At Hijinx Theatre |
| Hiijinx Theatre- Spinning the Round Table , Sherman Theatre Cardiff , September 30, 2005 |
| This review first appeared in the Western Mail.... A new charismatic leader has been elected in a landslide victory, thanks to a please-all set of policies and an effective spin doctor. The country loves him, even when he joins with other forces in a foray into the Middle East. His wife is dress-conscious but gets herself into embarrassing media situations. And when his popularity starts to wane, his faithful second-in-command enjoys a reputation as a man with integrity and almost puritanical moral correctness. Yes, it’s all very familiar, down to the familiar cut of the suit, the colour of the tie, the haircut and the facial expressions: we are in New Labourland. But what’s this ? The First Lady has an affair with trustworthy Mr Pure…surely not Cherie and Gord ? The spin doctor enjoys a stroll on Clapham Common and does deals with the red-tops…what, Ali, Ron and Mandie rolled into one ? No. This may look like the Blair ascendancy and collapse into chaos, but actually it’s Camelot: the Leader is Arthur, wife Gwen is Guinevere and cuckolding minister Lawrence is Lancelot. Morgan, the treacherous spin doctor, is an amalgam of Morgan Le Fay and Modred. You really only need an acquaintance with the Mabinogion or Tennyson to see that writer Lewis Davies has taken the bare bones of Arthurian Romance and fitted it to modern Britain, just as commentators did in the Kennedy era in the States. If this is a modern allegory, then, how does it end ? Will Lancelot – sorry, Lawrence, no, Gordon – accede ? Will Morgan – Campbell/Mandelson, that is – return ? What happens to Arthur and Guinevere, mythology’s Tony and Cherie ? Wither the Wasteland ? I will not disclose the end but it is certainly morally and politically ambiguous, depending where you stand on the New Labour project. The Spinning of the Round Table, the latest from Hijinx Theatre, is in fact remarkably uncritical of the politics: while the language and rhetoric is pure New Labour (it sounds as if it is lifted wholesale from real speeches), this is itself so much a self-parody that it needs to be highly exaggerated to work as satire rather than simply replicated. And, alas, the play isn’t sharp enough to be satire, not funny enough to be comedy, not deep enough to be tragedy and not interesting enough to be a thriller. It isn’t clear what Lewis Davies and director Chris Morgan are saying here, because even the correlation between Camelot and New Labour collapses once Guinevere and Lancelot (Gwen and Lawrence) have their affair – I guess these days adultery isn’t enough to bring a rule to an end as it did in the fictitious Age of Chivalry. Davies employs a kind of stilted, literary language that may well be what politicians say in front of the cameras (although Blair, of course, tries desperately hard to be casual), but surely not in private – unless we’re meant to interpret it as suggesting that these people lead the same superficial lives domestically as they present in public. This may explain Morgan Rhys’s wooden portrayal of the chivalrous Laurence and Ceris Jones’s Arthur, where he seems more concerned with impersonating the PM than creating a character, but they look to me like two good actors trapped by their roles. Emyr John’s Morgan (and doubling-up as a camp chat-show host in a scene that like many others needs drastic cutting) is two-dimensional and only Alison John as Gwen really emerges with much credit. All the cast are capable of better performances. Davies, essentially a story-writer, as a playwright seems to me still reluctant to allow his characters and plot to be freed from the page: Spinning the Round Table is a half-hearted sortie into politics that with all its wordiness and lack of tension never really becomes theatre, especially in this uninspired production. And having actors walk round and round between scenes does not constitute action. Supporters of Hijinx may wonder what has become of this fine company when it comes to it staging a weak play, weakly directed, uninspired lighting and design and unimpressive acting. Somehow Spinning the Round Table, they may feel, isn’t really a Hijinx play. But more important it doesn’t embody the Hijinx ethos. Time was, not so long ago, when Hijinx was a by-word for small-scale excellence. The rigour that was essential and practised in its work with special needs audiences was transferred to its community work. There was an attention to quality, a precision and a professional pride as well as a humanity that drove the work and attracted highly-talented practitioners to the company. That’s why the company survived the arts council’s threat to get rid of it. That’s why, presumably, the Boyden Report saw it as a cornerstone of theatre provision. Times change, of course, and Hijinx in many ways is successful: it has strong political support, a wide fan base and pulls in good audiences. But is that enough for those that have long memories ? The Welsh theatre world, they might think, is on the verge of losing one of its greatest assets – and, frankly, it can’t afford to. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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