ELECTRICITY. To 24 April.

Leeds

ELECTRICITY
by Murray Gold

West Yorkshire Playhouse (Courtyard Theatre) To 24 April 2004
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Thu 2pm & Sat 2.30pm
Audio-described 16, 20 April, 22 April 2pm
BSL Signed 14 April
Captioned 19 April
Runs 2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS: 0113 213 7700
www.wyp.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 April

More urban paranoia, comedy on the edge of stability but the current doesn't flow.Having the decorators in can be a middle-class nightmare, especially when they're all male and you're not. Affable Welsh boss Leo, lazy, self-justifying Jakey, and slow, inarticulate Bizzy (Jakey's son), run rings round Katherine, whose domestic quiet place, all sunset gold walls and flowing-water feature, has been in the decorating for 17 weeks and is nowhere near ready.

There again, the exposed, live cables hanging from the wall can't be seen to because she's forever on the computer next door. Compulsive keyboard duty seems another sign of modern stress, and when Murray Gold launches Katherine into the first of the long speeches in the play somewhat too early her apologies for always apologising and pent-up anxieties are signs of her mental state as well as the workers' behaviour behind her back.

The monologue's too early because the play hasn't established its position between realistic comedy and heightened metaphor. It never becomes funny enough for the one, nor pointed enough for the other. Ian Brown's attempt to turn another, tedious long speech, by Jakey, into a front-of-curtain address to the audience is stylistically incongruous you wonder if Brown realised the script's problems and was trying anything - anything - to make it work.

Certainly when the temporary stage-shroud falls away to reveal the completed wall-handiwork of Leo and mates, you see designer Ruari Murchison's done a resplendent job. But the direct address seems to have affected Christopher Eccleston who, faced with a lively lad character lacking the good lines such character needs, keeps mugging the audience with facial reactions.

The other workmen do well with the little they have, but Sophie Ward's given an impossible job to come straight upfront with her doubt-ridden worrying, then virtually disappear for most of the play.

Andrew Scarborough manages to create a forceful impression as a post-Thatcher businessman confidently putting workers in their place, then in Gold's most interesting strand - revealing his own doubts. But that requires him, and us, believing Jake's mumbo-jumbo as the plot turns all pantomime-fantasy. The electricity presumably represents something; it's certainly not any power in the script.

Jakey: Christopher Eccleston
Leo: Patrick Brennan
Bizzy: Oliver Wood
Katherine: Sophie Ward
Michael: Andrew Scarborough

Director: Ian Brown
Designer: Ruari Murchison
Lighting: Tim Mitchell
Sound: Mic Pool
Composer: Richard Taylor
Dialect coach: Penny Dyer
Fight director: Renny Krupinski
Voice: Susan Stern
Assistant director: Sarah Punshon

2004-04-11 15:00:41