Theatre
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Trir; ()UBSIIOT‘ of angina, where whom a perv/r cornea. an: ' people Create themselxes ' connection mtt: Illi‘, ria‘, Hal/40’: realist drama since the my; of lime" itii'. new pit-U: by Joel Hél".‘.”i’/1 travels dovm t’ii', road pretty coriifortably. explaring ill" ll.":‘, of a group of working class dysfiii.r,t:ur.a!n from rural Suffolk
In it two t.r',ttir:r‘;. one an angry in.”
unable to settle in work or relationships. the other slightly mentally handicapped from birth. discover that their ostensible mother is in fact their grandmother, and a guest for their birth mother leads them to uncover a grim family secret. Meanwhile a farmer cum touring folk singer is also estranged from his past. lhe piece moves along nicely enough. and is well acted by the cast of five. but the kind of territory covered has become a little too familiar. a particular kind of English contemporary drama that might not need much more exploration. Almost ineVitably. the piece treats paedOphilia as not endorseable. but more complex than the media hysteria that surrounds it might make it seem. The characters' obsessrons. though. With names and the processes of nomenclature. With each haVing more identities than one. is interesting. and if the mid 80s might seem rather a belated date for moralism about teenage pregnancy. there are. if we let that go. some tense and dramatic moments. lSteve Cramerl
I Traverse 3: The Univers‘ify of Edinburgh Drill Hall 228 7404, until '86 Aug (not 73, 20), times vary. {3,76 (ES—E77)
THE SPOILS
Secretarial interrogation o.
Y0utube Videos of the final minutes of deposed former dictators give us all pause to consider the human rights implications and responSibilities of a conduering power. Formal shirts and ties may have replaced orange Jtllllp Suits in Shady Dolls new production. but the role Of the Victor in am conflict is put under scrutiny in direct0r Steven Dykes‘ skewed vision of a militan interrogation. A uniformed interpreter (Clark Devlin) attempts to pry information from four seemingly lowly seCretaries. prewously employ ed by the conquered regime. His unusual technique involves subjecting the prisoners to a detailed analySis of
DARKNESS WITHIN
A story of social outcasts 00
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i i l . .. 'i l k I ENGLAND Transplanting ideas 00..
Tim Crouch, who has built a strong reputation at the Fringe with his shows My Arm and An Oak Tree has seemed a guaranteed banker in the months since this year’s show was announced. And this piece is worth the wait.
It involves Crouch and performer Hannah Ringham, who we meet in the Fruitmarket art gallery, both playing the same character, deciding instinctively who should say which line at every performance. And a pretty unprepossessing personality it is. The voice they iterate through alternate lines is a kind of smug metropolitan bourgeois, bringing its art collection casually into conversations, as well as a boyfriend of enormous wealth and international connections. But this internationalism belongs exclusively to the world of visual arts, showing little knowledge of any other existence than that of the snobbish hyper-affluent. We begin to feel a little sympathy when it is announced, through the fixed, ultimately pretty punchable smiles of the performers, that a heart ailment has been diagnosed, and a transplant has become necessary. Yet just as we begin to feel sympathy, a final scene occurs, which displays the shocking ignorance and disconnection from history of the protagonist.
Ultimately, Crouch's story piles the usual postmoderrn complexities onto a personality, rendering our response to the figure ambivalent, then strips all this away to display a simple moral fable on which we must take a position. All the cool surfaces of simple observation, such as the comments on the working class origins of the Fruitmarket building, without any further meaning or nuance, become something we must respond to with feeling and politicise. If we miss this on the way to the play's final confrontation with a victim of a global colonialist adventure, the denouement leaves us no escape. The peculiar blankness of Crouch and Ringham’s performance style complements the way in which this cleverly traduces several well established attitudes within the visual, and other arts. (Steve Cramer)
I Traversea The Fame: Galen. 945 119)., a. A..;; Jr
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