STOCKHOLM
Touring;
seen at The Junction, Cambridge
10 October, 2007
**
Kali and Todd are young, smart in both senses, have great sex (twice
onstage in the course of 70 minutes) and are about to take a break in
Stockholm. However, they already inhabit the syndrome named after that
city, whereby a hostage forms an attachment to their captor and perhaps
tormentor. Here, although there are hints that Todd is often quite
peremptory, he is principally the victim of Kali's pathological,
violent jealousy, which erupts into a domestic battle in the kitchen in
front of a long row of magnetised knives on the back wall. What follows
is not simply make-up sex: Todd explains that Kali's deep remorse is in
fact irresistibly attractive.
Writer Bryony Lavery is adept at finely honed lines, but I find her
work less compelling the more palpable is her earnest engagement with a
capital-I Issue, and in this case it grows increasingly palpable
through the second half of the piece. Having the characters narrate
about themselves in the third person whilst acting events out in the
first and second can be nicely disconcerting, but the climactic duet in
which they forecast possible, fatal futures for the couple stops being
chilling after a few seconds and becomes a matter of simply hammering
the point home.
Moreover, this is a Bryony Lavery play only second; first and foremost
it is a Frantic Assembly show. When I reviewed the otherwise thoroughly
impressive Black Watch last
year I remarked that the Frantics' brand of physical theatre had long
ceased to be innovative, and has now largely passed even from
reassuring reliability into tired cliché. This production does
nothing to sway me from that view. When fighting and loveplay are
portrayed with the same narrow physical vocabulary of crawling over a
multi-dimensional set and throwing one another over their shoulders, it
might be drawing an intentional comparison between these two passions;
but when the comparison broadens to several preceding productions – all
of which seem to entail young people uncovering a dark side, with
periodic jigging about – it is revealed as tediously formulaic. The
performance I saw in Cambridge was to an audience almost entirely of
school and college groups, whose first exposure to such a performance
style this may be; unless the Frantics raise their game, the novelty
even for these newbies will wear very thin very quickly.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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