THE CAR CEMETERY. To 1 December.
London.
THE CAR CEMETERY
by Fernando Arrabal translated by Barbara Wright.
Gate Theatre 11 Pembridge Road W11 3HQ To 1 December 2007.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm
Audio-described 21 Nov.
Runs 1hr 10min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7229 0706.
www.gatetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 November.
Iconoclasm cfrom the past.
Unlike that Absurdist drama icon Waiting for Godot where, allegedly, Nothing happens; Twice, in Fernando Arrabal’s impeccably Absurdist play from 1964 quite a few things happen, several times. But whereas the absurdity of human existence - so much importance, so little meaning – is pinned down at its core in Samuel Beckett’s play, Arrabal’s is an attempt to pile up the meanings in reductive metaphors that have no logical necessity.
Coming from a strong Catholic culture, his prime target is religion, represented here as worked out in a tatty auto-wrecker’s yard, the cars becoming cheap hotel rooms for the voyeuristic, while undefined events fill the air with distant disturbance. An athlete is paced by his trainer as he laps the space, while a major-domo serves up drinks, chamber-pot and women – more particularly, one woman, elegant Dila, with whom he exists in a relationship of alternate domination and ritual abasement.
Designer Lorna Ritchie extends the acting area from a tiny corridor between two banks of seating; a space mainly occupied by the crashed car where Dila and Milos exist, looking out through the fragmented windscreen. A pathway zigzags through the audience, used for the athletic training and as a route to other car/hotel-rooms.
As events proceed an apparent satire on modern life emerges as a parody of the crucifixion-story, including a pared-down Last Supper and Iscariot-kiss in Gethsemane.
As a swipe at religion it must have seemed far more forceful either in early sixties France, where Fernando Arrabal lived, or in the Spanish world where he was born (Morocco, 1932). Even so, it comes over as less extreme than Bunuel and Dali’s riot-inducing religious demolition-job L’Age d’Or of 35 years earlier. Today, it indicates how a widened theatrical vocabulary can assimilate Absurdist elements, and a corresponding view of the world.
Still, as an exhumation of its type this is intriguing, the tight performance conditions making the other car-rooms near-invisible, intensifying the sense of strangeness as voices mumble or murmur almost subliminally. Natalie Abrahami directs a cast whose cool control reins-in potential excess, though she cannot disguise the void in Arrabal’s wandering-minstrel Christ.
Lasca: Anna Barry.
Dila: Dolya Gavanski.
Tiossido: Jack Gordon.
Milos: Alexi Kaye Campbell.
Fodere: Pieter Lawman.
Emanou: David Ricardo-Pearce.
Tope: James Traherne.
Director: Natalie Abrahami.
Designer: Lorna Ritchie.
Lighting: Richard Howell.
Sound: Rob Donnelly Jackson.
Music: David Coulter with the Company.
Assistant director: Louisa FitzGerald.
2007-11-11 13:02:36