PURGATORIO. To 9 February.

London.

PURGATORIO
by Ariel Dorfman.

Arcola Theatre 27 Arcola Street E8 2DJ| To 9 February 2008.
Mon-Sat 8pm.
Runs 1hr 30min No interval.

TICKETS: 020 7503 1646.
www.arcolatheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 January.

Sheer purgatory indeed.
Wherever Purgatory is placed, it’s certainly closer to Hell than Heaven, at least for Arcola audience members. This rework of the Medea legend blasts on for some 90 minutes and at the end there’s no new light shed on it or anything else. Though, just possibly, it joins the “Hell is other people” of Sartre’s Huis Clos with a ‘Purgatory is each other in a failed relationship’.

And, yes, maybe there’s a dash of modern role-playing before the man and woman who take turns at being apparently an official in charge of the other, an apparent inmate of some institution (bare white walls, mirror, door, basic bed and chair) before their hardly surprising relationship is ‘revealed’ to an audience less unsuspecting than beyond caring.

Whether this is down to Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman is unclear. His dramatic reputation was founded on Death and the Maiden. But there’s a big difference when moving from that play’s specifics, a South American country post-dictatorship, to the more general statement a myth suggests. And it’s tricky, taking on mythic cargo, to steer between the trivial and the overblown (the Scylla and Charybdis in such matters).

Characters are to some extent formed - certainly influenced by - their experiences and the world around them. Yet Purgatory is a state for cleansing the soul in terms purely of personal responsibility. In adopting this setting, Dorfman denies the interplay of person and environment in his play.

Any specifics there might be are lost in Daniele Guerra’s full-blast production, which operates through emotional expression rather than clarity. One performance is competent in the lower reaches of emotion but degenerates into an all-too-common vocal coarseness of expression at high volume. The other could carry off awards as an acting-studio exercise (and in a foreign language, preferably Polish, a decade or two back it would possibly have elicited critical superlatives).

But its committed physical and vocal extremism become relentless when the words are in a language that should be understood. Emotion needs to work through meaning and situation, not use words and meaning as springboards for its own abstracted expression.

Woman: Adjoa Andoh.
Man: Patrick Baladi.

Director: Daniele Guerra.
Designer/Lighting: Charles Edwards
Costume: Jon Morrell.
Assistant director: Tom Mansfield.

2008-01-29 17:14:43