GIRL IN THE GOLDFISH BOWL. To 9 April.
Sheffield
GIRL IN THE GOLDFISH BOWL
by Morris Panych
Crucible Studio Theatre To 9 April 2005
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Mat 2pm 31 March, 7 April, 3pm 2, 9 April
BSL Signed 7 April 7.45pm
Talkback 5 April
Runs 1hr 55min One interval
TICKETS: 0114 249 6000
www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/buyit
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 March
Lightness in writing and performance doesn't belie serious point.As adult performances of 10 year olds go, Kirsty Bushell's Iris is a no-starter. There again, that's not what she's up to here. This Iris is an older head on rising-11 shoulders, taking us back from an older consciousness to 1962, when President Kennedy was seeing off the Russians' Cuba-bound missiles and when her goldfish Mall had disappeared. Flushed away, it's thought, by mother Sylvia who's also about to flow off to a new life.
Soviet missiles are nothing to young Iris by the side of her missing Mall, and she's only too willing to believe her scaly pet has transmigrated into the stranger from the shore who arrives with an uncertain sense of language, to mother's delight and dad's distress.
Father's unemployed, something symptomatic of the stasis afflicting the whole family, both in their lives and internal emotional states. Hopeless attempts to give some shape to their world involve dad in drawing go-nowhere rhomboids on his architect's board.
Canadian Morris Panych has a light touch helped by David Newman's deft direction and the performances, especially Bushell's Iris. Yet there's a sadness hovering, largely through the contrast between her light childhood manner and the later-life awareness that this slice of 1962 holds/held (the 2-times scheme is maintained by implication) not only events significant for the world and the girl, but also her final moments of childhood.
Designer Ultz sets the action in a fish-tank like aperture diagonally across the Crucible Studio. Iris alone steps outside this frame, as befits her double consciousness. Inside, Ultz provides suggestions of home and marine life, where the characters - including libidinous lodger Miss Rose- live with all the active circularity of the goldfish bowl which finally frames Iris's face.
Newman captures the way people spend great energy unproductively, worrying, plotting, fearing, fretting over what they daren't express, and the edges of eccentricity in what they accept as normality.
Iris speaks with childlike definitive quality about the home full of shifting uncertainty as perilous as the politics to the south with its implications of world-wide strain and anxiety. The fine cast capture this uncertainty in a well-balanced mix. It makes for a mini-society skilfully observed through a double perspective as Iris reports from the future on her young self and sees her household through that childhood perspective. A little treat all round.
Iris: Kirsty Bushell
Sylvia: Jessica Turner
Owen: Graham Turner
Miss Rose: Nancy Crane
MrLawrence: Ferdy Roberts
Director: David Newman
Designer: Ultz
Lighting: Nigel Edwards
Sound: Nick Greenhill
Choreographer: Dominic Leclerc
Dialect coach: Penny Dyer
2005-03-26 10:13:21