Sunday 30 April 2000

Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, Season 11, April 2000

The Funniest Man in the World 
Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, Season 11
Grant Street Theatre, April  until May 13, 2000
Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Watching Daniel Keene's  short plays is like peeking into people's underwear drawers. They are intensely personal and we feel like intruders
.

In Season 11 of the Keene/ Taylor Theatre Project, we crawl through the windows into five lives. We witness the despair and anguish, the fantasies and poetry of these marginalised characters.

Director, Ariette Taylor,  has once again skilfully woven together a program of five discrete plays. Characters stroll or scuttle through each other's stories. The performance style and design (Adrienne Chisholm) is consistent throughout and Taylor colours the text with choreographic detail. Atmosphere is enhanced by sound (David Chesworth) and lighting. (Daniel Zika)

The very stylised vivid red costumes of "A Three-Legged Chair" shift an otherwise earthy dialogue into a peculiarly abstract world. Three homeless men (Lewis Fiander, Marco Chiappi, Stewart Morritt) called Tom , Dick and Harry, bicker, struggle and admire each other with intermittent references to Shakespeare.

The Funniest Man in the World is a reference to master clown, Buster Keaton. This piece is a lyrical blend of exceptional narration by the honey-toned Helen Morse, with Jonathan Taylor's silent movie solitary clown and his quirky habits.  Taylor's mimetic, balletic movement is delightful as he scampers about like a nervous mouse. This piece is sweet and charming.

We shift tempo to a rougher, more dangerous episode of street life in Duet. (Chiappi, Morritt). Two men living in a drainpipe, share not only space but stories and even a cheap whore. They drive each other to distraction and eventually to violence.

The mildest play features Morse as a fragile and vulnerable mother whose 15 year-old daughter returns to her after many years in foster care. Chloe Armstrong is sweet and credible as the daughter trying to connect with the stranger who is her mother.

Two Shanks is a potent piece of self-narration with Lewis Fiander as a rambling old geezer who finds an infant on a dust heap. This is a compelling small tale which has epic resonances. It speaks of ancient archetypes in its journey from birth to ritual death and funeral pyres.

This season is a strong mixture of the poetic and the grisly which has a tender heart.

by Kate Herbert



No comments:

Post a Comment