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Showing posts with label Jennie Eggleton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jennie Eggleton. Show all posts
Friday, February 26, 2016
Friday, February 26, 2016
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After the Heat, We Battle for the Heart is a play divided. With a split narrative, duelling lead characters and even a split audience, it bristles with conflict. The central motif is bullfighting; playwright Tallulah Brown approaching it as a metaphor for female liberation, a battle with self-doubt and of cultural inheritance.
In contemporary London, Ruth (Jennie Eggleton) is miserable. She's just been sacked, her boyfriend (Josh Taylor) is exasperated, she's starved of attention and, to cap things off, her grandmother is at death's door. Perhaps it's no surprise that she ends up perched on a window sill, contemplating ending it all.
Meanwhile, in 1940s Spain, Peruvian matador Conchita Cintrón (Paula Rodriguez) prepares to face her 750th bull. But in Franco's Spain women are banned from bullfighting on foot. Conchita refuses to be told what to do, squaring up to this sexist law to the consternation of her manager Ruy (Fed Zanni), who fears political and physical reprisals.
After the Heat... seeks to reconcile these two very different characters; showing us how the bravado of a past heroine can affect a modern woman. Unfortunately, these two halves don't gel that well: the result is a play that first baffles and eventually bores.
Simply, the whole thing is cripplingly underwritten. Ruth is the emotional prism through whom the play is refracted, but we're given little reason to care about her. The main flaw is an internal monologue that explains explicitly who Ruth is, rather than allowing us to infer it ourselves through Eggleton's performance. It's a classic case of telling rather than showing.
Meanwhile, the bullfighting narrative is mired in cheesy melodrama. Both Conchita and Ruy feel like characters from a cheesy soap opera and the backdrop of fascist Spain is poorly conveyed. For example, Ruy warns Conchita that she should be careful as the crowd is full of "francophiles". Unless this bullfighting audience has a particular passion for baguettes and berets, I'm pretty sure they mean "Francoists".
Perhaps that's just an unfortunate slip-up, but it's symptomatic of a script that really could have used a couple more drafts, if not a top-to-bottom reworking. It's not that the central conceit of bullfighting as psychological metaphor isn't fertile soil (there's the classic Freudian interpretation of bull as id, bullfighter as ego and audience as superego), but After the Heat...'s feminist analysis works only in the broadest "believe in yourself" cod-inspirational kind of way.
I can't really blame the performers for this. I saw Only Forever so I know Jennie Eggleton is a top-notch actor. Both she and Paula Rodriguez are excellent when we focus on body language and the two can conveying genuine emotion through poise and dance. It's in these dialogue-free moments that we finally get an unvarnished glimpse at the characters. Then they start talking again and things collapse into a formless goopy mess.
As the curtain fell I genuinely couldn't work out what the point was. In an effort to understand, I read up on Conchita Cintrón and found the exciting and genuinely moving story of a woman bravely standing up to a institutionally misogynist dictatorship. But when a Wikipedia page is more moving than a play, something has gone awry.
★
'After the Heart, We Battle for the Heart' is at Vault Festival, until 28th February 2016. Tickets here.
Monday, September 14, 2015
Monday, September 14, 2015
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Somewhere up above the bombs have begun to fall. Muffled booms shake dust down from the bunker's ceiling. You're deep underground - protected from the apocalypse, the blasts of fire, the radioactive fallout - safe with your family. In comparison with the poor bastards on the surface you're doing pretty good. After all, just a couple of days, weeks or months down here and you can emerge and rebuild, right?
This is the launching point of Only Forever, an exercise in psychological post-apocalypse drama courtesy of writer Abrahan Arsis. We're locked in with a typically middle-class British family, circa sometime in the 50s. They are; can-do patrician George (Edward Pinner); loving/limping housewife Margaret (Christine Rose); arrested development adolescent Victoria (Jennie Eggleton); and nice-but-dim preteen Charles (Lewys Taylor).
At the outset they appear the model of stiff upper lip domesticity. The father is stern yet affectionate, assigning his family chores to keep the bunker shipshape. Mother Margaret provides friendly emotional support, washing sheets and fetching water from the well. The children study Shakespeare and power the lights by exercising on a bicycle hooked to a dynamo. Yet as events progress, dark secrets become exposed and fissures form within the family unit, leading to anger, depression, betrayal and all that yummy stuff that makes drama worth watching.
As the play takes place in just one location, set design and dressing is key. The Hope Theatre isn't the biggest performance space around, but the cramped stage with concrete painted walls works well in the play's favour. Sat in the front row I had the performers brushing up against my knees, often in danger of knocking my pint over. As someone who loves getting as close as possible to the performers this is all great stuff - in the dining scenes I felt as if I was sat at the table with them. Similarly, the walls and shelves are peppered with period appropriate books, boxes of recycled scraps and battered looking crockery. The lighting designer also gets decent mileage out of the flicker and pop of fluorescent bulbs as the power on.
Performance-wise the obvious standout is Jennie Eggleton's Victoria. Much of the dramatic weight of the play rests on her shoulders, combining childish mischievousness with hormonal yearnings and Christian sex guilt to marvellous effect. Lewys Taylor also impresses as a child actor - the play is broadly naturalistic and the role requires suspension of audience belief about his age, which he manages with aplomb. Edward Pinner and Christine Rose are a little less effective; with Pinner often sounding a bit Radio 4 Afternoon Drama and Rose substituting character depth in favour of having a dodgy knee.
Still, the narrative rumbles on effectively - the script constantly drops tantalising hints of dark doings within the bunker - leaving it up the audience's wild imagination what they're all hiding. The danger with this is that nothing the writer can do will live up to what the audience wants, but Only Forever avoids this by having a satisfying series of reveals and twists in the final scenes that cast shadows over everything we've seen.
But though this is an satisfying serving of genre drama, recalling everything from Neville Shute's On the Beach to the similarly bunker-set Fallout series of videogames, there's a constant sense of slightness. Frequent reference is made to Romeo and Juliet, though there's scant parallels between these stories' themes and preoccupations. Also, the Church of England religion of the family is often front and centre though aside from them being in subterranean purgatory, the absence of God from their lives is given short shrift. The closest the play comes to being 'about' something is its interrogation of gender politics, though even this never quite reaches full thematic fruition.
This leaves Only Forever as an enjoyable way to spend 75 minutes, yet not a particularly memorable one. Still, Jennie Eggleton in particular should be pleased with what they've accomplished, as should the technical crew and director Poppy Rowley, who create an evocatively claustrophobic mise en scene.
★★★
Only Forever runs until the 26th of September. Tickets here.
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