THE BALLAD OF CRAZY PAOLA. To 20 December.

London.

THE BALLAD OF CRAZY PAOLA
by Arne Sierens translated by Stephen Greenhorn.

Arcola Theatre (Arcola 2) 27 Arcola Street E8 2DJ To 20 December 2008.
Mon-Sat 8.15pm.
Runs 50min No interval.

TICKETS: 020 7503 1646.
www.arcolatheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 November.

A different drummer required.
Paola’s here all right. What’s needed for this revival of Arne Sierens’ short play in the Arcola’s smaller performing space is more of the Crazy. Nadia Latif’s production is more The Dirge of Moping Paola. Though Holly Atkins shows a decent understanding of the woman whose partner Serge, a rock drummer, died years ago, there’s little sense of the energy and wildness that might once have glued her to him.

And his half-brother Raymond’s arrival as drum-tutor to Paola’s wayward, unseen son generates the electricity of a final half-watt struggling to escape from a fading battery. In part that’s due to Anthony Shuster’s functional performance, which can have flashes of natural expression but never suggests much mental life behind the words, or thought-processes within speeches.

So Sierens’ play becomes a piece where the musical world is mere colouring for yet another self-absorbed trawl through a past relationship dredged back through recall. Even a head-on crash is related with all the energy of someone lamenting specks of dirt on washing hung out to dry.

Paola’s insistence her son’s drumming acquires skill and a regular beat neatly contrasts her past, while her attempts to avoid employing Raymond as tutor once she’s realised his relationship to that past has some tension. And Atkins provides an appropriate frisson of nerviness. But it becomes more comic than electric, and by the time Raymond leans over to kiss her, several scenes on, the emotional temperature has levelled out somewhere under lukewarm.

The result of all this is that the desultory action, too often reduced to incantatory delivery across the length of designer Lorna Ritchie’s dull-toned carpeting and staircase-suggesting slopes, gives little sense of either the crazed past or the shape of a developing, more complex relationship. The plasters that indicate Raymond’s broken nose mending as they’re removed in the first scenes, the objects stuffed into small compartments along the length of Paola’s room, are mere facts; there’s no resonance with the characters’ lives.

What’s left is an efficient run through the script. But there’s a sense the real play within it has eluded this production.

Paola: Holly Atkins.
Raymond: Anthony Shuster.

Director: Nadia Latif.
Designer: Lorna Ritchie.
Lighting: Michael Nabarro.
Sound: John Leonard.
Assistant director: Oliver Baird.

2008-11-28 11:39:30