Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh
4 stars
“Every language,” the nutty Professor in Eugene Ionesco’s 1951 absurdist sit-com says to his young female Pupil, “is only a manner of speaking.” So it goes in Gerry Mulgrew’s bright and deceptively light production for Benchtours, which ditches the company’s usual physical tics for something more seriously rounded. By the time The Pupil arrives for her private session with The Professor, The Maid has straightened out the diploma that hangs wonkily on the wall, putting order back into The Professor’s universe. Blessed with the confidence of the blissfully ignorant, The Pupil can add up to infinity but finds subtraction an abstract concept. As The Professor’s increasingly meaningless text-book ramble gathers momentum, the power that comes with such presumed knowledge thrusts home particularly hard.
In some respects, Ionesco’s play today looks like some parallel universe template for David Mamet’s teacher/student exchange, Oleanna. Here, though, until the final moments, Mulgrew accentuates the play’s out and out ridiculousness, punctuating each scene with a jaunty musical shuffle as he goes. As The Professor and The Pupil, Peter Clerke and Kirstin McLean never reduce their parts to caricature, but instead invest them with equal measures of assurance and self-belief. Catherine Gillard’s Maid lends a farcical bent to proceedings, even as she becomes complicit in The Professor’s psycho-sexual serial killing.
To be able to see such a rarely performed party piece in a production so full of confidence and brio is itself a lesson in craftsmanship. By the end, the diploma on the wall is all angles once more, and The Pupil, already numbed by toothache and the pain of self-knowledge, has passed with flying colours into the void.
The Herald, October 7th 2008
ends
4 stars
“Every language,” the nutty Professor in Eugene Ionesco’s 1951 absurdist sit-com says to his young female Pupil, “is only a manner of speaking.” So it goes in Gerry Mulgrew’s bright and deceptively light production for Benchtours, which ditches the company’s usual physical tics for something more seriously rounded. By the time The Pupil arrives for her private session with The Professor, The Maid has straightened out the diploma that hangs wonkily on the wall, putting order back into The Professor’s universe. Blessed with the confidence of the blissfully ignorant, The Pupil can add up to infinity but finds subtraction an abstract concept. As The Professor’s increasingly meaningless text-book ramble gathers momentum, the power that comes with such presumed knowledge thrusts home particularly hard.
In some respects, Ionesco’s play today looks like some parallel universe template for David Mamet’s teacher/student exchange, Oleanna. Here, though, until the final moments, Mulgrew accentuates the play’s out and out ridiculousness, punctuating each scene with a jaunty musical shuffle as he goes. As The Professor and The Pupil, Peter Clerke and Kirstin McLean never reduce their parts to caricature, but instead invest them with equal measures of assurance and self-belief. Catherine Gillard’s Maid lends a farcical bent to proceedings, even as she becomes complicit in The Professor’s psycho-sexual serial killing.
To be able to see such a rarely performed party piece in a production so full of confidence and brio is itself a lesson in craftsmanship. By the end, the diploma on the wall is all angles once more, and The Pupil, already numbed by toothache and the pain of self-knowledge, has passed with flying colours into the void.
The Herald, October 7th 2008
ends
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