ANGELS OF THE UNIVERSE. To 23 May.
London
ANGELS OF THE UNIVERSE
by Einar Mar Gudmundsson adapted by Neil Haigh
Gate Theatre To 23 May 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 1hr 10min No interval
TICKETS: 020 7229 0706
boxoffice@gatetheatre.freeserve.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 May
Play and performance finely balance surface energy and underlying melancholy.A quaintly-spelled programme note says this one-person piece from Icelandic Take Away Theatre comes to London via Huddersfield, a prize-winning Festival of Budapest showing and last year's Edinburgh Fringe – a kind of homecoming seeing Stoppard dubbed Edinburgh the Reykjavik of the south.
In Neil Haigh's engaging performance, Pall Olaffson seems a potentially smart member of Icelandic society; bright features and confident manner suggest, in English terms, something of a public-school prefect. His claimed girlfriend veers between medicine and law while his film-going settles enthusiastically on Chaplin and Bunuel.
But he's not well-integrated. Haigh achieves a profound if lightly-indicated sadness underneath the energy. The story of a potential inmate's rejection by Klepp Psychiatric Hospital bounces back when Pall tells us they accepted him first time.
The mentally unbalanced are the play's Angels: but they are lost creatures with no place on earth and no heaven. The sense of insanity grows before it's made transparent. It's in the extremes of mood, the energy thrown into detail, often petering out, the sudden shifts of pace and subject.
And it's reinforced by Gudrun Oyahals' set – a rack of clothing and appurtenances suggesting a small flat, all given a skewed unreality – a pram opening up as telephone or shaving bowl, giving the sense of a simple life somehow determined elsewhere, at odds with the character's energy.
There's comedy in the fellows Pal introduces: one's convinced he's writing Beatles hits and still waiting for royalties; another takes a group off for a swish hotel meal, paying the bill by announcing they're from the psychiatric hospital and asking for the police.
But, there's always sadness: the hotel jaunt was playing hookey from a fellow-patient's funeral – he walked into the sea. Another friend drives over a cliff. A funny routine with two cinema tickets playing a mating game happens as Pall's girl does a no-show for the cinema.
He can be unpredictably violent, but is vulnerable to real bullies. And over it all, there's the feeling of purposelessness, beautifully caught in Agusta Skuladottir's well-tuned production as Pall finally fades from the stage, as if he'd never been born.
Pall Olaffson: Neil Haigh
Director: Agusta Skuladottir
Designer: Gudrun Oyahals
Lighting: James Glanville
2003-05-18 13:04:18