Theatre
REVIEW GENRE THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, until Sat 3 Oct, then touring ●●●●●
Rona Munro's reimagining of Federico Garcia Lorca's all-female ensemble piece, doused in a blinging glow and dripping in ill-gotten gains, is the sort of glossy, hard-edged melodrama River City dreams of being.
After the gangland execution of her husband, Siobhan Redmond’s magnificent, vicious Bernie Alba keeps her doped-up, French manicured daughters virtual prisoners on her cream leather sofa suite. The increasingly frenzied pitch of their lusts and struggles for lives outside the house is tempered by a script that marries Lorca’s lyricism with vinegar-sharp banter.
It’s a lengthy play, and a few of the scenes do feel
very similar, as the four strongest characters – Bernie, Myra MacFayden’s truth-telling family retainer, Louise Ludgate’s splendidly bitter, wasted Marty and Vanessa Johnson’s hopeful innocent Adie – each cling to one motivation that they express repeatedly. There’s also a rather criminal waste of two very talented actors in Jo Freer and Carmen Pieraccini as the remaining sisters: had Munro determined to be less faithful to her source text, these roles could have been easily condensed into one and developed more. However, ultimately, Munro and director John Tiffany
have created a world that rings true and hits hard. (Kirstin Innes)
www.list.co.uk/theatre
REVIEW ADAPTATION THE BEGGAR’S OPERA Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until Sat 3 Oct ●●●●●
‘Adaptation’ doesn’t even begin to cover this reworking of John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera that satirised the political morality of the day. Retaining physical remnants of the original, Vanishing Point have opted for a multimedia collaborative approach. Drafting in singer-songwriter Louise Quinn and her band, borrowings from contemporary rock and pop (as Gay would have used), original songs and incidental music bump up against video segments, projected animations and spoken dialogue in this contemporary musical. With the aesthetic a retro-futuristic mish mash of fetish wear, gas masks and a giant sand pit, the feel is steam punk, the setting a dystopian future where the criminal underworld is literally subterranean and MacHeath is the love-rat villain du jour, loved and decried by the media in equal measure. The crowd-pleasing vulgarities, lewd sexuality and campy moments of humour carry the short production along swiftly.
Much has been made of connections to Alan Moore’s similarly dystopic graphic novels, but director Matthew Lenton eschews their subversive power and dodges the overt, us versus them, noble poor versus corrupt rich message of the original. What’s left is a brief engagement with the notion of a totalitarian media and a stylish, playful adaptation that remains faithful to all but the core of the original: good old- fashioned anti-authoritarian dissent. (Suzanne Black)
REVIEW MUSIC THEATRE CONFINED HUMAN CONDITION Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Thu 17-Sat 19 Sep ●●●●●
Comprising song, acting, dance and original musical scores, the two compositions that make up Confined Human Condition are both, evidently, Theatre Cryptic, but otherwise make strange bedfellows. The first, ‘Baghdad Monologue’, is an examination of grief and the Iraq war that makes a blandly liberal attempt to strip away Western rhetoric from the reality of death. The second, ‘Terror of Love’, is a lavish production that fetishises death, exploring the sense of immortality that can be achieved by dressing the body up in words. In ‘Baghdad Monologue’, Frances M Lynch’s grief as a woman trapped
emotionally by the death of her son is seen through the fractured shadows she casts on three translucent screens. The technique works well, though the other elements – composer Alejandro Viñao’s syncopated, electronic score and political themes – sacrifice the sense of genuine emotion to complexity and polemic. In Phillip Neil Martin’s ‘Terror of Love’, Loré Lixenberg sings to her lover from a
tongue-like red bench. Her powerful mezzo-soprano cuts through the theatre space with fiery intensity, heightening the sexual fervour that grips the stage as a beautiful woman (Clare Roderick) slowly disrobes behind a two-way mirror. It’s gothic, Freudian, theoretical, spiritual and a lot more, and though its ideas – based around the inscription of the flesh – aren’t new, they do resonate well, redeeming the production as a whole. (Jonny Ensall)
84 THE LIST 24 Sep–8 Oct 2009