At Louche Theatre |
| Louche Theatre- Effie's Burning , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , March 5, 2008 |
With a play being launched about killer child Mary Bell, and talk of a film about the fate of Madeleine McCann, discussion of the use and abuse of children (directly or indirectly) at the hands of the establishment, the law and the criminal justice system has never been more potent, so it was with a degree of hope that I attended Louche Theatre Company’s third outing at Aberystwyth Arts Centre – Valerie Windsor’s ‘Effie’s Burning’.Telling the tale of Effie Palmer – an educationally sub-normal woman in her sixties, committed to asylums from the age of thirteen and forgotten about – through the eyes of Dr. Ruth Kovacs, the attending physician looking after her after she has suffered horrendous burns following an incident where she may or may not have set her warden-controlled flat on fire, this is a raw, moving, disturbing but ultimately life-affirming play which has been staged with passion and executed with delicate flair. Director Harry Durnall’s set design is design at its most simple – two areas, one with Effie’s bed, the other with Kovacs’s office, a medical screen at the rear of the stage bridging the two, however unintentionally. Paul Matthews’s lighting design and Tom Riley’s sound design were also very simple, but effective – shifting states of light combined with a bookending soundscape of the quite disturbing but highly effective children’s voices of Ffion King and Katie Owen singing nursery rhymes. At times, the set did seem slightly unwieldy, with a lot of unnatural looking movements in order for Liz Hyde, playing Kovacs, to shift between the two areas, but this was a very minor concern. The two performances were exemplary pieces of subtle character development. Hyde, as Kovacs, displayed every facet of the character without overt signalling or demonstrative behaviour, slowly exposing every peak of humanity and trough of despair in a very realistic, human, incredibly believable way. Barbara Hogger, as Effie, displaying the full horror of the burns she has suffered (thanks to the good offices of make-up artist, production manager and light/sound operator Maisie Baynham) and, thanks to Dialect Coach Julie Turner, possessed of a soft, likeable but not caricatured West Country accent, played the eponymous part for everything it was worth, but without milking it. As the sorry tale slowly develops, over the course of the deceptively short run-time of one hour, these two actresses played off one another with all the mesmerising flair of an internationally-renowned jazz duo, allowing character development without overt display and showing a sounder grasp on concepts of humanity than I’ve seen in some time. Durnall and his company deserve the highest acclamation for a piece of storytelling that needed no more time than it had to make clear its message, and related it in a quiet, non-dogmatic manner for maximum effect. |
Reviewed by: Paddy Cooper |
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