THE FOUR TWINS. To 11 October.
Glasgow
THE FOUR TWINS
by Copi
Citizens' Stalls Studio To 11 October
Tue-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 40min No interval
TICKETS: 0141 429 0022
www.citz.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 October
Nasty, brutish and short - and great fun.With any play except a classic or a new work of genius, it's common to say the piece would have been better with 20 minutes lopped off (or half an hour, but that shows you really think it's irredeemable). Try that here, there'd be nothing much left. And we'd all miss out on a lot of rude, raucous fun.
It begins with the Smith twins doing a bit of in-family murder. Entere the prospecting Goldwashing twins in hygienic white uniform and mayhem really begins. 'Bitch' is the politest form of address. Hyperdermics stab out, with or without morphine, cocaine or heroin, and there are multiple stranglings and shootings.
Yet, cartoon-like, the dead keep resurrecting. No-one escapes - howling dogs wait viciously for if they do. So, cartoon-like, violence becomes hilarious. The acting quartet are wonderfully precise in a piece that could easily descend into a strychnine blancmange of sound and fury, a children's unskilled improvisation.
For there is something childish to this piece. It's luridly simplistic, but with childlike directness and delight in the grotesque. Copi (Chilean Raul; Damonte - he died of AIDS in his mid-forties, 1988) produces a brief and savage parade biting raw any pretence of humanity and gentility.
A pretty card wishing someone a happy 30th birthday stands ignored at the side of an apparently stylish domestic setting - gleaming reflections and colour projections soon turned to a mess of squirted liquids and discarded drugs sachets. It's the only good wish in the play, where human nature's dead red in tooth, claw and mind. Money and power form a 40-minute assault course for the audience.
At the end no-one's learned anything. The Goldwashings, having shot and strangled, tried to obtain gold and access to a numbered Swiss bank account, set off, and the equally self-seeking Smiths set out again as at the start. There are two pairs of twins, all right, but within the 'brotherhood' of humanity all are alike, and nothing kin to each other when it comes to following their own advantage.
Thematically, it's like taking a shower of undiluted sewage, a death-spray for hopes of humanity. Bracing and exhilarating, Kenny Miller's directed this dollop of disenchantment with wit and detailed precision. Worth half an evening for any serious theatregoer in search of scabrous excitement.
Maria Smith: Lorna McDevitt
Leila Smith: Elaine Mackenzie Ellis
Josephine Goldwashing: Patti Clare
Fougere Goldwashing: Toni Frutin
Director/Designer: Kenny Miller
Lighting: Stuart Jenkins
Fight director: Carter Ferguson
2003-10-05 14:43:24