Theatr Iolo |
| Theatr Iolo- Bisons and Sons , touring production , March 1, 2001 |
| An award-winning play from the Netherlands, it has some of the family tensions of The Godfather, alludes to Becket, Genet and Pinter, nods to Greek mythology and the Bible, exploits the Hollywood western genre - and is touring South Wales. So where can you see this innovative, provocative piece of intertextual theatre ? You can’t, unless you’re a teenager at a school to which Theatr Iolo is taking Bison and Sons or manage to catch a special performance such as the one at Chapter studio recently. And while it does make as good a starting-point as anything for a classroom discussion on sibling rivalry, manhood, ambition and patriarchy, it does stand on its own pretty well. The play and production are refreshingly non-naturalistic, effortlessly slipping from real life to fantasy as we find three brothers - aged 8, 12 and 14 but mimicking older males - abandoned as their father pleads with the bank manager to save the family business from bankruptcy. They play, they bicker, they taunt, they bully, they fight - their name is Bison, but at times it could well be Corleone. I doubt if young audiences will necessarily pick up on the debt to the Theatre of the Absurd or all the other cultural references and while the original, created by writer Pauline Mol and the Theater Artemis company, was the result of a devising process that would doubtless have given a tension and urgency I found a little lacking in Kevin Lewis’s production, at least when I saw it, it is still an impressive piece of young people’s theatre. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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