A Little Farce With a Big Bite
01 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Adrian Collins, Chris Weare, Kate Liquorish, Scott Sparrow, The Little Theatre, The Mechanicals, Tinarie van Wyk Loots
Ever been so frustrated during a play that you want to jump out of your seat and help the actors out? Sam Shepard’s characters Birdboot and Moon have…and they should know, they’re critics.
Fortunately for this critic, I didn’t quite have the same experience in this latest Mechanicals repertory offering. Though the stage antics certainly had me rolling on the floor, it was only with laughter. I count myself lucky.
A theatrical treat by Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound follows the adventures of two theatre critics attending an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit – a play that rapidly spirals out of control when the boundaries between art and life seem to merge, with some rather unfortunate consequences.
Photograph: Jesse Kramer
Hound is that rarest of creatures: a farce that is both intelligent and accessible. The play provides a perfect balance of delicious romp and very clever social observation and The Mechanicals don’t disappoint on either front. Certainly, they don’t pull any punches in their interpretation. This is all-out, completely committed farce. The play-within-a-play convention allows a cringe-worthily predictable whodunit to unfold, evoking a similarly cringe-worthily predictable performance of quite a different kind from our two resident critics.
Tinarie van Wyk Loots (Moon) and Scott Sparrow (Birdboot) are a Mechanicals dream team. Wowing as the fairy puppetmasters in Midsummer Night’s Dream, they are on the receiving end of the narrative games in The Real Inspector Hound, and director Chris Weare wastes no opportunities to yank on their proverbial strings.
Despite magnificent ensemble performances – and Kate Liquorish deserves special mention for her utterly committed, magnificently bewildered Mrs Drudge – the show is stolen for me by Adrian Collins. Playing the ill-tempered Major Magnus, Collins’ understated acting is a gem of an interpretation. His performance lies in excellent contrast to the highly-strung personas of his fellow cast members. Watch his stage business. He’ll have you in stitches.
Although on opening the play felt like it needed a little time to set performance rhythms and comedic timing, I’m certain that the run is doing full justice to the quality of the acting, direction and script. After all, The Mechanicals consistently pull theatrical magic out of the bag on tight rehearsal periods and even tighter budgets. They are by now well established as a quality Capetonian company to watch. You should take the opportunity to see them in this production.
…just turn your phones off and don’t answer any calls during the show. I’ve heard they don’t react particularly well to that sort of thing.
A (Delicious) Nightmare on Orange Street
19 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Adrian Collins, Andrew Laubscher, Dorian Burnstein, Emily Child, Guy de Lancey, Julia Anastasopoulos, Scott Sparrow, The Intimate Theatre, The Mechanicals, Tinarie van Wyk Loots, Vaneshran Arumugam
The Mechanicals have delivered the impossible. A full-cast Shakespeare, subtly, intelligently and creatively performed….in the Intimate Theatre. Good lord.
Guy de Lancey directs a full cast of the usual suspects (with several guest appearances) in yet another trademark dark and sexy performance by the Mechanicals – a welcome return to form after what I felt to be a rather disappointing adaptation of The Great Gatsby earlier this season. Audiences experience a world both grotesque and, paradoxically, enchanting – a veritable Victorian freak show of dribbling mad Dukes, misshapen fairy attendants and warrior women.
Photo courtesy Jesse Kramer
The set is magnificent, the lighting, creative, exiting and moody (unlike the ham-handed efforts of Bottom and co at creating moonshine, De Lancey designs a solution for depicting moonlight that is utterly ingenious and very beautiful). Perhaps my favourite touch, though, was the intermittent exposure of the back wall where a giant mirror reflected a well-lit audience to itself. A row of open white lights along the top make it resemble nothing so much as a stage dressing room mirror – insert your best after-dinner postmodern theories here.
I was deeply uncomfortable with the unironic and brutally uncompromising humour in the depiction of handicap in Dorian Burnstein’s Tom Snout. As, indeed, I was meant to be. This is not a rendering that is afraid of politics, that panders to the comfort zone or makes excuses. The constant opportunities to view oneself that the mirror provides ensures that, in viewing the other, we are never fully able to escape our own prejudices and politics. De Lancey denies the audience a comfortable, passive experience of consumption, ensuring that whatever reaction the other(ed) body or interpretation provokes ultimately reflects own selves as we sit, Duke-like in our viewing.
Despite a refusal work with PC notions of the body, De Lancey interestingly moves away from the standard misogynism inherent in the text, giving the play a strong feminist reading. Certainly, misogyny rears its ugly head at every turn, but here the women show their mettle. Textually, it is a challenge to give the women in the play some semblance of fightback without resorting to tokenism, or forcing the text in a direction it won’t support. De Lancey shows women up against the wire, women on the edge, women bent but not broken. He gives them fight, gives them (quite literally) clout and, most of all, gives them the power to subvert patriarchal rule even as they are fooled, forced and dominated. There is ample space for a very uncomfortable post-feminist interpretation here, but this is one area where Du Lancey ensures our modern sensibilities are catered for.
Speaking of modern sensibilities, the bizarrely jarring ante is upped with some excellent anachronistic additions – just as in a dream, where realism blends seamlessly with fantasy leaving the dreamer with a jangling mix of effects, so we are presented with a Elvis-coiffed, singing Bottom – far more disturbing than any ass’s head ever could be.
Tinarie van Wyk Loots and Scott Sparrow are, predictably, outstanding as Titania and Oberon. No idealised fairy kingdom here; this is a world at war – a viciously un-civil war – and the battered fairies show on their bodies the all-out war for power in all its gory violence. The war over sex and power is given a face, and it is a battered one. For me, they steal the show – a powerhouse combination of van Wyk-Loots’ chilling venom (which melts into disturbingly besotted lust) contrasts beautifully with Sparrow’s grinning mania. Both fairies offer the promise of darkness, whether it be sexual power or social. They, more than any of the human characters, seem properly ‘real’, true to their selves as they wage their all-out battle for sexual dominance.
In a brilliant move, Theseus the Duke – that beacon of Patriarchal oppression and Athenian (male) rationality – is depicted as a mad, debauched, dribbling inbred, his power as laughable as it is disturbingly present at the periphery of the mad revels of the crackpot dukedom he presides over. Hippolyta, forced into a role as a sullen child-bride, a virgin sacrifice to the Duke’s whim, is initially a virtually silent – and silenced – toy puppet. De Lancey has her body speak the volumes she cannot and, as the play progresses, we see her gaining resistance and, in the final gin-sodden bridal scene, we find her morphed into a washed-up Jackie Onassis; grim, determined to fight to the end and simultaneously self aware of what awaits her.
De Lancey has some bold choices for the hereos, too. Emily Child and Andrew Lauscher are deliciously self-obsessed lovers, Child particularly delivers a Hermia that is coldly, indeed ruthlessly in love, though whether with Lysander or her own rebellion we are never quite sure. The ice in her tone (and power in her arm) makes her a most formidable opponent and even more formidable lover. Laubscher was a wonderful Lysander; sexy and strong with just enough of the ridiculous dandy to show us the darker side of what can too easily and simplistically be cast as a golden couple.
Casting Adrian Collins as Puck was an intriguing choice, and one that worked surprisingly well. No mischievous imp, Collins brought cold, barely-suppressed aggression to the role – an ever-present, menacing masculinity that could not be contained even by the gaudiest of disco shoes. The use of Collins in a ringmaster role to frame the action – to reveal and conceal the cast and act as an audience interface – could not have set the tone better.
There were a couple of decisions – directorial or personal – that didn’t work quite as well for me. Julia Anastasopoulos’ heightened agitation and fits of petulance could have worked very well – certainly she came across as a most alarming lover, one sitting just on the comedy knife edge of Fatal Attraction potential. She grew on me in the second act (when everything hits a manic tone), but didn’t sit well with me in the first act where I felt it to be too heavy on the side of emotional caricature. The Mechanicals (the troupe in the play, mind!) did not deliver quite as I’d hoped, though Vaneshran Arumugam gave a deliciously pompous and extremely clever performance as Bottom.
If dark, disturbing, sexy theatre’s your thing, you really should head down to Hiddingh. The Intimate has got her sexiest makeover yet and she’d love the pleasure of your company, Tuesday through Saturdays at 7:30 until the end of this month.
Storytelling Fit for an Emperor
14 Jan 2010 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Andre Wiedeman, Andrew Laubscher, Eben Genis, Juliet Jenkin, Marthinus Basson, Maynardville, Nick Pauling, Tinarie van Wyk Loots
Never work with children and animals: director Marthinus Basson dares to do both (if you’ll allow me a little leeway for reptiles) and, yes, it works remarkably well.
In short: yes, the snakes are real. Yes, the bald heads are too. Brave visual statements abound in this production – the set is minimalist to the point of being stark, yet used to perfection. Where the play may lack interpretive bite and experimentation, the design more than compensates.
Antony and Cleopatra is a tricky play to stage. Spanning ten years and an entire Roman Empire, it’s a given that – at one point or another – you’re going to leave some of the audience behind. Basson’s solution was visual, simple and surprisingly effective. Giant fluorescent light tubes clearly marked the changes in location: regular, ordered verticals in militant red for the Romans; chaotic, irrational diagonals in sandswept ambers for Egypt and an acidwash blue underfloor glow for Pompey’s seaward rebellion. The effect was locational clarity with a bonus of moody atmosphere.
The play’s binary contrasts between Egypt and Rome, between reason and passion and man and woman are, perhaps, less fashionable contemporary observations. Basson did not shy away from them, however, and delivered a play that worked within the text’s themes rather than looked outside it to making overt, modern statements. Certainly, we are not lulled into any simple binary loyalties: Basson maintains the moral complexities that make clear-headed judgements so hard in this play, both for audiences and the characters themselves. Rome may be the seat of reason and colonial rule, but it is based on the manipulations of a misogynist, spoiled young ruler and egotistical in-fighting.
Basson’s casting does much to enhance this: Andrew Laubscher is thoroughly and gloriously unlikable as Rome’s own spoiled leader Octavius Caesar. Cleopatra may be a drama queen in love and a flighty coward in allegiance, but she is no coward when the crunch comes and carries through her own choice of fate with a firm hand. Egypt may be conquered, but it is always taken on its own terms. While a weaker actress might have been upstaged by Penny Simpson’s bold costumes (the design! The variety!), Tinarie van Wyk Loots gave a compelling performance as the petulant queen Cleo. She was magnificent when needed, tempestuous when crossed and arrogant in her sexual magnetism. Andre Weideman’s Antony was less successful for me, but captured the insecurity of ageing masculinity coupled with crippling doubt at his own flaws of passion clouding reason. Indeed, performances were generally strong across the cast – Nick Pauling’s debauched Sextus Pompius swashbuckled his way through the first act, besuited Eben Genis beautifully portrayed the morally conflicted Dolabella and Juliet Jenkin’s awkward Charmian proved a comic delight.
Basson’s understanding of the energy of performance and reception shone in his decision to trim some of the longer monologues from primary characters and favour instead the bit part – usually the first to suffer when cuts are required. From an eunuch’s frustrations to a messenger’s anxiety, all are given their airing in the course of the three hour performance. From a technical aspect, the music was, at times, awkwardly faded - a detail that will no doubt be fine-tuned in the course of the run.
Altogether, this was a very solid production. My only real unhappiness was with the interpretation of the final scene. As Cleopatra applies the asps to herself, she speaks as if they were substitutes for the children torn from her by the Romans (“Dost thou not see my baby at my breast/That sucks the nurse asleep?”). The sensual intimacy of this macabre maternity simply isn’t captured by Loots who, no doubt constrained by the performance reality of live snakes as much as her elaborate chin-high death outfit, merely holds them in an outstretched hand before closing her eyes as if in sleep.
Overall, a strong ensemble cast deliver a solid performance that is complemented by bold visual elements and clever direction. There are no interpretative surprises here – the pleasure’s all in the performance. Get thee to it, then.
