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.
One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show is a good play - not extraordinary but also not extraordinarily bad. Actually, at the risk of overusing the word to the point of exasperation, there is not much about this play that is extraordinary.
Written by Don Evans, it’s about an Afro-American family, probably in America, who by the addition of a new family member have to question their lives up to this point. This new family member then engages in a comical quest to live out their dreams. For example the father, a preacher, experiences the joys of pornography, while his son even takes it a step further and impregnates his girlfriend “Lil Bitz”. His niece, whose father is recently deceased, makes it her agenda to get a much older gigolo to marry her and her aunt; the preacher’s wife engages in an ongoing and very painful combat with the English language, which, to her surprise, does not sound more sophisticated if you put on a French accent.
The plot is funny and engaging while being foreseeable, the author presents stereotypes in an ironic way without actually moving past them and there is always this calm, soothing and uneventful feeling of watching soap opera. It is entertaining to watch and often quite amusing and even though some jokes seem quite forced and I find that portraying someone as not knowing how to pronounce the word “pervert” stretches a point quite far, nothing seriously disrupts the flow of the play. It isn’t exactly intellectually challenging material but at the same time it doesn’t have to be. It is what I’d call trivial theatre, entertaining but nothing you’d remember in fifty years, unless maybe you happened to actually star in the play. While all of this is well and good, the only thing that stuck me odd about it was the lighting during the soliloquies. While there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about a spotlight on a character holding a monologue, it takes the actor back into a more dramatic theatre. The light puts a distinct focus on the character we then expect to reveal his master plan on how to murder Claudius, his evil Stepfather. However here the soliloquy disappoints, the character doesn’t tell us anything unexpected or distinct, so consequently I don’t see any purpose in using a spotlight in the play at this point.
Nonetheless, all of these are rather small flaws in a good - granted, rather foreseeable - but still very well watchable play, which I would recommend to anyone with a bit of extra time on their hands and who – at least on this particular evening - isn’t out to discover the meaning of life.
You must log in to submit a comment.
