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Showing posts with label kate austen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kate austen. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
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Andrew Bovell's Speaking In Tongues is a strange bit of theatre. Performed in an inflatable dome at the rear of the Pleasance Courtyard, the audience sits in the centre on swivel chairs while the performance takes place around them. It's inverse in-the-round, or to give it a catchier name, doughnut staging (which is why I imagine the company is called Doughnut Productions). In a further twist, Speaking In Tongues is split into two parts that share chronology, characters and themes: The Lies and The Truths.
It's debatable whether one works without the other. I saw The Truths first, only realising as I entered that it was technically the second part of a bigger work. Afterwards, convinced that I needed to see the whole picture in order to properly review it, I got a ticket for The Lies.
Both plays are performed by Phil Aizlewood, Kate Austen, Ben Elder and Georgine Periam, who all play a series of married couples in strained relationships. The Lies opens with a synchronised four-way flirt, each on a mission to find a quick shag for the night. The consequences of those indiscretions fuel the rest of the show, their relationships disintegrating, reforming and collapsing in a series of emotional arguments.
The Truths has a slightly different tack. A woman has gone missing on a darkened country road. Prior to her disappearance, she left increasingly worried sounding answer phone messages asking her husband to pick them up. He missed them, having been spending the evening with his mistress. The Truths orbits her absence, flashing back to the missing woman's life as a therapist and showing us the roots of her anxiety and misery.
Speaking In Tongues is often a quite difficult to follow. Part of this is down to it being a story told over two halves and part is that each actor plays multiple roles that look and sound quite similar to each other. It's generally pretty fun when a play trusts its audience enough to play detective and assemble the narrative themselves - and you do get a pleasant buzz of achievement here when you connect the dots and realise you've already heard about some event via another character. But there are moments within this jumble of deceit, misunderstanding and coincidence where I simply couldn't keep a grip of the narrative thread.
The unusual staging doesn't exactly help. Doughnut Productions website states: "The infinite stage provides the actors with an unlimited performance area, being able to walk, run or even ride a bike through the audience." While I'm sure this is the case elsewhere, it definitely isn't inside the tent at Pleasance. Here the show felt seriously cramped, the actors pressed up against the walls and forced to awkwardly work around the audience as best they can. The swivel chair concept doesn't work either - the place is simply too small to rotate freely without awkwardly knocking knees with other audience members. You end up craning your neck to keep track of what's happening, which defeats the point of the whole concept.
It's a shame, as the show can boast some neat writing and performance moments. There's a great line in The Lies "it's good to be the one who leaves a marriage, having your friends and family hate you is really good for moving on" and, in the midst of some of the pitched arguments there's some nicely acidic ripostes. Performance-wise I seriously enjoyed Ben Elder's buttoned-down rich man in The Truths, both out of love with his wife and genuinely concerned that she's missing. There's a nice balance in the character that makes his interrogation by Phil Aizlewood's policeman appropriately tense.
Despite these speckles of interest, Speaking In Tongues doesn't quite work, at least in this staging. A lot of that is down to squeezing a few too many seats into a small venue, which restricts the performance space and makes us feel squeezed in together. But part of it is down a script whose components never quite gel into a satisfying whole. It's an interesting experiment, but not a successful one.
Speaking In Tongues: The Lies / The Truths is at the Green, The Pleasance Courtyard Aug 8-16, 19-28. Tickets for The Lies here and The Truths here.
Thursday, May 5, 2016
Thursday, May 5, 2016
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Each of us enjoys the fruits of civilisation: manners, politeness, order and morality. But that stuff is an eggshell thin barrier above a yawning chasm. Somewhere deep down we understand that the universe is without purpose, that there is no underlying meaning and that every single action by every human who will ever exist, noble or evil, is irrelevant. The sum total of human endeavour is fruitlessly pissing into a vast, infinite void.
This nihilism fuels David Gieselmann's Mr Kolpert, which examines the life's pointlessness and the consequential emotional numbness through the time-old dramatic scenario of the middle class dinner party.
Our hosts are Ralf Droht (Peter Watts) and Sarah Kenner (Libby Rodcliffe). We're introduced to them as they fussily tidying in advance of their guests arrival, ominously chit-chatting about how they'll unknowingly provide the entertainment for the evening. Soon the happy couple, Bastian and Edith Mole (Benjamin Victor and Kate Austen) arrive and are summarily informed that the large chest in the centre of the room contains the body of the eponymous Mr Kolpert, who their hosts have casually (yet brutally) murdered. But does it really or are these mind games?
Gieselmann proceeds to put all his characters (along with Matt Lynch's confused pizza delivery man) through the wringer. The hosts reveal themselves as bourgeois sadists desperate to feel more than ennui, the Schrödinger's box at centre stage begins emitting a disturbingly organic thumping sound, the guests vicious abuse one another and the stage becomes spackled with vomit. Even their pizza order is screwed up.
It's horrible stuff, but it's happening to horrible people so it's okay. The gradual intensification of violence, combined with the dreary suburban backdrop reminded me of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, where we find ourselves both entertained by and implicated in violence. By the time we're in the final scenes we're completely on board with the same bored inclination to violence that's driven Ralf and Sarah to commit bloody murder 'just to see what happens'.
It's an excellent play, extremely funny but with meaning bubbling away just under the surface. Each cast member is enjoyable in their own ways - though I had an instant soft spot for Peter Watts' Ralf. He buffoonishly alpha males his way around the stage, to my mind channelling a bit of Boris Johnson. Though confident and cocky there's this tiny glimmer of fear in his eyes, Watts' performance making it clear that though Ralf revels in his amorality he can't understand where it arises in him.
But my absolute favourite was Benjamin Victor. Back in March 2015 he knocked my socks off in Blink Theatre's The Collector, and he did the same here (incidentally, both plays use the nauseating stink of Heinz Big Soup to their advantage). Victor has this incredibly intense stage presence that director Lotte Ruth Johnson harnesses for laughs, particularly his absolute indignance when playing Forehead Detective.
It all ends on a pitch perfect moment of awkwardness, the characters realising they've plumbed the depths of wickedness and they're still unsatisfied. Stuff like this is the reason I love fringe theatre - Mr Kolpert is a gem of a play that's staged in style and for the fraction of the price of some glitzy West End glamorama. Highly recommended!
★★★★
Mr Kolpert is at the Lion & Unicorn until 14 May. Tickets here.
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