Festival Theatre ATRIUM Theatre interrupted ●●●●●
Last year Belt Up caused a stir by blindfolding the audience during The Trial. Even without blindfolds there is a great deal of trust placed in a theatre company: to guide the audience clearly (and safely) to an as-yet unknown destination. When standard narrative structures are abandoned and the destination is confusion, it gets more complicated. The set up is the rooms of an
eccentric, possible old, possibly dying man recounting his memoirs to a ghostwriter, a situation ripe with notions of truth, fiction, memory and reality. Then follows a series of almost- vignettes, some involving the audience, some musical, many comical. Surreal props and dialogue litter the performance, constantly undermining attempts at interpretation. The host, Malcolm Kinnear, and his household are alternately character and narrator and it’s never certain what is really real, real within the play or imagined. The pre-press would have us believe that the whole audience is a figment. Belt Up excels at experiential theatre and succeeds in its goal of befuddling and amusing. The answer to larger questions like ‘why?’ are left up to the imagination. (Suzanne Black) ■ C Soco, 0845 260 1234, until 29 Aug (not 26, 28), 11pm, £8.50–£10.50 (£7.50–£9.50).
BUD TAKE THE WHEEL I FEEL A SONG COMING ON Resonant family drama in the heart of the English countryside ●●●●●
A son returns home to the country after an absence of eight years with the intention of developing the local mill to create new housing in the area. Facing up to an abusive father stuck in a dying trade, a sister boiling with teenage rage and a mother trying to keep a lid on her frustration, this For everything you need to know about all the Festivals visit www.list.co.uk/festival
44 THE LIST 26 Aug–9 Sep 2010
piercingly observed drama tackles the gap between urban and rural, as well as the rift between generations. Clara Brennan’s writing is powerful,
with touches of dark humour and affecting compassion rippling through the dialogue. While a touch slow at the start, the domesticity of family life is captured beautifully and the narrative soon builds into an involving production that pulls you straight into the vivid world Brennan creates. Intimate, startling performances pack raw emotion into the hard-hitting themes of domestic violence and rural entrapment and explore how an increase in opportunities and means of escape for the younger generation can become both a cause for resentment as well as hope. Urgent and affecting theatre, its echoes will linger with you like a tune stuck in your head. (Amy Russell) ■ Underbelly, 0844 545 8252, 7–29 Aug, 4.35pm, £9.50–£10.50 (£8.50–£9.50).
Y H P A R G O T O H P N A O R N H O J
HONEST Engaging indictment of the banality of modern office life ●●●●● Civil servant Dave can’t tell a lie – not even the good ones, like humouring a ten-year-old in the illusion that his drawing is a masterpiece. So he sits down, pint in hand, and tells the gathered drinkers in a pub side-room with brutal honesty about his work and colleagues in a government
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department so saturated in buzzwords that no one knows what it’s even for. This 45-minute monologue written by DC Moore is a damning indictment of the utter banality of modern office life, the nonsensical jargon, and the violation of the English language by moronic middle management types. Unfortunately, at times it’s hard to hear above the pub chatter, but so engagingly is the story told by Trystan Gravelle that it hardly seems as vicious as it is. (Gravelle’s beautiful Welsh accent may have something to do with that – this play is worth seeing if for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of a Welshman saying ‘marsupial.’)
An ending that would be in danger of
becoming overly sentimental if it went on any longer is a small flaw in an otherwise blackly funny, cynically perceptive piece of work. (Laura Ennor) ■ Milne’s Bar, tickets from Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, until 30 Aug (not 23), 3.30pm & 6.30pm, £6–£8.
THE AUTHOR Outstanding show exploring voyeurism in art ●●●●●
In a festival with a good deal of verbatim theatre, Tim Crouch’s new play deals in a timely fashion with the difference between pure reality and authenticity. The tale told is self evidently untrue, yet its truth feels increasingly more believable than reality. At each step the audience is asked to collude in an untruth, as audiences inevitably do, so the fiction we cooperate with becomes overwhelmingly unsettling.
Crouch carries this off by placing himself and three actors within an auditorium with no stage, only an audience from which the performers carry out a ‘conversation’ about several events surrounding a production they have recently completed. From a ‘friend’ of the theatre involved in an auditorium accident on the final night, to an actor whose stage character begins to control him, to a young actress torn between commercial reward and serious theatre, and on to the eponymous scribe, each tests our
response to an increasingly shocking series of events. We are repeatedly asked if what is being described is too much, but continue to assent. Crouch’s piece examines the forms of voyeurism
involved in art, describing research that involves watching endless acts of violence on the net, and interviewing victims of abuse for the sake of representing them as ‘real’. In manipulating reality, the piece makes the point that the simple recording of an event, be it violence or pornography, has become so commonplace that we are somehow cauterised, preserved from its flesh and blood incarnation, yet even describing it verbally inside the ‘safe’ confines of a studio theatre can have an appalling effect. Seldom in recent years has the unwritten contract between actor and audience been so powerfully exploited. Good theatre is manipulative, but not necessarily true, and this compellingly performed play knows it. (Steve Cramer) ■ Traverse Theatre, 228 1404, until 29 Aug, times vary, £15–£17 (£11–£12).