THE BLACK EYED ROSES. To 28 June.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
THE BLACK EYED ROSES
Created by Northern Stage Ensemble
Newcastle Playhouse To 28 June 2003
Mon-Sat 8pm
Runs 1hr 30min No interval
TICKETS: 0191 230 5151
www.northernstage.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 June
Work of breath-taking scope and beauty: music, stories and dance evoking an uncharted world.Northern Stage Ensemble's contribution to the 2-week Newcastle Gateshead Gypsy Festival is work of wide imaginative scope and invention and immense theatrical flair, expressing the Romany world as immediate and physical, instinctive and responsive to essential human experience.
It may not be a textbook of mundane realities. But it expresses the spirit of a communal response to life learned through survival in an elemental world of sex, violence and death. These run through the stories and songs the Ensemble's gathered in their own travels of discovery.
The nearest to daily life is a tale - told by Jim Kitson with superb bar-room realism - of the man who paid his friend's wife for sex with her husband's wages. Mostly, tales reflect tradition and experience mythically - travel features frequently; so does nature.
A father tries to hide his daughter from the son; another wants to marry his child to the most powerful natural feature (sun, wind, mountain and rives are all masculine here) but cannot overcome her natural inclination. Which is towards fish: they feature more than once in these stories: creatures whose shapes impress themselves upon the people who watch to catch them.
The problematic matter of love-relations recurs: beans and lentils predict a husband's faithfulness. And, referring to the title, red liquid spilled on a white sheet expresses the belief a virgin's bridal sheet shapes blood into a rose-pattern.
What's said is only one aspect of this large-scale work. It's restless, endlessly moving, contrasting communal assemblings with quiet, reflective moments. Designer Neil Murray's magnificent minimalism accommodates intimtate and large-scale scenes.
The stage is opened-up and extended forward, a wooden platform torn away at front by white rocks and pebbles a hard path to tread, clashed together for violence, forming also a burial mound for the dead and at the back faced by a huge torn white sheet (imagine an Antarctic ice-mountain crossed with a gruyere cheese).
On this clean, elemental setting, director Alan Lyddiard and choreographer Tamars McLorg create a seamless flow punctuated by the intense tones of Hungarian Gypsy singer Mitsou. Magnificent.
Performed by:
Francisco Alfonsin, Mark Calvert, Alex Elliott, Rebecca Hollingsworth, Jim Kitson, Victoria Mateu Simeon, Stephen Lamb, Mark Lloyd, Mitsou, Tony Neilson, Peter Peverley, Debbi Purtill, Caroline Reece, Sophie Trott, Kaleigh Graves, Seth Kitson, Rachael Riley, Jonathan Wood
Director: Alan Lyddiard
Designer: Neil Murray
Lighting: Chris Slater
Sound: Rob Brown
Music arrangers: Jim Kitson, Peter Peverley
Choreographer: Tamara McLorg
Dramaturg: Duska Radosavljevic
2003-06-23 00:58:14