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Johnothan Pram - On/Off. - Tour.
Actor - Ben Faulks.
Director - Ben Faulks.
Company - Johnothan Pram. Company
Website.
2006 Tour Dates and Times - here .
Seen to review at Glasgow The Arches on 4 March 2006.
Reviewer - Tom Tàbori.
Removing the electric fig leaf.
As soon as the play begins the lights go off and the audience switch on
the supplied torches. So begins their relationship with Johnothan Pram,
whom the audience are relied on to illuminate. Yet not all the time, his
generator gives him intermittent power but with the world having stopped
turning and its population having departed for the sunny side, he struggles
to maintain his twenty first century standards, waiting for the electricity
board 'to return life to the preferred pace'.
Pram negotiates the perils of his bunker by plugging himself into the
dangling extension cables, attached to his back like an umbilical cord,
trailing behind him like Theseus' string. At the centre of this maze is
a small organ that seems to power the generator but is also where he delivers
his narrative, part explanation of his predicament partly a way of remembering
language. The surreal strains of the organ he speaks over throwing the
whole performance at this crumbling centre into even cruder absurdity.
But despite the awkward movements that the solo performer uses to convey
the crookedness of twenty-first century man without his crutches, the
play has a real beauty, such as when Pram cuts his umbilical cord and
sets oscillating the dangling extension cables, pendulums that throw mad
shadows about under the flickering light the audience' torches give him.
It is this torches concept which is the play's greatest delivery of theatre's
currents thoughts; as his performance wanes in the blackness, it is down
to the audience when they choose to switch off the light and cease to
sustain Johnothan Pram.
On/Off touches all the post modern bases, renewing the ideas its
flyer credits to Beckett, Kafka, Lynch, Svankmajer, Toffler and Don Vlan
Vliet. Johnothan Pram won't break down under the circumstances, and his
performance of normality grates to behold, but looks not unlike the twenty-first
century even before the lights went out.
Indeed, it begins to feel like Pram is the twenty-first century performance,
laid bare by removing its electric fig leaf that normally cover his blushes.
The audience of the fourth of February were mostly theatre studies students
and what wasn't new still ensured they saw a very strong endorsement of
the front lines of theatre. The cutting edge may not have been cutting
but the power of 'how far we have come' is beautifully demonstrated, as
in the absurd ballroom dance with the dressed up hoover, or the wielding
of the two angle-poise lamps, one in each hand looking like one of the
machines his humanism is struggling to distinguish himself from. A very
entertaining night's reminder of where we are.
©Tom Tàbori 4 February 2006 - Published on 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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