SCAPINO. To 9 September.
Chichester
SCAPINO
by Moliere translated by Jeremy Sams
Chichester Festival Theatre In rep to 9 September 2005
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed, Sat 2pm
Audio-described 10, 17 June, 1 July, 2 July 2pm, 13 July 2pm, 22 July, 19, 26 August, 9 September
BSL Signed 6 July 7.30pm
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
TICKETS: 01243 781312
www.cft/org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 June
Updated Moliere crowns a modernised Chichester.Romanian director Silviu Purcarete's not one to take a script lying down. The results are dark but come up trumps with Moliere's comedy, fleshed out to full-length and updated to a lugubrious, run-down grand hotel lobby. There is a sense of transience behind Moliere's plot, which depends on families being separated years back. The multiple reunions, usually comically absurd, acquire new resonance born of population shifts, of the dispossessed moving through once-grand portals (there's a lot made of the revolving-door here).
Meanwhile, affluent old men think only of themselves: Pip Donaghy's Argante on an eternal coronary edge, Steven Beard's Geronte slowly scooping all the food onto his plate, then using his attaché-case as a doggy-bag. What could say more in these G8, Make Poverty History times? Especially when Geronte receives his come-uppance, skulking in a sack, beaten by Scapino. Such complacency of well-established age is pulled out of Moliere.
More provocative is making the young male lovers (their fathers' children; mothers are noticeably absent) inept and unromantic, whether the thin-haired, aging Leander or the Michelin-man sized schoolboy Octave (myopic too, in one of Purcarete's excesses). Their women bear the mark of estrangement in formative years, particularly Alexia Healy's gypsy-stolen Zerbinetta, sexually aware and Katherine Tozer's flat-voiced Hyacinte.
In an age where you can't get the servants, Richard McCabe's Scapino becomes an independent operator, dispensing help and justice alike, with a cover of modesty (others say I have genius; I prefer to call it talent, he casually announces), coming out of retirement to play his tricks with a relaxed impossibilities-made-easy manner.
He's seen it all, and it disgusts him. Life's only worth the effort when he's exercising his skills. Scapino's discovered asleep on a piano-top. When he ends back there after meeting a fate like that of another inventive outsider, Cyrano, he plays the keyboard with one finger to the end. Only mid-trickery, fantasy and invention, does he come alive.
The interpretation suits McCabe's ability to switch mood instantly, to sudden super-intensity or face-curling disillusion. It's perfect casting in a production where comic devices and surrounding stasis are both brilliantly caught.
Argante: Pip Donaghy
Geronte: Steven Beard
Octave: Stephen Ventura
Leander: Kieran Hill
Zerbinetta: Alexia Healy
Hyacinte: Katherine Tozer
Scapino: Richard McCabe
Silvester: Graham Turner
Nurse: Darlene Johnson
Carle: Christian Bradley
Director: Silviu Purcarete
Designer/Lighting: Helmut Sturmer
Sound: John A Leonard
Composer: Vasile Sirili
Season Installation Designer: Alison Chitty
Assistant director: Thomas Hescott
Assistant designer/lighting: Frank Sturmer
2005-06-05 13:35:18