Showing posts with label Charlie Dorfman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlie Dorfman. Show all posts
Sunday, 11 June 2017
Review The Ugly One
Tim Gopsill finds a satire on identity and the body beautiful catches a zeitgeist but fails to fulfil its full potential.
The Ugly One
by Marius von Mayenberg
Face Value
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/
Marius von Mayenberg's 2007 black comedy is resonant in our age of selfies and self-branding, revolving round the conceit anything can now be replicated and mass produced.
In fact this German satire centres on a solo main premise and joke and, luckily, it is a clever one, even if there is a clunkiness about the accompanying gags and plot development.
When Lette (Charlie Dorfman), a brilliant electronics engineer, is considered by his bosses too ugly to promote his own invention, his assistant Karlmann (Arian Nik impressive in his debut professional role) gets the job and accompanying perks.
Lette then opts for what he assumes is an exclusive solution, plastic surgery turning him into the acknowledged most handsome man in the world and giving him back the gig for which he was originally so unceremoniously turned down.
However he doesn't foresee the plastic surgeon (T'nia Miller) capitalising on the success of the brand she has created out of him and profiting from mass production, effectively making Lette obsolete.
His assistant and subsequent rival Karlmann emerges with an indentikit face. The two even end up competing for two women, Lette's wife Fanny and a businesswoman (both played by Indra Ové).
The female roles involve a good deal of squirming and slinking about in a seductive fashion at which, it must be said, Ové excels.
Lette's spouse Fanny gets most of the really corny laughs. As Lette’s invention is some kind of hardware plug, Fanny, in her seductive passages, has so many cringeworthy gags about plugs, sockets and the like that it all skirts dangerously near to the tiresome.
Director Weise's and designer Loren Elstein’s staging is ingenious, using the Park 90. the smaller studio space, filling it with a square rostrum functioning as work desk, table and bed.
Meanwhile the floor space is also a projection screen (projection designer Louise Rhoades-Brown).
Weise has plenty of boisterous comic physicality in his production, but his direction also lacks a light touch.
The play deals with such an abstract issue in Maja Zade's translation, greater subtlety and a tad more whimsy in both the acting and the direction would have been welcome. Instead everything feels rather signposted and heavy-handed.
The plot eventually takes its narcissistic logic to the extreme and this certainly is a play with an intriguing premise. It's energetically directed and acted by Weise and its four-strong cast with lighting by Amy Mae and sound by Giles Thomas.
However it needs more nuance, along with much sharper, pacier timing, to make the satire really sting and The Ugly One therefore gets an amber light.
Thursday, 21 July 2016
Review Some Girl(s)
Some Girl(s)
by Neil LaBute
The Glittering Prize
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/whats-on
Guy, or maybe it would be more accurate to say (Some) Guy is a writer. He's reached a kind of pinnacle, a short story in The New Yorker. Wow, let all college educated would-be writers envy him! Now he's going on a pilgrimage through America. Many would say a peverse pilgrimage.
Instead of a Stag Night before his marriage, he's going on a stag journey to search out his former girlfriends, all of whom he has dumped in one way or another, after his beginnings working in a grocery store in Seattle through to the quest finale in Los Angeles or, more accurately, Hollywood.
Our latter day (almost) chaste pilgrim (Charlie Dorfman) seems bent on extracting every exquisite ounce of experience from his budget hotel room odyssey, locking horns and messing with minds of his ex-squeezes. Women he has known previously both mentally and in the biblical sense, before he gets, in his words, "hitched".
Mom of two redhead Sam (Elly Condron), his High School sweetheart, still flushes with anger as she recalls he dumped her just before Prom Night for another Yearbook princess whom he claims was like a "sister" rather than love interest.
Good time gal Tyler (Roxanne Pallett) has an inventive way of introducing him to French cigarettes, but he left her after finishing his Masters in Illinois, while being neither quixotic enough nor villainous enough to make it as the literary character he imagines.
Then his own Mrs Robinson at Harvard, lecturer in gender studies steely Mrs Bergstrom (Carolyn Backhouse), whose husband, his college mentor, is characterised in Shakespearean terms as "a cuckold".
All this, before the ultimate link in the chain, both hotel-room-wise and career wise, Hollywood Bobbi (Carley Stenson) whom we may expect to be actress, but instead turns out to be a medic who apparently exposes his injurious way of rewriting history to suit his own clumsy literary predilections.
Guy moves through hotel rooms and past flames with an almost polygamous relish, a collector, where his words have a scriptural resonance in their cross referencing as much as being part of his self-appointed script.
At the end of the first act, TLT and her ongoing automotive companion was willing to class this slick production and the play as merely enjoyable and well-acted with a schematic feel.
It's the deepening of the play in the second act which changed their minds as the commercial, the political, the craft and Guy's ability to conform to the set byways and highways leading to the Hollywood pitch merge. It's ss if he were some latter day Mowgli methodically educated into the Law Of The Jungle in a society and craft based on the tutor-tutee relationship. As he himself says, "Hey, I'm a quick study
For with every episode, divided by airline video projections and rock music, we look forward and backward understanding how his career has progessed. And while each woman has every reason to hate his guts and his ascension to the New Yorker where his story has cannibalised their lives they also participate in his progress towards Hollywood and seem to know they are shaping his success as they act out the stereotypes for him. .
Directed by Gary Condes, this is a production which has some very self-conscious scene changes. Yet this actually is in keeping with the feel of the writer as apprentice moving through the chain and a series of studio-like scenarios where women resign themselves to teaching him about scriptwriting stereotypes.
Guy's not especially talented, he thinks he is autonomous and is allowed to be downright sadistic and ruthless. Yet at the same time he makes all the right moves. For a play and production with skilful hurt and heft, we give a green light.
by Neil LaBute
The Glittering Prize
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/whats-on
Guy, or maybe it would be more accurate to say (Some) Guy is a writer. He's reached a kind of pinnacle, a short story in The New Yorker. Wow, let all college educated would-be writers envy him! Now he's going on a pilgrimage through America. Many would say a peverse pilgrimage.
Instead of a Stag Night before his marriage, he's going on a stag journey to search out his former girlfriends, all of whom he has dumped in one way or another, after his beginnings working in a grocery store in Seattle through to the quest finale in Los Angeles or, more accurately, Hollywood.
Our latter day (almost) chaste pilgrim (Charlie Dorfman) seems bent on extracting every exquisite ounce of experience from his budget hotel room odyssey, locking horns and messing with minds of his ex-squeezes. Women he has known previously both mentally and in the biblical sense, before he gets, in his words, "hitched".
Mom of two redhead Sam (Elly Condron), his High School sweetheart, still flushes with anger as she recalls he dumped her just before Prom Night for another Yearbook princess whom he claims was like a "sister" rather than love interest.
Good time gal Tyler (Roxanne Pallett) has an inventive way of introducing him to French cigarettes, but he left her after finishing his Masters in Illinois, while being neither quixotic enough nor villainous enough to make it as the literary character he imagines.
Then his own Mrs Robinson at Harvard, lecturer in gender studies steely Mrs Bergstrom (Carolyn Backhouse), whose husband, his college mentor, is characterised in Shakespearean terms as "a cuckold".
All this, before the ultimate link in the chain, both hotel-room-wise and career wise, Hollywood Bobbi (Carley Stenson) whom we may expect to be actress, but instead turns out to be a medic who apparently exposes his injurious way of rewriting history to suit his own clumsy literary predilections.
Guy moves through hotel rooms and past flames with an almost polygamous relish, a collector, where his words have a scriptural resonance in their cross referencing as much as being part of his self-appointed script.
At the end of the first act, TLT and her ongoing automotive companion was willing to class this slick production and the play as merely enjoyable and well-acted with a schematic feel.
It's the deepening of the play in the second act which changed their minds as the commercial, the political, the craft and Guy's ability to conform to the set byways and highways leading to the Hollywood pitch merge. It's ss if he were some latter day Mowgli methodically educated into the Law Of The Jungle in a society and craft based on the tutor-tutee relationship. As he himself says, "Hey, I'm a quick study
For with every episode, divided by airline video projections and rock music, we look forward and backward understanding how his career has progessed. And while each woman has every reason to hate his guts and his ascension to the New Yorker where his story has cannibalised their lives they also participate in his progress towards Hollywood and seem to know they are shaping his success as they act out the stereotypes for him. .
Directed by Gary Condes, this is a production which has some very self-conscious scene changes. Yet this actually is in keeping with the feel of the writer as apprentice moving through the chain and a series of studio-like scenarios where women resign themselves to teaching him about scriptwriting stereotypes.
Guy's not especially talented, he thinks he is autonomous and is allowed to be downright sadistic and ruthless. Yet at the same time he makes all the right moves. For a play and production with skilful hurt and heft, we give a green light.
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