THE FLU SEASON. To 3 May 2003.
London
THE FLU SEASON
by Will Eno
Gate Theatre To 3 May 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm no performance Sat 26 April Sun 27 April 6pm
Runs 2hr One interval
TICKETS: 020 7229 0706
Review: Timothy Ramsden 18 April
Self-regarding play that seems to think audiences know nothing about theatre: after this they'll possibly care less.There's a story in here and there's a hefty set of reminders it's a fiction. Theatre seems to be either about stories or distancing you from stories. The second's harder to bring off. Especially when – as here - the only two characters allowed to get on with any action or, literally, have a dialogue, are so powerfully played.
Their story may be corny: patients in a psychiatric hospital, they undergo love, pregnancy, parting of ways, but when the alternative is the ponderous platitudinising of the twin commentators so ineptly named Prologue and Epilogue, give me bowls full of corn. Admittedly Alan Cox gives a sinister tinge to the colder of the narrating pair, but all the words come down to little more than a whine about the falsities of playwriting.
Fair enough. There are plenty of useful jobs need doing instead. And as for the act of being an audience member, plenty of people are giving up on that (as theatre administrators so often whine). It's little wonder if this is what people are served when they go to the theatre.
Sledgehammer's unrelentingly seek to smash nuts in this play. Prologue's prose-poetry attempts to be cosmic are not; they're philosophical droolings which would be comic, only they're not funny.
Damien Thomas and Pamela Miles inhabit their wordy roles to give, somehow, some sense of life. But Thomas's Doctor, full of his own experiences, and Miles' Nurse are hardly developed or original characters. When the Nurse draws stick-people on a form instead of writing Woman's simple answer, the patient enquires if they use more letters now to write 'No'. It's a point Eno's whole play could take to heart.
But Matthew Delamere's haunted-eyed Man and the live-minded Woman of Raquel Cassidy- showing both will and vulnerability – as they move to mutual comforting affection then sway apart, show that playwrights tend to do best when the mirror they hold up is to something other than themselves at work.
The protean Gate becomes a pit, the audience high on a single row viewing-gallery. It's awkward for a largely static piece: leaving wood rails to bisect the characters close to you, and stiff necks risked viewing the ones at further reaches of the long rectangular acting-space.
Prologue: Martin Parr
Epilogue: Alan Cox
Doctor: Damien Thomas
Man: Matthew Delamere
Nurse: Pamela Miles
Woman: Raquel Cassidy
Director: Erica Whyman
Designer: Soutra Gilour
Lighting: Anthony Simpson
Sound: Michael Oliva
2003-04-20 12:00:01