PAPER FLOWERS. To 3 August.

London

PAPER FLOWERS
by Egon Wolff translated by Gwynne Edwards

Workhorse Productions at Greenwich Playhouse To 3 August 2003
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Sun 4pm
Runs 1hr 55min One interval

TICKETS:
Review: Timothy Ramsden 13 July 2003

Welcome rarity from South America: order and human emotions' drive towards chaos.If any writer knows what it is to watch paint dry, it's German-born Egon Wolff. Now in his 70s he's lived in Chile since childhood, writes in Spanish and has spent much of his working life earning a life in the paint business. As a long-time Sunday writer, he's had some profitable weekends. Though this literal chamber-piece is near-hermetic, it also carries a strong, character-based narrative drive.

It does, anyway, given the fine pair of performances in Pauline Walsh-Burke's production. Anna Kirke's upper-class lady, cut-glass precision in her voice and superiority in her busy dismissiveness is bound to be inviting trouble when she lets Tim Molyneux's cardboard citizen carry her shopping home. He's all closed-up physically, arms twitching and, at taste of real food, clasping his pained stomach.

Of course, it'll end in tears, though with Molyneux's character able to transform newspaper into crude flower shapes, his last manufacture shields her face and we don't know if she's laughing or crying. But her ordered life's become as wrecked as her home.

He's rarely an open-threat though as fatal to pet birds as Mis Julie's Jean. His violent spurts soon subside into an ingratiating veneer. It's more a matter of her vulnerability an ageing widow clinging in retail-therapy affluence to memories of an emotionally satisfied past, which she seizes the opportunity to renew.

This Man's streetwise sense steers him into her life, gaining protection from the threat waiting outside. He talks of redesigning her home (and, she hopes, her life) but it's all violent, destructive tearing walls, disordering paintings, displaying his clumsy paper models. It's left open how much she wilfully misinterprets this, how much she's merely glamorised by the chance of love again.

Walsh-Burke introduces a reflection of this pair, a smart young gigolo and dancing-hostess who tango together in idealised memory or come close to the older characters as emotion is sparked. Anna Kirke beautifully catches nervous tension beneath the social poise the character expects of herself, while Tim Molyneux finely varies between ferrety, full-tilt attack and shrivelled social outsider. Ana Mestre's set conveys the blankness in this woman's life and the mess to which her feelings lead her.

Woman: Anna Kirke/Maria Guirao
Man: Tim Molyneux/Tom Chadwick

Director: Pauline Walsh-Burke
Designer: Ana Mestre
Lighting: Ben Pacey
Sound: Kevin Healy

2003-07-14 13:29:31