Dundee Rep
4 stars
Where Dundee Rep’s Ensemble company previously ended their seasons with all-singing, all-dancing spectaculars, to finish instead with a rarely performed classic culled from the European avant-garde displays confidence in abundance. It’s justified too in Stewart Laing’s take on Jean Cocteau’s darkly comic laceration of extreme oedipal exchanges amongst the bourgeoisie. Because, reconstituted from its 1930s roots to a chicly sixties landscape inspired by the French nouvelle vague, it taps into some of the free-for-all sexual revolution of its chosen age with delicious abandon.
It begins in the bathroom, with Ann Louise Ross’s needy matriarch Yvonne bent double, only rescued by her husband George and put-upon sister Leo. Yvonne’s little boy Michael has been out all night, and when he finally does crawl back to mummy’s bosom, it’s only to announce he’s in love, even as he remains gleefully reciprocal to Yvonne’s advances. With a summit meeting arranged in the flat of Michael’s new flame, Madeleine, a triangle turns into an even more complicated quartet as everyone lunges into ultimately destructive rounds of emotional blackmail.
Witnessed in such a context, Laing’s approach is as quietly subversive as Cocteau’s own recasting of farce as something edgier. There’s a calculated restraint to the barbed exchanges, as much in Ross’s Yvonne as elsewhere. As the action moves between flats, one vividly regal, the other pure white, each room’s neat minimalism accentuates the madness within. Kevin Lennon’s Jimi Hendrix loving Michael may look somewhere between Jean-Paul Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle and Joe Orton’s Mr Sloane, but there is substance as well as style in this coolly modernist finale to the season that shows off the nastier side of obsessive love.
The Herald, June 13th 2008
ends
4 stars
Where Dundee Rep’s Ensemble company previously ended their seasons with all-singing, all-dancing spectaculars, to finish instead with a rarely performed classic culled from the European avant-garde displays confidence in abundance. It’s justified too in Stewart Laing’s take on Jean Cocteau’s darkly comic laceration of extreme oedipal exchanges amongst the bourgeoisie. Because, reconstituted from its 1930s roots to a chicly sixties landscape inspired by the French nouvelle vague, it taps into some of the free-for-all sexual revolution of its chosen age with delicious abandon.
It begins in the bathroom, with Ann Louise Ross’s needy matriarch Yvonne bent double, only rescued by her husband George and put-upon sister Leo. Yvonne’s little boy Michael has been out all night, and when he finally does crawl back to mummy’s bosom, it’s only to announce he’s in love, even as he remains gleefully reciprocal to Yvonne’s advances. With a summit meeting arranged in the flat of Michael’s new flame, Madeleine, a triangle turns into an even more complicated quartet as everyone lunges into ultimately destructive rounds of emotional blackmail.
Witnessed in such a context, Laing’s approach is as quietly subversive as Cocteau’s own recasting of farce as something edgier. There’s a calculated restraint to the barbed exchanges, as much in Ross’s Yvonne as elsewhere. As the action moves between flats, one vividly regal, the other pure white, each room’s neat minimalism accentuates the madness within. Kevin Lennon’s Jimi Hendrix loving Michael may look somewhere between Jean-Paul Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle and Joe Orton’s Mr Sloane, but there is substance as well as style in this coolly modernist finale to the season that shows off the nastier side of obsessive love.
The Herald, June 13th 2008
ends
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