Review The Enchanted

The Enchanted
Based on the novel by Rene Denfeld
Adapted by Joanna Treves and Connie Treves
Devised by Pharmacy Theatre

Living Death
https://www.bunkertheatre.com/

Death Row has been in the news lately for glib reasons - part of a post election inquest and political rhetoric. However the reality of the death row exists all over the United States where jail inmates are left in limbo, sometimes for years, until the appeals process against their death sentences is exhausted.

This devised performance from Pharmacy Theatre, in an adaptation by Joanna Treves and director Connie Treves,  draws on an acclaimed novel by Oregon author Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted.

The core of the tale is  is the arrival of The Lady (Jade Ogugua), an investigator who works alongside the prisoners' legal defence teams to probe further at the eleventh hour into  the background of those facing the electric chair.

There's nothing to beat a good story and there is a good story here - as the plaudits novel writer Denfeld has received can testify. The investigator trying to save two  lives, that of Arden (Corey Montague-Sholay) and a fellow prisoner York (Hunter Bishop), as time runs out is the stuff of top notch police procedurals and Hollywood blockbusters.

Sholay grounds the whole with a stonking central performance, contorting his stocky muscular body and giving ahis  clear tender delivery of monologues. These are interspersed with the entry of The Lady into the prison and her work as she probes the backstories of the prisoners hoping to find the basis of a successful appeal.

But this is real life and, without having read the novel, we have mixed feelings about such non-naturalistic representations transformed into an exquisite fable and what at times almost becomes a dance piece.

 The collective waves of movement which involve all the cast interrupt the flow of the story and turn this staging into a self-conscious actorly piece. The introduction of small puppets feels out of proportion to the large space and the slope of the audience seats, taking the audience out of the moment.

This felt self-indulgent and lessened the impact of the individual pieces even if Sholay's performance manages to integrate the personal story of a man whose stunted mind finds some kind of freedom in Death Row and the physicality much more successfully.

All of which is a shame because there are some compelling moments. The investigator goes outside the prison interviewing relatives and telling us of their lives. Here the devised piece begins to spark theatrically. This happens sometimes at its most naturalistic and, dare we say it, filmic scenes..

There's the investigator's interview of an inmate's aunt (Georgina Morton) as The Lady starts to piece together the disturbing backgrounds of men condemned as monsters. There's also a curious interlude of a priest (Jack Staddon) and a prostitute which feels like scenes from a particular type of 1970s crime genre movie but still has some nicely honed performances..

Despite the strong performances and without having read the novel, TLT does wonder about the wisdom of turning the material into a lyrical  devised piece which sometimes tips over into the mawkish.

We recalled the direct simplicity of Oscar Wilde's poem The Ballad Of Reading Gaol with which The Enchanted shares some of the imagery and which deals much more simply with a similar issue.

Perhaps The Enchanted would work better with projections of real prison buildings and other more solid images of the outside world. As it is the poetic verbalizing sometimes swamps the piece and feels in conflict with the nitty gritty of the investigation. .

The stage, in a design by Jacob Lucy, is bare apart from the a white block suspended from the ceiling with branches splaying out. A long thin white block on the floor of the space is pushed back and forth by the cast revealing silver cans round its edge

On the whole, this feels like an overlong 90 minute piece studded with little gems from a talented cast but there is an imbalance between the lyricism and the more naturalistic sections when the story feels lost. It's an amber light for an interesting adaptation which, nevertheless, sometimes feels a little too constrained by the source material. 

Review Normal

Normal
by Anthony Neilson

Sanity On Trial
http://www.styx.space/

The gruesome tale of serial killer Peter Kürten, The Düsseldorf Ripper, executed in 1931, is surely a gift for any playwright with a mind to mine German language literature.

For the story, as related in a 1930s' sensationalist press and subsequent books including one by the trial psychiatrist, has so many echoes of literary classics. The Struwwelpeter scissorman, the grimmest of Grimm Fairy Tales, Wagner's Lohengrin, Kafka's The Trial as well as contemporary German and Hollywood horror films at a time when the two industries were intimately connected.

Yet Anthony Neilson, in one of his earliest playwriting successes, chose to interrogate the story through more forensic if also fantastical means. Normal is a memory play filtered through the mind of Kürten's defence lawyer, Justus Wehner, who finds himself in an amusement arcade outside Germany with his children many years later with a sideshow dedicated to his erstwhile client.

Normal then becomes  an exploration and critique of the law, the legal profession, psychiatry and the media through a unique trio of characters. In this it parallels Fritz Lang's celebrated 1931 movie M, also inspired by Peter Kürten's crimes, where gangland has as much legitimacy, if not more, than the police.

Wehner (Corey Montague-Sholay) is a lawyer straight out of law school who is given a quasi-masonic leg up by his colleagues. They hand him the prestigious role of defence lawyer for Kürten (Richard Ede) when the trial is the subject of national and international curiosity.

His aim is to prove that self-confessed killer Kürten is not a "normal" murderer in control of all his faculties but a lunatic who has conducted a macabre stabbing, fire raising and murder spree. In this, it seems, he is willing to go outside Germany, enlisting the help of his parents to bring the anti capital punishment Humanitarian League to pressurize the authorities.

However his mission to convert his parents, the public, the jury and even the intractable Kürten to the cause thinly veils the overweening ambition of a swot. His subsequent emotional turmoil may even contribute to making a more monstrous situation as he succumbs to a version of himself which he believes Kürten has moulded.

A three-hander,  it is the real or imagined character of Kürten, juvenile delinquent, petty thief, animal molester and slaughterer, sexual deviant, torturer, killer, trade unionist, husband and apparent respectable member of the community, who dominates.

Ede's dapper, grey-suited Kürten is naturally then at the centre of this universe with, as satellites around him, Montague-Sholay's buttoned up but easily corrupted lawyer and Cathy Walker's Frau Eva Kürten, the wife with a past.

Occasionally there is the danger of the plot becoming lost in over-stylization but for the most part the cast give elegant and visceral performances of great clarity. 

And in the midst of it all there is also the suggestion of other plausible scenarios against the accepted version of the story, even if they seem like throwaway remarks: there may be copycat killings or  Kürten may be part of a group of more than one killer.

As we have indicated, Emma Baggott's fluid yet sturdy production, like Blasted in the same season, opts for a stylized rather than naturalistic portrayal of violence, which mostly chimes well with a Germanic expressionist style.

While the subject matter is straight forward, if macabre, writer Neilson's exploration of post World War One Germany's complexities and a subtext relating the murders to the rise of National Socialism lifts the play over and beyond a mere chiller thriller. The lawyer, we are told somewhat ambigiously, managed to leave his homeland before he had blood on his hands.

A subtle, pulsing soundscape from Giles Thomas and a spare black-walled set from Grace Smart, with a chandelier of scissors hanging from the ceiling, a dining table with a chair at each end and a metal trolley prove a flexible background for the action.

Ciarán Cunningham's ingenious lighting almost becomes another character - flickering and flashing to reflect mental states.  Regimented rows of lights on the table also dig into the psyche.

An illuminated  wall transforms the action into a silent film. A sheet covering a body takes on a translucent quality reminiscent of horror movies like Frankenstein.

In short, an amber/green light for a thoughtful and forcefully-choreographed piece which we would recommend for strong performances as part of an agile, striking production probing troubled times and warped spirits.