THE NEW TENANT. To 6 March.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
THE NEW TENANT
by Eugene Ionesco
Gulbenkian Studio, Newcastle-upon-Tyne To 6 March 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 1hr 50min No interval
TICKETS: 0191 230 5151
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 February
Are we here to see Ionesco or Tompa? On this showing, is either worth a whole evening?To find full-flavour English theatre go to the land's ends. Cornwall-based Kneehigh have a distinctive performance style, as does Newcastle's Northern Stage Ensemble no wonder the two have collaborated productively. And collaboration's key to Northern Stage director Alan Lyddiard's working. There's a wide Euro-influence in much of his own work plus the English/Catalan Homage to Catalonia about to open in Leeds and Newcastle.
But winter ends with neither company at its best. Kneehigh's Wooden Frock has time to grow on tour, but began as something of an exercise in company style rather than a show feeling necessary in its own right. And Newcastle-imported director Gabor Tompa comes over as a brilliant theatre mind overlaying an admittedly slight play with his inventiveness.
Prolific Absurdist Ionesco is best-known in Britain for his brief comedy The Bald Prima Donna (The Hairless Diva in John Mortimer's witty translation). It kicks the essence of bourgeois English life and conversation askew through dialogue delivered with the complacent flatness of language-learning discs.
It also represents Ionesco at his most entertaining. All Theatre de Complicite's invention was needed to bring life to The Chairs, in which a room's gradually filled with seats. The New Tenant extends the same idea for over 90 increasingly lengthy-seeming minutes as a rented room's filled with furniture. The apocalyptic conclusion, where the city's jammed for the flow of furnishings and some of the room's appurtenances acquire momentum of their own, becomes intriguing, but much of the proceeding action (a term loosely used here) has been a mix of comic doodles and incomprehensibility.
To see one, then two, sturdy removal men staggering under the weight of a single vase is amusing. There's an interest (though it goes nowhere) in the two men's contrasting manners: the rough and the smooth of the furniture-shifting world.
But Tompa's range of well-worn advanced' production ideas objects moving under apparent self-propulsion, sequences heightened by the emotional charge of classical music hot-spots' doesn't include such essentials as ensuring characters speak clearly. Even well-known Northern Stage Ensemble members phrase lines without full audibility. This isn't experimental theatre it's plain absurd.
Cast and full credits not available
Director: Gabor Tompa
Designer: Helmut Sturmer
2004-03-09 23:31:28