Review Fool For Love

Fool For Love
by Sam Shepherd

Looking For Mr Right
http://found111.co.uk/

It's a final trip up the stairs to see a play at found 111i n the former Central St Martin's School School of Art. The theatre company is now bidding farewell to its grunge venue and seeking another site-specific space after its successful sojourn on Charing Cross Road.

In the meantime, it's back to familiar Sam Shepard territory, a motel room in California's Mojave Desert where May (Lydia Wilson) and Eddie (Adam Rothenberg) brawl and tear themselves apart.

Eddie has tracked down May, driving over a thousand miles, he says, to pluck her up and take her to a piece of land he has bought in Wyoming where he plans to raise horses, chickens and make a place for May.

But he finds May, who maintains she has now reinvented herself as a good citizen, gained a job and a beau, more than reluctant to drop everything and drive back with him in his horse truck.

All the while, a lanky, grizzled Marlboro Man spectre (Joe McGann) watches over the pair while into the secrets, lies and battles comes the unsuspecting gentle Martin (Luke Neal) who is wooing May. 

A two-level thrust stage designed by Ben Stones works on two levels, on low stilts at the back is the run-down motel room with its door smeared with grime.

Then in front a gravelly front yard reaches out to the audience in this initimate venue. Angular neon lights and fairy lights also flash and flicker within the physical and psychic space.

It's a curious self-conscious piece which mixes the hardscrabble life of near-trailer trash folks with the language of the movie business. As May, Wilson brings a taut, stubborn fragility, struggling to free herself from the emotional lassoo pulling her towards tequila-drinking Eddie, away from Martin.

These are characters, apart from Martin, who are all physically and mentally in their own self-contained space yet affecting each other's lives. This double perspective doesn't always catch fire in Simon Evans' production, even if the individual performances remain strong with a strain of dark humour.

A quick passing one-act drama, the laconic play shoots its arrow and lands in just over an hour. The clanging, slamming door soundscape (sound design by Edward Lewis) takes us inside the characters as much as their words and actions.

A final stunning image with lighting by Elliot Griggs merges the movies and the itinerant world of these abandoned souls. With its lingering thin, whip sharp quality, this Fool For Love ultimately finds an elemental power. It's an amber/green light from your own bareback theatre reviewing TLT and her trusty steed.

Review Unfaithful

Unfaithful

By Owen McCafferty

Telling Tales

http://found111.co.uk/

An Irish man and a young English woman walk into a bar. It could be a post modern feminist joke or a pitch for the next steamy movie thriller or TV box set. Or, as in this case, the premise behind Owen McCafferty's play at fashionably grunge pop-up venue, Found111.

This bedroom drama  revolves around two couples, one Irish and one English: Respectively middle-aged wispily tense Joan (Niamh Cusack) and her beetle-browed husband of many years Tom (Sean Campion); Twenty-somethings pot-smoking sober suited Peter (Matthew Lewis) and  chavvily atrractive Tara (Ruta Gedmintas) with the former gathering up money to finance their lives.

Told in a series of flashbacks and flash forwards, this rather schematic piece criss-crosses the two couples. Irish plumber Tom admits to his wife his hotel bar encounter with a young woman. He lumbers through a few hoops of lies and half truths before coming up with what may or may not be the truth.

In a rush of resentment, Joan, a dinner lady supervisor, decides to ring the changes and books a room in the same hotel paying for a male escort, who turns out to be, lo and behold, Peter the other half of Tara   apparently a Maths' student dropout turned supermarket till girl  - she of the hooped earrings, green parka, denim mini skirt and long legs.

The scenes of this tale of infidelity are intercut with some clever in-character scene changes skilfully directed by Adam Penford with a simple ingenious design by Richard Kent transforming a bedroom to a bar with one swipe of a sliding wardrobe door.

Nonetheless, interesting directorial and designer tableaux feel more substantial than this rather colourless play. While Cusack reveals a lithe sexiness beneath her care-worn demeanour changing into a clinging Chinese silk dress before meeting her English gigolo, there are no other transforming or revelatory developments for the others. 

As a face-value plot about adultery or, as we suspect, a metaphor for the brave new world of TV and film which has developed since the internet, it feels unsatisfying. Still, it's deftly acted, precisely styled and fluently directed with the story of the older couple taking some telling twists and turns. We therefore give an  amber light for this stroll into the red light district of relationships.

Review Bug

Bug
By Tracy Letts

Swatting It
 http://found111.co.uk/ 

Strange and horrible things happen in  fictional motels:  Stabbings in showers in Psycho, paedophilia in Lolita, Thelma and Louise running from  the law before a final cliff-hanger,  a helpless female saved from mobsters by a Brit secret service agent in the novel The Spy Who Loved Me, drugs and murder in Touch of Evil. 

To this litany of weirdness and characters, playwright Tracy Letts added Agnes and Peter in Bug. Pothead Agnes (Kate Fleetwood)  is holed up in an Oaklahoma motel room with only a crack pipe for company, avoiding her ex-con ex-husband Jerry (Alec Newman). 

That's save for  the occasional visit of lesbian friend RC (Daisy Lewis). RC brings along gentle giant (shades of Steinbeck another motel afficianado) Peter (James Norton), seemingly a Gulf War veteran who introduces himself fetchingly saying, "I'm not an axe murderer", only that he "makes people nervous" because he "picks up on things".

He's certainly no Jack Torrance in The Shining , but gradually Peter starts to drop the odd line drawing Agnes, already susceptible to National Enquirer type stories,  into a world view veering from the comically conspiratorial to the fatally self-destructive. 

And those things he picks up on? They turn out to have a corporeal manifestation - a supposed insect infestation where the remedy proves worse than living with those pesky microscopic critters.

Bug, mixing Hitchcock with Kafka with Hollywood and comic book scifi horror, a hefty dollop of the X-Files and even a nightmare possibly from an Ian McEwan novel,  premiered in London in 1996.

But this was also post Watergate and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and very real health fears for Gulf War veterans. And the year of a real Asian beetle infestation in New York plus journalists revealing  the CIA promotion of crack cocaine importation to fund right-wing rebel groups in Nicaragua.

Yet in the end, the power of Bug the play lies not in state conspiracy, but how far over the edge the isolated and disappointed - and drug-addled - can be pushed and nudged into pushing themselves.

Still, lines thrown in at times - "Women aren't my bag" and "I'm playing devil's advocate" throw into question the delusion and self-knowledge of the couple. If - in a play written before mass internet usage - the media, literature, film, the news, even the psychology of acting and the creation of "character" are the instigators or results of tragedy.

With the audience as voyeurs on every side and looming plaster beams - there's a Psycho bathroom in one corner, the seedy motel room door and window at the other - it's an evening of proximities.

The changing light (lighting designer Richard Howell) outside is just discernible through the cheap curtains as Agnes crosses to the mini bar in the third corner wedged between members of the audience. Indeed viewed from above the bedroom set may even resemble a bug's compound eye.;)

There are subtle sound effects from Edward Lewis from the first chirping cricket (it's not a spoiler to say that this jiminy cricket gets the chop)  to the real or imaginary helicopters circling overhead near the end.

The Charing Cross Road venue proves perfect for this visceral grunge production directed by Simon Evans (oh, did we mention James Norton was in it?:)), both as a former art school and as the dilapidated grafitti-strewn home of Found 111. Whether the play would have the same impact on a formal proscenium stage is debatable.

Kate Fleetwood's Agnes and James Norton's Peter crash and burn, gnawing into themselves, within touching distance and it's the physical nearness which resonates, Daisy Lewis's RC and Alec Newman's Jerry frame the action of the junkie couple with strong performances. While Carl Prekopp's role of Dr Sweet  seems not so much underwritten as deliberately jarring.

With a nightmarish comic book quality, TLT and her own little bug(gy) laughed,  cringed and gasped spontaneously in the right places. Be prepared for blood, gore, dentistry beyond Marathon Man, alongside extreme population pest control and you'll have an enjoyable shlock horror rollercoaster evening. A green light.