THE COMING OF GOWF. To 28 August.
Edinburgh
THE COMING OF GOWF
adapted by Ken McClymont from P G Wodehouse
Gilded Balloon Teviot (Ballroom) To 28 August
Runs 1hr 15min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 August
Full of sounds of fury signifying less than it ought.
This could have been an oasis in a fraught Fringe, a place of total irrelevance to all that's happening in the world - not to mention theatres - around. While it's possible to imagine people who find P G Wodehouse tedious, it's no more conceivable than he would have found anyone declaring golf itself to be a wearisome pursuit.
And Ken McClymont's produced an artful amalgam of the golfing stories Wodehouse wrote as if coming out of the recollections of his club's oldest Member, golden days of games gone by and the intervention of golf in pursuits of love.
McClymont provides 2 frames to make the various anecdotes cohere. One involves a single-hole, 16-mile match to decide which of 2 young blades will win the hand of a beloved fair maid. The other, giving sense to the title, tells how ancient rulers took golf strokes for the practise of an obscure religion, one which takes over their lives with the ancient equivalence of a computer-game's obsessive power.
There's something sublimely right about golf-house stories assuming the game is the (18) whole world, or all of it that matters. Told in Wodehouse's matchless prose, even someone who can't tell his putter from his mashie can be entranced.
But it's vital to Wodehouse that his dimwitted Bright Young Things pursue their social lives with blithe unawareness of anything outside their immediate circle. Within this tiny world they are ultimately secure, however affllicted they may become by love, aunts, pigs or anything else their author flings at them.
These performances show none of that calm assurance. They're overblown caricatures throughout. Bluster overlays the stylish precision of the prose. Rhythms become disrupted. All the things that make Wodehouse's style comically precise and his world perfectly imagined are lost. When this combines with severely limited technique, leaving the poor sentences dragged rough and raw through most of these performances, the result is dispiriting except inasuch as it is now, at least, at the end of its run.
Betty Weston/Marcella Bingley/Charioteer: Natalie Bennett
Amanda Trivett/Wilberforce/Princess: Sarah Currie
Manager/Ralph bingham/High Priest/Kevin: Russell Loten
Mary Somerset/Mabel: Fiona Morrison
Ascobaruch/Eunice Bray/Youth: Justine Wortsman
Vizier/Arthur Jukes/Ramsden Waters: John Muir
Oldest Member/Gardener: Watyne 'Pickles' Norma
Mortimer Sturgis/Cedric/Lord High Chsamberlain/George: Pab Roberts
Eddie Denton/King Merolchazzar/George Perkins/Rupert Bailey: Mat Urey
2005-09-02 12:43:20