SPINACH AND CHIPS. To 9 October.
London
SPINACH AND CHIPS
by Zoltan Egressy translated by Mike Kelly
New End Theatre To 9 October 2004
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sun 3.30pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval
TICKETS: 0870 033 2733
www.newendtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 October
Fair production of foul-play drama.Some productions are perfectly performed but leave you uninvolved. Others have clear limitations but hit home. Peter Fekete's production of this Hungarian drama set in a scruffy officials' room before and during a football match can be faulted on several points. Nevertherless, it gradually asserts the grip of Zoltan Egressy's realistic drama. As part of the current Magyar season in London, it comes as a reminder not all East European theatre is non-naturalistic and image-strewn.
While linesman Soapy seethes vengefully with controlled fury, his colleague Artist (a poetic dreamer) suffers the loss of the woman who cooked him the title meal with a physical stiffness more symptomatic of a flu sufferer. And Laci, the upwardly mobile ref who lords it over them, doesn't really suggest a hunger for fame on the field. His angry moments tend towards a vocally undifferentiated roar.
Laci enters doing business on his mobile headset (and needing more aggression than Travis Oliver gives him). He's every inch the Euro-businessman and no doubt sees quite a cachet in gaining FIFA recognition as a ref. Meanwhile Soapy (both linesmen are known by nicknames, as if they have no great significance in this world) smilingly sabotages his chances while Artist is absorbed to the last in grief and bad verse.
It makes a compact microcosm of ambition and jealousy, of character conflicts unresolvable because they are rooted in essential personality types. Fekete moves the action along at a reasonable pace, though some moments are over-deliberate and the late shower scene relies on a hole-in-the-wall view of hot water and clean buttocks that amazingly causes no comment from the now-beleaguered trio.
He's less successful at creating the characters' inner lives. Artist is left too often at the side, in apparent need of paracetemol rather than recovering his lost woman. Laci lacks the killer instinct of ambition and is later annoyed rather than devastated at his downfall. Even Soapy seems tricksy rather than malevolently determined.
Still, if a quietly cunning story of rivalry and treachery among people paid to keep the rules is your thing, you'll find it here.
Soapy: Gary Condes
Artist: Jonathan Lisle
Laci: Travis Oliver
Director: Peter Fekete
Designer: Black Point Arts Budapest
2004-10-05 01:25:59