GETTING HERE To 25 July.
Midlands.
GETTING HERE
by Ivan Cutting.
Eastern Angles Tour to 25 July 2009.
Runs 1hr 10min No interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 June at Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery.
Eastern Angles takes a step in a new direction.
A seventy minute performance that was ten minutes late starting – it’s hardly surprising we’re in an airport. An initially rather bossy flight attendant, resplendent in company colours, immaculate make-up and assertively bright lipstick, orders us into lines, as a young husband and wife argue. A loudly confident pilot with something of a God complex sets us off on the voyage of this walkabout production from Eastern Angles.
Site-responsive productions often heighten theatricality by setting-off their location and the disorientation of promenading spectators with an element of unreality. That’s the case here. Quite a few cases - luggage is central to Ivan Cutting’s script, with its focus on the baggage people carry with them through life. In one case, the luggage conceals a character, Polish Malina, unaware of how she’s arrived in transit alongside Portuguese Catarina and Jose.
It’s a new development for Eastern Angles, and Peterborough’s Museum and Art Gallery isn’t the most sympathetic space for it. The promenading’s largely alternating between two similar spaces so there’s little chance for contrasts in physical conditions to give rise to different dramatic atmospheres. And the non-real elements in the play are suppressed by the very realistic portraits and local scenes hanging on the gallery’s walls.
Conditions may be better in the venues to which the show now moves. Yet the script itself suffers from treating its own non-realistic aspects with literal force. In the best examples of such theatre, there’s a reality around which implications of something different are suggested. Here, everything’s discussed as part of a logical argument.
One result is that Portugal’s Fado music and the mass retreat of Germans as the Red Army advanced in 1945 – important in the play and eventually pictured on screen – are laid before audiences on a factual plate rather than becoming elements insinuating themselves within larger possibilities. The piece, that is, does the thinking for us, and demonstrates in too rational a way where it’s going.
It is, though, immaculately performed at close quarters by all five actors. Angles has set off in an interesting new direction, even if they’ve not got there yet.
Air Hostess: Beata Majka.
Catarina: Chara Jackson.
Jose: Pedro Reichert.
Captain John: Ade Sapara.
Malina: Noeleen Comiskey.
Director: Ivan Cutting.
Designer: Charlie Cridlan.
Movement: Norma Attalah.
2009-07-01 13:33:57