| Praxis Makes Perfect: "kitsch, funny, moving, uplifting, silly and thoughtful" |
At National Theatre Wales |
| Neon Neon & National Theatre Wales , Location Near Cardiff , May 2, 2013 |
"While the music industry has been scrambling as well as navel gazing for a few decades now trying to figure out what will be the future of ‘the album’, National Theatre Wales and Gruff Rhys’ Neon Neon, with Praxis Makes Perfect, seem to have come up with the most fascinating and artful solution to date. "...Praxis Makes Perfect comes in, resplendent in its almost-chaotic mixture of earnest history lesson and dark-edged nightclub circus. "The show takes place in a warehouse, a whiplash from Cardiff city centre, but once the roll door is fastened behind, it is a misty, iron cave of anywhere, the ideal bubble for the oddest mix of genres, tastes and reference points you are likely to find succeeding in any artistic environment. "It is part-live gig and part-full throttle, no holds-barred heavily choreographed pretentious theatre. It is kitsch, funny, moving, uplifting, silly and thoughtful in equal measure. It is rabble-rousing, confusing, flawed, shambolic, loud, flamboyant, boisterous, crude and utterly triumphant. It is a theatrical event that chewed its audience up and flung them onto the dark pavement outside, to a man and woman bewildered and joyous. "At the centre is the figure of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Italian millionaire and subversive anti-communist publisher of the centre part of the twentieth century. His most famous achievement, and worthy of a drama in itself, was his publication of Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, which he connived to push out against all the pressures of the Communist machine. He becomes an icon of the revolutionary elite, those who see the power of the publisher. "There are fiery scenes where Feltrinelli plays basketball with Fidel Castro (neatly played out to a backdrop of photos of the real occasion when this happened), and enters a dangerous dance with a pistol-whipping Che Guevera. (The cameos in Praxis are full-blooded scenery chewing entertainment). "While the action, never less than hurtling along, is played out, Neon Neon slide out the thumping synth pop of the album that has inspired the show from the industrial stage of a rickety iron bookshelf. Gruff Rhys circles and moves within the show like a half-cut ringmaster. "Extremely charismatic and only half-aware of the audience beneath him, he spends most of the time with the look of a man trying to remember where he last put his car keys. The attitude of the band, the look of the show, and the general atmosphere, is somewhere between Stop Making Sense and a Socialist Workers’ Party Conference at the Hacienda. The audience are goaded into whoops and applause as Rhys holds up placards inciting exactly those things, and the music shudders through the bones and rattles the corrugated walls. This is garage theatre at its most grand. "Writer Tim Price has done a marvellous job with a script that had little room for manoeuvre when it came to content. A lesser writer would surely have buckled under the weight of the biographical information that needed to be let out in order for the story to mean anything to those who knew nothing about Feltrinelli. "Yet he has managed to inject much humour, grit and grace into the words. Director Wils Wilson, who must have a Looney Tunes Christmas party going on in her brain in order to keep tabs on everything that goes on from minute to minute, has inserted some very interesting moments of symbolism into difficult plot points. Subterfuge and conniving and torture and relationships, rather than skipped over or lingered on, are given emphatic representations by the versatile and energetic cast. "And it is energy that is the key. Everything rushes and swarms around the laconic Gruff Rhys, who ends up being the real star of the show, even ahead of such co-stars as Feltrinelli and Fidel Castro. Make no mistake, it is the music of Neon Neon that drives the thing, and the inspiring insights and sensibilities of Rhys and Bryan Hollon (the other half of Neon Neon) that are at the heart of the production." * * * * The Guardian was there: "The instructions are precise. I am to arrive at the designated meeting point on time, tell no one where I'm going, wear something red and bring my favourite book. This is no ordinary performance, and so it proves in this teasingly eccentric and genre-defying piece from National Theatre Wales and Neon Neon. Inspired by the life and mysterious death of the Italian multimillionaire and anti-fascist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who believed "reading is resistance", it combines pop gig and promenade theatre show. "Based on the recently released concept album by Neon Neon – AKA Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys and producer Boom Bip – Wils Wilson's production cleverly creates the sense that you are not just watching the 1960s unfold but are actually there. Performers clamber out of massive filing cabinets; an outsize anglepoise lamp becomes the light by which the CIA interrogate Feltrinelli after his failed attempt to rescue Che Guevara in Bolivia; a happening featuring body painting and balloons envelops us. Then a cartoonish Andy Warhol and Fidel Castro pop up. "Perhaps inevitably in 90 perky synthpop-driven minutes, it's hard to pick up on much detail – particularly as the lyrics (often brilliant) are mostly inaudible. It's difficult, too, to unravel the contradictions of a man who argued for books not bombs, but who apparently died attempting to blow up Milan's electricity supply; a man who was a communist but also ran a successful shopping empire. "But the show embraces those contradictions through its form – and part of its quirky charm is that when it comes to Marx it's often as much Groucho as it is Karl. Not that Tim Price's script neglects the politics: there's a terrific scene in which Feltrinelli is told that if he publishes the manuscript of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (which has been smuggled out of the USSR) it will be a crime against the party, to which he retorts: "Not to publish would be a crime against culture." Abridged from the full reviews which can be read at: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/may/03/praxis-makes-perfect-review https://www.walesartsreview.org/praxis-makes-perfect/ |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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