At Volcano Theatre |
| Volcano Theatre- The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet , Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff , October 22, 2004 |
| This review first appeared in the Western Mail. What what to say of this latest show from Wales’s leading theatre company, Volcano ? The Swansea-based group has not only tackled (and brought down) comic playwrights Ayckbourn and Coward and adapted Dylan Thomas and Karl Marx but has also taken on Shakespeare by exploring the Sonnets as a love triangle of passion, jealousy and sexuality and yoking the tragedy of Macbeth to the murderous madness of Rose and Fred West. But Shakespeare this ain’t. Or rather it is Shakespeare (in part) but given a cut-and-paste job so that some of the words are here but not in the right order or spoken by the assigned characters. Which is why the full title of show is The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (as so described originally) – with the names crossed out. This, then, is not about Romeo and Juliet, and indeed there is not a whit of elucidation of the original play, but about a group of people who at times appropriate Shakespeare’s words. It does offer the opportunity for debate (even if internal) about the nature of the connection between the creative process and the audience reception: I can believe that everything that happens makes sense to the makers; it doesn’t to me. And I’m someone whose favourite theatre company is Forced Entertainment. One of the many problems I have with this production, co-directed by Paul Davies and Fern Smith, is that it seems to be premised on the post-structuralist comments of a Swansea academic and a throwaway line from a superficial London theatre critic, both quoted as asserting that the world has been terribly mistaken for the last 400 years in its responses to the Romeo and Juliet. A questionable premise doesn’t necessarily make for a bad show, of course, but if you do know the play and appreciate the poetry, for example, the process of defamiliarisation is very difficult – and I put my hand on my heart here and confess I not only think Volcano’s starting-point is misguided but the delivery of the words too often makes me feel uncomfortable. But crucially I just didn’t make any kind of sense out of the experience and I don’t think it’s simply that resistance that for me at least (and not just me, I suspect) made the show perplexing, frustrating and ultimately disengaging. Three young people and an older man, who seems to control them through constantly videoing them and tracking the action of a model in the corner and by having Ken and Barbie dolls (I’m told) as performers; a set that has the furniture sitting on a marked-out floor-plan; characters who have their real names (as we know from later perusal of the cast-list) and the names of characters in the play, though Tybalt is here female; an LED display board with random quotes from the text; a soundtrack that draws on West Side Story, that rather more faithful retelling of the story, and goes from Zbigniew Presner’s film music via The Hustle and a karoke version of a Monty Python song to Tom Waits…. Now I know I may be missing something quite crucial (doubtless because of my lack of pop-culture knowledge) but I could simply not connect with any of this. The opening I found so confusing I didn’t realise until the end that it actually starts (I think) with the death of the young lovers, with the Friar Laurence characters introducing it in film-noir style. The night I saw it the board crashed and so I also have to assume that whatever plot the lighting design was suggesting was on this occasion absent. I’m not difficult. I appreciate the process that “interrogates the text” and offers a theatre piece that seeks to explore what has been exposed by this deconstruction. I don’t demand a narrative or characters or authenticity or a realistic set. I relish in subversion. I enjoy irreverence. And I have enormous respect for Volcano Theatre. But the vigour and integrity of the process doesn’t necessarily lead to engagement with the performance (although I have to say some of the audience seemed to find it very funny) and I found the piece deeply unsatisfying despite the best efforts of the cast. I will revisit the production, to be sure, but on first viewing it seems a mistaken academic exercise repackaged as a postmodernist box of tricks where the company has lost sight of what it’s meant to be about. But I could be hopelessly wrong. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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