Theatre
Reviews
NE \‘i.’ W( )HK A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE 000 Touring
The power structures that underlie confession, once a universal means by which people of earlier centuries could be controlled, are still in place. These days, the priests who control our behaviour by submitting us to questioning, declaring our inner selves in order to demonstrate powerlessness, are the lifestyle gurus, emotional advisors and even psychologists to whom we pay homage.
This Foucaulvian issue, one which projects power structures onto such ostensibly private matters as our sexuality, is at the heart of Graham Eatough‘s production of Renato Gabrielli’s text for Suspect Culture. In it, a well-off Englishwomen (Selina Boyack), suffering from such emotional isolation and loneliness that she will accept abuse as a surrogate for affection, and an equally confused, sexually inexperienced and despairing Italian man (Sergio Romano) have the beginnings of a relationship arranged by ‘The Agency’. This impersonal multinational apparatus supplies a life coach figure to each as the meeting looms, and these confessors
94 THE LIST 3- ‘ ' My 303:?
NIHON BUYO Edinburgh Festival Theatre. Mon H Mar
subject them to such humiliation in the name of conformity to social, sexual and class homogeneity, that love and life itself is imperilled. Can love be found in this context — not just that of the characters but our world itself?
Gabrielli’s text is wonderfully articulate on the sources of alienation in multinational culture, rendering its metaphors crystal clear, in all their painful and at times funny lucidity. Eatough extracts wonderful performances from both Boyack and Romano, full of detail and meticulous physical business. But the experience is not without its drawbacks. That some of the text is in Italian without subtitles is a minor impediment; more serious is that while the text does one thing very well, it does little else, moving fairly quickly into repetition. Moreover, while Luigi Mattiazzi’s set, a long and maze-like track not unlike a gigantic toy Grand Prix road, allows for many emotional near misses, but once again is destined throughout to repeat the same physical business endlessly, eventually, looking plain awkward. The performances save much of the evening, but this piece, even at 80 minutes, feels like a one-act play extended well beyond its natural length. (Steve Cramer)
Jesus CHRIST SUPERSTAR Touring I.