HEAD. To 29 August.
Edinburgh
HEAD
by Zoe Simon
Smirnoff Underbelly (Big Belly) To 29 August 2004
Mon-Sun 6.15pm
Runs 1hr No interval
TICKETS: 0870 745 3083
Review Timothy Ramsden 22 August
All well done, but without the spark to make it stand out in a well-worn field (or alley).One puropse Edinburgh's Fringe serves is to give young writers, directors and actors an opportunity to flex their muscles where there's a potential audience and critical attention, but not the individually spotlit exposure of some theatre premieres.
Fail Better Productions, which has roots in Warwick University (although this cast have trained elsewhere), sum up their production in their name. It could be put more positively as 'promising'; a lot of what limits it is not in itself problematic.
Zoe Simon has a good way with the kind of sawn-off dialogue used to express dispossession for the last 30 years of English theatre. She has some memorable images in her script; the cul-de-sac rubbish heaps among which her two central characters live have a glittering edge that indicates her characters have not given up on life.
And there's a determined roughness - Head giving birth down among the dirt-sacks, with fears of infection - that is no more romanticised squalour than that in many a previous play at prestigious theatres.
Simon's Head is herself a scrawny creature surviving on street scraps of pizza and cola. And Simon , giving her girl a small-voiced plangency and agression, is as good an actress as writer. Her main companion, Matthew Landers' Urchin, is also technically well acted, but looks far too healthy and composed to be another creature of te cul de sac.
Jonathan Heron's production could benefit from more focusing of main points; it tends to rush past at a genrally uniform rate. But it's punchy and uses its limited space well.
This isn't easy-viewing, light-touch theatre. But it could impress anyone coming without a history of previous such 'dispossessed-drama'. Who knows, in 20 years' time one of 2004's newborn babies might be fuming at a middle-aged critic reviewing their streetwise first play with a 'very good, but we saw it years ago in Zoe Simon's Head'.
Head: Zoe Simon
Urchin: Matthew Landers
P.H.: Gary Abrahams
Voice of Head's Father: Peter Craze
Director/Dramaturg: Jonathan Heron
Designer: Nomi Everall
2004-08-24 12:42:09