More Drama
With a setting that has to be inspired from the vast sandwich shop which Oxford occasionally appears to resemble, the opening of the BT's first "new writing" offering this year, "Next Please" will be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever gotten hungry whilst in the vicinity of the High Street or Covered Market. Set in Di's bakery, the play explores the differing relationships between people in the workplace and at home. The characters and pleasant humour initially appear more than a little reminiscent of the sitcom "Dinner Ladies," providing gentle amusement. However, the mood darkens, and an essential misery and lack of emotional connection in the lives of the central characters reveals itself, culminating in a sensitively underplayed scene by Poppy Burton-Morgan and Richard Bradford, leaving their characters, and the audience with a sense of bleakness.
Writer, Alice Wood, begins experimentally by blending interspersing separate conversations of which not all the lines are actually spoken, jumping from character to character in quick succession. This potentially confusing tactic is successfully utilized to immediately evoke the atmosphere, not just of the bakery, but of the workplace world it represents: busy, chaotic, far less intimate than the other settings, and trivial, at least, at surface level. The different characters are very rapidly established, and as you smile in recognition at the mildly comedic situation, their individual appeal is apparent.
With limited props, the play utilizes mime, to great effect. The "school-drama" effect this technique can often result in is avoided by the actors effective use of their bodies, rather than just hands, to create a sense of solidity and weight in invisible objects, by their acute awareness of the exact details of what they are doing, and by, one suspects, careful direction by Edward Behrens. The performance is smooth and seamless and the characters well sustained. This is a cast, which knows exactly what they are doing.
So don't be put off if you don't think new writing is your thing. Both Alice Wood and actress Poppy Burton-Morgan may be names to watch in Oxford drama. "Next Please" is realistic drama, without being dull. It won't shock or amaze, but it may well impress. Serious, without taking itself too seriously, it is witty and watchable, yet leaves a bittersweet impression.
Walking into the Bernard Sunley theatre of St Catherine's College, staring across the stage at a prop wall and door on which was pinned the sign 'Do not open. If you do you may die' was hardly propitious to a review of Stoppard's classic The Real Inspector Hound. Further distracted by the originality of the costumes (Maighread McCloskey), it took me some time to actually get into the play, and see the play within a play, and wonder about the spectacularly dead body onstage (Bassel Tarbrush).
The Real Inspector Hound is a one-act farce that lampoons both theatre criticism and the English whodunit. It also draws upon the play-with-a-play conventions familiar to audiences of Stoppard's first and perhaps most famous full-length play, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. It also echoes Samuel Beckett's refusal of classical rules (the basis of which was exposed in Aristotle's Poetics) and the existential sensibilities of Waiting for Godot.
In this adaptation by Jonathan Bailey (St Catherine's), two pretentious and semi-prestigious critics, Moon (played by Brian Semple) and Birdboot (Osman Haneef), become the play in Tom Stoppard's farce, more obsessed with their careers and bedding actresses in exchange for good reviews. Meaningless critiques abound, like Moon's "There are moments, and I would not begrudge it this, when the play, if we can call it that, and I think on balance we can, aligns itself uncompromisingly on the side of life. Je suis, it seems to say, ergo sum?"
Birdboot and then Moon step from their reality into the fiction they were commenting on, although both worlds were at first clearly separated by the use of lighting - there are a full symbolic ten feet between Moon/Birdboot and the play they are watching at the beginning. This space gradually disappears until we can see only one stage, and only one play. Moon and Birdboot are irresistibly drawn into the fiction and incorporated into the play. As Birdboot tells Moon, "I can't help it". The actors become the critics, whilst the actors themselves "seemed to have given up acting", silently standing over the accumulation of dead bodies.
The Real Inspector Hound, a metaphor for life, for dreams, for the search of identity? Moon feels defined by the presence of alter ego Higgs, whose death once revealed sets in motion the tragedy. As Moon asks Birdboot, does the play itself know where it's going? Does the audience really find out? Possibly the best answer comes from Moon, "If we knew that, we wouldn't be here."
So an interesting if slapdash adaptation of The Real Inspector Hound, although special praise must go to Lynn Guerra, whose portrayal of nervous, overly enthusiastic Cynthia, unfaithful to her supposed dead husband Albert, and dialogues with Inspector Hound (portrayed by the delightfully eccentric John Ramsey) are a comic treat.
19th Feb 2004