LITHUANIAN FESTIVAL. To 26 January.
London.
LITHUANIAN FESTIVAL
The One That Hurt The Most
by Gabriele Labanauskalte.
Runs 55min No interval.
Goodbye My Love
by Marius Maceviclus.
Runs 1hr 15min No interval.
Southwark Playhouse Shipwright Yard, Tooley St/Bermondsey St SE1 2TF In rep to 26 January 2008.
TICKETS: 844 47 1656 (24hr no booking fee)
www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 January.
Little cheer from the Baltic here.
This January Southwark Playhouse offers a modern Lithuanian one-act play, followed some nights by music or films at 9pm, on others extending from one to three dramas. At least, that was the plan, until the plays’ actual lengths became apparent, curtailing things to two shows. The pair above are joined by Festival Director Svetlana Dimcovic’s production of The Doll by Dovile Katiliute.
The two I saw mainly impressed how different the same actors (only one performer doesn’t appear in both) can seem with different scripts and directors.
Gabriele Labanauskaite’s The One That Hurt the Most is a collection of short scenes about the owners and habitués of a gay café, framed by visits to drugs-dealer Schnittke. Events include a desperate lover chasing the reluctant Jetaime, as well as the parents unaware their son has taken on that name in the semi-monde. The story drags along without much shaping, something Dimcovic’s functional direction does nothing to hide.
Actors go through each moment without any sense of context. Steven Beard’s Schnittke is perpetually agitated in drab coat over pink underdress; actors like Valerie Gogan and Charlotte Pyke survive tactfully on experience, while less experienced performers are left high, dry and in one case underplaying to near inaudibility in this acoustic.
They hardly seem the same performers as the assured company in Simon Usher’s production of Marius Macevicius’s Goodbye My Love. Birute has sold her seaview flat back home and given the money to an unseen but undoubted conman, who promises they’ll be using it to buy an Edinburgh cafe. Her son Antanas, with congenital heart-disease, berates her for falling for the trick.
Here, performances interact, creating depth and linking separated scenes through emotional consistency. Valerie Gogan shows both Birute’s initial confidence over a new life in the prosperous West and her fight to overcome the doubts her son throws in the face of her happiness, while Daniel Abelson gives Antanas the near despair of seeing his mother’s, and his own, plans falling apart. There’s a strong sense too of these people’s social context, especially from Beard and Pyke’s couple Kazys and Stase.
The One That Hurt The Most
Blue: Daniel Abelson.
Agne: Vanessa Ackerman.
Guy No. 34: Archie Adam.
Schnittke: Steven Beard.
Ben: Joe Elwood.
Luida: Valerie Gogan.
Jetaime: Martin Hodgson.
Cherry: Charlotte Pyke.
Clemens: Philip Wolff.
Director: Svetlana Dimcovic.
Goodbye My Love
Antanas: Daniel Abelson.
Irena: Vanessa Ackerman.
Kazys: Steven Beard.
Olga: Cara Chase.
Birute: Valerie Gogan.
Stase: Charlotte Pyke.
Builder: Philip Wolff.
Director: Simon Usher.
Designer: Sarah Barnett.
Lighting: Benjamin Polya, Chris Pye.
Sound: Simon Perkin.
2008-01-21 15:02:26