Theatr Iolo |
| Theatr Iolo- Bisons and Sons , Chapter Arts Centre , March 20, 2001 |
| Very few adults get to see the range of children's theatre on offer. Theatre in education companies may tour excellent productions extensively but they remain within a circuit in some underground world inaccessible to those outside its remit. I was pleased therefore to have the opportunity to see Theatr Iolo in Chapter Studio on World Children's and Young People's Theatre Day on Tuesday, 20th March. Iolo put on a two-part evening: Kevin Lewis's one-man show, Marcos , and their version of Pauline Mol's Bisons and Sons, originally commissioned by the Dutch company, Theater Artemis. Ever since David Adams praised it so highly last year, I have wanted to see Marcos - and I missed it. I kicked myself several times. But I did see the impressive Bison and Sons. You couldn't get much further from the patronising sentimentality that contaminates so much children's TV. This was clean, focused and unsentimental theatre that focused on what must be the stuff of every child's nightmare: abandonment. The set was minimal: a sketch of a kitchen, dirty and neglected apart from a cage which contained precious things. Just once during the performance it lit up with fairy lights as a kind of shrine to a lost mother. The sibling relationship of the three brothers - bossy elder brother, sulky middle child and babied youngest - were vividly realised by Duncan Bett (square shouldered, world weary Big Boy), Henry Sargeant (undervalued, self-hating Gigi) and Emyr John (soft, easily teased Benno). Gigi misses his mother the most. They confusedly struggle to believe that everything will be alright, enacting little plays within the play as they try to understand what has happened, bullying and comforting each other in turn, taking sides, sulking, collectively dreaming of warmth, nice food and comfort. Big Boy tries to look after the others by cooking a pan of plain white spaghetti which ends up all over the floor. But this small gem was neither gloomy nor sordidly self-indulgent but deft, hard-edged, quippy - and extremely funny. The actors individualised their characters with crisp movements, visually sketching personality by studied pose and concise gesture - a strategy highlighted when the two younger brothers mimicked the eldest behind his back. Or when they impersonated the bank manager they had never seen as an ogre who liked to do nasty things to small boys. Articulating fears allows them to be confronted and mocked as the material for comedy. The intimacy of the performance was enhanced by its production in the round. The play started by establishing the brothers' characteristics - bravery, moodiness and timidity respectively - through arguments over the assumption of authority represented by sitting in the father's chair. Yet the use of space undercut that authority from the start, The chair was off-centre and the real focal point was the empty cupboard standing in the middle of the stage-space. As the boys started to come to terms with the absence of their father and their possible abandonment they played and fought around and through that marker. Finally they left it as they refused the situation of being abandoned and decided to leave the house themselves to cope on their own. This brief plotline seems to reduce the play to a dreary moral message. That isn't at all how it seemed. The play's interactions were beautifully done, the playful but serious quality of a genuine struggle to understand reflected a process familiar to any adult - never mind a child - and this made the performance most alive. Good children's entertainment is not easy to produce. Because children always seek to understand the world through what they see and hear, Peter Hollindale claims that all writing for children (which includes theatre of course) is 'inescapably didactic': more than anything this means that children's theatre should never produce gooey platitudes and easy answers but should question those platitudes, deal with real things, engage in risk. This was witty and intelligent theatre: for grown-ups as well as children. It's apparently sold out see them if you can. |
Reviewed by: Jenni Williams |
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