MINCEMEAT To 12 July.
London.
MINCEMEAT
by Adrian Jackson and Farhana Sheikh.
Cordy House 87-95 Curtain Road Shoreditch EC2A 5BS To 12 July 2009.
Tue-Sun 7.30pm Mat Sun & 4, 9 July 3pm.
Runs 2hr 35min One interval.
TICKETS: 020 7478 0100.
www.sohotheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 June.
Dramatic riches in a series of rooms.
Who’d expect to find one of London’s most fascinating dramas in a Shoreditch warehouse? There again, the East End’s becoming the new West End, though more adventurous and lower priced. Here, Cardboard Citizens revive their 2001 success. Multi-layered, it gives satisfyingly complex unity to what at first appear rather disparate and frankly time-wasting theatrical devices.
If home gives a sense of continuing identity, homelessness can challenge that sense. Drawing in Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin (both once destitute) through Chaplin’s satire The Great Dictator - its plot involves amnesia – the play also draws on the fictional identities that actors create. The audience joins in their warm-up tongue-twisters, while dramatic devices play games with the spectator’s sense of what’s ‘really’ happening before their very eyes.
Yet Adrian Jackson (who also confidently directs) and Farhana Sheikh’s script is based on historical fact, albeit surrounded by official deception. After the theatrical preliminaries we troop up a narrow staircase to heaven’s reception room. Painted in institutional colours, it’s a haven of bureaucracy, which smoothly changes to wartime operations rooms in 1943, as heaven’s latest applicant, with no memories, attempts to piece together an identity.
Yet this identity, traced out in letters, photos and film, is itself a fake, created for a corpse intended to mislead the Germans over Allied invasion plans.
The faking process is followed through in detail, including a video account from (we’re told - as if believing anything by now) the undertaker who carried the corpse secretly through London by night. As his investigations proceed, the man without identity finds himself ripped untimely (the script quotes Shakespeare too) from upper-class affluence to become a vagrant Welsh descendent of Owen Glendower.
The short second part takes the action to realistic recreations of a rubble-strewn street and, via a scenic coup, to an underground shelter, suggesting both bomb-raid survival and the doss-house of Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths, repeatedly mentioned as a previous Cardboard production. Here lies, fantasy and possible truth collide in a theatre-piece where atmospheric promenade is a structural element, as dispossession and identity are explored with dramatic logic and emotional power.
Girl in Film: Rebecca Brown.
Animal 9/Johnny Bevan/Maureen: Linda Dobell/Terry O’Leary.
Animal 3/Head Official/Maria/Lorena: Ester Escolano.
Animal 1/Schicklgruber/Pam/Maud/Molly: Jo Galbraith.
O;d Montague/Charlie: Robert Gillespie.
Animal 4/Translator/Agnes/Cholmondley/Matches: Jakob B Goode.
Animal 8/Montague/Dai: Nicholas Khan.
Ivor Leverton: Ivor Leverton.
Animal 7/Major Martin: Ifan Meredith.
Animal 5/Lt Jewel/Fred Shrieve/Private Secretary/Gerry: Patrick Onione.
Animal 2/Speech Trainer/Obituary/Workman/Glyndwr: David Rogers.
Animal 6/Churchill/Foreman/Alf: Ben Smithies.
Director: Adrian Jackson.
Designer: Mamoru Iriguchi.
Lighting: Zerlina Baird.
Music/Soundtrack: David Baird.
Video: Emma Bernard.
Movement: Linda Dobell.
Voice coach: Tim Charrington.
Assistant director: Pierre Becker.
2009-06-29 12:35:12