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Showing posts with label Lost Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lost Theatre. Show all posts
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Thursday, November 17, 2016
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Princess is completely baffling. It bills itself as "finding the feminism in Disney", yet feels more like being trapped in a shitty goth nightclub. Rather than some exploration of gender politics, this is primarily a bunch of attractive dancers in bad wigs hurling themselves around the stage to dated plastic pop music.
Tautly muscled men in papier mache rabbit heads strike poses, women dressed like cheerleaders in a Marilyn Manson video shake their asses, a troupe of people with hexagonal heads march across the stage. At one point someone perches in a giant wobbly teacup. With furrowed brow and thoroughly scratched head, a couple of words reverberated around the inside of my skull: what the fuck is this?!
It's never a good sign when you have to retreat to the programme to understand what you're looking at, but sometimes you don't really have a choice. So, twenty minutes I gave in and popped it open, to be told that a summary of what I was watching right now was "to be a true princess one must submit to all the wishes and woes, the young girl fails to be initiated. Striving to become the perfect princess she must shake of [sic] her demons". I glanced back up at the stage to see a topless dude barrelling around the stage flapping big glittery wings. Hmmm.
This general bewilderment never lifted. Without the programme's (somewhat garbled) assistance I doubt I'd ever have worked out even the broad strokes out of the plot - which is apparently about a young girl's self empowerment through.. uh.. princesses? I guess? Smothered deep within the impenetrable choreography, boring pop music and revealing costumes there's apparently some kind of deconstruction of the princess archetype, but it's so faint you want to call up the Large Hadron Collider dudes and ask them to work on unearthing it.
This vagueness, coupled with the fact that much of the show features sexy girls in revealing costumes wiggling their butts, makes Princess's claims of "finding feminism in Disney" risible. Giving it as much credit as possible, the conclusion that animated princesses are questionable role models for young girls begs to be met with a deadpan "well duh."
By the midway point most people will have concluded that if it doesn't make sense by now, it's probably not ever going to. So you just check out and enjoy the skimpily clad dancers cavorting around in front of you. On this base level of appreciation Princess scrapes by - I'm not going to sit here and deny I don't enjoy watching attractive people writhing around in silly costumes. But even the dancing looks a little under rehearsed. I'm usually pretty easy to please on this front, but even I notice that the performers are off the beat, out of sync with each other and/or missing their cues.
Let's face it, it's never a good omen when one person simultaneously writes, directs, choreographs, sings the songs and produces a show. There are a handful of multitasking polymath geniuses out there, but all too often it's a sign that you're in for a vanity project. When you've had as much experience with crappy theatre as I have, you can read between the lines and realise that it's less that the show could only ever work with one person doing all these jobs and more that everyone else realised early on that they'd be onto a loser.
By all accounts the guy responsible for this, Stuart Saint, is a talented dude. He's done five straight years of well received panto in the Leicester Square Theatre, and you can tell Princess is something of a passion project for him. In interview he explains that Princess has been worked on since 1996(!!!), and this extended creative gestation has done the show no favours whatsoever. Sometimes you've got to face up to the fact that, even with 20 years of work behind you, it's sometimes best to 'kill your darlings'.
Saint would have done well to heed the words of a latter-day Disney Princess and let it go, because this lumpen heap of 'I don't know what the fuck' is pleasing nobody.
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Saturday, September 13, 2014
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You're Always With Me is a curious piece of theatre that often feels like it's fallen out of a time warp. Written by Soviet playwright Ilyas Afandyev in the early 60s it's a chewy chunk of social realism about factory workers, pokey flats, familial betrayal and love found in odd places. This is the the first English production of a play that seems to have made little cultural impact outside its native Azerbaijan - using Google as a metric, the only search results for the play link to this production and it merits but a passing mention on Wikipedia in Afandyev's bibliography.
So what have we been missing out on? This is of an unlikely love story of middle-aged factory owner Hesenzadé (Doug Devaney) and the teenage Mergilé (Stephanie Harte). Hesenzadé is a solitary widower, introduced happily chatting away to what turns out to be the ghost of his wife. Despite being eligible, financially secure and handsome he never remarried, transferring his paternal emotions onto his employees.
Meanwhile Mergilé is a girl desperately in need of a bit of kindness. Following the death of her father in World War II her mother, Mezaket (Zara Plessard) married the dastardly Faraj (Karl Niklas). He's a petty domestic tyrant, marching around the house hissing orders, terrorising the family, purposefully spilling orange juice on the floor and generally being a bit of a dick. Now he wants Mergilé gone, intending to convert her bedroom into his study. So, putting the clamps on Mezaket he demands she choose between her husband and her daughter. Goodbye Mergilé.
With Mergilé miserable, lonely and needing a job it's all too natural that she latches onto the fatherly Hesenzadé. As the two grow closer the town's collective eyebrow slowly raises and Mergilé's mother angrily tries to convince the two to knock if off. And thus drama is sown.
This is a curious love story. Mergilé is all over Hesenzadé like jam on bread, practically throwing herself at him in a series of clumsy flirtations. She cleans up his flat, makes him tea and pays him increasingly bizarre compliments. A highlight is when she calmly explains she's been secretly observing him through the window for years, in particular claiming that his hands have become powerful symbols of security and strength for her. Frankly if a girl said that to me I'd be nervously eyeing the door and worrying about the health of my pets.
But Hesenzadé apparently takes all this in his stride, spending most of the play calmly sitting on a sofa sipping tea. I never once got the impression that he was even a little bit romantically inclined towards Mergilé. Instead he treats her with affable politeness, offering up fatherly nuggets of wisdom and treating her romantic advances with polite tolerance.
I'm genuinely not sure if this total lack of romantic response from Hesenzadé is intentional or a flaw in the performance or translation. Confusingly in the final scenes he appears to undergoing some kind of teary heroic sacrifice by leaving Mergilé and setting her up with a younger man. Considering he's spent most of the play nonchalantly treating her as a semi-pleasant distraction this all feels a bit unwarranted.
The upshot of this is that Mergilé ends up looking increasing barmy, descending into dreamy romantic bliss over the most unlikely of candidates. She's a rather simple creature to psychologically diagnose: with "Daddy issues" written all over her. Her idolisation of her dead father, hatred of her stepfather and transference of these emotions onto Hesenzadé is bordering on dramatic cliche - especially when she apparently begins to properly crack up and begins seeing her wicked stepfather in every other man.
It's difficult to work out precisely why You're Always With Me never quite gels. Is it the translation? The performances? The direction? Is the play old-fashioned? Am I missing some 1960s Soviet allegory? Whatever it is, it's fair to say that there's something malfunctioning.
By and large the cast do a decent job with often clunky dialogue. Devaney and Harte don't even have a smidge of romantic chemistry, but their respective tranquillised/manic personalities at least make for a interesting combination of characters. Plessard as the angry, guilt-ridden mother makes a decent stab at combining the two emotions. Niklas ends up in Disney villain territory as Faraj, but throws in a much needed shot of comedy as harried factory supervisor Badal. Sadly there's not really much scope for anyone to really cut loose, especially as many potentially dramatic scenes are hamstrung by being conducted over telephone.
As the curtain fell my first thought was "is that it?" It's not that You're Always With Me is a particularly terrible production, but there's not a great deal to recommend about it. You can tell that this is a play with a point - what that point is is beyond me.
You're Always With Me is at the Lost Theatre until the 27th of September. Tickets here.
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