Theatre

An octet of Camden Fringe festival reviews

Alan Hindle | Tuesday 24 August, 2010 14:30

Witzelsucht & Moria
Witzelsucht is a neurological conditions characterised by a compulsion to tell jokes and rambling, pointless stories. Moria is both an uncontrollable sense of euphoria and a doomed dwarvish mining community under the Misty Mountains. Taking the dwarves out of the equation leaves us with GC Morgan’s wall-to-wall monologue about an elderly, rather incompetent psychiatrist sporting a striking brown tie falling for his occasional patient, the lovely but undependable Moria. Gradually, the doctor ambles congenially towards madness himself, spewing black bile and doing a spot of self-trepanning with a lump of slate.

Setting aside the impressive feat of memorising a vast script without punctuation or gaps for breathing, Witzelsucht’s greatest strength is also its weakness. The endless barrage of words is exhausting, though many inspired flights of language recall SJ Perelman and Myles na’Gopaleen. Occasionally there also flashes of William Burroughs, especially when the doctor enters his own madness. But the scenes that most effectively display the doctor’s descent are the quiet moments of disturbing imagery or silly dancing in Star Trek red and green lighting.

Morgan is a hugely likeable geek, with a plum in his mouth that could cut glass. As a performer, he is more of a monologuist than an actor- and he needs to learn to stand still and deliver the lines, dammit!- but the subtlety and pacing of his loopy doctor is outstanding in terms of writing and the joy of words.

As for the tie, a generous splash of ginger ale should get the black bile out. A fun show but a better book.

You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown
Kite eating trees, a beagle versus the Red Baron and the existential dilemmas faced by young children on the pitcher’s mound. Listing the achievements of Charles M. Schultz’s cartoon strip Peanuts reads like the vital statistics of the Great Pyramid of Giza- endless, awesome and mysterious. How did a simple cartoon about a round-headed loser become a global cultural phenomenon? Obviously it isn’t so very simple. Over its fifty year history Peanuts grew into a fully formed if nebulous philosophy, more Cynicism than Stoicism, with large dashes of Existentialism, and Charlie Brown as its Socrates.

This is a very deep theatre review, isn’t it?

And then I pull the football away!

Ha ha!

Peanuts is deep, but it was also funny, and You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown is a play constructed from half a century of four panel gags. Freshcut productions, a joint theatre company of students from Rose Bruford College and the Guilford School of Acting, really do bring the characters to life. Now, I can always have quibbles. Philosophical prodigy Linus Van Pelt is portrayed as an infant. The actor playing Charlie Brown missed an opportunity when he didn’t shave his head. But the cast, all of whom are also talented musicians, are excellent, and manage to walk like dachshunds. The show, by its nature, skitters along the edge of saccharine and sweetness, but the sourness of Lucy and Sally keeps the thing tasty. And in this production especially, Lucy and Sally rock.

2 am
Three women fake happiness with varying levels of success, dreaming of making music inspired by Michael Jackson and diving into week-long Internet love affairs. Just beneath the surface, however, lie the scars of abuse and abandonment. The “normal” lives they construct for themselves are fairy tales, but fairy tales are all about the dark currents under candy-coloured surfaces. That’s my interpretation, but Solas don’t offer any concrete meanings. They keep the meaning as fluid as their bodies.

The performers of 2 am, northerners all, use physical theatre to tell small, mythical stories. A creature more bird than girl crawls everyday to visit the hideous creature living under the pond. A goblin in a tree, who sings all night and sneers at people on the ground all day, discovers two baby boys and learns to love. The stories are quite sweet if occasionally twee, and the use of mime is clever, allowing the cast to become their own props, set, and costumes. The resolution of the three women’s lives bracketing these stories, however, is sudden. It’s like the play’s time is up, so here is your catharsis, thanks for coming. The blurb in the programme states the play will provide the ultimate in ‘feel-good’ theatre, but Happily Ever After is just another way of saying Nothing Lasts Forever, and trying to staple a positive message on the end, without actually confronting the issues of abuse raised, spoils the richness of the overall play.

Iszi Lawrence; Science Friction
Iszi Lawrence is a stand up comic and six foot tall, sex-obsessed twelve year-old child of “a lightning bolt and a Thundercat”. A techno-loving geek and classicist snob, a straight lesbian and a gay heterosexual. An atheistic Darwinian living with Creationist Christians who lusts after both Alan Rickman and Professor Snape without realising, or perhaps caring, they are the same person and one is fictional. She is combination of a steam train, pinball machine, and iPod, and while she chats on her cellphone she doodles fantastic Cimmerian adventures in blue ballpoint pen. If you showed her a rotting frog on the side of the road she would be gleefully disgusted, and while she would make lots of “eeeewww!” noises as she stuck her finger into its putrescent eyeball she would unable to stop herself checking what it tasted like.

Basically I’m in love with Iszi Lawrence. But I would never date her. Even assuming she was into short, balding, funny-looking, poverty-stricken theatre critics. Because if she should ever turn into her mother, as described in her act, she would probably just pack me in a Madeira wine-based Waitrose marinade, roast me with turnips and serve me with blanched kale, because that is what you do with snipes. Iszi would eventually have to kill me, because she is pedantic and obsessed with things being just so, and I’m a lazy slob.

But what a way to go. Eaten by Iszi Lawrence. In yer face, professor Alan Snape! Oh, wait, I’m daydreaming again. Time to move on to the next review…

Museum of Us
Emily never grew up. Who wants to grow up, into a world filled with work, bills and responsibility? So she remained with her toys and mixtapes of the 90s, riding her bike at night without a helmet until a car ensured she would never have to grow old at all. Her three childhood friends gather before the funeral to clear her parent’s attic before they move. Swept up in memories the women become girls again, playing with naked Barbies and overalled Kens, battling each with light sabers and dancing to Britpop.

A beautiful and lyrical film opens the play, narrated by a gentleman who sounds like the voice from every great kid’s animated TV series. In fact, this entire show seems like it was meant to be a film. Like the attic, it’s stuffed to the rafters with props. Toys that threaten to overwhelm and suffocate the play, bonding with the audience’s childhood as well, but stunting the characters. The naturalism of conversation between life-long friends, criss-crossing words and mumbling over each other, excludes us, the viewers. The best scenes are the simple ones, the most theatrical, when the girls tell us about their own lives and fears. In these sparse moments they grow and become real.

If this were a film instead of a play the genuine cleverness of the props couldn’t be appreciated. However, they could focus on the characters the excellent cast has little time to do justice to.

Roman Around
For a year and a half Ryan Millar was an illegal tour guide leading gaggles of mostly American tourists around the epicentre of Western civilisation, Rome. Vatican City, the Trevi Fountain, St. Peter’s Basilica, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Being a guide shepherding cats on vacation is hard work. In a way, reenacting these tours on a stage at the Camden Head pub is harder because we don’t get to actually see the Rome being discussed. While most of Ryan’s tour is of the mainstream tourist hotspots, and the mainstream interpretation of history (there is so much recent archeological discoveries about the origins of Rome, yet Millar chooses to tell the mythical story of Romulus and Remus as if it were fact) where it works best is when he gives us his own personal slant. The tale of Michaelangelo, a sculptor manoeuvred into painting the Sistine Chapel by a disgruntled architect, is given life and perspective by his telling, as well as a true sense of the monumentality and importance of that amazing work.

Unfortunately, while tour guiding certainly uses elements of acting, and while the history of the eternal city is jam-packed with drama, neither actually tell a coherent story. Ryan uses his own adventures coming a-cropper of local politics and rivalries between lazy Italian and chirpy, professional, North American guides to tie the show together. Neither one nor the other, and avoiding the story in between: The woman he went to Italy to woo to be his wife.

In the Meantime
Before this show started it showed such huge promise. Kevin Haney, hidden behind the paper screen at the Camden Head watching the audience come in and giving a running commentary was effortlessly funny. “Nobody wants to sit in the front row, they’re all afraid of being picked on. This isn’t improv!” he improvs, and then proceeds to gently pick on the audience. But while the three performers, Haney, Naomi Bowen and Robert Blackwood are supremely confident, funny, relaxed performers (especially Haney, who occasionally seems unaware he is in a show) the sketches themselves don’t work because the group are stingy with the punchlines. The jokes are all set-up and the pay-off appears forgotten. When the cast wants it can chuck zingers one after the other, all together, in pyrotechnic combinations. Bang bang, bangbang, zing. Sides are clutched, jaws are split- it’s beautiful. They can do it- but choose to so rarely. Why? This isn’t metacomedy with Neil Hamburger, it’s straight forward sketch comedy. One sketch took the most clichéd joke in the world… and proceeded to explain exactly how unfunny it is, and not in a funny way. Another was a joke told three times and what was intended to make it amusing were the accents used. Then suddenly a hilarious sketch about a villainous bakery inspector/cake monster reminds you these people are good at what they do.

Bloody Women
Medb, or Maeve, divine queen of Connacht demands her husband Conchobar, King of Ulster give her his county’s prize brown bull that she may be equal in wealth to he. When he refuses the goddess rallies her forces for war. All that stands in her way is a boy named Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster and the mightest warrior in the world.

Susurrus theatre’s two-hander production, Bloody Women is short but fearfully intense. Emer O’Connor, a haunted and haunting woman, stares balefully into the audience, fixing us with her mournful eyes while cellist Charlie Henry oozes melancholy and mist. Two buckets of water steadily turn red with blood as the queen wrings out the laundry of the dead, leaving the clothes sprawled on the floor like bodies.

The ancient story is given a new, feminist twist, I think, though I admit I’m not overly familiar with the original. Women, half the population of humanity, are not to be lightly set aside or abused. And when the goddess offers you help, you do not refuse, as you are refusing Life itself, which can only have one consequence. I could be completely wrong about that. I’d just come from a comedy sketch show and unexpectedly found myself knee deep in Irish blood, so I was a little disoriented.

A quietly powerful show but best seen when you can have a pint afterwards with friends to recuperate. Presumably a Caffrey’s.

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