FIVE MILES AND FALLING: Imitating the Dog: Tour to 23 May

FIVE MILES AND FALLING
by Imitating the Dog.

Touring to 23rd May 2002
Runs 40 minutes. No interval

INFORMATION www.imitatingthedog.co.uk
Review Mark Courtice 16th March 2002

Exciting production techniques need a more engaging script.The audience (maximum 25 people) are led into a lift. After the doors close a love story/ghost story/thriller begins, told through film, live action, and video. To begin with it is all terribly exciting, the lift feels very real, the film’s well shot, the doors open onto a scene where a young couple meet at the beginning of what might be a great love affair…

Southampton seems to be committing artistic suicide; grants to many of the city’s arts organisations including the renowned Solent Peoples’ and Nuffield theatres are threatened. The Gantry, the city’s home to contemporary touring work, is now closing for ever. Already homeless, they have been promoting work all over the city, including this installation/performance by Leeds based group ‘Imitating the Dog’ in an empty shop.

What really matters, however close to the cutting edge you are working, is good performance and writing. The acting here is static, partly because the size of the performance area revealed when the doors open is small and partly through what feels like lack of inspiration. The sequence of scenes uses different locations - so why do the characters remain in the same clothes throughout their whole affair? Why do they not move during the scene?

Moments work well; for instance a long, perfectly-timed sequence when a live actor performs to a video image of the other. This is clever, but such monologue swaps come to seem the only weapon in the writer/devisers’ armoury . When each character in turn remarks approvingly “You have a good memory,” we are not so sure.

A brilliant image in a kitchen that turns out to be a set-up in a shop challenges the notion of domestic realism, but this cleverly realised moment doesn’t lead us anywhere. All this creativity and surefooted use of different media should have been at the service of intriguing and exciting material, as engaging as the methods of its presentation. In the end 5 Miles and Falling turns out to be a rather obvious ghost story and not much else.

Man: Richard Malcolm
Woman: Alice Booth

Devised and Created by: Alice Booth, Seth Honnor, Andrew Quick, Richard Malcolm, Simon Wainwright
Technician: Kat Cooper
Camera: Mate Toth
Edited by: Mark Wordsworth

2002-03-31 09:23:42