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Showing posts with label Eugune Ionesco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eugune Ionesco. Show all posts
Monday, March 6, 2017
Monday, March 6, 2017
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It's been about 70 years since audiences first thrilled to the 'theatre of the absurd', so how does it hold up in this rather absurd era? Ionesco/Dinner at the Smiths' bills itself as being assembled from "fragments of Eugene Ionesco's works", but primarily seems like an adaptation of his 1950 play The Bald Soprano, inviting its audience to sip wine around a cruciform dinner table as we observe bizarre social interactions between host and guest.
Created by Marianne Badrichani and the Company and taking place in the sumptuously high-ceilinged Latvian House, we begin outside on the street. A primly dressed butler (Jorge Laguardia) distributes menus, then proceeds to lead us up the winding stairs to the banquet room.
Created by Marianne Badrichani and the Company and taking place in the sumptuously high-ceilinged Latvian House, we begin outside on the street. A primly dressed butler (Jorge Laguardia) distributes menus, then proceeds to lead us up the winding stairs to the banquet room.
We sit and chat for a while, eventually interrupted by the arrival of Mr and Mrs Smith (Sean Rees and Lucy Russell). They're an archetypical English couple who feel like they've fallen out of a 1960s sitcom. Mr Smith is a Daily Mail reading, cravat-wearing ex-Navy type with an unearned air of superiority and a face that's quick to redden. She has a stick up her arse, wiry and tense body language and darting eyes, as if she suspects judgmental neighbours have planted spycams in the room to observe them.
And so our hosts, gamely struggling through a dinner party that feels as if the hors d'oeuvres are laced with liquid ketamine. By the time guests Mr and Mrs Martin (David Mildon and Edith Vernes) arrive, we're trapped in a thicket of looped nonsense conversations, ouroboros repetitions, questions becoming answers mid-way through, and the sense that everything is prim and proper and perfectly absurd.
It's all pretty 'Ionesco-y', something helped by the playwright himself turning up to be interviewed. He gives us a potted life history and a summary of his theatre of the absurd: which recognises that, for all our social graces, we're each isolated in a meaningless, chaos. Every creaked out crap dinner party anecdote, just a desperate attempt to keep the existential wolf at the door. There's only one escape - to embrace absurdity, laugh into the void and accept the human condition and all its peculiarities.
Here, the 'dinner party' setting aims to shake us out of complacency, using absurdity as the scalpel to show the real core of the bourgeois soul. The company goes about this not just by the surreal dialogue, but by blindfolding us and whispering in our ear and tickling our shoulders, and serving a 'main course' of sentence linguini to consume.
For the most part this works fine. Even when it's not particularly interesting the show is weird enough to hold your attention. The cast, particularly, Sean Rees and Lucy Russell, lean into their roles beautifully, evoking a kind of Englishness that generally only exists in the heads of Conservative MPs.
Thing is, by 2017 the characters feel a little dated. When the play was first staged in 1950 these were plump, prime targets for satire. Now it feels a bit like watching a 1970s sitcom with unusually surreal dialogue - or perhaps a Monty Python sketch. Maybe these retro-sensibilities are unavoidable. but it blunts the show's edge a tad especially when contemporary society has so many worthy targets to aim at.
What's left is a show whose peculiarities and passion I appreciate, but the actual experience of sitting there watching it left me a little cold. Perhaps it's that in the age of Trump, it feels as if we're actually living the theatre of the absurd, leaving experiencing it through theatre a redundancy. Ionesco/Dinner at the Smiths has sparkling moments, but taken as a whole it's a meal that doesn't quite satisfy.
Ionesco/Dinner at the Smiths is at Latvian House until 1st April. Tickets here.
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
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Eugene Ionesco's The Lesson is a tremendous feat of writing. A key piece in the postwar 'Theatre of the Absurd', it's about a Professor giving an extended lesson to a bright-eyed young pupil. Other than the occasional intervention of the Professor's maid the entire play consists of this lecture, which grows increasingly bizarre. Covering arithmetic and philology, the Professor's tangled explanations and theorising quickly becomes a thicket of brain-numbing non-sequiturs and ludicrous pronouncements - all presented with rock-sold authoritarian confidence.
It's an excellent choice for a fringe production: reliant on dialogue rather than whizz-bangery and with malleable enough edges to allow for creative production design. First impressions are excellent, this is a visually striking set made a bedraggled carpet with test-tubes of dry paint suspended from the ceiling. Fishing line demarcates the boundaries of the stage, causing little silvery lines to flit in and out of view as the air moves around the room. Staged in the round, the set feels a bit like a boxing ring - entirely appropriate given the adversarial nature of the play. Designers Audrey Guo, Frances Jialu Chen and Tan Hua should be proud of themselves.
Similar levels of quality are found in Kelly Blaze's squeakily vulnerable pupil. Brimming over with eager nervous energy, she manipulates the audience with Shirley Temple cuteness layered with subtly dark strands. Her initial interactions with the Professor feel like Red Riding Hood meeting the wolf: innocence versus predatory hunger. As the play progresses the character becomes increasingly uncomfortable - suffering a painful toothache that eventually envelopes her body. In straightforward performative terms, Blaze sells the hell out this - running through 30ish minutes of agonised wriggling with ease.
All of the above is ace and would ordinarily comprise the bedrock of an excellent piece of fringe theatre. Sadly this is not to be, as this production of The Lesson is entirely ruined by one element: Toby Osmond's Professor.
First thing's first: he kept forgetting his lines. Now I'll give a tiny bit of leeway on this, the Professor role in The Lesson has the vast majority of the dialogue to the point where the play is essentially one long monologue. On top of that, it's a Byzantine, repetitive monologue that constantly loops around itself. Then again, Osmond is a professional, trained actor and learning complex parts is, y'know, his job.
Anyway, I can forgive the occasional memory misfire - it happens to the best - but seven or eight in one performance? Not helping at all is that rather than working around the problem and improvising until he picks up the thread (which Ionescu's style of dialogue gives you scope to do) he pauses, breaks character and tetchily shouts "Line?" at the stage manager. This is an intense piece of drama made of subtle rhythms and mounting tension - all spoiled by these constant gaffes.
But even when he remembers his lines Osmond is terrible. Wooden as all hell, he recites rather than performs the role, not sounding remotely convinced of anything he's saying. This is the key to the Professor's character - delivering stentorian gobbledegook as if it's the most obvious thing in the world, and it's utterly bungled.
There's also zero tonal progression to his performance. The dramatic curve of the play is such that, at least in the first few interactions between Professor and pupil, this could be a vaguely naturalistic bit of teaching. Ideally, as the drama ramps up and the pupil's grows ever more distressed, the Professor role should dovetail with it - growing monstrous as she shrinks in fear. Osmond doesn't do this, from minute one locking into a single tone, style of delivery and set of mannerisms that he maintains without change for the duration. It's a sad indictment of a performance when the closest an actor comes to communicating character development is taking his shirt off.
This production feels designed to impress. The creative team are all recent graduates from China now working in London and it's clear that no small amount of their blood and sweat have been poured into The Lesson. Similarly, the performances of Kelly Blaze and Roslyn Hill's (even in a minor role) are easily to the standard of the London stage. Toby Osmond's isn't: he's not only unprepared but unable to perform this role to a satisfactory degree and singlehandedly ruins what would otherwise have been a decent show.
★★
The Lesson is at the Drayton Arms Theatre until the 26th of September. Tickets here.
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