One of the mixed blessings of
theatregoing with the intensity common to the Edinburgh Festivals is
that productions slip immediately into context beside one another. The
Traverse Theatre, for instance, tends to strip its press performances
across entire days, with the result that last Friday I saw, and could
not help comparing, a number of monologue-based pieces dealing with
various kinds of bereavement.
The two most closely comparable are the Bush Theatre’s production of
Sea Wall by Simon Stephens (first
seen in London last autumn) and
Stefan
Golaszeskwi
Is A Widower, by the member of the Cowards comedy
group who scored a hit here last year with
…Speaks About A Woman He Once Loved.
I
am afraid Golaszewski’s play suffers by the comparison, as I suspect
it also does by its presence in this particular venue. His 2008 piece
was seen at the Pleasance in a more comedic milieu; at the Traverse,
folk seemed less ready to laugh at apparent gag lines. Golaszewski,
however, is trying to square a circle by being both similar to and
different from that earlier work. (The two will be twinned in London
later this year.) His first-person protagonist, set in the future of
2056, is deliberately written as increasingly unsympathetic and perhaps
deluded. However, where the experiences of young love recounted in
…Speaks About… were touchingly
universal, those in
…Is A Widower
seem more baldly unoriginal, and laced moreover with laboured “future”
references.
Sea Wall lasts only half as
long at 30 minutes, but paradoxically contains more by leaving more
out. Stephens’ protagonist speaks of his wife, daughter and
father-in-law, of swimming and diving in the Mediterranean (hence the
title, which refers to the Med’s equivalent of the underwater
continental shelf), and circles around the issues of God and
bereavement but never addresses either one directly for more than a
second or two. Andrew Scott’s performance is brilliant, except that
brilliance suggests high visibility and Scott underplays consistently,
sometimes even mumbling away entire phrases in what seems an entirely
natural delivery, at once affable yet slightly evasive. The first
performance I saw in Edinburgh this year, it instantly provided the
standard against which all others here must be judged.
I have long been an admirer of Stephens’ writing, and even more so of
David Greig’s. The latter’s
Midsummer
is in some ways a thirtysomething counterpart to his young-adult tale
Yellow Moon, seen in the same space
a couple of Fringes ago. Lawyer Helena and petty criminal Bob meet one
night in a wine bar and eventually, somewhat against their better
judgement, embark on a weekend-long
folie
à
deux of sex, alcohol and frittering away someone else’s
dodgy money. Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon punctuate their
interaction with wry, self-deprecating commentaries, and also with
renditions of Gordon McIntyre’s simple yet affecting songs. As they
find themselves falling in love with each other, so do we with Greig’s
own production.
Stefan Golaszewski invents a first-person protagonist, but it seems
that with Edgar Oliver what we see is the real McCoy: a self-conscious,
eccentric writer and actor giving an account of the bizarre
rooming-house in which he has lived for more than 30 years. With its
alcoholic mulatto postman, midget cabalist and the like, it sounds as
if Oliver has been inhabiting an Edward Gorey poem, full of horrors and
disquietudes somewhat askew from the conventional. His writing is
accomplished, but the impact of the piece as performed depends on the
extent to which one is engaged by his Gothically fey persona. I’m
afraid I could only buy into it so far and no further, as it seemed to
me too affected, not least in its strange vowel mutations: at one point
he speaks of sitting in the perk, almost entirely in the dirk except
for the light of the stirs.
Another orthoepical oddity, the occasionally over-articulated “r” of
the northside Dublin accent, mutates the word “general” so that at one
point, one of the characters in
Little
Gem seems to speak of having “a genital tidy”, which turns out
to be quite appropriate. Elaine Murphy’s play at first made my heart
sink, blending as it does two clichés: the Irish monologic
storytelling-style play and the one consisting of three generations of
women from the same family. However, it is seldom that we hear Irish
womanhood across the generations meditate so candidly on sexual
matters: granddaughter Amber’s pregnancy might be far more unexpected
to her than to us, but in contrast her gran Fay’s account of buying a
“rampant rabbit” vibrator to see her through her husband’s terminal
illness is disarming in several different ways. Murphy strives too much
for a shapely ending, but Paul Meade’s production for Dublin’s
Gúna Nua company is simple and direct.
The Traverse is once again producing a few shows beyond its Cambridge
Street premises, one of which is in the Barony bar in Edinburgh’s New
Town. It’s not the most salubrious location, but for that very reason
is a fitting setting for the Charles Bukowski-inspired
Barflies. Ben Harrison stages his
adaptation as a simple two-hander in which Keith Fleming, as
author-surrogate literary drunk Henry Chinaski, goes through
relationships with several women (all played by Gail Watson) ranging
from the doomed-romantic to the violent to the surreal. As the two
principal performers fight, fuck and philosophise across, around and on
top of the Barony’s bar counter, David Paul Jones augments the
proceedings with a clutch of judiciously chosen musical numbers sung in
his haunting basso-Antony-Hegarty voice. In truth, this seems a
comparatively modest project by the standards of the Grid Iron company,
who specialise in site-specific work (having performed tailor-made
pieces everywhere from a children’s playground to Edinburgh
International Airport’s departures concourse). I must also admit that I
have never been entirely persuaded of Bukowski’s genius (he liked
drinking and wrote well about liking it – so what?) Nevertheless, the
honesty of his authorial voice combined with Harrison’s dramaturgy
provides an hour and a quarter of more than serviceable drama. Oh, and
the ticket entitles you to a free drink.
Written for the Financial
Times.