WINGS OF DESIRE. To 19 September.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
WINGS OF DESIRE
by Alan Lyddiard adapted from the film by Wim Wenders
Newcastle Playhouse To 19 September 2003
Runs 1hr 30min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 19 September
Visually striking and innovative, though less clear as dramatic narrative.After the travellers, the inhabitants. Northern Stage Ensemble artistic director Alan Lyddiard may not repeat the sheer beauty and stage poetry of his summer production for Newcastle's 2003 Gypsy Festival The Black-Eyed Roses. But this mass cast (the Ensemble augmented by the non-professional Northern Stage Performance Group) adaptation of Wim Wenders' film about an angel and an aerialist - updated and relocated among the theatre's home city and its people - is conceptually and visually breathtaking.
Lyddiard and designer Neil Murray are the city's theatrical dream-team - Murray bringing a daringly original visual splendour on whatever scale he works. And the scale here is epic.
The stage is covered with a huge, vertiginous stairway. You rarely notice the top, partly because of a gauze that repeatedly lowers and raises as a projection screen, partly because the white stairway itself becomes a 3D floor for cinematic images.
The Tyne seems to flow down this stairway; or it becomes a huge set of escalators, people moving up and down like the massed figures in one of Sergei Eisenstein's twenties Soviet silent cinema epics.
Cityscapes show on this stage; actual figures move across it in counterpoint to moving celluloid patterns - it's miraculous nobody trips as the stepped-mountainside flows with images.
The other visual element is the (live-on-stage) female aerialist, climbing, cavorting, plummeting before, above and almost among us. It adds up to a theatrical white knuckle-ride.
But not always a very dramatic one. Editing that's fine on film finds itself up against a very different rhythm in theatre. By her later appearances even the professional aerial acrobat seems a bit of a deja-vu phenomenon, while the rising and falling gauze-screen eventually breaks, rather than creating, a satisfying dramatic rhythm. Whatever story's in there stays fragmented.
Partly this is a problem rising from the many high-profile moments: the mix becomes too rich. Some shaping's called for but isn't supplied. Some selection, or placing in a narrative rhythm. We're offered a clump of good bits, when what's needed is a satisfying whole.
And the vocal elements are far more bland. There are some telling moments caught on video - an adult's looking-back to the moment he first saw his father's deviousness, an account of grief on the edge. But, despite using microphones, a lot of the onstage comments hardly registers. Some are too brief, without building a powerful montage in the way the filmic images contrive. Other are simply flat or unclear in diction - and that's not mainly aimed at the non-professional cast members.
Last year Lyddiard gave his Ensemble a programme of precise, script-base work - Beckett, Pinter,Mamet - to positive effect. When the precision this achieved provides an equal force to the visual theatre-poetry (as in Roses) the impact is astounding. Here, it's more fitfully impressive.
Performers:
Mauricio Alvarez, Sonia Beinrith, Frances Biggs, Keith Brown, Adele Cairns, Mark Calvert, Clara Crivellaro, Chantal Daly, Philip Docherty, Alex Elliott, Adele Evitt, James Fisher, Bekki French, Fran French, Alwyn Gornall, Dan Harland, Tony Haxon, Sylvia Hebben, Rebecca Hollingsworth, Dave Hollingworth, Mark Hunter, Jim Kitson, Stephen Lamb, Mark Lloyd, Susan McGuire, Jimmy McKay, Jane McLaughlin, Bill Meeks, Catherine Mennear, Polly Moseley, Tony Neilson, Diana O'Hara, Kathy Paul, Peter Peverley, Bill Pickard, Ian Raby, Kevin Robson, Laurie-Ann Rudd, Jason Savin, Valerie Shields, Valerie Speed, Andrew Stephenson, George Stoker, Mark Stoker, Steven Toothill, Tom Walton, Isabelle Winder, Emma-Jane Woodley
Director: Alan Lyddiard
Designer: Neil Murray
Lighting: Chris Slater
Sound: Rob Brown
Music: John Alder, Mad Jym, Loop Guru
Film imagery: John Alder, Alex Elliott, Alan Lyddiard
Film editor: John Alder
Movement: Francisco Alfonsin
Aerial work: Chantal Daly, Steve Belfield
Assistant director: Annie Rigby
Drmaturgy: Duska Radosavljevic
2003-09-21 15:44:14