The title of Simon Stephens’ play
Pornography, the jewel in this
year’s Edinburgh Fringe selection at the Traverse Theatre, can be
interpreted in several ways. It can refer to the material itself, which
crops up as a motif uniting some but not all of these interwoven
stories of lives in London on and just before 7 July 2005; it could be
a comment on a specific storyline dealing with brother/sister incest;
it might even allude to the voracious, prurient way in which we consume
“human interest” stories like these. Stephens is, as ever,
dispassionate yet sympathetic in his writing: one of the play’s threads
is an imagined account by one of the 7/7 bombers of his journey on that
day, and it shows keen observation without ever venturing into ideology
or judgement (either by the character or of him). Sean Holmes’ hi-tech
rough-theatre staging is finely judged, not least in those elements of
Stephens’ pick’n’mix script which he chooses not to include in his
staging.
Pornography aside, I am afraid
that once again the first tranche of Traverse shows do not quite meet
one’s expectations of this prestigious venue which in some ways
operates as a bridge between the Fringe and the Edinburgh International
Festival. I am gradually being won round to young American company the
TEAM, whose
Architecting is a
tangled, ambivalent lament for the old American South. The company are
bright, energetic and combine seriousness with exuberant enjoyment, but
they might benefit from more variety in their dramatic structures and
greater selectivity in the ingredients they finally include. The other
American-ish offering (although bearing the badge of Glasgow’s Arches
Theatre Company), the apocalyptic naval two-hander
Finished With Engines, comes over
as an uncertain imitation of the work of The Riot Group, the company of
which actors Stephanie Viola and Drew Friedman are co-founders.
A brace of transfers from London – The Royal Court’s
Free Outgoing And
Nocturne from the Almeida, both
reviewed here last month – nestle alongside a pair of Irish offerings.
With
The New Electric Ballroom
(which he directs himself for Druid), Enda Walsh once more follows the
template of earlier plays seen at the Traverse such as
Bedbound and
The Walworth Farce: a small group
of characters in a confined environment, obsessively telling and
re-telling a narrative which gives them meaning (in this case a tale of
squalid shenanigans in a 1960s dance-hall) but which is broken and
re-shaped in the course of the play. Walsh has now set out an
impressive stall as a successor of sorts to Samuel Beckett, though I am
as yet unconvinced that we need one. Mark O’Rowe’s
Terminus is a three-pronged magical
realist story of life, death and disembodied souls flying around
contemporary Dublin, in a production from that city’s Abbey Theatre;
committed performances by Eileen Walsh and Karl Shiels, alas, failed to
curb my annoyance at the jangling doggerel verse in which O’Rowe has
written it.
Philip Ralph’s
Deep Cut
(produced by the Sherman of Cardiff) is an efficient polemic, a
near-verbatim play compiled from various testimonies regarding the four
young soldiers who died by gunshot at Deepcut barracks between 1995 and
2002. Mick Gordon’s sensitive production does not quite manage to hide
the palpable shift in tone halfway through from individual
human-interest story to big-issue crusade. The RSC/Traverse co-
production of Zinnie Harris’s
Fall
completes that writer’s Howard Barker-like trilogy of war plays; the
subject under examination here is how individuals and society move on
afterwards, and whether executing war criminals is a necessity of
justice or another act of hostility which sustains the climate of
strife. It is a thoughtful piece, but a long and dry one; seeing the
trilogy staged together would be interesting but phenomenally daunting.
Written for the Financial
Times.