Cruel, surprising, arbitrary and glorious |
At Hijinx Theatre |
Hijinx Theatre- Estella's Fire , Sherman Theatre Cardiff , October 3, 2006 |
This review first appeared in Big Issue Cymru When Jane Austen was asked what was her fiction facilitator, she is said to have replied: “I write about love and money. What else is there to write about?” This axiom could easily undercut the oeuvre of that other classic story-crafter, Charles Dickens, and this is never more evident than in his powerhouse novel Great Expectations that loosely forms the foundation of this exceptional play. This is not a wholesale plot/character plunder, though, but rather a riff on the universal Dickensian thematic and moral imperatives that resonate endlessly on a loop throughout history, namely the damage us humans do to each otheroften without premeditated malice or even the slightest conscious recognitionfor love and how money, no mater what we believe, affords no succour from its disappointments and tragedies. Here, playwright Louise Osborn drills her gaze specifically on how generations of women weigh each other down with the emotional impedimenta of the past with devastating, derailing effect. Miss Haversham (Caroline Bunce) is the archetypal Cinderella manqué perpetually awaiting re-shodding by her prince who never shows and consequently rules her charge, Estella (Zoë Davies), with a combination of brittle bitterness, cool hauteur and perverse, deep affection as the narrative unspools the essential sadomasochism of human nature. In their gilded gaol of skewed love and loveless money, the pain of a life of regret and the fear of a future unlived rages like an angry twister engulfing everything in its destructive path. The play is the articulation of what happens when the music box closes and the spinning showgirl descends into a dark, surreal netherworld under the lid and things take a terrifying twist. What Osborn's script does so forcefully and elegantly is take us into this world and make the make-believe wholly believable. The language is lean and flows alternately like bile or blood, the former indicative of thwarted dreams and plans and the latter symbolic of the beats and pulses of the heart. The script is liposuctioned with no fat so no flab flobs over its belt; every thought, word and sentence has a purpose to shuttle the characters or action along. Nothing's there simply as a grandiose playwright's way of saying, “Here's my work! Aren't I clever?” It's there because it's saying something either about the characters or the world they live, or, spookily, the world we live in. There are some really good one-liners that leave you thinking, “Oh, Christ! That's so true; that is the way of the world.” The script is aided and abetted by the lighting, sound and set that synergetically layer tension and claustrophobia until the crescendo comes as both a shock and a relief. By the end, you feel you need to lie down in a darkened room for several hours with a wet flannel until your blood pressure stops coding out and you can face the vagaries of human interaction and some of the fireworks it invariably invokes without the urge to scream until your lungs split at the waste and haste of it all. The acting by foursome, Bunce and Davies as well as Stephen Hickman and Lizzie Rogan is superlative. Most of us think we have a basic understanding about what being an actor actually entails. Essentially, we think it's about pretending, adopting an alternate persona and portraying it, the commonly-held misconception that acting, as opposed to performing, is some acute form of rehearsed lying. When it's done properly, it's precisely the opposite. It's practised, coruscating truth-telling, and being told the truth, or, indeed telling it, is not something the majority of us take to readily or kindly, which is why like all apparently facile and absurd things acting is frustratingly difficult and ephemerally complex. Each performer grasps this fundamental principle and runs with it to provide something challenging, disquieting, funny even. Good drama is much like life; cruel, surprising, arbitrary and glorious and Estella's Fire shows this in extremis. |
Reviewed by: Jason Jones - Big Issue Cymru |
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