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Contents: October 16, 1999:
The cast of "50 Revolutions."
(1)Murray Gold's "50 Revolutions."
(2)Simon Bennett's "Drummers."
"50 Revolutions"
This clever, satirical collection of 50 vignettes is a witty skewering of modern career and relationship angst. It's evening in London. People are shopping at the supermarket, some worried about their careers, others about their sex lives. Some people are going to music clubs, others have no place to sleep.
By Murray Gold, directed by Dominic Dromgoole
Produced by Oxford Stage Company
Whitehall Theatre, Whitehall, (Charing Cross)
171 369-1735
Opened September 10, 1999
Closed.
Reviewed by Lucy Komisar September 10, 1999They interact and intersect in sets meant to represent the gray anonymity of the city-- gray geometric blocks, brick and concrete, and steel pipes; a hunk of bathroom tile with soap and paper dispensers; a sterile café. The background sounds are of insouciant jazz.
People talk but don't connect. In a public restroom, two homeless young women (Emma Handy and Emily Joyce) panhandle. "I've only got cards," apologizes the well-dressed mark. At the market, everyone tells a black cashier, "Open late? Bet you'd rather be dancing." Actually, Tetley (an appealing Nikki Amuka-Bird) has theatrical aspirations and would rather be acting, but she picks up odd jobs, including being a subject for medical research.
Everyone seems somewhat dissatisfied and alienated. A man announces that he's doing sexual exercises. A woman explains to her friend that she wants empathy, genuineness, and non-possessive warmth. Later someone defines that as how one should treat the dying in a hospital.
People's lives seem structured in ways that increase their alienation. A personal manager (Amanda Root) in the music business complains, "In these times, everyone has a manager; the higher you go, the busier it gets. Even a manager needs a manager." She says she has vertigo in reverse, dizziness from standing at the foot of things. A character declares to a nightclub bouncer (an eerily oafish Tom Fisher), "It's a good thing to be big and strong.... what with number of people needing brute force to keep them out of a building."
Celebrity actress Tatiana (the glitzy Joanna Roth) wants her boyfriend, Leo (Nicholas Clay), to fight the crude bouncer, who is determined to seduce her. The hulking fellow gets unbidden help from his "feminine side," who turns out to be a lesbian, and from his soul, who is gay.
The confusion of personal relationships is played out wonderfully by Nathaniel Parker as the actor, Peter, and Nicola Walker, as his impossible girlfriend, Linda, who brandishes faithlessness as a weapon against loss of independence. "What are you, some kind of historical avenger?" the distraught Peter demands, cursing her, then talks to himself about impact this is all having on him: "I'm losing my dignity."
Nothing goes right for Peter. When he opens in a play, "Cod with Everything" (a send-up of Arnold Wesker's "Chips with Everything"), a theater board member (Michele Austin) arrives to tell him he can't use a real cigarette for a scene that requires the prop. Then the homeless characters we met in the restroom wander onstage and interrupt the "play's" action.
But "they're entitled," we are told. There's even a political flavor to flavor in an ice cream called "extreme soisante-huit." (That's French for 68.)
The "playwright" Johnny Perkins (Francis Lee) apologizes for writing about injustice, but makes an impassioned plea for the theater. "Movies are all money, they can speak where there's money. But the theater, maybe it will make people think." The speech is too plodding to be satire, and if it's an effort to add depth with serious stuff about conviction, it doesn't work as well as the humor.
With its bright, lively cast, the humor in "50 Revolutions" works very well, indeed.[Komisar]
"Drummers"
A drum is a house; a drummer is a house-breaker. Author Simon Bennett, who is 32, was a drummer who spent two years in jail for burglary at age 20. He started writing in prison, then studied theater at nights when he got out. He relives his past in this searing, angry, brutal play about a collection of low-life thieves who inhabit the gritty, nasty shadows of humanity.
By Simon Bennett, directed by Max Stafford-Clark
Produced by Out of Joint; Karl Sydow, Ambassador Theatre Group; Cambridge Arts Theatre; Mercury Theatre, Colchester
New Ambassadors Theatre, West Street (Leicester Square)
171 836 611-1110
Opened September 6, 1999
Closed; on UK tour
Reviewed by Lucy Komisar September 6, 1999"Drummers" is produced by Out of Joint, founded seven years ago to generate new writing. Productions that have come to New York include Caryl Churchill's "Blue Heart" and Mark Ravenhill's "Shopping and Fucking."
The play is set in the tough neighborhood of Brixton, moving from the beat-up back room of a pool hall where Pete fences stolen loot and shoots up between his toes to a tacky kitchen with rough table and chairs and pictures of Christ and a saint. Set designer Nathalie Gibbs uses sheets of glass plastered with cardboard and bits of paint to create a collage of desolation.
Pete (Paul Ritter), Barry (Callum Dixon) and Ray (Peter Sullivan) are not people you want to know. Their language is suffused with profanity and hate. They seem born bad. When Ray's mother (Maggie McCarthy) asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, "a thief." Pete's father George (Ewan Hooper) despises his son for being an addict and tells him to "disappear." Bennett projects an ironic tension between their distorted values and society's norms. Pete's father George tells Ray he was surprised to hear he was thieving again. The next time he'd get five years. "Where else can I go?" Ray asks. "You could take a job." A look of shock. George: "I'm sorry. Don't mind me. I'm old fashioned. Get a job. What was I thinking?" Or, when George says his café is getting a better class of customer, Ray comments that "Brixton's getting a bit up-market these days."
They don't really belong to up-market, though there's a continuous suggestion of vague yearnings. When Pete says he took his wife to an expensive restaurant, one of the hoods asks, "Didn't you feel out of place?" He replied, "You get suited and booted....put on a posh accent, you can get away with murder."
Ray, talking about a country manor house to rob, says he wanted to paint it's picture, not burgle it, but he can't paint. He tells his brother Barry that maybe on the way to the house they'll stop in a nearby castle, "get a sense of our history, stack on the old culture, and go off pillaging like a proper pair of Vikings."
When Ray and Barry break into the fine house, Ray stops to drink the owners' tea. "Oh my fucking word, that's lovely," he declares. And "I say one thing for the upper classes; they know their fucking tea."
After two and a half years of prison, Ray exudes hostility toward his mother and his brother. He is furious at his mother for giving up on him, for calling him the devil. "My mother nutted me off long before prison," he says. He'd been jailed for an arson attack on his mother's church.
The viciousness is ugly and unrelenting, erupting violently on stage in a crude, brutal way that leaves little to the imagination. There's no honor here among thieves or brothers. Ritter, Dixon and Sullivan give riveting performances. Bennet intimates that even Ray has some humanity, that his anger has roots, but by the end of the play, you have your doubts.[Komisar]
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