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Showing posts with label maybe a little harsh on those guys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maybe a little harsh on those guys. Show all posts
Friday, June 8, 2012
Friday, June 8, 2012
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This play stinks. Getting a bad review, especially one as negative as this one is going to be can't be much fun to read at all, and if David R. Roberts ever finds his way to this page I hope he understands that the wounds I am about to inflict upon him are my honest opinion and made entirely without malice.
'The Shadow Formula' is a play set in London, 1938. It concerns the machinations of various intelligence services and mad scientists who are trying to get hold of the titular Shadow Formula. Dragged into their web of intrigue is Cary Donat (Edwin Flay), a veteran of the Great War who is haunted by the memories of his dead comrades. He teams up with the mysterious Raz Peel (Fiona Nivalis) to try and work his way through the tangled spy games and save the day.
I should briefly cover the good points of this production before I start the post-mortem. The costuming is consistently of a high standard, and mostly fits the period well. There are a few anachronisms, but overall, it's a fairly impressive feat of costuming. A small production like this can't have an enormous budget, and whoever was in charge of costuming has acquitted themselves very well. The female lead, Raz Peel's costume in particular is a nice mix of practicality and style, it complements the character well with the fur collar adding a nice touch of luxury to the somewhat bare and austere set.
That is about the only unqualified praise I can give to the show. The descent begins here.
What this production desperately wants to be is 'The 39 Steps'. The somewhat screwball, freeform, MacGuffin centred nature of the plot, as well as the setting is instantly reminiscent of both the Hitchcock film and the stage production. The lead character is even named 'Cary Donat', after Cary Grant and Robert Donat (star of the film The 39 Steps). 'The 39 Steps' is a great film and a brilliant West End production, so if you're trying to tread on the same ground as it does then you'd better do a damn good job. In trying to understand why 'The Shadow Formula' fails, it's important to have an understanding of what makes the stage production of 'The 39 Steps' succeed.
'The 39 Steps' is a comic adaptation of the Hitchcock film that uses minimal stage techniques to comic effect. It is performed by a charismatic cast of four, who using a couple of chairs and some small props manage to execute a complicated multi-character plot involving car chases, fights in and around moving trains and desperate dashes across rainy moors. In terms of tone it doesn't take itself seriously at all, poking fun at the far-fetched premise, the uptight nature of the characters and how ridiculous it is to try and stage action sequences using a few chairs. 'The Shadow Formula' tries to do a lot of these things, but stumbles at almost every hurdle.
The critical flaw that stops 'The Shadow Formula' working in the same way as 'The 39 Steps' is its tonal inconsistency. This manifests itself in many, many ways throughout the production and effectively nullifies any comedy as well as simultaneously spoiling the half-hearted stabs at pathos that the play attempts. The promotional material for this play describes it as a "noir comedy-thriller". This is a tricky (but not impossible) tightrope to walk down, as to serve each of these aspects well requires that different techniques be used to keep the audience engaged.
First, and most obviously, to be comedic, the play needs to be funny. You need a well-polished script and funny actors to be able to pull this off. 'The 39 Steps' gets a lot of comedy mileage from tacitly acknowledging that the cast as well as the audience understands how ridiculous it is. 'The Shadow Formula' attempts this sort of thing with some weak nudges at the fourth wall ("We're not characters in a stage play you know."). Conversely, to pull off a noir thriller, we need characters that the audience can sympathise with, genuine stakes, suspense, danger and events with real consequences. It's damn hard to keep both of these plates spinning at the same time, and if you fail (as this play does) you ruin the comedic elements by introducing too much pathos, and undermine any dramatic potential with the constant attempts at light-hearted humour.
For example, early on in the play the lead character heads to a bar to propose to his girlfriend. He seems genuine, and has seemingly borrowed money from a loan shark to pay for a ring. As far as the audience can tell, the lead is sincere in his emotions. Soon afterwards the corpse of his would-be wife is thrown through his front door. Our lead is shocked and distressed for maybe a minute or two, then it's back to lighthearted humour and half-jokes. In a straight comedy it'd be possible to relegate the dead girlfriend to some kind of a motivation for the character, but we can't here. Our hero's character arc is him getting over his survivor's guilt from World War I. In a straightforwardly dramatic scene we see him wracked with guilt ("I can still see their faces Claude, hear them talking"). So we have a character who is seemingly defined by not being able to get over the deaths of his friends, but is also barely affected by the body of his girlfriend being dumped in his house.
Another example of massive tonal inconsistency is the dialogue and actions of Diana Unity Fox (Jodyanne Richardson). Her character is one of the primary antagonists, a British Union of Fascists member and obsessed with meeting Hitler (she's pretty much a paper thin caricature of Unity Mitford). At one point she captures our two heroes and ties them up to a chair. It turns out the female lead, Raz, is Jewish. Her lackeys spread petrol around them and she begins gloating that "Jews are only good for burning!". This is a tremendously bad line for a number of reasons. Firstly, you'd better be a damn good writer to bring up holocaust imagery in your light-hearted comedy thriller and keep the audience laughing. The audience isn't laughing. You've got a pretty big comedy hill to climb if you're going to have the villain making gleeful references to the holocaust. But, what compounds the badness of this lane is that the events of the play are set in 1938, before the ovens of the death camps. So you have a line that not only completely torpedoes any comedy, it's also anachronistic!
This, and other elements give the script the feeling of a first draft. Tiny mistakes and things that don't make sense pepper the script. These examples are somewhat nitpicky, but they illustrate a lack of care and attention to dialogue and consistency. Lines like "he's taking the night ferry from Victoria!" (Victoria is a train station in central London with no water near it), "3 papers for 5p!" (Why would you want to buy more than one newspaper at a time?) and "She was smothered, we suspect foul play" (well the fact that she was smothered would seem to suggest that). These, and other lines so obviously don't make sense that it's a bit mysterious that someone, anyone didn't pipe up in rehearsals and point this out. It's not like they're plot critical lines, just minor alterations would fix it.
I am not the kind of person to dwell on these sorts of minor logical inconsistencies, but the play is peppered with them, and they become hard to ignore. If the play had a strong, propulsive narrative then it'd be a little easier to overlook them but the over-arching plot is so badly conceived that you find your mind wandering and dwelling on the minutia. The titular 'Shadow Formula' that the plot revolves around is an utterly ridiculous sounding chemical that, as describes "brings the shadows to life". The way that it's described makes it unclear as to whether they're speaking literally or not, and the play has been so tonally inconsistent that the audience is right to be confused as to whether the mad scientist is talking about conjuring monsters from the occult. It turns out he's not, but the fact that we are even wondering this is itself a failing. This chemical is so dangerous that apparently "two or three drops could drive an entire country mad". Our lead later gets dosed with it (admittedly this is described as a sample), and seems to be pretty much fine after about 10 minutes. Other plot-related inconsistencies are a laboriously set up "Chekhov's bullet proof vest" which in the end proves bizarrely irrelevant, and a chemistry-free romance that springs between our leads (who are both recently bereaved of their significant others by the end of the play) for no apparent reason other than narrative convention states that these two should kiss at the end.
All of my criticisms would be null and void if this play made the audience laugh. It doesn't, the most that the audience I was sitting in managed was the occasional polite titter. Most of the burden of this rests with the script, there is no delineation between "take this seriously" drama and the comedy. Part of the blame though, is with the cast.
It feels a bit cruel to criticise the cast (as far as I can tell they're all amateurs) and there are no truly awful performances. But, with one exception, none of them have any comic timing, and even though the script is pretty poor nothing they do salvages it. There is one exception, and that is the character of Claude Lockhart (Gabriel Keogh) who runs a bar (and I really, really hope that his surname isn't a reference to what I think it is). He has timing, and is actually funny. Every time he's on stage my interest perks up a little bit, and he's got an easygoing humour that makes me wish that this character was our hero. Sadly he later gets unceremoniously shot in the back. Oh well.
Our two leads are obviously able to act on some level, but have absolutely no chemistry or comic timing with each other. It's almost frustrating in the case of Edwin Flay, he can clearly pull off drama, there's a scene early on in the play where he's remembering his dead war buddies, and Flay sells this really well, mixing just the right amount of drunken melancholy and pragmatism. It's a good, well-acted scene, and sure it's completely tonally inconsistent, but it's nice to see something that is categorically good in this play. But while he'd fit well into a straight drama, he seems almost supernaturally incapable of raising any laughs from the audience.
Fiona Nivilis seems off altogether though. Admittedly, her character has somewhat conflicting motivations, she makes an impassioned speech against Nazism "all that's needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing!", but then her motivation later shifts to wanting to rescue a man she's known for about two weeks to the extent of handing over part of the sinister formula that the Nazis want. She neither convinces the audience of her hatred for fascism, or for her love of this man. To be fair to her she doesn't have much to work with scriptwise, but she seems quite dispassionate for someone with so much to lose.
There are other, minor annoyances unconnected to cast, script or direction. The smoke machine next to the stage seems to be on its last legs, and wheezes loudly throughout the production. The first half concludes with a character breaking a plate over another character's head. I was a bit dismayed to watch one of the actors crawling around on stage with a dust pan and brush cleaning this up during the interval. It seems quite disrespectful to the actor to ask him to demean himself crawling around in front of the audience. Sure, he may not have the biggest part, but that doesn't mean he should have to do this. Send someone out with a broom and then clear it up off-stage. The scenery looks somewhat ruined and bombed out, with iron rebar poking through concrete. This would make sense for a play set during the Blitz or in post WW2 London, but what are they trying to say by using this in a pre WW2 setting? They're charging £10 on the door for this, and there is a distinct sense of sloppiness to proceedings.
It's a bit depressing really, the play is not even a fun, interesting failure. I was sitting in an almost empty huge auditorium, in pretty much a silent, unresponsive audience. It's got to be pretty depressing to look out from the stage during this comedy to see bored looking faces staring back at you. I want to offer constructive criticism, but it's hard in this case as the flaws are buried deep in the foundations of the play and at this point there's not much you can do to fix it.
This is a play that tries to do too much and fails at almost everything it tries to do.
(as a postscript, I should add that all quotes from the play are from memory, but I wrote them down in the interval and afterwards so should be mostly accurate)
Friday, May 25, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
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I was a bit surprised to find an Edinburgh comedy preview on at King’s Place. The place is ultra classy, all pine, neat sculptures and £4 bottles of beer. They have Dyson Airblades in the toilets which, while they have become slightly more ubiquitous, are still my benchmark for an upmarket establishment. I’ve only been there before for classical music and I always feel a bit out of place there. I'm just waiting for a security guard’s hand to gently but firmly land on my shoulder and ask me to “please leave now sir, quietly, and without a fuss”. I don’t know how these acts managed to wangle their way into here, but it’s nice to see comedy in such a deadly serious venue.
Max and Ivan are… Con Artists
I don’t want to beat around the bush, this was wonderful stuff. 'Max and Ivan' are Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez, and they play every role in a complex Oceans 11 style heist thriller. It satirises nearly every trope of the genre, and manages to pull off giant action set pieces with just two chairs and two guys. The tone of the humour reminded me of Hot Fuzz or the golden age of the Simpsons in that while it pokes fun at the ridiculous aspects what it is satirising, it still, on some level, takes its own narrative vaguely seriously.
Watching what is essentially an ensemble piece with 7 main characters performed by two people does require that you pay attention. It’s a bit like being thrown into the deep end of a pool to begin with, but each character has a distinct body language and accent, so you learn fairly fast who’s who. 20 minutes into it you can easily tell who’s ‘on camera’ just by body language, let alone accent. I haven’t seen any of their other productions, so I don’t know if this kind of complex, multi-character narrative is anything out of the ordinary, but it’s a credit that even as the plot twists into unlikely contortions, we can still follow what is going on. Each of the main characters is quickly and efficiently sketched out. The characterisation is by necessity, fairly broad (the sinister Russian oligarch, the jaded, upper-class female hacker, etc) but even through all the jokes, and even though the fourth wall was comprehensively demolished I surprised myself by actually caring what was going to happen to them. Now, I wouldn’t exactly go so far as to say I was emotionally invested in these characters, but most of them have little mini-arcs within the narrative that pay off pretty satisfyingly and you find yourself caring when they are placed in danger.
This was the premiere performance, and things were a little rough around the edges. The second half was largely performed with scripts, but the charisma of the performers carried them through. They hit just the right balance between chatting to the audience and getting on with the performance. It was almost scary how quickly they built up a rapport with everyone there, and the audience was consistently enjoying themselves even through the occasional forgotten line or missed cue. In fact, the scrappy nature of the performance probably added to the enjoyment, and some of the biggest laughs were as a result of adlibbing.
The structure of the humour seems influenced in some way by the ‘cut away gag’ nature of animated shows like Family Guy. We repeatedly ‘cut away’ to say, films that the characters appeared in, or a previous heist. Unlike Family Guy though where the cutaways don’t forward the plot, and just serve to reference some random piece of 80s pop culture, all of these filled in a nice bit of backstory and added to the characterisation. There are some inspired bits of writing in this, which I don’t want to spoil. My favourite however, was the “that’s not a con!” sequence, which just kept piling on the ludicrousness to great heights.
I would love to see this again towards the end of their Edinburgh run to compare the difference in performance. I’m curious to see whether the off-the-cuff nature of the adlibs and the close camaraderie with the audience survive a month long run.I’d like to think it will. I also want to see how Ivan looks after doing the toothpaste gag for a month (he's right, that can't be healthy). But I loved the rough edges of last night, and even with missed lighting cues, scripts on stage and forgotten lines wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The Three Englishmen: SQUARES
The Three Englishmen are Ben Cottam, Nick Hall, Tom Hensby and Jack Hartnell. It’s much harder to write about their set than it is Max and Ivan, mainly because of slightly subjective factors that stopped this being quite as funny as it should be. The format is relatively quick-fire sketches covering pretty disparate ground. It ranges from straightforward parody to the surreal.
Technically there is not much wrong with the show. The costuming is quick, simple and effective and the characters within the sketches are, like Max and Ivan, quickly and efficiently defined. We can usually tell what stock character is being used from the first line said. The jokes are original and fairly creative – there were very few times where I thought that something missed the mark completely, and yet somehow the show felt lacking. It was loose and ponderous where it should have been razor-wire taut.
The annoying thing is that there are lots and lots of excellent jokes in this show, but the energy frequently dips, or the show lingers on a particular sketch past the punchline. The most funniest sketches were the shortest, the two involving boys/buoys were straightforward and funny without outstaying their welcome. Some just didn't work, for example, the Juliet Binoche joke just went on and on and on with no clear punchline in sight other than copious mugging to the audience.
It’s even worse when the concept of the sketch is pretty good, and would work if it was half as long (the Wine Shop sketch particularly) but it gets bogged down in repeating what the audience knows over and over again. If the joke is (and sorry for spoiling this one) that the guys running the wine shop are hopeless alcoholics, it doesn’t get any funnier after the second or third time you’ve shown us this. 3 or 4 minutes later the same joke was still being made and was rapidly getting unfunnier.
Towards the middle, the show began to fall into what I call the Whirlpool of Sympathy. This is when something happens that makes you feel sorry for the performers on stage. This happened during a song towards the middle where we were exhulted to sing along - “come on, you know the words!”. Apparently not. No-one sang along. In that instant there is an immediate disconnection between performer and audience. The audience feels a sense of group self-consciousness and you can’t help but think “why is no-one singing along?”. A frisson of discontent spreads through the crowd, suddenly there is a dividing line between the act and us. We are now not on the same page. I don’t know what the performer must think in that moment, confronted by a sea of silent, uncomfortable faces, but I’m betting it’s not good. I find myself feeling a bit sorry for the people on stage– it’s got to be a horrible feeling when people apparently aren’t having a good enough time to sing along with you. It’s hard to laugh at someone when you’re feeling a bit sorry for them. At this point we are both are trapped in the Whirlpool of Sympathy, it’s not a funny place, and it's damn hard to get out.
It feels a bit callous to be so critical, really. It’s clear to everyone watching that everyone on stage is funny in their own right, and that this is material that’s been worked on quite a bit. There are outstanding moments, for example a sketch where animal behaviour is acted out to the narration of David Attenborough – a concept that’s probably good enough to sustain an entire show on its own. The low points are the one-joke sketches that go on too long where the one-joke isn’t even particularly funny, like the Chris de Burgh sketch.
Towards the end there is a colossally unfunny celebrity chef song that lands like a lead balloon on the stage. It just keeps going and going. And I suppose it’s funny in a way that the audience can’t even recognise the chefs in question without being told who they are (if you think about it a bit harder you realise that probably means this bit isn’t working very well). We’re asked to sing along again. Silence. I feel more sympathy for the performers, who are trying so very, very hard to entertain us.
Sympathy should not be the emotion that comedians engender in their audience. I’m convinced there’s a great, lean, punchy 45 minute show here. They’ve just got to trim the fat out.
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