| Offensive facile and clumsy |
At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru- Orange , Chapter cardiff , September 22, 2006 |
This review first appeared in the Western Mail...Chippie loves Gregg’s pasties, Viv uses porno mags. Chippie supplies Viv with an inexhaustible supply of pot noodles, Viv plans to paint his bed-sit in Cardiff City colours. When Chippie uses a video camera he points it at the subject’s knees, when Viv interacts it is to play kids’ games or cheat at gin rummy. Two stupid inarticulate working-class Cardiff brothers. But they’re more than stupid: they are, in fact, quite severely mentally disabled. So when they decide to take revenge for a British aid worker being taken hostage in Iraq by themselves kidnapping a local Muslim they, inevitably, bungle it. They force Saleem to make a video recording, then Chippie doesn’t send it. It’s not clear if they have even told the outside world of their individual act of retaliation. Chippie just leaves Viv to guard their hostage, unaware that his younger brother is forming a relationship with Saleem, a far more intelligent man, albeit one that will be seen to be meaningless. It sounds almost like a Samuel Becket script, a tale of existential absurdity, a nihilistic view of the current world situation. Except that this is just about one of the most offensive, facile, clumsy new plays to have got on to the stage in Cardiff, even by Sgript Cymru’s uneven standards. The subject-matter of Orange is serious stuff but so much about it, both in Alan Harris’s writing and Tessa Walker’s direction, tends to trivialisation – from the title (a reference to the now-familiar Guantanamo-style prison uniform the kidnappers force on their hostage) to the onanistic activities of Viv and the unexplained dangerous irrationality of Chippie. These are three men, hostage-takers and hostage, who have no background, no character: they exist only on the stage and we have no idea why they behave as they do. It starts like a Hollywood movie, all action and thumping music as the brothers bundle their victim into the room, and continues like a tape-loop as Chippie comes and goes with his pot-noodles, munching his pasty, and Viv masturbates, talks inanely and allows his victim to remove his blindfold to play games. The orgasms may be realistic but even the locking of the door is unconvincing. Just what is it saying ? That by inverting the usual scenario, militants can be seen as simple, ill-educated, mentally deficient incompetents ? More generously, that the simplistic tabloid reporting of the Blair-Bush “war on terror” works on impressionistic, working-class socially-excluded no-hopers to create a generation of ill-informed racists ? One suspects that the basic idea, of reversing roles, is supposed to make us see things afresh, but in fact any points are so obvious as to be worthless and by portraying hostage-takers as a couple of mentally disturbed lads (and we might have expected drugs to make an appearance, but they don’t) any serious argument becomes impossible. The cast – Lee Bane, Geraint Hardy and Marc Anwar – stand no chance with an undeveloped script and a direction that sweats with desperation. Sophie Charalambous’s set was realistically detailed but the innocuous pin-ups above Viv’s bed seemed unlikely in view of his habits and too much of the action (if that’s the word for card-playing) was set where most of the audience couldn’t see it. Unusually, Sgript Cymru refused the customary free copy of the script to critics: I wonder why ? |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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