NOTHING TO DECLARE. To 24 August.

Edinburgh - Fringe.

NOTHING TO DECLARE
by Liz Tomlin.

Point Blank at Pleasance Cavern To 24 August 2002.
1.30pm.
Runs 1hr No interval.
Review Timothy Ramsden 20 August.

The performance skills are all there but to limited constructive purpose.
'Crisis chic' is what the woman in the burnt-out vehicle with its red-cross logo calls the situation. Designer disaster in the middle-eastern battlelands, where a turning too soon or too late off the highway has brought her into bandit country. The incinerated vehicle shell is the result, in a piece which develops some way from its basic premise, but ends up marooned as surely as the vehicle dominating the small Pleasance stage.

Tomlin succeeds in making more of the idea than the sketch it might have remained: presenting a figure neat enough for a day's shopping, if not quite a night out, whose constant reference point for what's happening around her is a consumer land of labels and Malls. Yet the development doesn't really suggest the potentially deadly encounters with earnest military types she's had way out Middle East. Nor does it carry conviction that here is someone in the baking sun, talking to us as she swings with energy around her vehicle, yet is reaching the last drops of her water supply.

The situation she finds herself in is so much more important than the character, who really deserves no more than a bit part a wider story. Yes, she's human and yes, we'd like to see her rescued. But there's a wider perspective of people trapped far less accidentally or stupidly in this conflict. To most of them much of her consumer talk would mean little, which in the end it does anyway.

That's the point. But, unless you're Samuel Beckett, it's not easy to make a piece entirely out of someone whose empty chatter shows she has nothing to declare especially in a situation crying out with more significant statements to be made. Let's note Ms Tomlin's energy and undoubted performance skill, and pass on.

Performer: Liz Tomlin.

Director: Liz Tomlin.
Additional Direction: Steve Jackson, David O' Shea, Paul Dingworth.
Designer: Richard Lowden.
Additional Design: Zoe Walton.
Lighting: Paul Arvidson, Emma Deegan.
Additional Movement Direction: Charlotte Vincent.
Dramaturg: Steve Jackson.

2002-08-27 10:18:56