BOLLYWOOD JANE. To 30 June.
Leeds
BOLLYWOOD JANE
by Amanda Whittington
West Yorkshire Playhouse (Quarry Theatre) To 30 June 2007
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu 1.30pm & Sat 2pm
Audio-described 29 June
Captioned 27 June
Runs 2hr 35min One interval
TICKETS: 0113 213 7700
www.wyp.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 June
Different elements don’t come together.
So many things ought to make this a good show. Writer Amanda Whittington brings a rebellious teenager, fed up with her comfortless existence with a quick-tempered mother, into a transforming cross-cultural encounter, and there’s dancing from a sizeable community cast. The whole should be uplifting, but it remains resolutely clogged-up and earthbound.
Partly it’s a matter of clashing scales. At the heart of Bollywood Jane is an intimate story of relationships. Teenage Jane and her mother Kate are a step-up from A Taste of Honey’s quarrelling daughter/mother duo Jo and Helen, but there’s a modern sharpness to their relationship. And when Jane’s father comes back into Kate’s life, after an attempt to present him as someone significantly sinister, it’s more as plot contrivance than much of a real character.
Running from home Jane meets young Dini, helping-out in his brother Aamir’s shop but really living for Sanjay, and his project to show Bollywood films in a crumbling cinema. Jane gets friendly enough with Dini to be surprised but not distraught when she discovers the sexual preference that’s been obvious enough throughout the play. Things end hopefully.
Intermingled with this, there’s big-scale Bollywood, seen both in extracts from a brightly-photographed film and dance sequences in each act. The film involves a screen lowered over the set, the choreography requires the scope of the Quarry Theatre’s extensive stage.
This dancing provides the evening’s high-points. Choreographer Zoobin Surty provides hot and cold swirls of colour that lift the situation from England’s urban streets to a brighter, livelier world. Unfortunately, what Whittington provides on the streets, in people’s homes and the faded cinema foyer, is a downbeat realism as clichéd as the Bollywood sequences but without their entertainment value.
Surty ensures all his community cast appear at least competent, and there are several clearly skilled performers in the ensemble. But there’s little sense of these dances connecting with Whittington’s handed-down social realism, while her plot and characters seem desultory. Only Nichola Burley’s teenager, suddenly in love with a new world while rebelling against her fragmentary family life, makes any impression among the individual characters.
Aamir: Avin Shah
Jane: Nichola Burley
Kate: Katherine Dow Blyton
Dini: Darren Kuppan
Sanjay: Jayson Benovichi-Dicken
Sabrina: Nikki Shaw
Mac: Victor Gardener
Team Raj: Harbinder Basan, Cathy Birch, Lianne Brown, Holly Cassidy, Jill Hargrgeaves, Adnan Hussain, Shakeel Hussain, Victoria Jablonski, Heather Jackson, Lisa King, Bernice McBride, Munmun Mukherjee, Raj Parmar, Shannon Phillips, Ruby Rall, Georgina Settle, Amy Whitrod-Brown, Jo Wilkinson, Erica Wilson, Pia Wohland
Team Simran: Louise Clarke, Mahjabeen Galaria, Amy Hardcastle, Marianna Hitiris, Usman Ishaq, Salma Kauser, Elizabeth Matfin, Gita Ben Mistry, Eilidh Newton, Katy Padam, Elena Patel, Rangani Perera, Lara Pattison, Adam Quereshi, Betty de Silva, Sophie Mei Lan Slack, Jo Small, Mamta Stalin, Angela Thornton, Connor Whiteley
Director: Nikolai Foster
Designer: Colin Richmond
Lighting: Guy Hoare
Sound/Video: Mic Pool
Composer: Grant Olding
Choreographer: Zoobin Surty
Dialect coach: Michaela Kennen
Voice coach: Susan Stern
Dance Captain: Nikki Shaw
2007-06-23 10:15:03