhile, under the author's direction, Liam Carney and Norma Sheahan
give two intense and overpowering performances. Gerald Berkowitz
David
Benson - To Be Frank Pleasance Dome
Like his earlier show on Kenneth Williams, David Benson's exploration
of Frankie Howerd is part imitation, part attempt to understand himself
through parallels to the late comedian. As in the Williams show, Benson
is at his strongest when talking of himself, somehow channelling his model
without direct imitation. In this loosely-scripted performance, Benson
invites audience reminiscences of Howerd and uses them in his search for
a point of contact by which he can identify with the figure he can so
easily imitate externally. He finds it in the up-and-down nature of both
their careers, his own having languished after the brief glory of his
Williams show. And so, when he imagines his own comeback at a gay benefit,
we sense Howerd's unhappiness, egotism, obsessive preparation and ambiguity
about his own sexuality creeping into Benson's self-portrait. Many performers
can do imitation-based tributes to others. Benson's special gift is the
ability to absorb his subject into himself, so that Benson-being-Benson
ultimately captures more of Frankie Howerd's essence than Benson-doing-Howerd.
Gerald Berkowitz
Berkoff's
Hell and Dostoevsky's Dream of a Ridiculous Man Hill
Street
George Dillon has made career choices, in his repertoire and his performance
style, that doom him to forever live in the shadow of Steven Berkoff.
It is almost as if a fine singer chose a career as an Elvis impersonator,
as one can hardly appreciate Dillon's considerable talent when all one
can see is B-grade Berkoff. Without the open joy of performing that Berkoff
brings to his acting, Dillon is rather glum at best, and a programme of
two dark works about would-be suicides is pretty heavy going. Hell, the
monologue of a man sinking into the unbearable pain of loneliness, is
performed in near-darkness. Dillon sits in almost motionless profile as
his amplified voice seems disassociated from his body, creating a portrait
more of emotional deadness than of unbearable anguish. The Dostoevsky
gives him the opportunity to be more active and varied in his presentation,
as this despairing madman has a vision that carries him through renewed
hope, sudden guilt and then renewed dedication to life in a complex emotional
journey. In both pieces, the intensity of Dillon's performance is impressive,
and were it not that one always sees the ghost of his model doing it so
much better (I hate to keep harping on this point, but he does bring it
on himself), it would be overpowering. Gerald Berkowitz
Berkoff's
Women Assembly Rooms (Reviewed at a previous Fringe)
Linda Marlowe, who has created most of Steven Berkoff's female roles,
brings two decades of experience and understanding to this delightfully
larger-than-life programme of excerpts. From the uncensored sexuality
of Helen in Decadence, its obscenity purified by her innocent self-delight,
to Clytemnestra pausing in her murderous anger to weep for the victims
of war, Marlowe's instant characterisations are fully formed and overwhelming
in their intensity. All one's favourite set pieces are here - Doris on
family love in the cinema, the Sphinx spitting out her contempt of men,
Helen reliving a fox hunt. On a more subdued note, the short story From
My Point of View offers a sensitive portrait of a woman who settles for
a small life because that's all that's on offer. Josie Lawrence's direction
anchors the characterisations in a realism that contrasts with Berkoff's
usual highly stylized mode, and thus helps give Marlowe's performance
a warmth and depth that are a revelation. Gerald Berkowitz
Best
of Scottish Comedy The Stand
With mediocre comics charging twice as much for shorter shows elsewhere,
the Stand's offer of three comics for £6 is definite value-for-money.
The mix changes from time to time, with MC Jane Mackay the constant. A
brassy, confident comic, Mackay quickly gets the audience warmed up with
a series of pro-Scottish and anti-English jokes, establishing her north-of-the-border
credentials so she can later poke fun at Scottish targets as well. Her
subjects - fat, sex, drink and the boredom of highland village life -
may be predictable, but she attacks them with energy. Frankie Boyle is
a young comedian with a boyish charm and cheeriness that immediately get
the audience on his side. Like many others, he picks on individuals in
the audience, with fast-thinking responses to hometowns and jobs, and
insults that never go too far. Prepared material includes a witty take
on the sex advice in women's magazines and the image of Geordie polar
explorers. The artist known as Vladimir McTavish has to work somewhat
harder to win the audience over, with fulminations against immigrant beggars
taking work away from Scots not quite registering. It isn't until he gets
onto safer, more conventional territory like alcohol that he scores, though
he is to be commended for attempting riskier material with inventive paedophile
and IRA jokes. Gerald Berkowitz
Susan
Black - The World's Gone Mad! CO2
Susan Black's solo show gives the singer-comedienne the opportunity to
display both her impressive vocal range and her seriously warped sense
of humour to audience-delighting effect. Presenting a string of characterisations,
from addled 1920s movie star, through alcoholic 50s pop singer, to Pavarotti-sized
opera diva, Black displays a finely-toned ear for parody along with a
voice that is likely to leap an octave without warning and the best falsetto
tremolo since Tiny Tim. She is also likely to take each character into
an unanticipatable direction, either comically or musically, as when the
film star sings of a sailor lover with an inconvenient interest in wearing
her clothes, or the diva must convert a pruning fork into the tuning variety.
Add in enough elaborate wig and costume changes ("I'm heavily into velcro")
to turn a drag queen purple with envy, along with opening and closing
numbers that suggest Annie Lennox on some deeply mind-altering substance,
and this barely-describable show is an hour you are not likely to forget.
To tell the truth, I'm not absolutely certain it's actually good - the
free sample drinks they were handing out at CO2 may have contributed --
but I know the fringe experience would be a lot poorer without it. Gerald
Berkowitz
Adam
Bloom Pleasance
He darts around a lot and he's a master of the mundane observation. He
plays the flute to a tape of his own routines and got mugged earlier this
year. Yes, Adam Bloom is truly a man on the outside looking in, and Edinburgh's
a funnier place for it. Like a nervous tic he prods you into bemused laughter
over why gay men wear tight tops, how to edit out Eminem's homophobic
bits, plus a remarkable yet wholly plausible theory about the singularity
of willies. Mobile phone rings get rapped, and the fact he was mugged
of his own Nokia provides a handy vehicle for a learning session on the
inner workings of the comic craft. One of the most infuriating comics
around, because it's nigh on impossible to spot which bits are scripted
and which are off the cuff, Bloom's leaps of logic can be mildly awesome
- from foot operation to God to masturbation. And he's always worrying
the edge of humour like an insane Jack Russell - if the joke doesn't work,
he'll come back to it from a zillion different angles until it does. Much
to his audience's bemused appreciation. Nick Awde
Blue
Remembered Hills
C Too
Dennis Potter's jaundiced view of the innocence of childhood, originally
a television film, is given an effective staging by the Repton School's
Rep Theatre Company. Potter's conceit, to have adults play ten-year-olds,
has some of the same effect of drag performances since these are clearly
not real children, they become essence-of-child and thus more universalised.
We first see the 1940s boys innocently playing war games while the girls
play house, but gradually Potter's deconstruction of the myth of innocence
begins, with the casual cruelties of which children are so capable, and
a strict alpha-male pecking order that could rival any animal species.
By the end, when the children take an irreversible leap into adult-style
hypocrisy, childhood can never look quite the same. This all comes across
totally successfully in the Rep Theatre production, which is superior
to some of the professional offerings on the Fringe. Gerald Berkowitz
b9:
clinch mountain lookout C Underground
Imagine a family that owes its gene pool to Barbie, Ken and Twin Peaks.
Throw in a dollop of Third Rock from the Sun and you'll get an inkling
of what happens behind their lace curtains in Wakka Wakka's disturbingly
humorous snapshot of suburban Americana. This nuclear unit of Mom and
Pop and apple-pie kids is right out of the catalogue. In their fitted
kitchen they gaily hold quizzes on world capitals, sing songs about John
Wayne, while the kids hide in disgust at the heavy petting of their still
affectionate parents. Everything's hunky-dory, okey-dokey, a touch Rock
and Doris - even when the kids beat the crap out of each other. It's all
jolly japes, or is it? Cut to a decade or so later and they're now divorced
burn-outs, with S&M clones surreally on the doorbell and in the closet.
A timeshift deeper into Eraserhead territory finds them still together
in the decrepitude of their twilight years, albeit in cantankerous conflict.
Throw into the mix a blubbery bingo caller, a louche cabaret crooner,
whose inane songs function as a chorus, plus an unhealthy obsession with
cafetieres, and you've got a remarkable yet demented piece of visual theatre
- or maybe they've simply watched too many reruns of Blue Velvet.
Nick Awde
Born
African Augustine's
Zimbabwe's Over the Edge Theatre brings its group-created look at the
lives of contemporary Africans to an Edinburgh that has been impressed
by the company's work in past years, but may be disappointed by this outing.
Three actors - Kevin Hanssen, Wiina Msamati and Craig Peter - play, respectively,
a privileged white man, a black servant woman and an unemployed coloured
(i.e., mixed-race) man. The white, brought up in a particularly liberal
family, discovers how his culture and colour inexorably push him toward
unconscious racism. The black woman is burdened with a son who drifts
into violent crime, and can find comfort and dignity only in remaining
true to her own values. The coloured man is forced to piece together a
sense of identity and of manhood with little help from his past or his
culture. The three actors also several subsidiary roles in each other's
adventures, but the whole thing is paced so very, very slowly (direction
by Msamati and Zane E. Lucas) that there is neither any sense of urgency
to the plots nor any joy in the acting transformations. The pace also
gives us too much time to be aware of the clichés and soap opera elements
in the plots - for example, the criminal son attacks a man who turns out
to be his half-brother by the father who deserted his mother years ago
and now encounters her again - well, you get the idea. In short, the play
is well-meaning but barely adequate as drama, relying too much on its
audience's good will and political-cultural sympathy to carry it over
its theatrical weakness. Gerald Berkowitz
Broken
Blossoms C Venue
From the Victorian story that served as the basis for one of D. W. Griffith's
greatest silent films, Negativequity have formulated a physical theatre
piece that is never as evocative and effective as they would wish. In
London's East End, a Chinese labourer watches sadly as a Cockney prizefighter
abuses his daughter, while in flashback her unwed mother bemoans her outcast
fate. The four figures rarely share the stage and even more rarely interact,
significantly reducing the play's ability to create character or evoke
empathy. Instead, in isolated monologues or mime sequences the Chinese
character philosophises in self-consciously poetic broken English, the
father struts his machismo in sub-Berkoffian terms, the daughter bustles
about in silent despair, and the mother compulsively re-enacts her banishment
in shame. Expressionistic whiteface and repetitive stylised movements
reinforce the reminders of Berkoff, though without his obscene poetry
or rhythmic energy. Even the few scenes that would seem guaranteed to
resonate emotionally, as when the Chinese man gives the girl her first
real doll, have no evocative power (One can imagine what Lillian Gish
must have done with that moment in the film). There is undoubtedly much
skill and dedication in this company, but it has not been channelled into
an effective theatre piece. Gerald Berkowitz
Scott
Capurro Pleasance
He's mean and he's lean (well, that's what a month in Edinburgh does for
you), and Scott Capurro's now unwinding in a couple of late-night specials
for the benefit of an adoring public. Taxiing straight over after the
curtain falls at his show at the Assembly Rooms, the comic strolls onstage
to launch into his trademark tirade against lesbians, past lovers, Scotland,
the USA, the audience, himself, his gran (she died at last) and, well,
everything. It's funny, fast and furious. Never one to sit on his laurels,
Capurro's always inserting new material and what's making his eyes water
this year is the one-star review he got from The Guardian for his main
show F**king Our Fathers. The fact that everyone else has wowed over his
full-length play and that co-star John Cardone has got a Stage acting
award nomination has totally passed him by. Hell has no fury like a comic
spurned and fuck he's funny when he's letting it all hang out. One suspects
the rejection will feature high in his stand-up stuff for years to come.
Jackie Clune should have been on bill-sharing duties but her throat was
feeling a little raw (cue gentle, er, ribbing from Capurro) and she couldn't
make it, which was a pity, since their styles go down well together. Anyway,
that just meant we got double Capurro, which he was happy to accommodate.
So nice to catch him so relaxed. Nick Awde
Catastrophe
Komedia St Stephen's
Three of Samuel Beckett's late short plays are brought together in this
dark and evocative programme directed by David Lavender that is perhaps
only slightly more sentimental in its interpretations than the author
might have preferred. In Rockaby, Denise Evans plays the nearly mute woman
rocking while her recorded voice recites a spiralling account of a soul
gradually loosening its ties to the world and giving itself over to death.
The recorded words are beautifully and delicately read, though the live
actress's occasional outbursts of "More!" as she instinctively resists
the end have just a bit too much desperation in them. Ohio Impromptu presents
two identical-looking men, one (George Dillon) reading to the other (Mark
Hewitt) about a man reading to another, in an image of the sterility of
self-reflective self-absorption. Again, Dillon gives in to the actor's
temptation to make the reading a little more actory and passionate than
the situation might warrant, but not to the point of warping its effect.
Catastrophe is Beckett's least characteristic play in its overtly political
content, as a prisoner is prepared and posed for some sort of show trial
or display. Dillon's director is clearly a commissar rather than theatre
figure, and Evans's assistant a cool lab technician, both to strong effect.
Gerald Berkowitz
The
Chanclettes: Gone With The Wig George Square Theatre
Improbably masculine Mediterranean gentlemen from Barcelona transform
themselves before your very eyes into dazzling divas in a lavish, hi-octane
celebration of "TV trash, glamour and cinema cult-culture". I can see
why the idea might not grab you by the gusset, so all I can say is, "Go
see it!" - you won't regret a second. Dancing and miming to a montage
of sound bites and songs (itself worthy of an Emmy for its inventiveness)
the ladies not once drop a beat in this alternative camp hitlist from
the past five decades. The usual suspects - All about Eve, Judy Garland,
Ab Fab, Cher - are joined by boob babe trio Sam Fox, Dolly Parton and
Aretha Franklin, and a very bizarre Bee Gees number. Wisely avoiding all
the done to death cliches, there's room for new additions to the gay pantheon,
such as, er, Prince Edward. Like Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the Chanclettes
reach out to one and all with a million routines and even more changes
of frocks. There's something for everyone, even for those whose lives
are untouched by sequins and boas - they get to spot where the quotes
and songs come from. Gorgeous, glitzy, funny, and easily the best night
out on the Fringe. Nick Awde
Andrew
Clover - Puppy Love Pleasance
Much as we reviewers try, we can't click with everything we see. It might
be a question of taste, ideology perhaps, or simply last night's dodgy
curry. My problem with Andrew Clover is that I hear his audience laughing
from the belly upwards and I don't understand why. The theme is first
love, which gives Clover ample opportunity to spin out his tale of stumbling
across his childhood sweetheart in adulthood and making a go of it again
while plumbing the audience's own experiences. Although the comic lost
the thread about ten chaotic minutes in, he happily stumbled across an
American in the front row who proved a goldmine of bizarre experiences,
and was later upstaged by his own puppy toppling slowly backwards down
the back drapes. This is potentially glorious, anarchic mayhem that mystifyingly
converts into Habitat humour - a sort of Mr Buffo the Clown for adults,
but I was obviously deprived since we never had clowns at our kids' parties
(we trapped pythons and scorpions instead). Oddly endearing, if only for
his psychic emotion-fest at the end which guaranteed that everyone left
loving each other and, more importantly, Andrew Clover. Nick Awde
Closer
Than Ever Garage
Theatre
David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of Off-
and Off-off-Broadway, having written dozens of small-scale musicals over
the decades, along with their other film, TV and theatre work. This plotless
revue of songs possibly is and certainly seems to be a collection
of out-takes and leftovers from their other shows and random songs with
no context. The general tone is bittersweet, with a touch of New York
hip cynicism. She Loves Me Not, for example, is a trio of two boys and
a girl, each in unrequited love for one of the others, while One of the
Good Guys is the lament of a loving husband who never strayed, and You
Want to Be My Friend? is a woman's bitter reaction to a departing lover.
The music is clearly the work of a pro, sometimes (I Wouldn't Go Back)
quite complex, and only occasionally betraying the inevitable influence
of Sondheim (What Am I Doin? could be an out-take from Company). The young
performers from the University of Nevada are all charming and talented,
the clear stars being the two graduate professionals among them, the macho-but-sensitive
Todd Horman and the sensual showgirl Chrissy Wright. Gerald Berkowitz
The Club
Gilded Balloon (Reviewed in London)
David Williamson's 1980 portrait of an Australian football team at war
with itself is a comedy sadly lacking in laughs, at least in this revival
by John Thomas Productions. The club president and coach detest each other,
the players threaten a strike, the star is a spaced-out pothead, the former
coach resents everyone, the club administrator is sneakily ambitious,
and virtually none of this registers as funny. There are hints in the
script that the author intended each character to be grotesquely eccentric
in different ways, so that their exaggerated bouncing off each other would
have escalating comic effect. But Jonathan Guy Lewis has directed all
but the laid-back druggie on exactly the same single unwavering note of
angry shouting throughout. As a result, only the most extreme culture
clashes, like the player's dreamy admission that he finds football cosmically
insignificant, or the old man's reactions while smoking what he doesn't
realize is a joint generate any titters, and not even the central running
gag that has everyone swearing undying loyalty to everyone else to their
faces but plotting against them the instant they leave the room has any
comic snap. Gerald Berkowitz
The
Cocktail Party Greyfriars Kirk House
T. S. Eliot's verse drama was commissioned for the Edinburgh Festival
of 1949, so it is nice to see a Fringe company finally reviving it. It's
not an easy play, and the young West Ten Productions, made up of recent
Oxford graduates, don't really triumph over it. But it's a thought-provoking
and intermittently moving work, and I'm glad to have seen it. Eliot introduces
us to a group of upper-class Londoners whose lives seem at first to be
bound by the frivolous world of cocktail parties. Gradually we discover
that some of them are deeply troubled and that others (and this is where
the play gets a bit otherworldly) are part of a circle of wise "guardians"
who advise and manipulate people into accepting their destinies. In particular,
a woman destined for sainthood and martyrdom is guided toward embracing
this path, while others are taught to accept their limits. Unfortunately
this production's limits are encapsulated in their faith that a little
talcum in the hair will make a 20-year-old look 60. All the acting is
external and signifying, all the blocking is clumsy - and, in short, the
play's virtues and limitations come through despite the production, not
because of it. Gerald Berkowitz
The
Comedy Zone Pleasance
This year's fab foursome for the wee hours is a cracking package tour
around comedy with something for everyone. On compere duties and displaying
a nice line in crowd control is Rob Deering, who creates an impact - literally
- the moment he walks in. He peppers the proceedings with truncated songs
by Madonna and Dido - clearly the man has a bad case of guitarus interruptus.
Barely has Karl Theobald taken the mic and he's already halfway through
an epic shaggy dog ramble about the absurdities of growing up, from the
cradle to the grave, taking in an infestation of celebrities in his kitchen
along the way. Under the gentle humour lies a surprisingly hard edge Next
on comes Francesca Martinez, greatly improved from last year. The sweetest
face in the business, she ruthlessly plunders her disability (cerebral
palsy) through driving tests, sex and hashish in the carpet (don't ask).
Her stature may be wobbly but never the jokes. Closing is John Oliver,
whose laconic if not incisive trawl through British habits paradoxically
makes him all the more endearing. Inventor of the self-regulating heckle,
he addresses the implausibility of reality TV, a bad day on the foot and
mouth cull shift, and the precise sexiness of the Birmingham accent. As
I said, a cracking package. Nick Awde
The Complete
Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) Assembly Rooms (Reviewed
at a previous Fringe)
More than a decade ago, the three American guys who called themselves
the Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC, geddit?) put together this pastiche
covering - or at least mentioning - all of Shakespeare's plays in 90 minutes.
Those familiar with the British tradition of university revues will recognize
the format (Americans, think Saturday Night Live with erudition and literary
jokes in place of the pop culture references) - a string of sketches and
stand-up bits mixing very clever verbal wit with bawdy jokes and sight
gags. So, for example, Titus Andronicus, which climaxes in a cannibalism
scene, is done as a parody of a TV cooking show (gore-met cooking, geddit?).
The history plays become an American football game with running commentary
(Henry IV passes to Henry V...). At their best they can be very clever,
as when they blend all those interchangeable comedies about mistaken identities
and girls disguised as boys into one all-purpose plot, Three Men and a
Little Transvestite. Even the groaner puns are worth it; Othello (who,
of course, gets a rap number), comes on with toy boats tied to him (he's
a Moor, geddit?). For my money, though, there's a little too much reliance
on easy physical humour, and a few too many pratfalls. The two longest
sketches are Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet, and both are built on the sight
gag of a six-foot guy galumphing about in a dress and wig as Juliet or
Ophelia. It gets a laugh, but it's too obvious a laugh, and not up to
the level of some of the shorter bits. The original trio have cloned themselves
a few times and head various touring companies, so you're likely to see
one or none of them. By its very nature the show is uneven (The sketches
can't all be gems), but it does deliver what it promises - 90 minutes
of fast-moving light entertainment. Gerald Berkowitz
Nina
Conti - Let Me Out Komedia Southside
Nina Conti (daughter of Tom) is a young classical actress who recently
began studying ventriloquism under the influence of charismatic writer-director-performer
and currently ventriloquism enthusiast Ken Campbell. Now Campbell has
written her a play to show off her newly-acquired skills, and neither
it nor her performance is particularly impressive. What passes for a plot
has Conti experimenting with various dummies to find one to adopt for
her act. She doesn't move her lips, and she can create different voices
and personalities for a Scottish bear, a method-acting snake, a gay monkey
and the like. But she hasn't mastered the B sound (or found a way to disguise
its near-impossibility), and she can't work with more than one voice at
a time or manage the transitions from doll to doll with any finesse. And
either through the fault of the writing or her performance, the play just
drifts rhythmlessly until it just stops abruptly. Conti may have mastered
some of the technical basics of ventriloquism, but she is a long way from
being ready for performance. Gerald Berkowitz
Crash
Pleasance
"I'm hurtful - that's my job!" sneers the local radio shock jock in reply
to a sympathetic caller he's just crushed verbally on the turntable. But
the following week the same nurse turns up at his home. Trying to turf
her out, the defensive DJ claims he's pushing our collective envelope,
but she wonders who is it that's really getting hurt Marshall (Joshua
Levine) and Carol (Sarah Edwardson) soon find themselves warming to each
other. But after their first date they are disturbed by the appearance
of Vivian (Sioned Jones), whose overbearing familiarity with Carol's new
beau adds a palpable layer of tension. A triangle evolves whose dynamics
are determined by the emotional wreckage of a crash from the past. Levine's
near flawless dialogue finds a good match in Simon Clark's direction and
although a detour into truth or dare territory means the play meanders
for a while, it soon gets back into the fast lane to complete this compelling
portrait of three burn-outs on the hard shoulder of life. And so intense
is the intimacy created by the cast, the audience is almost made to feel
intruders on these very private lives. A perfect chance to catch great
talent on the way up. Nick Awde
Crouching
Ferret, Hidden Beaver Komedia Southside
The genius of the talented writers/performers we know as Richard Dyball
and Alastair Kerr lies in deflating highbrow to middlebrow without insulting
the audience's intelligence. Even when the material's slight, they rarely
miss their mark and since they're gifted comic actors, there's none of
that off-putting cliqueness that surrounds stand-up comedy. To set the
mood, they bound on with a corporate presentation of breakdowns of the
comedy they provide per penny spent, before launching into a brilliantly
themed take on Edinburgh and the Fringe. Even the book festival gets a
rare burst of exposure when an ousted sports pundit gives a reading of
his disturbingly effete memoirs. And topping the audience faves are the
fastidious art critic delivering a fatuous Guardian lecture and a near
wordless salsa number between two socially challenged males. The characters
are so real they're almost scary. There's the half-talented but enthusiastic
West country comic duo doing a pub comedy benefit for a mate down on his
luck - Dyball and Kerr play the gig for real and so get double the laughs.
Add to this a Kirov Ballet pas de deux for football hooligans and you've
got as perfect a night out as your pennies will buy. Nick Awde
Dahling
You Were Marvellous C Belle Angele
Steven Berkoff's show biz satire, being given its world premiere by Wisepart
Productions, contains recognizable flashes of the author's wit and energy,
and his well-known contempt for the more commercial branch of the theatre.
But it is ultimately little more than an extended revue sketch, and not
very much more clever than a particularly bright undergraduate might have
written. In a trendy restaurant after a West End opening night, luvies
kiss air and stab backs. Everyone slates the show before the stars come
in and then praises them effusively. A Peter Hall-type director pontificates,
an American movie star trying to jump-start his stalled career exposes
his ignorance and vulgarity, a fringe director brags of his low-budget
commercial failures while putting away the champagne, and so on. It's
all delightfully bitchy, all clever, and ultimately all predictable. Under
Derek Bond's direction, the young cast are all more than adequate but
lack the snap that would make this sparkle. Gerald Berkowitz
Dance
Like A Man Komedia St Stephen's
Concern over the transfer of culture in the India of today laces this
over-ambitious play about two generations of creative folk. Two successful
bharatnatyam dancers, husband and wife, are now in their sixties and wondering
when they should take a bow into retirement. Meanwhile, their daughter
is showing great flair in continuing the family trade as her boyfriend,
an outsider, looks on in bemusement. An intriguing premise soon becomes
a tale of polemics and, despite excellent characterisation from the actors
and some nice flashes of humour, the story meanders into indifference
weighed down by too many ideas and not enough plot. Admittedly the production
is hamstrung by booming acoustics -one of the best spaces in town for
physical theatre, St Stephen's is unsuited for plays. No idea what this
was about - maybe an examination of cultural differences, maybe one of
generational conflict. There are good ideas in Mahesh Dattani's script
but it needs paring by at least 40 minutes. The few seconds of dance were
tantalisingly brief and it would boost things excellently to see more
- and help it make more sense. Harsh words perhaps, but since Prime Time
Theatre has had this on its books since 1995, you'd think someone would
have told them. Nick Awde
Dark
Is The Night Gilded Balloon II
An enjoyably journalistic theme links this adaptation of two of the tales
that filled the pages of long-gone mags like Amazing Stories. Kicking
off as a prelude is the short but effective The Night Wire, a slice of
creepy hokum about a man-eating fog creating deadline problems for an
international news agency. Manning the night shift are a pair of hardnosed
editors (Jonathan Coope and John Brenner) who idly debate the latest Test
scores from Australia until wire operator Philip Dinsdale becomes the
receptacle of a rolling news item that proves as deadly as it is unexpected.
Next dollop of horror is The Waxwork, a longer piece which allows the
atmosphere to get really cranked up. A struggling reporter (Dinsdale)
wants to write a feature on how he spent the night in a waxworks museum.
He convinces the unwilling manager (Coope) and nightwatchman (Dougie Arbuckle)
that it would make great PR too. Of course you know something's going
to happen, particularly since the hapless journalist picks the murderers'
section - duh! The shocks when they come make the entire hall jump. A
great, great cast makes excellent work of Paul Sellar's composite script,
with spot-on direction from Kenneth Bentley. Nick Awde
A
Dark River Theatre Workshop
Uzma Hameed's self-directed play for the Big Picture Company is an attempt
to raise rather banal material to romantic tragedy through the evocation
of myth and the utilization of dance, film and music effects. Two yuppie
lawyers in London prepare for their wedding when the visit of the groom's
cousin leads to a predictable triangle as he and the bride are magnetically
drawn to each other. Dance, film and dream sequences suggest that something
more than soap opera is at stake, and eventually a supernatural element
is introduced to explain and justify the intense emotions. Unfortunately
the explanation, even if accepted, comes too late, and the clash between
the mundane plot and the frequent symbolic interruptions merely serves
to underline the dramatic cliches of the former. Anouska Laskowska has
the most difficult role as the dream-haunted bride who cannot understand
what is happening to her, while Ben Jones is stolid and single-dimensional
as the groom and Mido Hamada stuck with little more to do than skulk about
enigmatically as the lover. Gerald Berkowitz
A
Desire to Kill on the Tip of the Tongue C Underground
Xavier Durringer's play, skillfully translated and Anglicized by Mark
Ravenhill, catches a group of young people in dead-end lives at exactly
the moment when they realize that's where they are. We meet a cross-section
of the twenty-something urban unemployable class - a hotheaded ladies'
man, an ineffectual hanger-on, a calm slightly older guy, a gal-pal -
spending one more futile Saturday night outside a dance club. The stud
has seduced a married woman, and expects her to run off with him. But
her decision to leave both husband and lover for an uncertain independence
has reverberating effects. Friends turn against friends, dangerous truths
are told, some realize it is time to move on while others face the degree
to which they are trapped. Very little actually happens, and indeed -
as the title suggests -- stasis and paralysis are central to the play's
vision. Under Richard Twyman's direction, performances subtly capture
the play's insights. Will Irvine, playing what at first seems a simple
hothead, lets us discover a stifled man whose energies can only explode
in violence or sex, while Taylor Lilley gradually reveals that his character's
calm disguises a deep weariness in search of escape. Gerald Berkowitz
Diatribe
of Love Assembly Rooms
Gabriel Garcia Marquez' only play is a monodrama for an actress that covers
familiar terrain with a satisfying number of subtle variants, and Linda
Marlowe uses the opportunity to display her performing range. The monologue
of a rich woman approaching her 25th wedding anniversary and facing the
emptiness and deadening compromises of her marriage is predictable in
its broad outlines: nostalgic for the breath-taking romance of her youth,
resentful of her husband's infidelities and even more for his allowing
their relationship to wither, and aware of her own lost youth and lost
opportunities. By nature a broad and passionate actress, Linda Marlowe
takes full advantage of the script's seething and then exploding anger.
But it is clear that her real enjoyment comes in communicating the author's
quieter insights, such as the fact that she misses pillow talk more than
sex, and that her husband's ultimate betrayal was in choosing a mistress
uglier than she. The memory of one opportunity to stray that she rejected
is faced without regret until she suddenly realizes for the first time
that she could have taken that brief pleasure at no emotional or moral
cost. In these and similar moments of quiet epiphany, Linda Marlowe raises
her character well beyond the conventional and familiar. Gerald
Berkowitz
Dr.
Bunhead v. The World's Biggest Bogey George Square Theatre
Courtesy of Tom Pringle and Dr Bunhead's Science Education comes this
multi-themed barrage of hilarious contraptions and experiments where the
equation of successful kids shows, poo/wee/bums, is totted up with bogeys
and bottom burps. Each proves a remarkable trove of scientific fact and
an opportunity to demonstrate all the fun things you can do with them
since they involve releases of energy, which means unlimited bangs, crashes,
booms and explosions. The scientific framework means that Dr Bunhead can
roll off irresistibly big words like magic spells in a way that small
ears find evocative, and so there's nothing strange when he suggests that
we look at the fun things you can do with polymers. An experiment to create
Mr Wippy's giant whirling poo is my favourite, followed by using botty
burps as an environmental alternative for a cooker (don't try this at
home), which bizarrely but logically moves on to warts, the expansive
influences of liquid nitrogen on a hot water bottle, cryogenics (don't
ask) and Dr Molecule the Stunt Jelly Baby. Explosive fun for all ages,
and the only show I can think of where a banana gets wild applause just
for being a banana. Nick Awde
Doctor
Prospero Assembly Rooms
Gareth Armstrong follows up his award-winning Shylock with this solo show,
written by Stephen Davies, about the man who may have inspired Shakespeare's
Tempest. John Dee was an eminent Elizabethan philosopher-scientist-astrologer
who was in and out of royal favour during his life, and famous enough
for Shakespeare to have heard of him. This solo play imagines a direct
connection, with Armstrong alternating monologues by Dee with possibly
related passages from The Tempest. His account of his love of learning
has parallels to some of Prospero's speeches, for example, and his description
of a treacherous assistant jigsaws into speeches by Caliban. As clever
as all this is, the parallels frequently seem forced, and are rarely illuminating,
either of Shakespeare or of Dee. Indeed, the program notes tell you more
about Dee than the play does. Still, Armstrong's performance is engrossing,
and he reads the Tempest selections well. Gerald Berkowitz
FareWel
Traverse
In Ian Ross's play for Canada's Prairie Theatre Exchange, the residents
of a small Indian village lead dead-end lives punctuated only by the occasional
wake and the irregular appearance of government welfare (or fare-wel)
cheques. Their days and community identities are divided between Pentecostal
Christianity, traditional beliefs and the paralysis of dependency. One
young man, fired with dreams of self-governance and casino riches, tries
to seize control of the tribal government, but the endemic stasis is too
ingrained. By the end, very tiny steps have been taken toward community
and cultural identity, but nothing has really changed. By its very nature
more a character study and slice-of-life than drama, the play benefits
from an unquestionable authenticity but suffers from a weakness in structure
and lack of forward movement. Most of the cast, including the author as
an alcohol-befuddled former tribal elder and Michael C. Lawrenchuk as
a man out of step with his neighbours just because he has ambition and
a work ethic, have been with the play since its 1996 premiere. Some of
the other performances are just this side of amateurish, and are not helped
by a sluggish and rhythmless direction. Gerald Berkowitz
Fern
Hill Assembly Rooms
Guy Masterson, whose solo recitation of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood
has been a popular fringe staple in past years, now turns his attention
to some of Thomas's other works, in a programme which is just as impressive
and is likely to be just as successful a touring piece. Masterson is a
very dynamic performer, with a style ideally suited for Thomas's kaleidoscopic
prose pieces, like Holiday Memory in which we see an entire beach scene
and population through a boy's eyes. With something new leaping into consciousness
every few words (Thomas loves cataloguing lists of sights, sounds, smells),
Masterson instantly and briefly transforms himself into the person or
thing being described and just as instantly becomes the next. While this
occasionally comes closer to charades than acting - "He walked [mimes
walking] up [points up] the hill [gestures diagonal]Š" - it is both fascinating
and very evocative of Thomas's Breugal-like scenes. The similar Visit
to Grandpa's and Christmas Memory are equally alive and evocative in Masterson's
performance, while a selection of poems is recited more starkly and simply.
Thomas fans will be delighted, while newcomers will want to run out and
read the originals, with Masterson's image forever associated with the
words. Gerald Berkowitz
Fish
Supper The Stand
It's a rare thing nowadays to be served up a straight-ahead, no-frills,
gimmick-free sketch review. Concocted by Julie Coombe, Miles Jupp, John
Littlejohn and Colin Ramone - writers/performers who are bewildering fluent
in every dialect north of Watford - this is an hour that bubbles with
a potent range of ingredients. The funeral of an amnesiac family's granddad
on the day the son forgets he's getting married, takes the scenario to
its insanely logical conclusion where everyone forgets that they forgot
to forget what they'd already forgotten. Shorter visual quips include
the X-rated holiday snaps viewing session and a request for directions
to the clitoris ("It's on the tip of my tongue"). The laughs can be unexpectedly
left-field, such as schoolboys debating Catholic morals with a tarty nun
and pervy bishop, in perfect verse. A mere starter that went down a storm.
Speciality of the house is their no-holds barred take on politics. The
disco-dancing Islamic fundamentalists just about passes the taste barrier,
while the Ulster terrorists declaring their gaydom at a tarring and feathering
is riotous, particularly when they come back to sing UDA! in Village People
guise. And, a rare thing in live comedy, the sketches just get better
and better as the show progresses. A prodigious talent. TV should snap
this lot up. Nick Awde
Foley
Traverse
Michael West's monodrama is a very subtle character study, too subtle
perhaps to be a fully effective theatre piece. A man (Andrew Bennett)
simply stands there and gives a somewhat rambling account of his life
and his family. Irish Protestant gentry, they come across as dour, lifeless
and loveless, even as he describes some satirically comic scenes drawn
from his somewhat unreliable memory. That unreliability the frequency
with which he must interrupt a narrative to acknowledge that he's confused
two events or got his chronology wrong is the first clue to West's subject,
though it is easy to miss it. What dominates the monologue is the speaker's
contempt toward his family for their lifelessness and his anger at his
Catholic ex-wife for her triviality and vulgarity. Only very late in the
90 minute play do we realise that these judgements are undercut by the
unreliability of his account, and that what we are actually hearing are
projections of a self-hatred based on his own empty and vulgar existence
(which means that some of the things he's told us about himself have also
been misremembered). This is in fact very sensitive and insightful characterisation,
but in theatrical terms it means that we do not know why this man is talking
to us or what the subject of the play is for far too much of its length.
Andrew Bennett gives a controlled and moving reading, but doesn't help,
as he should, by giving any foreshadowing in his performance of the complexities
to come. Gerald Berkowitz
Four
Dogs and a Bone Greyfriars Kirkhouse
John Patrick Shanley's satire on Hollywood skewers all the usual suspects
with considerable wit, so that, while there are no major new insights
on offer, there's a lot of fun to be had along the way. The producer of
a low-budget film (Jay Malarcher), a starlet clever enough to use her
stupidity as a tool (Aryn Kopp), a veteran actress who knows every trick
of the game (Kate Udall) and a screenwriter (Jerry McGonigle) who seems
at first a babe in the woods but who learns fast, take turns manipulating,
coddling, back-stabbing and generally screwing each other. And Shanley,
who's been there, catches it all with a perfect ear for each character's
particular style of doubletalk and with wickedly delighted satire. The
young American company play it with verve and energy and, violating my
general rule that actors should not direct themselves, Udall and McGonigle
combine co-direction with the two most shaded and adept performances.
Gerald Berkowitz
F**king
Our Fathers Assembly Rooms
Eminently offensive stand-up Scott Capurro has always had his elegaic
side - he just hides it well - and in this self-penned play the provocation
turns to provoking (as in thought) while leaving the traditional walk-out
factor commendably high (14 the night I was in). Two ageing (that's late
thirties) gay mates sit in nappies at a bar and watch the prime of San
Francisco manhood pass them by along the yellow brick road. Eyeing up
the talent, Capurro lets slip far more than he intends about what he really
wants in a man - a "hot sweaty retiree" - a concept John Cardone at first
ignores but soon finds irresistible. The pair embark on a close-to-the-knuckle
quest for a father figure, via altar boy antics, Colonel Von Trapp's greasy
glove and a butt-nacked shagfest on a lilo where the hickness of Cardone's
younger hooker reminds punter Capurro eerily of his dad. Things turn a
touch surreal when Father Time places an order for a cappuccino. The perfect
older man, naturally, and when was the last time you saw a naked scythe
onstage? Brilliant performances match brilliant writing - a bit like Waiting
for Godot played as Waiting for Mr Right. From the recognition glimmering
across the audience, it's clear that this fable about growing up has something
for everyone. Soft maybe, never flaccid, this is essential, rampant viewing.
(The asterisks are in the title, by the way.) Nick Awde
Gagarin
Way Traverse
Gregory Burke's comic drama begins with an uneducated petty thief wittily
analysing the philosophical limitations of Jean-Paul Sartre, and it never
stops surprising with its unexpected juxtapositions of genre, character
and mode. The title itself alerts us to an anomaly, a street in a small
Scottish town named after a Soviet cosmonaut, because of the Scottish
district's long communist sympathies. The philosopher-thief, played with
passion and intellectual intensity by Michael Nardone, and a more straight-forward
and politically committed friend (Billy McElhaney) have decided to kidnap
and kill the head of a multinational corporation, as a revolutionary gesture.
But they get the wrong man, a weary, locally-raised middle-management
type (Maurice Roeves) who vaguely sympathises with them but is older and
wiser enough to see the futility of their gesture. Add in a naive youngster
(Michael Moreland), and you have Shavian political debate, gangster melodrama
and low comedy in almost equal proportions. The debate is good - engrossing
and mind-stretching - while the characters develop in complex and unexpected
ways that engage our sympathies. In all, one of the most thoroughly satisfying
plays in Edinburgh. Gerald Berkowitz
The Game of Love and Death Rocket South
Bridge
Neil Bartlett's updating of Marivaux' comedy of manners is a witty and
stylish 1930s social romance that virtually cries out to be turned into
a musical comedy, perhaps with a Cole Porter score. While the basic premise
is squeezed a bit awkwardly into the updated setting, it is no sillier
than most musical plots: an upper-class couple facing a marriage arranged
by their fathers approach their first meeting with, unbeknownst to each
other, the same plan: each will trade places with his/her servant, the
better to observe the prospective spouse. The result is absolutely predictable
- both the supposed servants and the supposed masters fall in love, all
four thinking they are crossing class lines to do so - but the inevitable
working-out of the dance is fun to watch, and there are witty lines and
strong comic moments along the way. Unfortunately, this production by
the young Short Back and Sides Company has all the worst characteristics
of amateur theatre: shallow characterisations, gross overacting, funny
voices and accents, and a general clumsiness in moving about the stage.
Gerald Berkowitz
The
Good and Faithful Servant Rocket South Bridge
Joe Orton's short play is given a nicely-staged production by a young
student company. Always half social critic and half propriety-shocker,
Orton attacks most of the middle-class protestant values in this look
at old age. A man retiring after 50 years is fobbed off with worthless
gifts and the warning that he had better return his company uniform before
he goes. A chance meeting with an old woman recalls a brief tryst decades
ago and leads to the discovery of a grandson he never knew he had. Meanwhile
the grandson has got his own girl in trouble, and the old man is farmed
out to a hellish retirement home, and... Well, you get the idea. Along
with the farcical satire comes Orton's patented moral comedy, as characters
are repeatedly shocked by one sin while taking another in stride. The
deliberately two-dimensional quality of all this is cleverly captured
in a production that uses actual pop art cartoons for sets, and if things
flag a bit toward the end, there has been fun along the way. Gerald
Berkowitz
Good
Morning? Pleasance
Saturday morning. Three young office workers, destined one day for dazzling
careers in middle management hell, wake up on a sofa in strange flat.
Piecing together the events of the night before, their hazy Q&A session
to remedy alcohol-fuelled amnesia becomes a fractious puzzle of missing
wallets, stolen phone number and absent workmate. Soon the accusations
start to fly in this wickedly funny farce for the Scooby Doo generation.
Writer Eddie Rosen died in 1999 only weeks after completing the script
at the age of 18, but what he left is an absolute gift to actors Kali
Peacock, Steve Chaplin, Edward Price and Jonathan Tafler. Directed by
Sonia Ritter, their characters are unnervingly real, whose every gesticulation
adds to the humour levels. The show has its rough edges and begins to
overstretch its logic even before the weird workmate makes his appearance.
But it's a wonderfully simple concept - dare I use the word Ortonesque?
- and is even funnier for continually threatening to slip into deliciously
darker territory such as Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel. Put this on
at the West End -supporting it sensibly long-term - and you'll easily
attract a whole new generation of theatregoers. Nick Awde
Gusset
Komedia Roman Eagle Lodge
Walk around the crumbling garment districts of any of our cities and you'll
soon spot tiled into the facades of disused workshops the word Œhosiery'.
For long before Marks & Spencer, this nation was a powerhouse churning
out knickers to the world. Now no longer and this has spurred writer/performer
Elaine Pantling's semi-autobiographical search for answers to life through
a gusset cutter's now redundant skills. Direct from school to the factory,
Leicester lass Paula Potter learns her craft via initial humiliation under
a German overseer to the discovery that she has talent with the scissors.
As Paula is promoted from lowly overlocker to prestigious cutter, along
the way she describes the world of her workmates, her marriage and the
holiday fund. And like some miracle tree-bark from a tropical rain forest,
she has discovered that the gusset holds many uses for the good of humankind.
Not only does it serve as a handy metaphor for life but it also has properties
which are therapeutic and practical - the red/green gusset, for instance,
serves as a handy marital'sex switch'. Gently poignant yet always witty,
unlike Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, the pathos never once threatens to
strip away the humour, and one wishes there were more of the delicious
humour of reported dialogues with other characters. Knicker elastic for
the soul with a feelgood factor that rides high. Nick Awde
Rich
Hall and Dave Fulton Present The Terry Dullum Appeal
Assembly Rooms
"This isn't improv night - we've already chosen the disease!" Or so say
Hall and Fulton as they bound on stage to host their benefit night for
an 11-year-old boy and his sad plight. The comics first met at a gun fair
in southern Winsoncin, where they also stumbled across poor Terry, whose
affliction is not the lobster claw hands visible in the towering publicity
pic but Tourette's Syndrome. Sadly, due to stringent UK food laws on the
movement of crustaceans, Terry can't be with the show, so his bottler
dad Earl (Canadian comic genius Mike Wilmot) has popped over instead.
Earl's sozzled, foulmouthed speech indicates that his son's syndrome might
be in part inherited. The line-up includes WWF stars Rainmaker and Interrupter
intoning the poetry of Alaskan chanteuse Jewel through ill-fitting hoods
as Hall and Fulton take turns to rail against euros, global warming, Tom
Cruise and Bill Gates. Fulton's lay-in into Scottish mores is a masterpiece
of the now ritual harangue. Accompanied by a grungy guitar and bass combo,
Hall ends with an appropriately loopy singalong about the moral duty to
kill President Dubya. Gloriously outrageous, something different is promised
for every night. As laughs per minute, easily the Fringe's best value
for money - whoever's pocket it ends up in. Nick Awde
Hamlet!
The Musical C Venue
One of the sleeper hits of this year's Fringe, this pastiche entertainment
by Ed Jaspers and Alex Silverman is a spirited romp that benefits from
never taking itself, or its source material, too seriously. This is Hamlet-lite,
set to music ranging from cod Mozart to cod Lloyd Webber, with stops along
the way for direct take-offs of a couple of 1950s rock classics. Opening
with a tongue-in-cheek plot-establishing "Danish Blues," the score's other
highlights are the tango "To Thine Own Self Be True," the play-within-the-play
(The Mousetrap- The Musical, of course) built on instantly-recognizable
tunes from every musical of the past 20 years, and the Les Miz-flavoured
"To Be or Not To Be." Very little attempt is made to set Shakespeare's
words to music, the clash of classic plot and contemporary slang being
part of the joke. Hamlet himself (Dave Dorrian) is chubby and not very
bright, Claudius' prayer scene is just an opportunity for a sting of slapstick
failed attempts at murder, and the climactic duel involves hitting each
other with inflated rubber fish. An undoubted crowd-pleaser, this is still
more a jeu de spirit than fully developed show, though it has real potential
in the Return to the Forbidden Planet tradition. Gerald Berkowitz
Kevin
Hayes The Stand
I attempted to review this stand-up comic twice in the course of the Festival.
Both times he refused to go on because the audience was too small for
his liking, and had the venue give them their money back. Gerald
Berkowitz
Hess
- Prince of Spandau Komedia Roman Eagle Lodge
It is extraordinary to remember that held in captivity right in the heart
of Germany until his death in 1987 was one of the major architects of
the Third Reich - Hitler's right-hand man Rudolph Hess. In a bravura performance,
Ricardo Pinto homes in on the Nazi's unbelievably arrogant self-delusion
as he recalls in his cell the key events and players of his life. But
while director Catherine Jefford gives Pinto free rein where his strengths
lie, she should desist his dodgy German accent (more Transylvania than
Unter den Linden). Meanwhile, Helder Costa's script pushes effect over
substance - there is a whole generation out there ignorant of who Hess
was let alone General Salazar or Hess Junior. And how many would get the
oblique reference to former UN chief's Kurt Waldheim's SS past or the
Nazi pagan ritual that begat it? Perhaps the point of it all is the powerful
closing speech about racism being the key to total control of the masses,
yet the play inadvertently shoots itself in the foot when you realise
that no one involved has offered any idea of the true face of racism.
Sorry about that, but it has to be said. Nick Awde
Craig
Hill's Wiz to Oz
Gilded Balloon
There is hardly a joke to be found in Craig Hill's hour of stand-up, just
the pleasant chat of a very pleasant fellow, and if you fall under the
spell of his considerable charm, that's almost enough. This is less a
comedy act than mildly engaging table talk of the "Let me tell you what
happened on my holiday" sort, framed by a bit of production at the start
and finish. Opening with a gay-lyrics version of Over the Rainbow, Hill
then goes into a deliberately rambling account of his recent trip to Australia
(Oz, geddit?) to be part of the gay-themed Mardi Gras parade. Digressions
on his first-ever plane trip to Greece and on a disastrous audition for
Cats just add to the informal raconteur effect, broken only by one more
song and a closing audience-involving mini-production number. If you find
Hill's mildly camp good spirits infectious, the hour can pass quickly
and pleasantly. If not, the thinness of his material is all too evident.
Gerald Berkowitz
Hipsters,
Flipsters and Finger Poppin' Daddies Gilded Balloon
Lord Buckley was an American jazz monologist, a kind of ur-rap artist
who specialised in jive-talk riffs on classic tales, bible stories and
the like from the 1930s through the 1950s. Musician Weston Gavin knew
Buckley and obviously admires him, but his attempt to recreate some of
his classic monologues falls flat on every count. Gavin has the air of
a history professor reporting on his research, reciting memorised material
he really doesn't understand. Though there is occasional backing music,
he completely fails to conjure up the sense of jazz improvisation or of
give-and-take between music and voice. The image of the square-looking
guy in the suit jive-talking is briefly amusing, but Gavin is unable to
capture any of the rhythm or energy of the original. As a result, his
tales of "The Naz" and his miracles or "The all-hip mahatma" and his role
in Indian emancipation are lifeless, while his reading of one of Buckley's
set pieces, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address translated into jive, is embarrassing.
Imagine a middle-aged white man attempting a recitation of a Puff Daddy
rap, and you'll have some sense of this sadly misguided performance that
is no service to Lord Buckley's memory. Gerald Berkowitz
House
of Deer Pleasance
Eva Magyar's dance and mime piece for the Hungarian company The Shamans
is skilfully performed but totally opaque in meaning without external
assistance. Appearing first in the guise of a hesitant and uncomfortable
Victorian actress, she makes it clear through pointing at antlers and
deer pictures onstage that they are somehow the subject. What follows
are alternating sequences of dance, usually of high, celebratory energy,
and of mime, usually showing the actress's discomfort with the material.
Some but not all of them relate to deer, and one begins to suspect that
the piece is really about the pains and difficulty of the creative process,
until dances that don't fit this interpretation appear: a mourning woman,
a mother and child, a bloody death. After the show, the press office gave
me a press release that explained that this was a dance interpretation
of a Romanian folk tale about a hunter magically transformed into a deer,
and that it has "an urgent message for Eastern and Western audiences alike."
Oh. Gerald Berkowitz
The Hush
C Venue
The group now calling themselves Hush Productions have been to the Fringe
before, with comic mime shows striving for the effect of living silent
movies in the Mack Sennett vein. If they're not always fully successful,
there's still some fun to be had along the way. The convoluted premise
of the current show has a comedy-starved future cloning Charlie Chaplin
to bring laughter back to the world, only to have him kidnapped, so that
a private detective has to save him. So we get a series of slow-motion,
fast-motion and slapstick sequences of the bumbling detective finding
and losing the scent, coping with a femme fatale, and the like. What keeps
the show from success is a recurring style of finding a comic idea - for
example, a slow-motion fistfight - and just extending it for a minute
or two, with no real development or transition into the next bit. If you
dozed off after the first 15 seconds (and you might be tempted to), you
wouldn't miss anything until a blackout or change in music signalled the
next self-contained bit. I can't help feeling that there's a really great
fast-moving half-hour buried in the very uneven hour that The Hush runs.
Gerald Berkowitz
I
Am Star Trek C Venue
Rick Vordran's short play is a biography, salute and expose of the man
behind Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, but I fear that all but the most fanatic
trekkies (and is there any other kind?) will find it delivering a lot
less than it promises. The play traces Roddenberry's career, from the
first pitch of the Star Trek idea to Lucille Ball's company, through the
three years of the original series and the subsequent dark years during
which Roddenberry (and many of the actors) lived by whoring themselves
to trekkie conventions, to the first way-over-budget film and Roddenberry's
subsequent banishment (though they kept his name on everything), to his
being summoned back to run the Next Generation series. Along the way,
we get some quick behind-the-scenes glimpses of his loyalty to colleagues
and later betrayal of them, of coping with the prima donna antics of Nimoy
and Shatner, of hints of sexual hanky-panky and of the cold-bloodedness
of Hollywood and TV executives. But there's really little news to any
of this, and the natural audience for this show surely knows all this
gossip and more. It's not much of a play, either, with no real characterisations
or character growth, and nothing but chronology to drive it forward. A
hard-working cast double and quadruple roles as they race through history,
but capture neither good impersonations nor dramatically interesting essences
of any of the characters. Gerald Berkowitz
Infinite
Number of Monkeys Gilded
Balloon
Stuart Barker and Tim FitzHigham offer a fast-moving revue that stands
out from the run of the mill by actually crediting its audience with a
bit of intelligence and the ability to catch jokes that go by casually
or understand ones that require a smidgen of knowledge, like King Solomon's
boredom with prenuptial stag parties or Bletchley Park boffins breaking
the Enigma code but unable to read German. Language is a running theme
of the show, from a defence of the football pitch and double-decker bus
as units of measurement through a sketch of rival dictionary writers playing
Scrabble. How Adam came up with a name for his first-born, things that
can't be said in sign language, and what's really on new-age self-help
tapes are among the topics explored with wit and admirable brevity, as
another compliment to the audience's intelligence is shown by letting
no sketch linger on any longer than absolutely necessary. Gerald
Berkowitz
Clive
James & Pete Atkin Pleasance
The collaboration of lyricist James and tunester Atkin has been revived
by the timely relaunch of their albums over the Internet this year. Back
on the road, their new double act is a laid-back recap of their adventures
in the music business since the late sixties when, as members of the Cambridge
Footlights, they forged a relationship that spawned six albums in the
seventies. Atkin sings songs on guitar and keyboards. In their acoustic
form, the songs fall between Pete Seeger and Alan Price, with a smoky.
Some are serious and some are funny, touching on Apollo XIII, jazz pianists,
westerns and one about gangsters, The Joker, which wouldn't look out of
place on a Scott Walker CD. James intones poems on pieces of paper, with
offerings that didn't make it to lyric form, and even takes a stab at
a vocal number. The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered shows the Australian
wit in fine acerbic form, and there's a heartfelt ode to Lucretius, but
his Blade Runner elegy is excruciating ("Ned Kelly was the ghost of Hamlet's
father" anyone?). Intriguingly, he reveals the same hankering for Americana
that took Bernie Taupin to the pop top. The real rapport still between
the duo means that the 2002 tour of this perfect remedy to chatshow doldrums
should be the sell-out it deserves. Nick Awde
J-Boys
in Gay Samurai Revue
Garage
I sat in the back row between the usher and a Buddhist monk, noting the
burly, freshly scrubbed men of a certain age cramming the front rows before
the lights go down and the stage fills with panda eyeliner and lithe bodies
that strip to cloth thongs in a kung fu routine. Gohatto may be in the
cinemas but this is in your face. And that sort of sets the theme for
the rest of the show... A bizarre bushido number with fans, audience participation
- helping the poor lads out of their thongs - an improbable sword fight,
again with fans, models simulate sex on a table to the strains of Vangelis,
a couple of choreographed threesomes later on. Ricky Martin and Stravinsky
complement the soundtrack. Like the music, the dance routines are a strange
mishmash that is part Japanese, part Indian, part European. And as spiritual
lap dancing goes, it can't make up its mind whether it's art or porn,
but the boys wonderfully keep the ability to laugh at themselves. After
all, there are only so many ways you can remove a thong. A production
also of note for having a scarier audience than the cast. Nick Awde
Jesus
Hopped the 'A' Train Gilded
Balloon II
Two killers in the holding cells, overlooked by a good screw (Salvatore
Inzerillo) and a chillingly philosophical bad screw (David Zayas). Angel
(Joe Quintero) shot Moonie high-priest Kim in the ass but now faces charges
of first-degree after the cult leader dies of complications. Fellow inmate
Lucius (Ron Cephas Jones) murdered eight men but only got caught when
his victims started turning white. Oz this is not - it's more Death of
a Salesman with a thoroughly contemporary twist where the Hispanic and
African-American need to first work through the overwhelming racial baggage
of what landed them in gaol before they can examine the tortured souls
underneath. Well-meaning middle-class public defender (Mary Jane Hanrahan)
can only get her fingers burned. Director Phillip Seymour Hoffman's sole
contribution to Stephen Adly Guirgis' snappy post-Mamet script appears
to be whacking up the volume until it becomes one long shouting match.
Still, the performers attack their roles with boundless energy and no
one hogs the roles - it's a great ensemble - but in terms of the life
experience writer, director and actors bring to the play, one walks away
suspecting they know more about inner tubes than inner city. Nick
Awde
Joan
C Too
An opening scene of writhing bodies drenched in bombastic classical chords
and violent red lights. God, did I want to hate this. But a heartbeat
later and I was hooked, so what can I say? This is an amazing, brilliant
show where every element has come together in perfect alignment. Written
and directed by Donna Kaz, the story avoids epic overkill and goes straight
to the heart of the human behind the myth of France's answer to Braveheart
- "I'm 16, leave me alone!" the young goatsherd prudently informs the
saintly voices that instruct her to don men's clothes and wage war on
the English invaders. In a vibrant blend of narrative and physical, where
the grammar of movement is as complex as the spoken, a flowing series
of snapshots chart the warrior maiden's journey to her doom, punctuated
by startlingly informative digressions, chorus-like, on dynasties, weapons
of war, the Inquisition and the siege of Orleans. Romi Dias' feisty Joan
leads a six-strong cast who deliver their multi-roles with hi-energy sensitivity
- pushing perfect script and direction even higher. Oh, and best techno
medieval soundtrack of the Festival so far. Nick Awde
Journeys
and Memories Komedia St. Stephens
Theatre Cryptic's offering
is billed as "Music to be looked at, not just listened to." In practice
this means that for Steve Reich's railroad-themed
Journeys and Memories an onstage string quartet accompanies a music track
while a film shot from the front of a moving locomotive is projected on
a screen behind them and, as muffled words are heard on the soundtrack,
they appear, karaoke-style, on the screen in short, about the level
of multimedia sophistication you might expect at a particularly modest
school fete. At this particular performance the film breaks down after
10 minutes, as it would at the fete, leaving us with nothing to look at
but the musicians while the dimly-heard recorded voices move from modern
train trips to the darker journeys of the Holocaust. (The video comes
on and then breaks down again a couple of times, just to reassure us that
nothing new is happening in the projected pictures and words.) The video
works for Istvan Marta's Doom A Sigh, offering unimaginatively literal
images to accompany a wailing song about losing one's parents: the words
Mummy and Daddy, two photographs, and the text of a poem on being an orphan.
For the Allegri Miserere, the musicians walk about slowly while Claire
Pencak offers a minimalist dance before the blank screen. In short, the
most uncreative and least evocative visualisations of music imaginable,
though the quartet plays well, and would more profitibly
be encountered in a straight recital. Gerald Berkowitz
The
Kaos Volpone Theatre
Workshop
Ben Jonson's scrutiny of greed is the latest classic to get the Kaos treatment
and no technique is spared to inject this farce with the savage, dark
comedy it deserves. Director and adapter Xavier Leret has pulled off a
stripped-down scissors job that loses nothing of the original's wicked
bile. Staged with all the melodrama and accentuated realism of a silent
movie, there's all the trademark physicality here that characterises the
Kaos ethic - grand guignol, gothic poses and four-dimensional blocking.
Heading an appropriately manic cast of characters is Jack Corcoran's Mosca,
a demented Nijinsky faun who conducts a merry dance of duplicitous double-dealing
as the good burghers stampede to be included in the will of his master,
Oliver Parham's hissing Volpone, who slithers over his great Nosferatu
tomb of a bed restlessly seeking more riches to feed off. But don't let
this eclipse the fact that the English here is some of the best you'll
hear declaimed on stage today, creating an overall theatricality hard
to better -in the process, language magically becomes another segment
of the physical vocabulary. Humour is essential too, attested by scenes
such as the a cappella Pandora's box of the physician's roadshow or acrobatics
involving a ladder and full cast as the will is discovered. A gravity-defying
masterpiece of wit. Nick Awde
Dillie
Keane Pleasance
Dome
After 20 years of being madly in love with her, like any other intelligent
man of my generation, I've finally figured out Dillie Keane. The spearhead
of Fascinating Aida, here appearing solo, is actually a medium channeling
the ghost of Noel Coward. Both as singer and (with Adele Anderson, another
third of Fascinating Aida) songwriter, she has captured, more than any
direct imitation could, the essence of the Master's wit and charm. Songs
about being disconcerted by the range of diet and sexual advice offered
by women's magazines, or about waking up and wondering just who that is
on the next pillow, have exactly the arch bemusement of Coward. And Dillie's
singing style, racing nonchalantly through the verse and then luxuriating
in the chorus, is the purest Coward. Even the more serious songs, about
dating again in one's forties, or reveling in late love, consciously and
unashamedly flirt with oversentimentality as his did. Actually, Dillie
does acknowledge her admiration for Coward during the show, along with
a somewhat more surprising passion for Kurt Weill. Anyway, enough of this
thesis: she's a delightful comedienne-chanteuse who sings about internet
romance, condoms, the temptations of lesbianism (It would be so much simpler),
and the siren call of motorway cafes, and she's funny, and the songs are
great, and an hour is far too short a show for her to offer. Gerald
Berkowitz
The
Kevin Gildeas Gilded Balloon II
You'll be lucky to stumble across a slicker, rougher, scarier act than
Kevin Gildea and his band in the comedy clubs and bars either side of
the Atlantic. The man emits pure comic gold dust via a seamless stream
of songs and stand-up that takes a painfully funny trip to the dark side
of the blues -laced with his laconic Irish commentary. Best example is
No No No, a gut-chuckling tale of giving in to illicit carnal desires
with someone not your girlfriend, narrated in a delivery worthy of the
best beat poets. Other songs stray into further territory such as pop
or the Doors, although the odd concept falls flat on its face - the futuristic
Star Wars number is a stinkeroony. But, refreshingly, each song gets a
memorable tune as well as a stonking groove, and the vamps that run under
the connecting monologues sizzle too. Don't let the humour fool you, since
the act rises far beyond mere pastiche. Providing a truly excellent soundtrack
for Gildea's smoky vocals and asides are drummer The Goose and guitarist
Dr Millar, who throws in rolling extra bass lines as if there's a trio
playing. Sound of the, erm, future. Nick Awde
Lady Macbeth Rewrites the Rulebook C Venue
In Renny Krupinski's self-directed vehicle for his young company Broads
With Swords, a Lara Croft-like computer game is somehow jumbled into the
complete works of Shakespeare, which is itself jumbled so that characters
and lines from various plays mingle together. Encountering Ophelia, Juliet,
Cleopatra and other doomed heroines, Tara Loft (Amanda Hennessy) is enraged
by all the rampant suicidal impulses and iambic pentameter, and browbeats
the ladies into incipient feminism. But Lady Macbeth (Sarah Desmond) joins
forces with the computer game baddie (Rachel Steggall) to seize control
of all their plays, until the three witches come to the rescue. The openly
silly plot is the excuse for two delightful romps of spirit. All the Shakespearean
action is accompanied by authentic dialogue, but assembled randomly from
the entire corpus, so that a single speech may have lines from a half-dozen
plays and still make sense. Meanwhile, the author-director's experience
as a leading fight arranger makes it unsurprising that the all-female
cast break into sword fights, kung fu bouts, all-in wrestling and just
the passing punch-out at the slightest provocation. Shakespeareans can
play spot-the-quotation, while everyone can enjoy the inventiveness of
the absurd plot. And, without question, this fast-moving hour provides
what has always been missing in Shakespeare, lots of chicks fighting.
Gerald Berkowitz
The
Lear Lesson Theatre Workshop
Steve Friedman's short play for New York's Modern Times Theatre is a clever
little black comedy that always has some surprises up its sleeve. In some
near future when theatre is a completely dead art, an aged actor-director
tries to resurrect it by giving private lessons. Into his home comes a
budding Shakespearean actress who would seem to have some fairly significant
handicaps an extreme stammer, a tendency to become nauseous when speaking
Shakespeare's words, and a total absence of talent. As an attempt to study
and rehearse scenes from King Lear hits snag after snag, what follows
acknowledges a debt to Ionesco's The Lesson and to the tradition of Grand
Guignol, and may also nod occasionally toward Rod Serling and Stephen
King, but its darkly ironic vision is ultimately its own. Under the direction
of Danny Partridge, the author plays the teacher with a sly ambiguity
that hints alternately at genius, charlatan or madman, while Rose Friedman
makes the student the essence of young American blankness, and Zuzanna
Szadkowski skilfully blends warmth and sinisterness in the oddly intrusive
housekeeper who ultimately provides the totally unexpected key to the
whole puzzle. Gerald Berkowitz
A
Life In The Daze Of Stanley Bishop C Venue
The mid sixties. As the nation's headlines are emblazoned with the Beatles,
Profumo, and a certain final with Germany, Stanley Bishop awaits instead
the hangman's noose. Condemned to swing for a crime he didn't commit (naturally),
he embarks on a musical review of the events that landed him in the frame.
All he did is sort out a bit of bother in the Soho nightclub owned by
gangland boss Frankie Biggs, so as a big thank-you Frankie hires him as
his minder. Gangland boss Kenny, Frankie's brother, doesn't like Stanley
but likes Frankie less, so he hatches a dastardly plot to stitch up our
innocent hero. Despite the efforts of his golden-hearted moll, Stanley
is doomed. The flyer hails this is a "musical parody" but it's far more
than that - the original songs are vibrant, hummable and owe as much to
Lionel Bart and Hair as to the Small Faces or the Who. Most impressive
are the ensemble numbers such as Partners in Crime and Better Than Working
that mix soap opera humour with ripping style. Great writing, phenomenal
direction and choreography, but the real stars are the brilliant 13-strong
cast who act, sing and dance their hearts out like there's no tomorrow
(well, there isn't for Stan, is there?). Nick Awde
Like
Thunder Gilded Balloon II
Niels Fredrik Dahl's play is yet another domestic drama about a family
dysfunctional through inability to face and accept truths, and while the
writing never triumphs over its soap opera elements, dedicated performances
sustain your interest and involvement until the excesses of cliched plot
and overwritten dialogue become too great a burden. A family gathers to
deal with the fact that the husband and father has been missing for four
years. One son is committed to the belief he is still alive, another is
sure he is dead, and mother just wants some sort of arbitrary closure.
Meanwhile, the brothers hate each other, one has a bad marriage of his
own, and the other is a former criminal who has gone blind. Throw in a
séance, a long buried (but telegraphed far in advance) secret about father,
and a startling but ambiguous new revelation, and it really is more than
even the most skilled playwright could juggle successfully. Under Franzisca
Aarflot's direction, the cast of five treats the material with total dedication,
though the fact that the family members all have different accents further
threatens credibility. Maureen Allen is most successful through quiet
underplaying of the mother, while Katherine Morley supplements the role
of the medium with an evocative violin accompaniment to the action. Gerald
Berkowitz
Lilia
Gilded Balloon
Lilia Skala, Austrian-born actress with a long career in American stage
and television, is best remembered as the forceful nun in the film Lilies
of the Field. Her granddaughter Libby Skala has written and performs this
salute to Lilia, using her special perspective to show us both the actress
and the woman. Speaking in Lilia's voice and occasionally her own, Libby
tells us of her becoming the first female architect in Austria, but chucking
it all for a career on the stage. Always modest about her accomplishments,
Lilia credits every breakthrough and opportunity to God, though she is
proud of her own courage in resisting Hollywood's instinct to typecast
her as a nun for the rest of her life. At the same time she is a dedicated
artisan and strict teacher when her granddaughter expresses the desire
to become an actress, and she is not immune to the grandmotherly syndrome
of alternating smothering love with small cruelties. Libby Skala captures
Lilia's voice convincingly, though the piece loses its momentum in the
last quarter and begins to meander shapelessly. A labour of love if ever
there was one, the performance is ultimately a celebration more of the
beloved grandmother than of the revered actress, and thus as much about
its writer-performer as about her subject. Gerald Berkowitz
Lip
Service Gilded Balloon
This short play about telephone sex line girls promises titillation but
actually delivers considerably more, as authors Gary Humphreys and Philip
Sington not only give us a peek into the personal lives of the anonymous
voices but also structure plot and characters to offer a string of intriguing
surprises. Stephanie (Kiki Kendrick), who operates the small phone service
with her offstage lover, rather enjoys developing romantic fantasies for
her callers, and at the same time dreams of moving up to operating a night
club. New hire Lisa (Ellen Collier) is considerably crasser in both her
phone persona and her private behaviour; she does not hesitate in bragging
that she's stealing Stephanie's man or in dismissing the adventure as
a casual fling. But neither woman, nor the situation, is exactly as they
appear; and just who is exploiting whom, and who is the romantic, are
questions the play takes us through several twists before answering. Under
Scott Williams' direction, the two actresses are allowed to appear too
one-dimensional in their opening personalities for the complexities that
develop to be fully believable, and just a few hints of foreshadowing
might have enriched both performances. Gerald Berkowitz
Locking
Horns Hill Street
Christopher Walker's new play is an exploration of the difficulties of
being male, as its two characters must fight their way through a series
of false and regressive self-definitions to discover their true manhood.
While one could debate his ultimate solution, which involves the camaraderie
of battlefield soldiers, and while the play runs out of steam a little
before its ending, there is much impressive physical theatre along the
way. Under the author's direction, Rory Eliot and Dennis Antonakas play
two variants of typical macho stud, respectively the self-adoring sexual
animal and the superior, street-smart cynic. First encountered in a stylised
street fight accompanied by rhymed couplets, they move from this sub-Berkoffian
mode to more original imagery, as the author has their strutting and preening
repeatedly converted into Neanderthal or animal parallels. The characters
themselves are vaguely aware of these brief transformations, and the disorientation
they cause is part of the learning and maturing process. The play hits
a disappointingly soft centre when both men are given lengthy self-revelatory
monologues to expose their deeper sensitivity. Reducing or eliminating
that banal anticlimax would strengthen a work whose considerable virtues
lie in its high energy and inventive staging. Gerald Berkowitz
Love
and Other Fairy Tales
Pleasance
Scarlet Theatre offer a delightful Chaucerian romp in Nick Revell's retelling
of the Wife of Bath's Tale, capturing all the spirit and comic energy
of the original while infusing it with a modern sensibility and staging
it with spirited invention. Cutting the Canterbury pilgrims down to six,
Revell retains the outlines of their original personalities and interplay.
The Prioress is still more of a grand lady than a nun, the Pardoner is
a slimy conman, and so on. But there are also new nuances - most notably,
Chaucer himself is a pompous sexist who needs to be brought down a peg
or two. So, when the Wife tells her tale of a callow knight forced to
learn and then internalize a true respect for women, counterpointing it
with her own celebration of the sexual life, more than one of her listeners
learn life-affecting lessons. As directed by Grainne Byrne and Katarzyna
Deszcz, the cast of six double as pilgrims and characters in the tale,
subtly letting us see each of their roles affecting the other. A generally
bouncy spirit is maintained - literally - by miming horseback riding throughout,
and only the most churlish of academics would even notice the anachronistically
egalitarian 21st century attitudes they have infused into the text, so
thoroughly enjoyable is the journey. Gerald Berkowitz
The
Loves of Shakespeare's Women Assembly Rooms
Susannah York offers a programme of linked readings from Shakespeare as
part of a promotional tour for her book of the same name. Every actor
should have a solo show like this, that they can trot out to fill fallow
periods, and there is no reason why York can't continue doing this one,
on and off, for years - no reason except that it's not particularly good.
Her readings, ranging through the usual suspects, from Juliet through
Cleopatra, are rather perfunctory and unevocative, playing either like
lifeless recitations or over-explicit audition pieces, while the links
are obviously sentences taken out of context from the book, with abrupt
and jarring transitions. Above all, the programme fails my two acid tests
for this sort of reading: does she offer any excitingly new line readings
or interpretations, or does she make me wish I could see her in one of
these roles? The audience I was in was dominated by a coach party of Americans,
between their city tour and their afternoon of shopping, and they applauded
politely. I'm sure there are plenty of people like this who will enjoy
York's painless foray into high culture, but I am not one of them. Gerald
Berkowitz
Lyrebird
- Tales of Helpmann Assembly Rooms (Reviewed at a previous
Fringe)
Tyler Coppin's solo salute to dancer/actor Robert Helpmann is no overly-respectful
hagiography, but it succeeds in making its subject seem significant, fascinating
and fun. Coppin's Helpmann is a cartoon comic figure made up of vanity
camp and inch-thick makeup. He is also a thoroughly entertaining raconteur,
shamelessly waxing eloquent on his favourite subject - himself. From his
early days in Australia, which he professes to have been bored with by
the age of six, through a career in ballet, theatre and film, Helpmann
seems to have devoted himself to self-promotion and self-enjoyment in
equal proportions. He can be bitchy ("She had a face like a bruised knee"),
tellingly critical, as on Nureyev, or lovingly appreciative, as when recalling
dear friends Vivian Leigh and Katherine Hepburn. Always flamboyant and
fun, Coppin gets an especially warm response when he has Helpmann call
himself "a skinny old poofter having a hell of a lot of fun," and his
closing is a declaration of love for matinee audiences. Those attending
this mid-afternoon show cannot help but return the love. Gerald
Berkowitz
Man
In The Flying Lawn Chair Assembly Rooms
New York's 78th Street Theatre Lab takes the true story of Larry Walters,
a California truck driver who in 1982 attached an aluminium lawn ch |