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Oleanna
Playwright - David Mamet
Director - Steven Little
Set Designer - Jon Bausor
Lighting Designer - David Holmes
Composer - Lucy Melvin
Voice Coach - Ros Steen
Company - Theatre Informer & Howedn Park Centre Livingston
Venues & Dates - Tour Details at end of review
Seen at the Netherbow
Reviewer - Thelma Good
Frightening real and certain
Words and touches can be misinterpreted and that is the nub of John's
problems with Carol and Carol's problem with John. This is a play you
go to the pub after to argue about who did what to whom and was anyone
in the right? Greg Powrie is John the Professor hoping to get tenure and
a house. And Carol, Irene Allan is his student who has struggled to get
to academia and finds it's corruption and rituals things she and her Group
have issues with.
Jon Bausor has created a set of a trompe l'oiel bookcase with the only
readable title Sociology, the skewed circular carpet with a smaller circular
rug lying off centre and the English Dictionary prominently lying in the
out-tray. The perfect setting for these encounters where what lies in
the people's mental in-tray drives them. Split into two halfs the play
makes you squirm and reel as Carol full of her version of truth repeated
goes back to get her point well and truly across. Allan's Carol is frightening
real and certain, uncompromising, unwilling to accept less than prefect
behaviour from others. The encounters show her control and her power.
And John, well he's an ass for letting her see him alone after the first
time. He does indeed undermine his own position writing that education
is just a warehouse for youth, but if that gets him tenure and security?
More of us are like John than Carol. and degrees aren't about truth now
if they ever were. Powrie has John just right, the flush in his cheeks
in the second half betrays the professor's fear. Mamet's play is here
strong and disturbing for we live increasingly in a world where experts,
academicians use words to hide their ignorance behind and rights and human
failings are the complex battleground we fall in and fail to understand.
Theatre Informer's fine production informs and provokes the audience to
cry out at how dangerous different interpretations can be.
It's John I and my husband routed for despite his all to visible flaws,
we don't want to meet Carol represents the danger of seeming moral rectitude
when you think a prefect world is attainable here on earth. And Ros Steen's
voice coaching gives the actors two great accents, the East Coast academic
John and the foreign tinged American of Carol and Lucy Melvin's music
sets the tone.
© Thelma Good 13 February 2002.
EdinburghGuide Reviews of plays Steven Little has directed
for his company Theatre Informer - Man
with Connections production and the Much
Ado About Nothing he directed at the Byre in 2004..
Tour Begins
11 & 12 Feb 2002 at 7:30pm Livingston Howden Park Centre
01506 433634
14 Feb at 7:30pm Edinburgh Netherbow Theatre 0131 556
9579
14 Feb at 7:30pm East Kilbride Village Theatre 01355
248669
15 & 16 Feb at 8:15pm St Andrew's Byre Theare 01334
475000
18 Feb at 7:30pm Falkirk Town Hall 01324 506850
20 Feb at 7:30pm Paisley Arts Centre 0141 887 1010
21 Feb at 7:45pm Cumbernauld Theatre 01236 732887
22 & 23 Feb at 7:30pm Glasgow the Arches 0901 022
0300 (calls cost 25p per min)
Tour Ends
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