GOOD AND TRUE: Stan's Cafe till 25 Oct
GOOD AND TRUE: Stan's Café
Bham Rep (The Door) till 25 October
Info www.stanscafe.co.uk
Runs: 1h 15m, no interval
Review: Rod Dungate, The Door, 21 October 2003
Very funny, disturbing, ensures your undivided attention and deserves every moment of its continuing success
Probably in days gone by Stan's Cafe would have been called alternative theatre. I'm not sure if that is a relevant label now and I'm pretty sure James Yarker (who directs this piece) wouldn't welcome labels anyway. The fact is that this small company are among the leading exponents of . . . well, leading exponents in Europe and beyond.
Four actors, a table, four chairs. In the audience we can feel secure: we are in a police interrogation room and the police are fabricating an interview entrapping a, presumably innocent, victim. Oh, if only life were so simple. No sooner do we begin to follow the narrative journey than the elements within the narrative begin, like tectonic plates, slowly to shift, slowly to grind against each other. The ground is definitely no longer solid beneath our feet. Time is measured out, not in TS Eliot's coffee spoons, but in mugs of tea.
We blink and questioner becomes questioned. What we thought was false becomes real. The actors play characters definable only by their context within the narrative at any given moment. They surprise us (as characters) by stopping to take stock of the linguistic mess they have got themselves into: zooming off again, escaping, by inventing a different context and selecting a different victim.
For a piece about questions and answers it raises a lot of questions and leaves us to ponder the answers. Part of the fun of the piece is our desire, our struggle against the odds to create a plot within Stan's Cafe's narrative. In a way this is our struggle to make sense of our world which often seems devoid of it.
There is a sense of the team having their material completely under control though: the piece never falls into formless verbiage. Having said this, there's a dip in interest about two-thirds of the way though during a section based around word-association. It lacks the freshness and wild inventiveness of the rest and teeters towards the uninteresting.
GOOD AND TRUE is tightly gathered together again, however, and finishes not with a bang but with an unsettling whimper.
Company
Sarah Archdeacon
Amanda Hadingue
Craig Stephens
Nick Walker
Director: James Yarker
Lighting: Paul Arvidson
Sound: Brian Duffy
Design: Stan's Cafe
2003-10-22 16:22:51