ONE-TWO till 23 August touring into October
Edinburgh-Fringe/Tour
ONE-TWO
by Graham Eatough
Suspect Culture at Traverse One To 23 August 2003 then tour
Tue-Sun 10.15pm
Runs 1hr 15min No interval
TICKETS: 0131 228 1404
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 August
Technical complexity never resolves into a satisfying theatre-piece.
With this show, Suspect Culture's Graham Eatough becomes the Mr Placebo of Scottish Theatre. You think you see a new theatre piece that has some meaning. There are performers speaking lines that seem to matter. There are plenty of video images creating a sense of the urban reality against which the lives recounted to us are lived. There's a band onstage (occupying virtually the whole stage-floor space).
But, it all adds up to very little. One-two, me-you, first-and-second-person: it's so general that it's all been done before since time (and certainly since video) began. This becomes an exercise in restating the obvious. It's multi-media, total theatre chic, void of impact. Yet it's so skilfully composed, it must have seemed to participants they were certainly putting together an important piece of theatre.
Apparently the piece is about a man and a woman living to their own soundtrack, choosing from the stories in the world fed into a music machine called OSKAR. 'Set to music, our stories seem more special'. No, they don't. Or, the claim recalls the old truism that if something's too silly to be said, you can always set it to music. For sure, what downloads onto the Traverse stage doesn't convey the claims from the company's notes referred to above.
It's a strange notion that people might choose to live their lives according to pre-existing stories, rather than being affected by events. It would be a strangely self-conscious, impossible world if they did.
Complex though its technical assembly must have been, this theatrical structure is soggy and bland in its dramatic impact. Which doesn't deny it an element of theatrical and musical verve. And sometimes the spoken sections have the fascination of the scripts in Tim Etchells' Forced Entertainment productions. But the parts are not only sometimes more than the whole, they resolutely remain separate parts. There's nothing so past a shelf-life than former experiment living on its laurels.
Performers;
Jonny Dawe, Ruth Gottlieb, Faroque Khan, Sharon Smith, Sarah Willson
Director: Graham Eatough
Designer: Ian Scott
Video-maker: Shiona McCubbin
Music: Nick Powell, OSKAR
2003-08-13 09:39:41