Assembly
Roxy, Edinburgh
Three
stars
If it
wasn’t for the Swastikas and the SS uniforms worn by its participants, the
meeting that formed the heart of RFT Theatre’s revival of Conspiracy, Loring
Mandel’s stage
version of his Emmy-winning screenplay for the 2001 HBO film of the same name, might be for a corporate away. As the sixteen
men in suits proved over the next ninety minutes of Robin Osman’s production
for the lo-fi Formation theatre festival, such everyday power-plays aren’t the
only things that look familiar.
The play is a dramatic
reconstruction of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which Germany’s Nazi
government co-opted the grandees of assorted agencies into approving the final
solution that led to the Holocaust. From the first 'heil Hitler' onwards, there
is something chilling about how even the faintest glimmer of humanity is
manipulated into submission or else simply shouted down by the loudest voice. By the end, as slickly realised sparring gives way to litanies
of the men’s real life fates, the occasion more resembles a funeral.
Just
as vital and equally as current was Cowards Anonymous, in which the audience
were not so much greeted as mocked and cajoled into the room by a trio of
characters wearing woolly masks who act as an undercover welcoming committee
for an ill-defined convention of cowardice. Two known only as J and K tag-team their
way through spleen-venting monologues that test their audience’s limits in
terms of honesty and self-deception. A third, I, plays a morose piano at the
back of the stage before they too reveal more than they’d bargained for.
Despite
the casual air, director Tyler Mortimer’s production of Josh Overton’s script
is a meticulously constructed if loose-knit provocation that sees performers
Izzy Hourihane, Eilidh Albert-Recht and Ink Asher Hemp mix stand-up, cabaret
and live-art to wilfully incendiary effect. With the company’s roots in the
Hull-based Pub Corner Poets company, Cowards Anonymous pokes rudely behind the
mask of everyday niceties to lay bare a series of brutal truths that might just
make you braver.
The Herald, July 13th 2018
ends
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