OLEANNA: Theatre Tours International; on tour to 1st February 2003

Oleanna by David Mamet

Theatre Tours International on tour to February 2003
Runs 1hours 20 minutes: No Interval

http://www.theatretoursinternational.com

Review Mark Courtice: 6th February 2003

Revival survives the quality test
How to test a play? Why, revive it after ten years, transfer it across the Atlantic, and do without a set. If a play can survive these slings and arrows it's probably Hamlet.

How well, then, does Oleanna cope? Guy Masterson's small scale tour throws all this at Mamet's early 90's text, and yet it remains a fascinating evening.

10 years ago this was dispatches from the front line of gender warfare; a pick-a-side, knock-down story of PC run mad which men and women could argue about all the way home. Now, we are fighting the class war, our arguments (well pointed in this intelligent production) are about who gets the chance of a university education. Indeed, we are all so well versed in the land mines of appropriate behaviour that we watch fascinated as Masterson's tutor heads sturdily towards disaster. 10 years ago it would have seemed much more surprising.

The set is just two black chairs in a black box. This mostly works, but, fatally, the phone (almost the 3rd character) is a mobile, which we all know can be switched off, whereas it needs to be insistent and implacable, routed from a switchboard that won't give up.

Without a set the focus is, of course, thrown onto the acting. Mamet writes fantastic, energetic, almost operatic dialogue sounding as harmony and counter harmony over a ground bass of tension, which the actors enjoy. Especially sharply played was the great opening when they almost never complete a sentence in 10 minutes, and yet tell us everything we need to know. While they get almost everything right, Beth Fitzgeralds specific Midlands' drone ties her down and Masterson, while really getting the nowhere in particular' demotic of the rootless, classless 40-something, does not take up the challenge of the endless lists and measured academic cadences that give away the pompous port swiller hiding below the surface.

This play's ideas are about power, and we don't have to be in a particular age, or battleground to appreciate them, and this is a piece of powerful, absorbing theatre that should last for years.

John: Guy Masterson
Carol: Beth Fitzgerald

Director: Emma Lucia

2003-02-13 19:45:15