A MANIFESTO FOR A NEW CITY. To 30 April.
Tour
A MANIFESTO FOR A NEW CITY
by Julia Darling
Northern Stage Tour to 27 April 2005
Runs 1hr 40min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 April at New Greenham Arts Newbury
A Tynesider visits Catalonia and pays homage to her home city.
A double farewell in Northern Stage Ensemble's last show by departing artistic director Alan Lyddiard whose vision and persistence has created an individual, exciting regional company. Yet more sadly, news came just before this piece opened at Newbury (its second venue) that writer Julia Darling had died of cancer.
Her vivid, uncluttered script has an energetic life. Jane Arnfield's notebook-bearing poet may not be Darling's alter-ego but the character bright, optimistic, brimming with enthusiasm - stands in for this fine script's creator.
Neil Murray, whose Newcastle designs have often been extravagantly magnificent, creates a city out of plastic chairs. Laid out not quite in rows, nor quite herring-bone, the ten performers sit on them like an alternative audience, isolated citizens in a city of poverty sandwiching a regenerated riverside, the Sage, Baltic, coffee-, wine- and tapas-barred, feather-bridged Tyne where:
Property is soaring,
So is laminated flooring,
And you can buy a mooring
Down St Peter's Quay.
Such lyric sections, given a further spring by Jim Kitson's a cappella music, are interspersed with documentary-style stories of people whose public faces hide individuality, the artistic security-man, musical clerk, lesbian primary teacher (sole happy individual among the self-styled Disgruntled) and apple-growing taximan.
After an interval (the evening's most questionable feature) come two brief scenes. The poet's eye imagines a small-is-beautiful takeover; the city no longer smells of photocopiers and raw greed, car-parks and credit cards are no longer life's parameters and luxury flats are given free to poets.
Yet all goes dystopic, chairs piled in tower-blocks, the world all aggro-rock, men dispossessed of suits in tailors' mock-ups singing full-frontal rage, before retreating to a ba-ba-backing group as smart-belted women line up in anger at the mikes. The smile's wiped from the poet's face and proceedings crumble into Brechtian announcements and agit-prop demands on the audience - crude political theatre devices mirroring the break up of the poet's vision. Utopia's best when it's all in the mind. This all takes the piece into less assured areas, but leaves it stronger and, like all Lyddiard's Northern Stage golden era, utterly theatrical and entirely distinct.
Cast:
Francisco Alfonsin, Jane Arnfield, Mark Calvert, Kate Craddock, Alex Elliott, Bekki French, Rebecca Hollingsworth, Mark Lloyd, Tony Neilson, Peter Peverley
Director: Alan Lyddiard
Designer: Neil Murray
Lighting: Kevin Tweedy
Sound: Rob Brown
Composer/Musical Director: Jim Kitson
Dramaturg: Duska Radosavljevic
2005-04-17 13:41:55