THE RABBIT by Meredydd Barker. Clwyd Theatr Cymru to 24 November
Mold
THE RABBIT
by Meredydd Barker
Emlyn Williams Theatre, Clwyd Theatr Cymru, To 24 November 2001
Runs 1hr 40min No interval
TICKETS 01352 755114
Review Timothy Ramsden 16 November
This Welsh Rabbit may be unevenly cooked, but there's a suitable warren of ideas and plot possibilities.It starts as it means to go on; with a bang - a shot in the dark to make the audience jump. It ends pretty bloodily too. That just leaves the big bit in between. The one where the play needs to go.
Tensions abound on the failing Welsh farm where Garan plants roses in his recently dead wife's memory while his son big Mal resents brother Rhys' return from London. And the hulking, child-minded Dav lurks around till he plays his part in the plot's final stages.
Then along from metropolitan gangsterland comes Tag, the menacing Robert Blythe looking like an amalgamation of Anthony Hopkins and a Michelin man. He's here to collect the cash Rhys took from him. Remarkably, he also seems to have a thing going with the sour-sweet faced Sian, who's also Rhys' girlfriend.
Coincidence? Not a bit. Barker's scenario is similar to cult 70s film The Wicker Man. Tag is lured into a trap, like a fox in a field full of rabbits. Except that The Wicker Man was set on an island. The Rabbit is merely located on a remote peninsula and the fox has brought his guard-dog, a human pit-bull, along.
Like too many stage thrillers, this one spends over-long dabbling around in the first half, thinking it's creating mystery and mood while actually dissipating them. There's no doubt several plot strands are neatly laid in the narrative – watch those sweet-smelling roses crop up in a new light. But the family tensions are not fully worked-out, either in the plot's denouement or through character development.
My other quarrel is with the play's relentless urgency. Barker uses the telegrammatic dialogue fashionable since the 1970s to show inarticulacy. It's compounded by director Terry Hands' insistence on near continuous agitation, no doubt intended to add emphasis, but often sounding like fury for its own sake, and signifying nothing.
Still, there are enough virtues in the play to make it worth staging, and to suggest that when Barker doesn't try to throw in too many ingredients and balances narrative drive with careful character development he could set more hares racing in the theatre.
Rhys: Oliver Ryan
Mal: Bradley Freegard
Dav: Simon Nehan
Garan: John Cording
Sian: Siwan Morris
Tag: Robert Blythe
Director/Lighting: Terry Hands
Designer: Mark Bailey
Sound: Kevin Heyes
Fight director: Renny Krupinski
2001-11-19 02:12:36