VARIETY. 12-17 August.
Edinburgh International Festival
VARIETY
by Douglas Maxwell
Grid Iron Theatre Company at King's Theatre 12-17 August 2002
Runs 2hr 20min One interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 16 August 6pm
Variety adds neither spice nor life to this Festival.To be fair, it's happened before. The Festval, worthily anxious to promote new Scottish work, has lighted on someone who's achieved recent acclaim and dunked them into unsuitable circumstances, leading to a limp, watery contribution to its often-fretful drama programme.
I'm unclear quite what the production programme's statement that Grid Iron 'commissioned' this play means, since the writer and director, along with producer Judith Docherty, are effectively the faces of this company. Still, I suppose I could try to get funds from somewhere to announce I'd commissioned a few reviews from myself.
There's nothing fishy in the process - it just seems a very formal way of saying the Scottish Arts Council's Playwright Commission Fund gave them some cash for their regular playwright to write on.
I shall, of course, eat - or delete - these words when Grid Iron produce a list of other playwrights they're been commissioning with such funds recently.
But no amount of writing around the matter can go on avoiding the production itself. It gives no pleasure to put the boot in where so much critical footwear has apparently gone already. But if any capable, independent producer had seen this script they would surely not have recommended a full production without radical reworking. Only one scene, between the differently talented gay performers Waldo and Connor, holds the attention as convincing conversation.
And if they'd seen early rehearsals, it's hard to believe emergency repair work would not have been ordered on this clumsy, self-conscious staging.
Both the Maxwell/Harrison hit Decky Does A Bronco and the writer's Helmet were more ordered pieces, focussing on young male experience.
Variety is a heap of cliches by comparison, effortfully handled, and even a variety of Scottish acting's most reliable figures - John Kazek, Peter Kelly, Anne Marie Timoney - can do nothing except prevent their roles seeming even worse than they do.
It's all here: the foul-mouthed pro, the breaking-up marriage, the end-of-tether, the mad hope of saving a theatre in 1929 from being turned over to the Talkies. And it's all derivative, unconvincing and awkwardly staged by a director whose last major large-scale work, the Almeida's touring A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, was widely felt to be wrongheaded.
Both writer and director have future projects which sound more hopeful for their development. Here they have bitten off more than they can chew - or, to put it another way, have come up with something indigestible.
But where, in Edinburgh's International Festival, was the dramaturgical support that could have advised or wielded the knife to prevent this situation? I respect a company like Halifax's Northern Broadsides, who will cancel a proposed tour if they feel a production will not be of the right standard. Edinburgh could learn something from Yorkshire.
Dr Walford Chipo: Paul Blair
Harvey: Jimmy Harrison
Charlie Buchanan: David Ireland
Jack Salt: John Kazek
Edward Todd: Peter Kelly
Rose: Amy Leach/Sinead Leach
Linda Singh: Rina Mahoney
Connor McNair: Douglas Rankine
Betty Kemble: Anne Marie Timoney
Director: Ben Harrison
Designer: Fred Meller
Lighting: George Tarbuck
Costume: Alice Bee
Composer: Philip Pinsky
Choeographer: Lisa Robertson
Voice coach: Ros Steen
2002-08-19 13:45:34