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DIRECT FROM

MOSCOW

THE GREAT RUSSIAN

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28 The List 27 August—9 September I993

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FESTIVAL

Poor Poe watch his mother cough

up blood and die when he was two.

This is the iirst remembrance conjured

up by a truck-coated, lion-haired

George Dillon irorn the impenetrable

gloom oi the dwarilng stage oi

Pleasance Dne. It is also the tact to cling to like glue it, like me, you ieel

that a whisker oi sympathy tor the

subject helps an hour-long dramatic

biography. For, as Dillon weaves together

extracts irom Poe‘s iiction, his letters,

his critical and autobiographical

writings, a character emerges who is unremittineg obnoxious. Dillon’s Poe is morbid, seli-pitying, melodramatic;

his aesthetic is Impossiny prescriptive; his passions seem contrived and aiiected.

lot that a bad man necessarin

George Dillon .6 13,. V

George Dillon: Poe laced implies a bad show, and, with clever lighting and lightning-quick shiits in mood and perionnance style, Dillon does build a rich texture and a suitably ominous atmosphere. lie also keeps Poe’s indigestible Victorian verbosity in manageable chunks, and even these he leavens with blunt asides. The script itself is thoughtfully assembled, and potentially iascinating in, ior example, its blurring oi the line between the idealised love in the Gothic poem The Raven, and the ugly reality oi Poe’s revulsion ior his ailing wiie.

Why then does this piece just tell to engage? (Catherine Fellows) The Remembrance oi Edgar Allan Poe (Fringe) George Dillon, Pleasance (Venue 33) 556 6550, 26, 30 Aug, 2, 3 Sept. 1.30901. £6 (£5)-

The Games Rule

Two men play games in a bare room

containing nothing but a bench, a rag and a piece at chalk. Sometimes the games are tun, to pass the time, but

mostly they return to Spool, a

guessing game. The loser at Spool has to pull the lever when the awiul siren blasts. The loser at Spooi, as with all

the games, is the ponderous Tubbs. Quick witted Ash runs rings round

Tubbs. lie always has the answer, the

riposte tor every occasion. it is Ash

who iuels Tubbs’s imagination when

they conjure up the fantasy oi a

restaurant to sate their appetites. But without Tubbs. Ash’s iantasy is going

nowhere. Obviously, without Tubs, Ash can never win.

Iithere are lusttwooiyou,withan inilnlte unonnt oi time, then bredting the rules becomes pointless. The role

here is never to letter, as lick Frost (Tubbs) and Daniel Finlay (Ash)

The Games Rule: lever

rampage through the script screaming numbers at each other. Numbers which outside the perionnance seem like chaos, but inside the coniines oi the theatre make periect sense. Rules In The Games Rule were not made to be broken, but invented to be bent, twisted into a poignant production.

(T horn Dibdin)

The Games Rule (Fringe) Tandem Theatre Productions, Theatre Workshop (Venue 20) 226 5425, until 4 Sept (not 29 MI). 19m, 24 (£3)-

_J