Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
Blind, I felt a hand clutch mine. I was tugged forward into the dark. Fingers brushed up my leg, a voice whispered and breath blustered across my neck. I was surrounded.
Finally, the blindfold was yanked down. I saw shapes, a figure caught by wires, twitching, his hands suspended. I looked to the man next to me. His face was glistening, and I brought a hand to my own damp forehead. ‘What have I done?’ I thought. But this was no Bacchanalian orgy; this was The Trial.
Brought to you by Belt Up and making a post-modern voyage to the Fringe this summer, The Trial follows a man swallowed by the relentless machine of bureaucracy, accused of a crime of which he is ignorant. True to form, the immersive techniques worked; after I had stopped my self-conscious giggling I was swallowed by waves of fear and guilt. The acting was predictably good (the swats) with Dominic Allen sickening the audience with his bulldozingly faultless performance and the ensemble prompting me to write an epic metaphor comparing them to a flock of birds swooping as one over the English fields and yet at times each one fluttering as a solo robin over a winter’s garden… I digress.
True to form, the immersive techniques worked; after I had stopped my self-conscious giggling I was swallowed by waves of fear and guilt.
I wish (as I believe that this is the moment) I could say something meaningful about Stephen Berkoff’s poignant interpretation of Franz Kafka’s play, but I can’t. I should have been paying close attention, picking up the trains of thought beautifully laid out like silk cords through a labyrinth.
But I was busy trying to breathe. Take thirty already smelly students and petrify their arses off with a little stroking in a small black box on a stuffy June night and you have a recipe for some serious arm pit floodage. It was hotter than Ziggy’s, and more uncomfortable than tea with your great aunt. Be strong, I told myself; the claustrophobic atmosphere is part of the intense dramatic stuff. Be immersed.
I leaned gingerly against the wall. Perhaps it was the sweat on my back, perhaps it was the calls of my aching feet, but pretty soon I had let my bum slide to the floor. I looked gingerly at the other members of the audience. They looked back, scornfully. God, they said, with their expressive eyes, you’ve given up. I haven’t, I said back (symbolically, of course, because talking in the theatre is naughty), I’m still immersed! No, they cried, we, we suffer for our theatre! Go back to your wishy-washy pantomime if you can’t take real art!
Enough of this wallowing in my own paddling pool of self-pity and sweat. It’s the actors we should talk about: They ran about like hamsters in a wheel doing all that acting business (the being other people game) and their little faces had veritable canals of gloopy salt trickling off their foreheads and plopping off their chins. Boys and girls, this was extreme drama in extreme conditions. Belt Up, I salute you. But if you are going to immerse me, can you do it with air conditioning? And a sofa? And a foot massage?
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