RSAMD, Glasgow
3 stars
Popular classics performed by drama students with heads full of theory but little practical experience can go either way. On the one hand a strictly traditional approach is favoured, replete with posh frocks, cut-glass accents and doublet-and-hose. The other, more experimental approach, is the equally well-worn path to enlightenment via a deconstruction knee-deep in contemporary references, anachronism and a cut-and-paste irreverence to its source material.
Under the guidance of writer/director/performer David Leddy, the ensemble from RSAMD’s Contemporary Theatre Practise course who co-devised this new piece sit between two very swishy cabaret stools. With the audience at at tables arranged to form a spiritualist’s circle, a magnificent seven fictional apparitions become possessed by the poetic ectoplasm of their creators; characters conjured up by Barrie, Coward, Ibsen, Lorca, Sartre Wilde and Williams, plus Turkish writer Mehmit Muhitten Sevilen are unleashed in the same room.
Out of such a meeting of minds comes a tower of epigrammatic babble, as Hedda Gabbler meets Peter Pan’s grown-up Wendy, who morphs into a brooding Stanley Kowalski while a chorus of Blithe Spirit’s Madame Arcati attempt further apparitions. As Leddy’s over-elucidating programme notes explain, all dialogue is quoted directly from its respective masterpiece with no additions.
Visually it’s consciously camp, oddly resembling the fancy-dress party in The Killing Of Sister George. In terms of sound alone, though, its cut-up cacophony is an audacious pick-n-remix of sampled bon-mots which means everything and nothing. The result, despite disclaimers to the contrary, is a linear narrative concerning a woman’s place in the world that actually has a good half dozen beginnings, middles and ends. In such a parallel universe, words alone are rendered meaningless.
The Herald, December 7th 2007
ends
3 stars
Popular classics performed by drama students with heads full of theory but little practical experience can go either way. On the one hand a strictly traditional approach is favoured, replete with posh frocks, cut-glass accents and doublet-and-hose. The other, more experimental approach, is the equally well-worn path to enlightenment via a deconstruction knee-deep in contemporary references, anachronism and a cut-and-paste irreverence to its source material.
Under the guidance of writer/director/performer David Leddy, the ensemble from RSAMD’s Contemporary Theatre Practise course who co-devised this new piece sit between two very swishy cabaret stools. With the audience at at tables arranged to form a spiritualist’s circle, a magnificent seven fictional apparitions become possessed by the poetic ectoplasm of their creators; characters conjured up by Barrie, Coward, Ibsen, Lorca, Sartre Wilde and Williams, plus Turkish writer Mehmit Muhitten Sevilen are unleashed in the same room.
Out of such a meeting of minds comes a tower of epigrammatic babble, as Hedda Gabbler meets Peter Pan’s grown-up Wendy, who morphs into a brooding Stanley Kowalski while a chorus of Blithe Spirit’s Madame Arcati attempt further apparitions. As Leddy’s over-elucidating programme notes explain, all dialogue is quoted directly from its respective masterpiece with no additions.
Visually it’s consciously camp, oddly resembling the fancy-dress party in The Killing Of Sister George. In terms of sound alone, though, its cut-up cacophony is an audacious pick-n-remix of sampled bon-mots which means everything and nothing. The result, despite disclaimers to the contrary, is a linear narrative concerning a woman’s place in the world that actually has a good half dozen beginnings, middles and ends. In such a parallel universe, words alone are rendered meaningless.
The Herald, December 7th 2007
ends
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