ALL MOUTH. To 7 July.

London

ALL MOUTH
by Jonathan Lewis and Miranda Foster

Menier Chocolate Factory 53 Southwark Street SE1 1RU To 7 July 2007
Tue-Sat 8pm Mat Sat & Sun 3.30pm
Runs 1hr 55min One interval

TICKETS: 020 7907 7060
www.menierchocolatefactory.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 June

Underpowered voiceover comedy.
In their actors’ commune of convenience, performers with variously recollectable pasts gather to prepare for auditions and their ‘meanwhile’ staple, the commercial voiceover: words that coo or enthuse behind the slick-pics of TV adverts.

Their skill’s at corporate beck-and-call as manufacturers and consultants listen down the line from corporate offices round the world, chipping in with their penny, cent or yen worth of suggestions for mood, intonation and pace.

Into the nest of quietly desperate performers comes beginner Rod. His youth and ample locks secure him the kind of invitation old Digby’s extended to attractive-looking young men often enough before, while Rod’s use of the all-purpose “awesome” to flatter anyone within hearing shows how he intends to suck his way up the greasy career-pole.

With a script jointly from a successful actor and writer there’s a clear knowledge of the dynamics of relationships and how the profession works. Mel (Caroline Harker, suitably patient at work, clear-sighted at home and showing the pressures of a split relationship) opens in the recording studio with a clear, comic picture of the actor swallowing pride as the money-men’s suggestions hurtle down the ISDN.

A shady side-line is revealed in a parallel opening scene after the interval. Self-interest undermines professional cohesion, and short-term gain beats longer-term survival. Outside the recording-studio’s narrow confine, matters are less pointed.

Things chug pleasantly along, but little lifts this off the playwrights’ drawing-board, to divert the predictable action or make the characters live as individuals. A voiceover artists’ strike against the threat of synthesised voices never comes to the boil. And there’s a hesitancy hanging around Jonathan Lewis’s production of the script he co-authored.

Best are Harker and Nigel Whitmey’s Greg, concentrating on the audition trail for a role as a soap-opera cleric. But the whole piece has nowhere beyond obvious satire to go, and ends up as disappointing as Digby’s long-prepared invite to Desert Island Discs. The only chance for a voice to express its owner’s personality, it is of course fated from the off. But the idea’s clumsily resolved and, like so much here, fails to carry conviction.

Mel: Caroline Harker
Greg: Nigel Whitmey
Paddy: Simon Chandler
Rod: James Russell
Digby: Christopher Benjamin

Director: Jonathan Lewis
Designer: Anthony Lamble
Lighting: Steve Barnett
Sound: Sebastian Frost for Orbital

2007-06-12 01:14:35