Review Out Of Blixen

Out Of Blixen
Created by Riotous Company
Dramaturg/Writer Paul Tickell

Behind The Veil
http://www.the-print-room.org/

Cryptic yet enchanting, Out Of Blixen is a devised production inspired by the story telling and life of 20th century Danish adventuress and author, Karen Blixen, who famously ran a Kenyan coffee plantation.

Mixing verbal and physical theatre, accompanied by piano and percussion of Nikola Kodjabashia, it's a piece tailor made for the dilapidated gilt glamour of the Print Room At The Coronet and this tangential introduction to the life of this intriguing figure.

Some of her life, in Africa, has already been chronicled in a 1985 movie starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford but TLT and her own sidekick in theatre adventures has never seen it nor read any books of Karen Blixen (aka Isaak Dinesen)

So it came as surprise to find that Blixen wrote intricate fables - if we were to find an equivalent English author, maybe, somewhat to our surprise, the Oscar Wilde of The Happy Prince and other tales would be the nearest in our minds but also with a playfulness of Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy.

The production reflects the delicacy but sabre-edged tone of four Blixen stories and in between we have tiny fragments of Blixen's life thrown in like piercing glass shards.

Floating white voile curtains descend from the ceilings in a simple but evocative set designed by Luis F Carvalho and lighting by David Plater picking out the flashes of colour amidst the theatre's pillars and decadent ornamentation.

Flashes of colour come also with the appearance of a small girl (Kathryn Hunter who also directs) in blue Edwardian sailor dress who bonds with a young cabin boy (Marcello Magni) on shore leave before the couple are torn apart.

The piece includes integrated moments of aeriel silk work (Mia Theil Have) at a point where birds, angels and a graceful young woman on a swing meets.  Sea voyages, Russian sailors, Persia, Scheherazade-like linking of tales through the frail figure of Blixen (Kathryn  Hunter again) and the cruelties and expediencies of 18th century feudal Denmark with a mother's self-sacrifice all figure.

The latter with the well-travelled rational nephew of a Danish feudal estate owner  (Femi Elufowoju jr) who is sorrowful but keeps in mind the intial injunction of the reminiscing sailor in play's first few lines, "We must all look after ourselves!

At just about 80 minutes, this is an elliptical take on an enigmatic writer who eventually may have expired from syphilis (par for the course in the artistocratic circles into which she was born) or may have been infected by the cult of celebrity which eventually enveloped her. The piece unpacks itself like a set of exquisite Chinese boxes and we award our own jewel-like green light for Out Of Blixen.

Review Deathwatch

Deathwatch

By Jean Genet

Death And The Maiden

 http://www.the-print-room.org/

A criminal hardman awaits execution by guillotine for murder locked up in a cell with two petty criminals who, in spite of everything, have their lives ahead of them. Or so they think ...

Directed by Geraldine Alexander, Deathwatch has  a set designed by Lee Newby with  the feel variously of a circus ring, musical box, birdcage and cage fight venue.  

This dream-like mix of the artificial, the violent and the abstract is heightened by a ringmaster/complicit prison guard figure (Naomi Frederick) - known as The Watch.

Green Eyes (Tom Varey) towers above his two cell companions in strength and audacity, but only he awaits the death sentence for the gruesome murder of a young woman during sexual intercourse. Illiterate, he depends on another to pen his letters to his girlfriend.

LeFranc (Danny Lee Wynter) acts as his secretary, reading out and writing letters for him while teenager Maurice (Joseph Quinn) hovers round the two, engaged in a feud with LeFranc while eroticizing Green-Eyes.

From their cell, they can hear the clink of the prison keys and the sound of "the slicer" as it ends the life of another prisoner.

It's a well-paced, carefully choreographed production with evocative lighting by David Plater and sound by Simon Slater.

Jean Genet wrote the first version of Deathwatch under the title Pour La Belle in 1942 while jailed in Fresnes prison.  Indeed this production of the play is accompanied by an exhibition of  Brixton prisoners'  art.

But at the time of writing, France was under Nazi occupation. Fresnes prison contained petty thieves like Genet but also resistance fighters, whether Communists or those with more right wing sympathies, many of whom were murdered by the Nazis or the Vichy regime French militia. 

Genet's own Trotskyite communist lover was to die on the barricades in 1944 at the hands of the militia while Genet flirted with the aesthetics of fascism.

In this tangle, the play eventually became Haute Surveillance, although by the 1960s Genet was inclined to dismiss it. However in 1985, a year before his death and having taken up the causes of the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, he cut and reworked it. This is the version David Rudkin has now translated as Deathwatch.

And, while not knowing the original, it feels like a faithful translation. Not only conveying the murky intense experience of three men in a prison cell power play but something more.

What came over to TLT and her own cellmate (and we're not sure whether it was an experience we enjoyed) were the complications of Genet's life as criminal and writer emeshed in dangerous criminal,  political and literary associations.

Indeed, while the name Snowball is that of a black prisoner also under sentence of death and kingpin equal to Green-Eyes on the jail block, TLT immediately thought of Animal Farm and the amalgam of Trotsky and Lenin in a character in George Orwell's book with the same name. 

Could it be that the nickname Snowball was making the rounds?! It also fits in with the themes of betrayal, power yet mistrust, certain death - and surveillance - in the play.

Maybe this immersion in imminent execution, a state punishment then in both France and the USSR,  still strikes true - a horrible inevitable real-life ritual, but it is a difficult play to love. Yet the fetishism of murder, eroticism, sexual ambiguity and sadism transformed into sacrament feels horribly accurate.  An amber/green light for a visceral evening.