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.
The first half of Wedekind’s play focuses almost totally on the children of the play, and what a brilliantly lively, gangly, agitated and confused bunch they are. Across the uneasily-allied factions of boys and girls, a spectrum is drawn of adolescent experience. Even for a university student, playing a fourteen-year-old requires a complete and devoted physical transformation, and this transformation is one that the cast pulls off brilliantly, without exception. The boys either glide with adolescent nonchalance or hum with insecure energy. The girls skip gleefully between coquettish simpering and womanly poise. Each character’s movement, diction and expression together convey a complete character, a real, whole, emerging human personality scrutinised in the magnifying glass of adolescence.
This melting-pot of emerging consciousness is no better exemplified than by the interaction between Freddy Elletson and Francesca Murray-Fuentes, smartly cast as Melchior and Wendla respectively. Elletson, looking every bit the willowy young man, opposite Murray-Fuentes’ pretty little girl, epitomises the ambiguity at the core of the play. When Melchior first reaches out a long, thin arm to tuck a lock of hair behind Wendla’s ear, each heart in the audience audibly skipped a beat. All such moments of physical intimacy were carried off with absolute dedication and conviction by the strong ensemble cast, perhaps best exemplified by the play’s masturbation sequence. Here, Robert Stuart as Hanschen gives a religious reverence to the ceremony of what might otherwise descend into a cacophany of audience sniggering. Hanschen moans and writhes, at turns euphoric and at times utterly self-loathing, analysing the gravity of his sin with the schoolboy poetics which dog all the play’s youth. Stuart deftly rode the shifting audience mood of amusement and discomfort, with initial giggles quickly stifled by Hanschen’s pivotal instant of self-disgust and at no point in this difficult scene did Stuart flinch.
As the story develops, the world of adults begins to cast a longer shadow over the children, with authoritarian moral principles suddenly and harshly looming. The conflict between the nurturing and disciplinary values of parenthood is best explored in the division between the initially similar Frau Gabor (Morven Hamilton) and Frau Bergmann (Ella Dolan), the mothers of Melchior and Wendla respectively. Even as Frau Gabor defends her son’s virtue to the death, Frau Bergmann po-facedly condemns her daughter in an utterly devastating betrayal which marked one of the production’s stand-out scenes. The adult performances were strong across the board, with only one misstep coming immediately after the interval in Tom Vickers’ portrayal of Professor Sunstroke, Melchior’s unfeeling schoolmaster. While Vickers’ pantomimic performance of a crank German schoolmaster was undoubtedly delivered with conviction, it seemed utterly out-of-place in a production which otherwise convincingly made monsters out of ordinary people. However, special mention must also go to Vickers for some genuinely excellent masked work in the play’s climactic scene in one example of the play’s unobtrusive multi-role casting.
Every element of this production seemed marked by a singular flair for mood, pace and innovation. Toby Foster’s lighting design and tech subtly and sometimes beautifully punctuated the onstage action, and the costumes, props and stagecraft were unilaterally a wonder to behold. The only single niggling problem with the overarching design was the fact that the beautiful white set amplified all lights cast on it, so no blackout was complete, and a few unceremonious movements between scenes were a little too visible. But this was a tiny detail utterly overshadowed by the completeness of the production as a whole. One of the most atmospheric sights I have witnessed in the Barn is Spring Awakening’s hay loft, realised with only the gentle background sounds of rain and a table covered in hay and lit from beneath.
Week 3’s Spring Awakening was an effortlessly entertaining exploration of awakenings ecstatic, masochistic and onanistic, and stands as a clear and stern message to anybody taking on a Drama Barn project: put this much work into it and it can be this good.
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