| L'Hotel by Alexander Ferris |
| First presented in 2003 by Jarbones Theatre Company |
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synopsis: |
There is 1 review of Jarbones Theatre Company's L'Hotel in our database:
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L'Hotel
by Alexander Ferris
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[print] |
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venue Sherman Theatre, Cardiff |
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July 18, 2003 |
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| At last! A new theatre company, a new work - and one that promised to be, well, different. At a time when Welsh theatre is at its lowest ebb for decades, such initiative can surely only we welcomed. And here is Jarbones, aka Alexander Ferris and Llinos Mai, offering a bold manifesto to create "entertaining and edgy theatre for young people", "dynamic and meaningful new work", "slick and energetic product". From one who might be some years outside their target audience age range (as were many in the audience in the Sherman's Venue 2 space), we applaud their chutzpah. Or so we thought until the Berliner maitre'd had invited us to wander from the Starlight Lounge of his dubious establishment to Room 12a, where two brothers were engaged in sibling rivalry. Here we started to realised that youthful enthusiasm is maybe not enough. What is also needed is, perhaps, some performance skill and some good direction. In the first act of this three-part show, the so-called Cabaret Wales showed they had not really learned how to use microphones - but in a reasonably amusing turn that was partly meant to send up girly duos, there was a faux-amateur feel so it didn't matter. In the rest of the evening's entertainment, alas, the actors revealed they didn't really know how to use their voices or their bodies either. Room 12a was excruciatingly bad, like an F-grade student presentation: devised by the company, the programme says, so all must be held jointly responsible for the staging of a piece that should never have been presented to a paying audience. The final offering, In the Basement, was at least mildly intriguing in its merging of absurdist drama and gangster film noir. In its constant repetition of the line, "Does it matter ?" there is clearly an attempt a kind of post modernist questioning of meaning - but in the drawn-out non-action of a woman and two men taking turns at being a prisoner few of us can really have cared that much. Just what the motivation was for this trio of pieces loosely linked by the conceit of all taking place in a seedy Berlin hotel is not clear. "Meaningful" it wasn't, and the last words one would associate with Jarbones's first production would be "dynamic" or "slick". Not only was there no concern with content, there was no performance rigour: it was both trivial and incompetent. But perhaps the insistence on reasonable acting, an intelligent script and proper directing is a sign of old age. I would love to be encouraging to this initiative but with the best will in the world it is difficult to think of redeeming qualities, unless the desire to appear on the stage regardless of the inability to perform to a professional standard is a virtue. The company really does need some expert guidance, and I am surprised they don't seem to have got it from their hosts, The Sherman. What the company did do well was get an audience - a sell-out, indeed. Clearly Cardiff audiences are starved of new theatre, but what a shame that the drought was relieved not by welcome rain but by a sand-shower. |
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| reviewer: David Adams |
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