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.
Written to be a promenade performance, the play started in V Bar, where we met Scullery (Dan Wood) and other characters from the road around which the play centres. This is where certain misgivings I had about the viability of a promenade, immersive-style play in the Drama Barn were realized. It is so dependent on the type of audience that the actors get: about their ability to ‘join in’. Already, in V Bar, you could see the audience unsure about how they were meant to react to and engage with the performers, and this was never really assuaged - becoming even more prominent later in the play, when Bisto, a cheesy, grungy, skinhead-type DJ (played hilariously by Ziggy Heath) endeavoured to induce the audience to dance in a tacky 80s disco, and instead we milled around reluctantly and embarrassedly.
Entertained initially by Scullery in V Bar, we were ushered quickly to the Barn where we stood as a hesitant herd in the middle of the space. As you entered the Barn, you also entered a thick fug of cigarette smoke, a fug that was only added to by continuous smoking by every character throughout the play. (And as the actors multi-roled, that was a lot of smoking).
The play does not have a linear narrative and is instead structured like a photo album: we see only snapshots of all of the characters appearing in different sections of the space, which were lit consecutively so that the audience knew where to look. I can say without a doubt that the technical design was the best I have seen in the Barn (praise must go to Josh Hatfield for his innovative design), and thank god that there seems to finally have been a use for the disco ball! Some characters reappear, some don’t, some we see for only a two-minute-long monologue, others we watch tearfully as the characters slowly and agonizingly starve themselves to death in front of our eyes. The couple of Joey (Freddy Elletson) and Clare (Madeleine Crowe) occupy a dirty, crumpled mattress and sheet in one corner of the Barn. Joey has taken to starving himself. ‘Is this a protest?’ Clare repeatedly asks him. But it’s not – what is heartbreaking about this scene is that ‘protest’, as it is, is futile in the face of the widespread unemployment that characterized the Eighties in Britain, and particularly in northern mining towns. So no, it’s not a protest. It’s the spiral of depression in a life when nothing matters, when it seems that there is no other option but the slow road to death. This is what Road does particularly well – set up a poignant and heartbreaking scene and then just as quickly set up another, the message drilled home to the audience being that for every person who was driven to self-destruction in some form or another, there were always more. The sheer range of characters that the cast of seven played was incredible and only emphasized the ubiquity of poverty in that era.
This play stands out more than other Barn plays, because not only did it employ original staging, beautiful lighting and a challenging script, but because the multi-roling in the script gives the cast the opportunity to showcase their range within the same piece. Barn regulars such as Freddy Elletson, Adam Alcock and Fran Isherwood all surprised me with the detail and believability they gave to their various characters. It is testament to the direction of Laurence Cook and Matthew Beard that such remarkable acting was drawn out of their cast.
Despite the stunning performances from each cast member (unfortunately I can’t name them all, but every single actor created something astonishing), the energy of the play dipped towards the end of the first half, due, in part, to the audience having to stand for over an hour. There was also a problem with visibility – with any promenade performance, one has to assume that you just won’t get to see every scene, but it also caused obstruction as the audience crowded around unhelpfully, unsure of where to stand. This could be alleviated by an even further reduced capacity, but that would be a shame as this is a production that deserves to be seen by many. Road offers something different, something vastly different to what is usually seen in York’s student theatre, and for that it is ultimately a success.
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