NOIR. To 25 May.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

NOIR
by Peter Straughan

Northern stage Ensemble and Live Theatre at Newcastle Playhouse To 25 May 2002
Mon-Sat 7.30pm
BSL signed 24 May
Runs 2hr 20min One interval

TICKETS 0191 230 5151
Review Timothy Ramsden 17 May

Dark desires in the Newcastle night; a body in the woods and turmoil in town in this taughtly-constructed drama.Anyone parodying or pastiching performance styles needs to show they could do the thing straight if they wanted to. By this measure, Peter Straughan's play passes high. It's stage cinema; short, punchy scenes, shifting us back and forward over several weeks, create an apt film noirish disorientation. As the action ranges around a young woman's murder, it opens up secrets and fears, not in forties Los Angeles or New York, but on Tyneside today.

We're guided by times and dates, typing themselves (with some atrocious, misplaced apostrophes) across the two-decker screen fronting Imogen Cloet's set, which opens up sectionally to reveal the hidden lives, anxieties and desires of the staged city. You'd need to be concentrating very hard to keep track of time. No problem there – events and their implications cross-reference and eventually tie together through the action. And it's par for the genre that we're struggling a bit to keep up.

Besides which, each scene grabs attention. The story involves, among others, a security guard with top-league shamus fantasies, a feminist lecturer on film noir who's disenchantedly into bondage games with her husband and an American evangelist with a qualification in accountancy, a grand rhetoric of abuse plus a strong right arm soon bunched into a pugnacious fist.

How someone responds to Noir's likely to link in with their interest, or tolerance, when it comes to noir and to genre-related work in general. I found it strongest when pursuing characters' obsessions and the troubling gaps in relationships, opening up people's secrets; least involving when Straughan employs his undoubted strain of humour. But it cuts a neat way through the strangeness of normality; the urban nightmare lived by those who make up (in either sense) mainstream society.

The sense of these compartmentalised lives and their interlocking frictions is strong in Max Roberts' production. Roberts expertly marshalls his confident cast and rightly intervenes to strengthen the closing scene's clinching clarity on both murderer and victim, bringing into new focus an apparently random piece of earlier stage business. Subtler than this plot-chasing comment: the script's a killer

Reverend Lang: Mark Calvert
Ruth Hollis: Maggie Norris
Waitress/Dr Meyer/Croupier/GP: Tracy Gillman
Ray Keyes: Michael Hodgson
George Hollis: Deka Walmsley
Howard Day: Jim Kitson
Morris Talman: Joe Caffrey
Alison Day: Jill Halfpenny
Customer: Peter Peverley
Barber: Mark Lloyd

Director: Max Roberts
Designer: Imogen Cloet
Lighting: Malcolm Rippeth
Music: Jim Kitson
AV/Sound: Rob Brown
Fight direction: Richard Ryan

2002-05-20 12:02:34