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San Diego.
Premiered at the 2003 Edinburgh International Festival.
Playwright - David Greig.
Directors - Marisa Zanotti and David Greig.
Designer - Simon Vincenzi.
Lighting Designer - Chahine Yavroyan.
Sound Designer - Graeme Miller.
Fight Director - Alison de Burgh.
Company - Co-production between The Tron Theatre Company Glasgow
and Edinburgh International Festival. (You can make your own comments
on San Diego on the Tron Website.)
Cast - here .
Venue - Tron Theatre Glasgow.
Dates - 16
Oct - 1 Nov at 7:30pm Not Sun or Mon).
Run Time - 2 hours 30 mins including 15 mins interval.
Reviewer - Thelma Good.
Takes off again with top flight Crew.
San Diego- Tron Theatre & EIF Production. Huss Garbiya as David
the Patient and Abigail Davies as Laura.
© Kevin Low 2003.
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Experiencing David Grieg's play for the second time (review
of premiere at 2003 EIF) is like flying with less cloud cover. You can
see ahead more and know roughly the route. This play is like a complex
poem, or a piece of music where themes are introduced in various keys,
from various different instruments and directions. There are many riffs
about home, marketing, modern countries and lives where no one really
knows who or where they are.
If you like your plays straight with no deviation, subtext, drifting or
gradually emerging meanings I'd give this one a miss. But if you like
varations on several themes and picking up on the loose links, this sideways,
morose and at times humourous look at the worlds we live in rewards. It's
a flight into David Grieg's head where his characters are so insistent
at living their varied lives and encounters, he has to channel hop their
dialogue.
It also is another chance to watch fine actors get to grips with a complex
and demanding text. The bleeding moving heart of it all is Huss Garbiya
as David the "only kidding" Patient and Abigail Davies
as Laura the girl who is so hungry for human warmth she feeds herself
and David part of herself. Theirs are some of the most extraordinarily
loving and distressing scenes in drama, and their acting makes you flinch
and cry.
First seen on a larger stage which gave helpful distance to the orginal
performances as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, San Diego
now has two new actors. Forbes Masson brings a more sangine and
wry nature to the character of David Grieg while Michael Fenner
gives us The Pilot in a performance which has us feeling more his awareness
of his torn nature between being a captain of a airliner and a man who
could not offer his distressed daughter, Laura a home despite owning lots
of places in various countries.
With its depth and multi layered determination to let the stories float
free and not tether them to tied lines, San Diego is an innovative play
from Greig. With his co-director Marisa Zanotti he has created a rewarding
complexity to delight those who can let themselves trust this distinctive
theatrical pilot.
© Thelma Good 17 October 2003. - Published on EdinburghGuide.com
Text is published by Faber And Faber as a StageScript and costs
£8:99. Available from the publisher, The Tron Theatre and good bookshops.
August and October 2003 Cast: (Two new cast
members in October 2003) David Greig - Billy Boyd (in August 2003) and
Forbes Masson (in October 2003), The Pilot - Tony Guilfoyle (in August
2003) and Michael Fenner (in October 2003), Pious/David in Consultancy
- Callum Cuthbertson, Laura - Abigail Davies, David the Patient - Huss
Garbiya, Innocent/Bedouin Tribesman/David in Consultancy - Paul Thomas
Hickey, Marie/San Diego Cop - Vicki Liddelle, Daniel - Milton Lopes, Andrew/San
Diego Cop/David in Consultancy - Nicholas Pinnock and Stewardess/Amy(Hooker)/Sarah
- Gabriel Quigley.
Review of the Premiere Preformance of San Diego at the 2003
Edinburgh International Festival.
Playwright David Greig.
Directors Marisa Zanotti and David Greig.
Company Co-production between The Tron Theatre Company Glasgow
and Edinburgh International Festival.
Seen at Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh.
Reviewer Thelma Good.
San Diego is not only written and co-directed by David Greig, it
also contains himself or a person called David Greig, played by Billy
Boyd, as one of the characters. Inspired by his first trip to the
US in 2000 Greig takes a trip into our modern shifting world. After last
year's critical and box office success of Outlying Islands, here
Greig returns to the theatrical multi-layered, not-tying-up-all-the-ends
plays he has developed in One Way Street, The Cosmonaut's Last Message
to The Woman He Once Loved In The Soviet Union and The Speculator.
It's a highly assured return and with Marisa Zanotti as his well chosen
co-director the production travels along with many short scenes, and is
only occasionally held up. We meet an increasing number of women called
Amy and quite a few men called David (reminding us though each is unique
there's a pressure to brand name even among people). It reflects on the
enormous dislocation and ennui of our present day transitory lives. There
are several strands. The Pilot of Greig's plane, magnificently underplayed
by Tony Guilfoyle, the hooker, Gabriel Quigley one of the
Amys, his son actor Andrew, Nicholas Pinnock and Andrew's praying
to God wife Marie Vicki Liddelle all in California. Andrew is playing
the pilot in an aircraft hijacking movie and Quigley who in another
role and scenes plays an actual stewardess, here plays his on screen uniform-torn-in-revealing-ways
stewardess.
The Pilot has another strand in his daughter, the distressed and distressing
Laura, Abigail Davies in London, with her counsellor, Tamzin
Griffin and another patient David, Huss Garbiya - David and
Laura are attracted to one another, her extreme self-harming results in
Davies and Garbiya giving the most extraordinary and
enlightening scenes in a production which is full of them. Another major
strand contains Callum Cuthbertson's Innocent and Paul Thomas
Hickey's Pious. These men try to find a job for the African stowaway
on Greig's plane's undercarriage, Daniel Milton Lopes, whose line
"I didn't come to San Diego to ....( fill in the job they're trying
to instruct him in)", hilariously backflips Reginald Perrin's boss's
"I didn't get where I am today...". There's also the Davids
- Hickey, Cuthbertson, and Pinnock joined by Quigley,
all management consultants brainstorming by mobile phone tele-conferencing
on how to get people to travel by plane, a fine dig at the vacuous attempts
to commercialise concepts for market lemmings.
The staging designed by Simon Vincenzi, finely lit by Chahine Yavroyan,
has white walls and a blue floor, the only entrance is on one side, with
a palm tree at the back beside a drinks machine, two monitors on their
sides on the floor, and one hanging from the ceiling. At the start the
airport look of the play is increased by the quantity of wheely cases,
(some of which contain costumes or props and are used as convenient perches
by the actors) positioned front faced towards the audience all over the
stage, only the motionless stewardess, complimentary drinks tray tray
in hand, near centrestage stops your mind going down the evacuated airport
scenario.
Greig's play sheds light and a painful theatrical lyricism on another
type of evacuation, not of physical buildings but the evacuation our modern
selves impose on our beings and our descendants as we move again and again
about the world in the stratosphere, always going somewhere but rarely
if ever finding ourselves. San Diego touched down here in August
for a brief premiere run, it will be taking off with a slightly different
cast crew in the Autumn. It's a trip to book for, delivering accomplished
modern theatre from a team, Greig and Zanotti, who look set to become
as well respected for their extraordinary visions and elliptical approaches
as directors Peter Handke and Robert Lepage.
© Thelma Good 16 August 2003 - Published on www.EdinburghGuide.com
Theatre Editor, Thelma Good's e-mail is
thelma@edinburghguide.com
Although every effort has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the
information presented in these pages, no responsibility can be accepted
for any errors or omissions.
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