Talking
To Yourself-
part of The Arches Award for New Stage Directors
Season.
Director -Sally Hobson
Cast - Graeme Mackay, Ewan Cameron, Ruth McElroy, Kirstin McLean,
Kamal Arafa, Sarah Green, Johnny McKnight, Julie Brown, Sonya Sier and
Kate Stannard.
Company - Arches Theatre Company
Venue - The Arches www.thearches.co.uk
0901 022 0300
Dates -2 - 5 May 2001 Performance lasts 55 mins no interval.
Reviewer -Thelma Good
Talking To Yourself is exactly what a theatre piece shouldn't
do. It should communicate, giving a journey of discovery and insights
to an audience. It often does this using our common emotional and physical
languages to explore our differences. This devised play with 10 good
young actors , directed by Sally Hobson starts well but fails to do
these things throughout, increasingly its striking images were just
that, striking not edifying as well. The overall production doesn't
meld the realism and naturalism interestingly offered in the first few
scenes.
It opens with three litter-strewing female sprites, one experienced,
one newish on the job and one learner. Then the 7 they wait for, and
whose files they've read, come to stand in a taxi queue and get soaked.
Yes real water, really wet actors, not actors who act wet, they are
wet. Some have a passion for real things on stage, I don't share it.
At first the sprites bump the 7 into one another so the 7 strike up
the kind of conversations strangers have. Here the play is most successful,
humorous and light in touch, the well observed acting draws us in, involving
our interest and concern.
But next the 7 start to make statements about themselves and then about
the human condition, using the glib phrases a badly trained counsellor
gives. Believability in the characters' uniqueness goes, as nameless
they give us potted histories of why each is as we see them. Nor do
I welcome music which pushes emotional buttons as the actor pushes the
same ones, it often undermines the actor and makes the audience feel
manipulated. The play's earlier promise was only maintained when the
Big Issue Seller, in a extraordinarily fine physical performance, transforms
into a reptilian equivalent of his human character.
Otherwise Talking To Yourself became yet another of these devised
plays with no dramatic core but hollow platitudes baldly stating, rather
than offering, insights. The medium of the stage is best served when
you show dynamics and change through the course of the play so that
understandings arise in the audiences' minds not thrust forcibly upon
them. That's theatre's power and its subtlety, enabling the audience
to think for itself. But then that's my opinion, yours may be different.
You can see Dead Pan and Talking To Yourself in the same
evening as they run back to back.
© Thelma Good 2 May 2001
The Arches Award for New Stage Directors -
The other winners are Adrian Osmond - Lion
in the Street,
Martin Danziger - Dead Pan