LOVE ME SLENDER. To 4 May.
Oldham
LOVE ME SLENDER
by Vanessa Brooks
Coliseum Theatre To 4 May 2002
Mon-Thur/Sat 7.30 Fri 8pm
Runs 2hr 25min One interval
Good performances in a soft-centred comedy whose consistency melts in the mind.It's surreal leaving this play about a control-freak slimming instructor to enter a Coliseum foyer bedecked with slim young women's photos and a display of invitingly iced celebration cakes.
The play's as confusing. Most of Siobhan's class want to achieve goals through weight-loss. Lucinda wants promotion, Claudette not to embarrass her undergraduate daughter. Rosie's desperate to get a man.
But Siobhan makes matters worse for them with her own hang-ups until the group, like the play, have their cake and eat it. Rebelling against her tyranny, they open the choccy truffles and have a ball. Nice, but naughty; health issues never trouble them. Young Kelly – whose anorexia is signalled with the heavy-handed obviousness of most of the plot's revelations – suddenly returns smiling from hospital. There, easy wasn't it? No need to deal with the reality underlying the glib one-liners and characters who, behind their physical substance, remain wafer-thin.
Good comedy explores its characters; this often exploits them. Suddenly, ambitions are achieved without the need for the pain-fuelled gain (or loss). There's a theme of thinking for yourself, but Siobhan is too patently neurotic and manipulative for the group's revolt against her dominance to hold any surprise.
Yet Janys Chambers' fluent direction, on Celia Perkins' convincingly dank church-hall changing-room set, makes much of the comedy. There are seven fine performances, led by Maria Gough's elphin-outlined Siobhan, her corroded life increasingly revealed behind the gleaming metallic smile and sharp-inflected commands. All cope well with dialogue whose idea of realism is clipping first words off sentences.
Anna Kirke keeps teacher's pet, and most manipulated, Rosie this side of self-pity. Vivienne Moore's smiling Jean, working at five jobs to bring in the money (not surprising she gets down to target weight), moves convincingly from compliant smiling to self-assertive happiness, while Jennifer Marriott's feisty pensioner's makes her mark despite being stranded by Brooks on the fringe of the action. Sally Sheridan's aspirant executive and Charlotte Barker's university-challenged mother plump for happiness in their own bodies with a conviction arising more from performance than writing: in production terms, at least, the Coliseum's fit as ever.
Kelly: Leanne Burrows
Siobhan: Maria Gough
Claudette: Charlotte Barker
Rosie: Anna Kirke
Lucinda: Sally Sheridan
Celia: Jennifer Marriott
Jean: Vivienne Moore
Director: Janys Chambers
Designer: Celia Perkins
Lighting/Sound: Phil Davies
2002-04-28 10:11:50