AUDIENCE WITH MR RITZY - TALKING BIRDS: Touring

AN AUDIENCE WITH MR RITZY: Nick Walker
Talking Birds (co production with Warwick Arts Centre)
Touring (info www.talkingbirds.ndirect.co.uk in our links)
Runs: 55m, no interval
Review: Rod Dungate, 11 October 2003, Warwick Arts Centre

An intriguing, multi-layered play: everything in place but not quite working yetAN AUDIENCE WITH MR RITZY has much going for it but like a car which isn't quite correctly tuned it doesn't achieve peak performance.

It's a neat conceit. Mr Ritzy and Mr Gaumant are a comedy duo: they are booked for a slot (a kind of variety spot) and will present, as part of it, A Heart of Darkness. The problem is that Mr Gaumant is unable to appear . . .

Mr Ritzy (Graeme Rose) performs Heart of Darkness on his own and, in doing so, levels of reality and truth become blurred, they shift from one to the other. Heart of Darkness is, on the face of it, an old-fashioned tale of adventure the rescue of Grimsby's Elephant of Plenty. We quickly shift positions, though, nothing is as it seems: the fiction within the fiction becomes a truth (though of course still a fiction) because Mr Ritzy begins to confess to the murder of his partner Mr Gaumant. As we are taken further into the story we lose sight of the outer layer of non-reality (the variety slot) and witness a man revealing a truth.

If this sounds confusing well, it is confusing. These are the shifting sands on which Talking Birds like to build in this case a metaphor for the mental state of Mr Ritzy. The simple surface of the performance hides the disturbing inner workings.

The performance seems to misfire at a comedic level. This is important because it makes the audience feel excluded: we cannot participate in the journey and so have no journey of our own. I suspect this is due in large part to the opening variety show section: here Rose performs Mr Ritzy's mentally disturbed state whereas he should relax and concentrate on building the 'variety show performer-audience' direct relationship and let Mr Ritzy's state of mind gradually reveal itself to us (which it will do.)

All the ingredients seem to be present, including some sharp design elements (people buried in desert sand, an air balloon basket) and an intriguing effect where we begin to relate to a gramophone as Mr Gaumant.

It just needs a bit of sorting out.

Director: Nick Walker
Design: Janet Vaughan
Music: Derek Nisbet

2003-10-12 13:57:35