I CAN'T WAKE UP. Lyric Studio to 9 February.
London
I CAN'T WAKE UP
based on an idea by Paul Hunter
Told by an Idiot, Lyric Studio Hammersmith To 9 February 2002
Runs 1hr 15min No interval
TICKETS 020 8741 2311
Review Timothy Ramsden 28 January
Pre-Victorian values: lashings of the navy and an asylum involved in a touching comic treatment.As 8pm approaches a tannoy declares 'I Can't Wake Up in the studio theatre'. Its slightly surreal nature's nothing to what follows, which apparently owes its origin partly to John Toohey's HMS Portable Nightmare.
That's certainly a title fitting the feel of the show, backed as it is by a huge sail which trails onto the floor to become a kind of carpet. The effect recalls Dali's melting watches. It accompanies an action where characters, their mental - and the theatrical - states change with rapid unpredictability.
Sometimes we might be in Oliver (The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat) Sacks territory as Mallen recognises his wife Emily only when she wears a hat, screaming at her for a whore when she lets her hair flow free. There's an added time-dysjunction when Mallen, an English naval officer of the Napoleonic age, simultaneously lives in a world of TV and microwaves.
Such inventions delight him. He recites the football scores (wisely averting a potential riot as interference blocks out the Arsenal v Spurs result – there's knowing your audience) and is addicted to Coronation Street. This is a world where a letter is written with a quill pen then dispatched by e-mail. So, whose mind isn't functioning rationally?
Mallen is in an asylum, watched over by Richard Clews' imperturbable doctor. Yet at times we leap into his watery world as the others become sailors Jenkins and Jackson, under his apparent command. Oh yes, and this is a visual comedy, despite the subject and title (words spoken by a character moving towards extinction in Jo Shapcott's poem Lovebirds). An early argument between Marmier and Clews is reduced to cartoon like exhalations with gale force physical effects on the recipient. It's a tough imaginative act to follow. Sometimes the invention sculls along briskly; occasionally the show paddles fitfully around.
But there's little else like this company in England – whose glories Mallen serenades in an utterly Euro-phobic, absolutely anti-Napoleonic way in the piece's xenophobic verbal zenith. The fact his wife is Swiss seems to escape him. Like so much else.
Doctor/Emily's Father/Waiter/Jenkins: Richard Clews
William Mallen: Paul Hunter
Emily/Jackson: Catherine Marmier
Director: John Wright
Associate Director: Hayley Carmichael
Designer: Naomi Wilkinson
Lighting: John MacKenzie
2002-02-01 00:33:11