KATRINA To 26 September.

London.

KATRINA
by Jonathan Holmes.

Bargehouse Oxo Tower Wharf Bargehouse Street SE1 9PH To 26 September 2009.
Tue-Sun 8pm Mat Sat 4pm
Runs 1hr 30min.

TICKETS: 020 7922 2922.
www.youngvic.org or www.jerichohouse.org.uk
Review: Carole Woddis 8 September.

Man made the city - and helped destroy it too.
To what extent was the disaster that befell New Orleans in August 2005 man-made or natural? True, it was hurricane `Katrina’ which inflicted the initial damage. But it was the neglect of the levees over many years by City officials and the treatment of its poorest inhabitants in the storm’s aftermath that arguably caused the greater damage.

Jonathan Holmes’ homage to New Orleans leaves us in little doubt as to the man-made contribution to the disaster through its verbatim account taken from those who suffered most, New Orleans' poor Black inhabitants.

Setting it in the Bargehouse, a derelict warehouse that first came to prominence as a performing space under Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal’s time at LIFT, its cavernous rooms and crumbling walls create a suitably decaying ambience – though, in retrospect, perhaps more could have been made of what must have been terrifying physical sounds of roaring wind and crashing buildings.

Writer and director Holmes, who also produced Fallujah in 2007 and whose Jericho House production this is, gives some of this accumulating terror in a promenade production that takes us initially through rooms festooned with tourist posters and biblical voice-overs to the main room, dominated by enormous Mardi Gras masks, and finally a long hall down which a funeral processes.

Wisely, the story is told through a handful of characters – wonderfully played - of which the most vivid is Beatrice, whose ferry of the dead body of her beloved Virgil, a free-roaming musician, across the flooded waters to City Hall becomes an odyssey of mythic, Greek proportions.

But there is also Miranda, a young grandmother; Cal and Dan, two low-lifers and two white tourists, Lorrie and Larry caught up in the mayhem. Together their accounts amount to an eloquent but furious indictment of civic and state negligence and brutality.

According to these statements, police and National Guard turned on the people whilst helicopters hovered overhead catching `the story’ rather than airlifting in food and water. It would have been useful to have heard more from the officials; I suspect it would have made the civilian testimonies even more corruscating.

Beatrice: Andrea Harris.
Miranda: Wunmi Mosaku.
Dan: Joe Speare.
Cal: Andrew Dennis.
Lorrie: Stephanie Langton.
Larry: Orlando Wells.
Musician: Michael Mwenso.
Additional voice cast: John Hurt, Emma North.

Director: Jonathan Holmes.
Designer: Lucy Wilkinson.
Lighting: Paul J Need for 10 out of 10.
Sound: Peter Nash for Monty Funk.
Composer: Peter Readman.
Video: Nick Price.
Assistant director: Ilana Winterstein.

2009-09-11 00:11:04