Kings Theatre 4 stars The women who whinny and canter like horses as the audience enter are a striking introduction to Romanian maestro Silviu Purcarete’s impressionistic interpretation of Jonathan Swift’s great satirical novel. It’s as if they’re higher beings on a catwalk, tantalisingly untouchable but irresistible too. The fact that this image of Swift’s Houyhnhnms is almost immediately upstaged by something even greater speaks volumes about Purcarete’s power to impress, even as the feral Yahoos – human beings in their basest form – move in en masse. Taking the fourth book of Swift’s epic as his starting point, Purcarete maps out an absurd nightmare portrait of man’s inhumanity to man through two figures bookending the ages. As an old man is carted off to an institution, his storybook left behind, a little boy rides in on a wooden horse to pick up the pages. With the child onstage throughout, it’s as if the series of extravagant tableaux and ensemble-based sketches that follow are extracted from his imagination. Babies are hammered to death and their innards served up as exotic delicacies. Giant rats scuttle about like a comic double-act. Bowler-hatted men in shadow attempt in vain to be bigger than they are. A puppet prostitute meets her match before she and her suitors depart with a miniature Can Can. Men in suits march in regimented unison like penguins before regressing into a primeval horde. With barely a word spoken onstage other than a recorded narration, such audacious stage-play is pulsed along by Shaun Davey’s vivid minimalist score. Awash with and melancholy in equal measure, as the boy and the old man’s voyage ends, there’s an acceptance of life’s ugliness, even as the possibilities beyond await. The Herald, August 18th 2012 ends
Myra McFadyen – Actress Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024 Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.” For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
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