Review: Beowulf (The Panto)

Two great English traditions collide in the Charles Court Opera’s latest production. That mainstay of literature students’ reading lists, Beowulf, is given the ‘it’s behind you!’ treatment in a ‘boutique’ panto at The Rosemary Branch Theatre, Islington.

It’s an unlikely combination. Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf is mainly about heroic deeds, warriors bragging about heroic deeds and lots of confusing business to do with the bequeathing of swords. Also the hero, Beowulf, dies. Which will never do in Panto-land.

However, this is a valiant attempt to translate Beowulf’s tale (or something loosely based on it) into an audience-participation-filled romp; cross-dressing, custard-pie-flinging and all. We start in the court of King Hrothgar (a hammy old drunk as done by Simon Masterton-Smith), where the monster Grendel is sneaking in and killing courtiers (but only to appease a dragon), which by all accounts is taking the edge off the party mood.

Muscle-bound Beowulf turns up to save the day and duly rips off Grendel’s arm, much to the chagrin of the monster’s long-suffering mother, who in turn vows her revenge on the court … but actually ends up joining Beowulf, along with his companion Wiglaf (Amy J Payne) and love-interest Hrothmund (Catrine Kirkman), on a quest to take down a dragon. Will there be a happy ending? I won’t spoil it.

 

Beowulf: The Panto suffers from a lack of a proper baddy. Grendel’s mother is played as the dame – albeit wonderfully so, with just enough smirking and eyebrow-wriggling from John Savournin, also the show’s director. Grendel (a perfectly petulant Philip Lee) is a hapless creature; misunderstood but ultimately placid. This leaves us with the evil dragon, characterised through a voice-over, and I, for one, missed the traditional cackling villain appearing in a puff of smoke to be duly booed and hissed.

What carries the show is its music. The cleverly adapted pop songs and musical numbers, arranged by James Young, performed by a classically-trained cast and helped along by actor-musicians on stage throughout, give extra polish. Charming puppets add yet another layer of musical wit.

And it looks almost as good as it sounds. James Perkins’s wooden-slatted design suggests both the Danish mead-hall and the mountainscape elegantly. Grendel’s costume is particularly fantastic: a scaly green cocoon knitted together with a liberal sprinkling of buttons and googly eyeballs.

Beowulf: The Panto is certainly an eye-catching gimmick in a season where you can’t move for Widow Twankey’s bloomers. And there are lovely clever touches harking back to the original material: audience participation in old English, for one. But I wonder if adapting an unwieldy piece of Anglo-Saxon literature to come up with a panto is a bit, well, unnecessary; particularly for a company as capable as this one. The script occasionally feels a little exposition-y and too light on jokes – and it’s hard not to blame the original subject matter for this.

The show is undoubtedly accomplished, yet my heart wasn’t entirely won over. It’s funny, but not uproarious, and perhaps not quite sharp enough for a grown-up panto.   

 A version of this review was originally published by playstosee.com

Review: Orpheus in the Underworld @ Young Vic

Well, here’s a production to defenestrate the very little you thought you knew about opera. There’s no baffling Italian and definitely no Valkyries in this English adaptation of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, gleefully and smuttily done by Rory Bremner (yes, he of Bird and Fortune/ TV impressionist fame). Instead, we’re offered industrial-strength swearing and lots and lots of sex.

The show – a joint venture between Scottish Opera and Northern Ireland Opera – is Offenbach’s 19^th-century operetta, based on the myths of Orpheus and his wife Eurydice, transposed into a modern day scene of sleazy celebs, grubby bankers and grasping politicians, all set against a backdrop of screaming tabloid headlines.

We start with a clatter and the clack of sensible-heeled court shoes as our narrator of sorts, Public Opinion (Maire Flavin), bumbles from the back of theatre, and back out again, trying to find the stage. From the moment she finally appears front and centre to set out her position as the self-appointed guardian of public morality  – standing firm in news-print skirt-suit (the words ‘Hate’ ‘Ban’ ‘Sick’ and ‘Filth’ picked out prominently) Maggie Thatcher handbag in the crook of her arm –  it’s clear we’re in sly satirical hands.

The curtain  – a blown up OK magazine-style cover  showing a celeb ‘dream wedding’– opens on a Botoxed, fake-taloned ‘It’ girl  tottering and pouting in pink Lycra and platform heels. This is our estuarine Eurydice (Jane Harrington, giving good Essex swagger), she is married to composer Orpheus (Nicholas Sharratt), a hopeless prig in a Nehru collar. They loathe each other and when their extra-marital affairs collide, it sets up a string of events that will lead us to the underworld, via the Gods at Olympus (re-imagined as a Westminster champagne bar) and back.

Bremner’s re-worked libretto is an heroic piece of thoroughly modern silliness; surprising, rude, witty and laugh-out-loud funny.  Phone hacking, strikes, Berlusconi, Strictly Come Dancing, X Factor, Jeremy Kyle – it’s all here and duly lampooned. Neat visual gags strike just the right note of kitschy knowingness; from ‘Bacchus I’m worth it’ embroidered on the seat of Eurydice’s red satin panties to the ‘News of the (Under) World’ backdrop in Act II.

The English-language translation, a no-holds-barred commitment to bawdiness (gird your loins for Jupiter in bondage leather and a fly’s wings seducing Eurydice) and a frenetic pace make Offenbach’s original music commendably accessible.

And none of this is to the detriment of the vocal performances either.  The singing is uniformly powerful and pure, with playful twists in the delivery keeping trickier musical moments fresh. The choreography is tighter than Eurydice’s bandage dress and the attention to detail, slick ensemble work and physical comedy more than make up for the fairly simple staging.

It is, admittedly, about as deep as a teaspoon of champagne, but that’s hardly the point. A riotous carnival of modern grotesque such as it is, it succeeds in breaking down ideas of what is high art and what is not. The small stage crackles with energy and I came away giddy and grinning from ear to ear.

A version of this review was originally published by playstosee.com

Review: The Unrest Cure @ Pentameters Theatre, Hampstead

Pentameters Theatre in the heart of genteel Hampstead is a bijou fringe-theatre space above The Horseshoe pub. Its repertoire is quirky and somewhat literary, which makes it an appropriate setting for The Unrest Cure, an homage to the work of PG Wodehouse.

Set in 1932, the ‘unrest cure’ of the title turns out to be an elaborate practical joke dreamt up by siblings Virginia and Charlie following a chance encounter in a railway compartment.  After overhearing fretful hotelier Ernest Huddlestone bemoan his increasingly middle-aged lifestyle, they design a ruse – involving a fictional visit from the Prince of Wales – to shake this anxious stranger from his mundane routine.

The script, written by Simon Godziek and Rob Groves, is an old-fashioned romp with a liberal sprinkling of ‘old beans’, ‘nincompoops’ and jolly good ‘bricks’.  As you would expect, there is lots of clever wordplay, but too often the jokes teeter into panto territory, eliciting groans rather than belly laughs. Instead, the play is at its most interesting when the humour touches on the surreal – a throw-away line about a cattery-owner named Shrödinger springs to mind.

The acting is a frustrating mixed bag. Math Sams as tightly-wound Ernest cringes and capers around the stage with gusto. Pretty Lucy Middleditch has great presence as spirited Virginia. But this energy and nuance is not always matched by the rest of the cast.

 

Other problems? The stage is too cluttered. In such a small space a pared-back set would have felt fresher and given the actors more room to play with. And with the audience so close, every sloppy design detail is visible (luggage labels written on in anachronistic marker pen), which just feels amateurish. Likewise, the scene changes could have been slicker and handled with more imagination.

The script is stuffed with references to Wodehouse’s writing, making it a ‘literary treasure hunt’ for enthusiasts. However, while the plot trips along nicely, and there are funny moments, overall, I’m not sure the production is consistent or inventive enough to keep those who aren’t Wodehouse fanatics satisfied.

A version of this review was originally published at playstosee.com

The Faith Machine @ The Royal Court

A more human tale than the title suggests, Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Faith Machine is a neat, engaging cogitation on religion, love and making a difference.

We start in the Manhattan apartment of twenty-something couple Tom and Sophie, poised on the brink of a break-up. The date is September 11, 2001.  

There is an argument, a dead father, an ultimatum and the half-hearted packing of a suitcase.   

The inevitable implosion of this romance is punctuated (a terrible, deafening full-stop) by the sound of a jet engine overhead and the sudden rearing up of solid concrete lines, projected on to screens flanking the stage.

It’s a powerful moment, if only because we know it’s coming.

A shame then, that the run-up is a little lack-lustre. The ingredients are there: young lovers, guilt and grief, politics and emotional blackmail.  But the end product isn’t quite heady enough. The debate is too structured, too controlled.

Brit Sophie (Hayley Atwell), furious at advertising-type Tom (Kyle Soller giving good tightly-wound New Yorker) who is about to sign a morally-reprehensible drugs company as a client, rattles off a list of the corporation’s crimes. She wants him to drop the account and has been compiling case histories, newspaper clippings. Her speech spools out into a tangle of pharmaco-jargon.  She clutches the file in her hands –  the evidence she hopes will save her relationship, return to her the idealistic man she fell in love with (he was supposed to be a novelist before selling his soul. Ho hum.). But having her read from a file in the middle of a barney pulls the scene into a didactic lay-by, making it hard to get a handle on this couple from the get-go. How have they got to this stage? Why are they together in the first place?  What’s missing is a sense of claustrophobia and desperation you’d expect from a break-up. Ditto a sense of the emotional clumsiness of young people trying to reconcile coupledom with fledgling adult identity. Sophie talks in the language of immature, uncompromising, idealism – she suggests Tom is racist for what she sees as complicity in abuse of African children – but this seems to go unflagged by the direction. It all feels a little leaden, though the physical presence of Ian McDiarmid as Sophie’s late father Edward adds an interesting psychological wrinkle to the scene.

What follows is spicier. We skip back to 1998, to Edward’s island retreat in Patmos, Greece  –  he has just resigned his post as a bishop and an old friend is trying to persuade him to change his mind. He is also meeting daughter Sophie’s new boyfriend Tom for the first time. Over a meal prepared by Edward’s straight-talking Russian housekeeper Tatyana – welcome comic relief expertly dished out by Bronagh Gallagher  - Edward’s cross-examination of eager-to-impress Tom overlaps with rumination on Christianity and in particular the church’s attitude to gays, before running into another blazing row.  Big themes are thrown out as ouzo is downed: scriptural interpretation, colonialism, love and the importance of story-telling. The writing is snappy and McDiarmid is appropriately flamboyant as the erudite, eccentric left-wing bishop.

Act two hops to a gay wedding in Surrey, 2006. Then back to Patmos and an incredibly tender scene in which Sophie strip-washes her increasingly senile father and changes his incontinence pad. These grim realities are too much for Tom, whose undisguised horror and physical contortions (lots of dry heaving) are played for uncomfortable laughs.

A second interval, and we’re in the present day and Sophie and Tom – both vaguely attached to other people – are making love. Or trying to. Somehow, they find themselves mired in an argument – revisiting old ground, her idealism versus his capitulation to big, bad reality – the chemistry is spot on here, the home truths painful. Both writing and acting have hit their stride, and the tragedy of these two characters caught between their love for each other and their moral scruples – or lack of them, is palpable. A wave of sorrow threatens to break.

There’s a lot to grapple with in The Faith Machine. And the play is at its best when the big questions of religion and purpose are rooted in the smaller, subtler moments between characters – whether that’s pissed guests at a wedding, or a dying man struggling to communicate with his daughter. There are a few clunkers – for one awful moment the play seems to have found its conclusion in a broken-down Tom asking the heavens ‘who am I?’. Thankfully there are still a few more lines to come that give a little more finesse. More of a sense of place, perhaps through sound – especially in the New York opening – would have nudged everything closer to perfection.

In the main though, the writing is deft and familiar, weaving in everything from human trafficking to Lady Gaga, guiding us gently through an intricate and thoroughly modern moral maze.

Simon Stephens’ two fingers up to youth-culture-according-to-Skins

THEATRE REVIEW- Punkrock @ Royal Exchange, Manchester, Thursday 22^nd October 2009

Standing in the foyer waiting to go into Simon Stephens’ latest play Punkrock really put paid to those naysayers who bleat that theatre never attracts a youthful audience. It also put paid to the opening line I’d been mentally penning all the way from Piccadilly Gardens. For as soon as I stepped foot in the place, it became plain that my planned musings about the Royal Exchange not being a particularly ‘punk rock’ kind of theatre (its clientele tending to be more ‘daytrip to Blackpool to buy rock’) had been woefully undermined by the presence of several coach loads of fresh faced teens.  

And how glad I was to be undermined. It would have been a huge waste had Punkrock, with its sixth-form age characters and thrashing soundtrack, had to play to a huddle of octogenarians who would have secretly preferred Noel Coward. Set in the upper school library of a Stockport private college, Punkrock is a heady clash of teenage philosophy- and no, not just the school of iPod there I am. The play is crafted from the kind of conversations you can only have when you’re 17 – from grandiose meanderings on the nature of humanity to angst-filled panic over mock exams. Love, loss, identity, sexuality and class are all given a hearing. Particularly compelling are the musings of disturbed teen William (Tom Sturridge), who rails against the limits of his suburban hometown.

Helped along by uniformly (no pun intended) excellent, nuanced performances from the young cast, Stephen’s script motors along smoothly and before you know it just another morning break time morphs seamlessly into a Columbine-style atrocity.

Many hands have been wrung over whether Punkrock adds anything new. Comparisons to everything from Lord of the Flies to The History Boys have been flung at the play, yet look at the play closely and none of these should stick. Stephens’ script effectively offers a rebuttal to youth-culture-according-to-Skins, despite the bleak climax of the play (which is as jolting as the bursts of Big Black and Sonic Youth et al. that punctuate each scene) Punkrock remains a play suffused in the importance of normality. 

How refreshing that Lilly (Jessica Raine) is permitted to describe losing her virginity as “lovely”. How significant that Stephens doesn’t insist on framing it in terms of teen pregnancy or angst or pain, rather he just allows it to happen; sensibly, premeditated and with enjoyment. How un-Skins. Likewise, the final scene of the play, for all its odd, purgatorial overtones, set in a psychiatrist’s office, serves to remind us that even after the unthinkable has happened, normality prevails.

Classic Review: A Time to Kill

Don’t be fooled by the opening few chapters of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill. Or, for that matter, by the pithy gobbets from the critics that invariably grace its covers. For A Time to Kill is not quite the über-thriller you might expect from Grisham, the king of the legal-drama, whose status thus is secured in perpetuity by the purchase power of an army of businessmen and holidaymakers alike. While the early pages of the novel bombard you with scenes of near-unbearable violence and their brutal repercussions – a young girl is raped by two rednecks, her father guns them down- what ensues is a far more measured, often painstaking portrait of a small town in Mississippi and the nuances of legal proceedings in a capital murder trial.
To accommodate this level of legal detail, Grisham’s passages are short and he frequently switches location or adds new characters. This stretches the flabby plot to the point of exhaustion. However, Grisham does just about manage to hang his digressions and vignettes upon central protagonist, upstart defence lawyer Jake Brigance. Brigance is suitably distasteful so as to be compelling.

Yet while the book makes for a flawed thriller, what nudges it towards status as a classic is arguably its portrayal of racial tension.

Almost (and I stress almost) more shocking than the initial scenes of violence is the novel’s deployment of a language of racial divide. Grisham’s frequent and near gratuitous use of a particular word, the worst of racial slurs, a word that has both killed careers and been embraced by Gangsta rap, is an interesting call for a white author to have made. On the one hand it may be necessary for verisimilitude, many of his characters are meant to be unequivocally racist. On the other it could be seen as perpetuating a certain cycle of representation, not least when Grisham’s black characters themselves use it self-referentially.
Ultimately, it is part and parcel of an impression that the novel is set in a town whose attitudes are lagging behind the times. Indeed perhaps the most inappropriate words in the English language are in this instance the most appropriate. After all, race (and racism) determines class in the novel, it determines social standing and it may even determine whether vigilante father Carl Lee Hailey lives or dies. Maybe it is inevitable, if not necessary, that it, too, determines the novel’s vocabulary.

Future Perfect

EDINBURGH FRINGE PREVIEW: Stitches @ The Martin Harris Centre, Manchester, Thursday 13^th August 2009

Order hangs by a thread in Claire Urwin’s play. Bel, Liby, Web and Nettie are charged with remembering the world as it was “before the firefloods came”. And so in the Department of Flora and Fauna (“conscription’s three years but many do stay longer”) they methodically piece together impressions of what the world might have been like, recording their findings in the form of quilts. If only they could stitch their own fragile identities back together so easily.

In her latest play, Claire Urwin offers us a post-apocalyptic future and in doing so, as in all good dystopias, manages to spotlight the fears present in, well, our present.

Pangs of recognition should set in as the female conscripts spend their recesses gazing myopically at their “flaws” in tiny mirrors. And I challenge even Sarah Palin to sit through Stitches and not feel the slightest squirm of climate-change related anxiety as the conscripts describe their perma-fogged world. (Actually, any chance anyone could get Palin along? It could bring some much appreciated publicity to this talented troupe in an over-saturated Fringe market. She could even visit the Lothian NHS while she’s at it…)

Likewise, the delicately wrought conflict between Bel (“the very very rich”) and Nettie (“the not quite so rich”) should register with a recession-logged audience like pinpricks on skin.

This is not to say that Urwin’s play is a polemic. Far from it. Gently teased into dramaturgical life by director Rajiv Nathwani, the plays never shores itself up against any one character. Even posturing, upper-class Bel (Vanessa Fogarty) remains warm and engaging. This is in part down to the dexterity of Urwin’s writing- with timely interjections of comic relief- and in part a testament to Fogarty’s performance, which, frankly, could charm the proverbial pants off the birds in the proverbial trees.

Occasionally moments of tension between characters lump together too stolidly, but you will forgive these if your eye is caught by the feral new girl Amy (Elisabeth Hopper) who says little but observes much.

Stitches is a triumphant answer to those who wondered what Urwin would do next. The luxurious poetic language remains, as do some stunning monologues, but Stitches proves that Urwin is capable not just of writing character, but of playing her characters off against each other.  Such is the enormous dramatic potential of the final moments of the play, as Amy’s presence- and the dawning realisation that she was one of those left behind while the earth burned- threatens to destroy everything the other conscripts have so painstakingly patchworked together, that it will surely have a life after the Fringe. Preferably with the welcome addition of a second act.

In short, Stitches is a lyrical, meticulously performed swansong to today’s world, just filtered back to us through the acrid smog of tomorrow.

Stitches is on at The Spaces on the Mile @ The Radisson (Fringe Venue 39),  4pm, Monday 17th August until Saturday 29^th August.

No, I couldn’t afford the Manchester International Festival!

Last Sunday, some friends and I took to the streets of Manchester for the festival. We soaked up the afternoon sun, swigged cider and enjoyed a slice of Mancunian life. Oh yes – and we completely managed to miss Jeremy Deller’s Procession.

Perhaps I should clarify. We weren’t in central Manchester at all, but at the Beech Road festival in leafy Chorlton. We’re pretty sure the international festival didn’t miss us. Especially as not one of us, a bunch of new graduates, happens to be in possession of a ticket to one of its events. My friend from Failsworth’s verdict? “It’s fine if you’re middle-class and from Didsbury. But crap if you’re young and/or skint… cont’d at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/jul/09/manchester-international-festival

Review: Cloud 9

A lovely feminist

REVIEW: Cloud Nine @ Capitol Theatre, Manchester, Thursday 21st May 2009

Not to sound like a Victorian matriarch, but I do so find Cloud Nine a wholly objectionable play. I should adore it. It is, in principle, the kind of politically and theatrically radical piece that I should want to hug until its clever little feminist conceits fall right off.  So why so churlish? Well, it just doesn’t quite work does it? Churchill’s instructions for cross-casting (male as female/ white as black/ adult male as female child) are ideologically brilliant yet in performance they fall flat- like an undercooked, anti-patriarchal soufflé.

Gabriel Gawin’s recent revival (part of Manchester Metropolitan’s graduate showcase) did little to exorcise my inner schoolmarm. It’s easy to feel lost in this play, which sprawls itself before you spanning Colonial-era Africa and 1979 London, and this sensation isn’t aided by the vast black-box space of the Capitol Theatre. Pale wooden shutter-blinds, slats out of place, hang jauntily from the ceiling, sharing airspace with a grey-scale Union Jack flag and several antique birdcages.  I’ll admit I didn’t get the metaphor.

And metaphors are a problem in this play. In the first half Betty, the wife of tyrannical patriarch Clive, is played by a man. We must (must!) therefore infer that every thought in Betty’s pretty little head is enforced by a man. We must consider how Betty is forced into a constricting gender role despite being equal to a man (heck, she IS a man!). Yet Gawin’s Betty (Ryan Cerenko) is more pantomime dame than anything else. Cerenko camps it up royally, squealing and swooning all over the shop (presumably for feminists everywhere…)

It is all very enjoyable, but what about when the irony falls away? Are we supposed to feel sorry for Betty Twankey when she describes the extent of her sexual participation as ‘just keeping still’? Can we possibly reflect upon the inequality of the sexes (bygone and enduring) when Betty too easily elicits laughter?

Gawin’s staging of the second half is also problematic. Written for a park in the ’70s, Gawin is meticulous in a recreation of the period. Yet, dressing up the speeches of this second act in achingly retro clothing confines the emerging tensions safely to 1979. And I resent any implication that we are somehow post-feminist.

I am, of course, being grossly unfair to lay all of this at Gawin’s door. Churchill’s feminist figures in the second act have not aged well. One character is a lesbian who declares she hates men (at least wardrobe had the sense not to put her in dungarees is all I can say). A sexually frustrated, married woman for whom the answer is not economic equality but a lesbian lover. An effeminate gay man who announces ‘I think I’m a lesbian’. Must we all be lesbians, Caryl?

This leads me to my final big fat problem. It stems from my desire for positive representations in a play that is so politically charged. The second act of the play naively leaves its colonial past in, well, the past rather than address its legacy. The initial casting of a female actor as Edward sanitizes any homosexual encounters. The women in act two seek salvation in sexuality.

Yes, Churchill wrote the script, but nearly 30 years since its debut performance I wished for more from a revival. I want a production that makes the audience ask why, three decades on, we haven’t yet found the answers to Churchill’s questions. Or is that more Cloud Cuckooland than Cloud Nine?

Review: Never Enough and Return to the Silence

Physical Theatre makes my head hurt. A lot. Thinking about it… Writing about it… How do you reconcile this semantically flaccid term, used to describe the work of everyone from DV8 to Shared Experience? How do you produce a piece of so-called Physical Theatre that doesn’t inspire unimaginative jokes about poncing about and pretending to be trees?

Some reasons for my physical theatre-induced migraines are illuminated by Manchester-based sketch troupe Lady Garden. These six female performers never fail to make me giggle with their unabashed lampoonery of embarrassing student fantasies of self-expression. Their opening skit sees the Lady-Gardeners slither on stage in tight, black leotards, trailing red ribbons behind them and crying out such inanities as “Ejaculation” in their best “I trained at RADA” voices. Yet despite this cautionary tale, the lure of the physical for student practitioners is palpable at the NSDF. So I will persist, headache be damned. 

A trio of incredibly bendy performers from the University of Hull did their level best to challenge perceptions of physical theatre this week. Never Enough, a devised tale of fear and self-loathing, manages to arabesque its way through a myriad of cultural references that attack the heart of a postmodern consumer society. Its three characters, thrown together by a narrative reminiscent of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, show the audience that no amount of shopping and fucking can ever be enough. Rothko-inspired paintings hang at the back of the stage, their vivid colours cheapened by the contrasting black box-space; IKEA imitations of fine art. At the fateful dinner party held by Rebecca (played impeccably by a tightly-wound Helen Goalen) tinny jazz music is piped in. Later, Lizzi (Abbi Greenland) comments that listening to jazz makes her feel “posh”— more than a nod in the direction of Adorno & Horkheimer’s theories of cultural commoditisation. Even the vision of domestic bliss voiced by Will (Marc Graham) is constructed from fantasies of what he would buy. Evidently, RashDash productions’ thematic concept is as tight as their choreography (and Lady Garden’s lycra).

The second pleasant surprise in Never Enough is the frequent deference to comedy. Much has been made of the glorious dancing cup-cake (Helen Goalen again, with unwavering conviction) and it is interludes like this, which lend the show energy when the script falters.

A similar dose of irreverence wouldn’t go amiss in Curious Directive’s Return to the Silence. A clinical piece, in more ways than one, Return to the Silence use movement, multi-media, some chords lifted from a Coldplay album and “unconventional seating” to tell the tale of a neurologist who suffers a stroke.  Amid a visual and aural cacophony designed to mimic the many functions of the human brain Curious Directive’s large chorus wheel several small seating banks back and forth through the auditorium. When they say this production will move you, they mean it. Literally.

Whether you will be affected by Return to the Silence is less certain. The parade of neurological disorders in the show is distinctly sterile and staid. Especially, when you consider that the narrating neurologist is supposed to have gained new insight into what it means to have your head fucked. Sadly, the crashing, sentimental piano music is no substitute for emotional interrogation. The devised dialogue falls flat on more than one occasion and repeats clinical information that has already been projected for us via the film screens at either end of the theatre.

So half-way through the week and half-way through a packet of Nurofen, what can be concluded about physical theatre at the NSDF? It probably amounts to more than Bacchae-inspired baked goods and swivelling seating. But I can’t be sure. I would hazard that it might boil down to whether or not getting physical actually serves your story. Try and do it without the maudlin facial expressions.  And that a balletic prance when moving a piece of scenery is always unnecessary.