At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru / Pearson Brookes and Thmoas- Ghost City / Who are you looking at? , Cardiff , April 15, 2004 |
| Just how many monologues can one bottom sit through? Twenty-four, according to Gary Owen’s new play, Ghost City (Sgript Cymru). Twenty-four monologues from Cardiff citizens, set over a twenty-four hour period. Touring the city with a digital camera, Owen sought inspiration from the very streets of the capital, and the audience even gets a neat map to show where, done in the outline of a dead body. Monologues are exhausting for an audience: you can’t just sit back and watch a plot unfold. You are assuming the role of the other actor, the sounding board, and you have to guess, twenty-four times over, who’s talking and what the hell they’re talking about. Ghost City uses the same four actors in the same four outfits to do the lot; the stage is bare except for concrete cubes and, apart from the drip through Chapter roof, there’s not much in the way of a soundtrack. It’s all down to the actors and Owen’s writing to carry the piece off successfully — and luckily, both are fluent and convincing. Monologue characters are often sorry, pathetic creatures — just what are they doing talking to themselves, anyway? — but Owen’s were warm and sympathetic, in the main drawn with a light hand. The best tied sharp emotion with humour — the taxi driver, who has just shagged his girlfriend’s younger sister, was both crude and poetic; the stalker girlfriend unbalanced but oddly persuasive. Owen has a tendency to sidle off into personal agendas (war, racism) where characters tell rather than show us how to feel. The more exuberant voices are only interested in telling their own story, but manage to reveal far more in the process. Occasionally the scenes strayed into the over-emotional and the downright incomprehensible — the conversation with a computer programme, for one — but there was a neat ambiguity about the Tony Blair-a-like, reassuring us in measured tones about going to war while revealing his own misgivings that we were allowing him to take responsibility for the decision. Towards the middle, the monologue format threatens to get tiring, but in a burst of flexibility Owen changes pace and lets his characters talk to one another. The spotlight is off us for a while. Themes begin to develop — some characters appear more than once, different stories collide. We’re allowed to see someone else’s perspectives on a character, and not just rely on our own. To nitpick, sometimes there was a jarring theatricality about the production — people huddled in blankets; the rather pompous moving of the concrete blocks for no apparent reason. Worst was the sudden leap into over-dramatics with the bizarre feed-back noise that interrupted every monologue. You spent the first half of the speech worrying when the noise was going to happen, and the second half worrying why. Still, Ghost City is the best new Welsh drama I’ve seen since I started reviewing for Planet — and when it goes on tour it will be travelling to New York. Will it work there? The one Welsh-language monologue could do with a few more pointers for English speakers to make sense of it (it was near the end, we were knackered from all that concentration), but the diversity of characters stops it from being parochial. With his peep show look at the city’s inhabitants, Owen manages to make Cardiff both intimate and varied; almost a teeming metropolis. The multi-media “event” from Ed Thomas, Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson, Who Are You Looking At? also takes Cardiff as its launch pad. Here, Cardiff is splashed onto a bigger canvas — one that is all lights and night clubs and strangers. Where as Ghost City builds a vision of the city from the minutiae of personality, this piece is an outsider’s point of view, staring in. Following several girls’ journey through Cardiff at night, the camera watches from different angles; what the girls see, what a stranger would see looking in at them. Finally, we’re peeking in at a window of the Big Sleep Hotel, watching for the girl in the room and feeling distinctly jaded for doing it. Thanks to the different media used in the production — live jazz, live narration, video screens showing different stages of the filming — Cardiff looked big, meaty; almost Parisian. In fact, it was like watching a moody French film, all about atmosphere, at times vibrant and exciting, but with no real sense of tension. The piece felt stretched, like the idea was too slight to really last the distance. Perhaps it’s a mistake to expect tension from something that was really an overly long art installation, but that’s audience expectation for you. We all insisted on sitting down instead of wandering around like we were asked, and the production suffered for it. Lazy things, audiences. They like all the work done for them. This review first appeared in PLANET 164, April / May 2004 |
Reviewed by: Alex Carolan |
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