SILENCE AND VIOLENCE
London
SILENCE AND VIOLENCE
by Torben Betts
Aces and Eights Theatre Company at the White Bear To 12 May 2002
Tue-Sat 8, Sun 4pm
Runs 1hr 30min No interval
TICKETS 020 7793 9193
Review Timothy Ramsden 5 May
Power and need in a forceful play given a fitful premiere.Torben Betts, a young and fiercely prolific playwright, seems to be developing a new generation Theatre of the Absurd. His last White Bear play The Biggleswades was a vitriol-soaked Bald Prima Donna, while this new one does for dictators and power-driven egoists the kind of thing done half a century ago by Swiss dramatists Durrenmatt and Frisch in their unnerving dramas of calmly-portrayed political terror.
But Betts writes for today. And he has a sharply distinctive voice in these three scenes, building a picture of the way force denies human values. In the first an up-and-coming dictator's wife visits Giesbach, a condemned artist severely injured in the disturbances accompanying her husband's rise to power. Her supercilious, superior manner lightly covers a need to be painted by him. Prestige, power and desire mix as she undresses for a portrait and to make love.
In the following scene, her husband seems both a computer-age Mussolini, indulging in arm-gesturing balcony speeches to the crowd, and a modern Western-democracy demagogue in the making. Ideals of peace and freedom co-exist with his present to his wife of her predecessor's head in a hatbox. Such power, clashing against her human need for the painter, leads her to despair and suicide.
So to the final meeting, of reprieved artist and political leader. Giesbach seems still a prisoner but now in relaxed coastal ease where the tyrant sets him to carve a huge, Mount Rushmore-like, memorial to his wife in the cliff-face. There are dozens of helpers, and – instead of the living woman - the preserved corpse as model. The cliff is soft rock, liable to crumble. There's something of Romeo and Juliet in this, the living person destroyed then glorified in dead material, while Bunuel's Tristana matches Betts' ironic ferocity at the woman corrupted and destroyed by male domination.
The limitation of such de-individualised drama is that its figures, however vividly etched, cannot develop much individuality. Yet, though the variously successful performances in Nick Claxton's competent production convey the play's ferocity, there's a strong sense the play contains detail still to be sculpted in future productions.
Holloway: Sheena Irving
Giesbach: Mark Huckett
Windermere: Costa Milton
Director: Nick Claxton
Designer: Mayou Trikerioti
Lighting: Jae Forrester
2002-05-06 12:17:08