MAPS OF DESIRE. To 6 April.

London

MAPS OF DESIRE
by Claude Harz

Wonderful Beast Theatre Company at Southwark Playhouse To 6 April 2002
Runs 2hr 10min One interval

TICKETS 020 7620 3494
Review Timothy Ramsden 20 March

Love and longing in old-style France gets an interesting theatrical telling.Wonderful Beast is no stranger to highly physicalised theatricalisations of folk stories, but this time, in adapting tales from Marina Warner's collection of courtly French narratives, Alys Kihl's company leaves folk-tradition for the world of ancien regime France and its little-remembered women fabulists.

As the formal costumes suggest, there's less physicality and more narrating in this new show. And the material is not fundamental theme-bearing stuff. Instead we have itchy desires rubbing against outward formality and respectability. Sex in exotic, aristocratic settings is on order, with opposing concepts deliberately balanced against each other, right from the light opening piece's contrast between vacuous beauty and ill-favoured intelligence.

It's the least of the quartet – distinguished by Pancho Capaletti's scrunched-nose, cross-eye intellectual. Jane Barber has china-doll brainlessness, but her finest moment's to come with the final piece. A king leaves his three daughters in a tower with orders to keep intact the glass distaffs he's handed them. The foolish pair, lackadaisical and loquacious, lose their virginity and shatter their distaffs, but Barber's Finette outwits the monster prince set on despoiling them all. She has a Gretel-like resourcefulness which Barber makes smilingly sympathetic, with an alert intelligence that avoids smugness.

Most touching as a story – and Kihl catches its inevitable sadness well – is the third piece in which Patrick Kennedy's Igor is transported to an island and its Princess. They live in perfect love until an 'Is that the time?' moment arrives and, told he's spent centuries there, he insists on reconnecting with real-time history. The pull is fatal and the piece fades out on a scene of composed, courtly grief.

It's the preceding story where sexual titillations flourish most. A mother gives birth as her husband's killed in battle. Determined her son shall not die the same way she has him brought up as a girl. When love flowers it's amid the fickleness of rancid gossip, caught with simple effect by the company. There's an unreality about the love-conquering-all conclusion but Kennedy gives a precise show of feminine grace.

Throughout, the atmospheric, at times onomatopoeic, music enriches the action, though it can't disguise this is stuffy, scented court air, not the bracing freshness of popular story traditions.

Murat/Princess/Uncle/Eole/Nymph/Finette: Jane Barber
Mailly/Riquet/Comte/Boreas/King/Belvoir: Pancho Cappaletti
Mme D'Aulnoy/Countess/Peddler/Nymph/Grenadine: Ann Firbank
Perrault/Marquis(e)/Marianne/Igor/Richcraft: Patrick Kennedy
L'Heritier/Mother/Zephyr/Nymph/Loquatia: Sasha Mitchell
de la force/Governess/Woman/Felicity/Lackadaisy: Montserrat Roig de Puig

Director: Alys Kihl
Designer: Ruth Paton
Lighting: Colin Grenfell
Movement: Susan Nash
Composer/Musician: Katja Mervola, Nathan Thomson

2002-03-21 00:59:59