SHADOWMOUTH. To 17 June.

Sheffield

SHADOWMOUTH
by Meredith Oakes

Crucible Studio Theatre To 17 June 2006
BSL Signed/Post-show discussion 13 June
Runs 1hr 5min No interval

TICKETS: 0114 249 6000
www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 8 June

A hard slog even at 65 minutes.
With the cancellation of Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo and this tedious brief piece, the leavings of yesteryear’s theatre style, Samuel West’s first Sheffield season fizzles out rather than coming to a more deserved end following its range and several successes.

The main success here is Liz Cooke’s design, which shrouds the triangular half of the Crucible Studio given to the performing area as a huge, dark cavern. At its far end is a modishly-angled sofa (90% to the horizontal) on which the young man known as Boy sits and bleeds.

For Boy is a troubled figure, and it’s a strange world where we know his friends’ names but not his own, or those of his mother or the older gay Man who tremblingly lets him have a room while holding back from touching him with a kind of masochistic honour.

Once the mix of spoken scenes, modern-dance movement and video might have seemed progressively exciting. But it’s been done often enough (OK, maybe not in Sheffield, but this isn’t meant to be museum theatre) to need to express more than here, where drama and dance often underline or repeat each other unnecessarily. The movement merely lengthens a short story to a longer one, though it provides moments of physical interest not present in Meredith Oakes’ stodgy script.

This states the obvious: older man finds younger tremblingly attractive, young man’s mother keeps cropping up with cares and concerns, tough friend (Glaswegian, natch) is callous and violent, Boy’s girlfriend has casual youthful callousness but genuine emotional attraction alongside. It’s a parade of undeveloped, over-obvious source material.

Dominic Leclerc has a clutch of five decent performances. Only Tony Guilfoyle’s Man has any significant dramatic potential and that he manages with the mixed sense of iron-control over behaviour and, in his narration of past events, the trembling difficulty of achieving such control. Joanne Howarth gives the boy’s Mother reality in her brief scenes while the younger trio show the assertiveness both male and female, that can be attracted by the external passivity of the inwardly-destructive, ever-uncertain Boy. But dramatically the piece remains stillborn.

Man: Tony Guilfoyle
Mother: Joanne Howarth
Boy: Ryan O’Donnell
Paul: Eddie Kay
Daisy: Imogen Knight

Director/Choreographer: Dominic Leclerc
Designer: Liz Cooke
Lighting: Mark Jonathan
Sound/Music: Gareth Fry
Video: Ben Eaton
Fight arranger: Terry King
Assistant director: Ellie Jones

2006-06-11 13:16:00