Review | After the End
March 1st 2009 14:37
:
After the End
I believe London born playwright Dennis Kelly turns 40 next year; he's written many plays for stage and radio and these days is on commission to the RSC and the Royal National Theatre.
Like most playwrights he has some curious early work written for two actors, two handed plays or two-handers we call them. Two-handers are cheaper to produce in the theatre compared to a cast of more than two and they are very challenging tricky things to write. After The End was first produced in 2004 hot on the heels of Debris; both plays position a world for the audience that present a man and a woman in an unreal situation. Both plays deal with pain, love and loss.
The modern British theatrical aesthetic tends to be dour, grey and severe. Imagine being inspired by Pinter and Jo Orton for example and having a canon that includes Edward Bond and Steven Berkoff, there's a lot of darkness and quite a bit of confrontational imagery thrown in when you consider the playing field.
Bond for example, shocked audiences by presenting a punk character on stage tossing a brick into a baby pram, playwright Sarah Kane gave audiences incredibly violent stage action including rape and murder, Berkoff had actors spitting on the audience: uncanny as it seems it's sincerely a barrel of laughs depending on the mood you're in, but as I watch it, I can really relate to the phrase Stiff upper lip. Alluding to the infamous habit of Britons avoiding showing any emotion - thus compelling playwrights, word-smiths and performance-artists to be outlandishly confrontational just to get a rise out of an audience.
Kelly's play After The End features in the 2009 Adelaide Fringe, playing at The Bakehouse Theatre in Angas Street. A highly wrought situation that seems suspiciously obvious and horrifically real from the first scene plays out over ninety minutes in real time, a week or more in the staged reality.
Louise a young woman (Hannah Norris) has come-around after being unconscious to discover she's in a cold steely bomb shelter with a bloke she knows from the pub Mark (Nick Pelomis); he's telling her about his dreadful experience, what he saw as he saved her life by bringing her here to his shelter. Charred humans still fighting for their lives as blackened chunks of them crumble.
Essentially Mark is describing an apocalyptic bomb blast and Louise is trying to reconcile this with her feelings. After all, she's stuck down in this tiny cold space with a dull loser.
Director Daniel Clarke has combined the talents of designer Wendy Todd, sound designer Jason Sweeny and lighting designer Sue Grey-Gardner to come up with an authentic but subtle set, everything is pared down to the bare minimum, lights are well focused and utilized in order to assist the many scene changes, the sound is well constructed highly atmospheric yet superbly unassuming.
The production is still fresh in its season (it plays until March 22) and the performances are somewhat imbalanced at the moment; the play, being a two-hander relies heavily on convincing performances. While the character of Louise has a remarkably startling journey, Mark's journey is deeply complex and perhaps a little easier to emotionally generalize from an acting point of view.
Sometimes an actor plays the ultimate betrayal of a character by restricting their emotional range because of what their character is in the circumstance; for instance say the character is a murderer and an actor plays against being like a murderer to assist with the dynamic tension of the text, this can back-fire and make a performance seem lacking in natural human variety and virtues. It can make a character seem two dimensional. It is a difficult balance to achieve, particularly so with a dark comic vein running through a play. Pelomis has not yet quite found the balance in Mark, which grapples and grates a little with Norris' Louise who is buoyant and consistently believable. This is something that will improve as the season unrolls.
Clarke takes us as authentically through the play as he can, and both actors deliver committed performances, shockingly so within this particular genre of British theatre where violent sexual imagery is de rigeur. Ultimately it's an early play of a now career-playwright who is getting a lot of attention, this play is one of the reasons why people took an interest in him in the first place but I wouldn't call it a great play at all. It's an interesting play structurally and it shows a fair command of dialogue laced with sharp dark humour. It's nonsensical and unreal for all its bold attempts at suspending our disbelief in a similar way to a horror movie where you watch characters doing something you know is going to be a bad idea but they do it anyway. You know those moments in a cinema or watching a DVD and you're saying "Don't go out there!" and of course - they go out there...
Although the story seems like a no-brainer pretty early on and it's not until the last scene when the twist that made Kelly an interesting playwright in the early days develops; it is predictable but dramatically compelling enough to arrest the attention. It is not a production one enjoys for the content as the story unfolds - it's a highly pitched power struggle between a man and a woman saying something about pain, love, loss and the universality of sad lonely people. Not at all uplifting and very intense = Not a happy night out at the theatre unless you want to be shocked and disturbed. If you feel like being mortally horrified you'll love it; otherwise it's great food for thought.
What would you do if you woke up with a whining bore in a locked bomb shelter?
David Jobling
Posted January 15, 2009
If you were the last woman on earth, who would you choose for the last man? For poor Louise it's not the gorgeous, intelligent man of her dreams. Instead, she is trapped with her rather unnerving work colleague Mark.
Daniel Clarke presents the first professional Australian production of the critically acclaimed play After the End by one of the UK's most successful contemporary playwrights Dennis Kelly for the 2009 Adelaide Fringe.
Daniel Clarke the Artistic Director of the Adelaide Lesbian and Gay Cultural and Arts Feast Festival produced a hit show in the 2006 Adelaide Fringe, The Bogus Woman, this production is Daniel's first directorial outing in South Australia since living and working as a theatre director in the UK for 4 years. After the End stars Hannah Norris and Nick Pelomis, with designs by Wendy Todd, lighting by Sue Grey-Gardner and sound design by Jason Sweeney. The production has received support from Arts SA and the Adelaide Festival Centre's InSpace: Development Program.
Louise (Hannah Norris) wakes to find herself with her work colleague, Mark, (Nick Pelomis) in his 1980s backyard nuclear bomb shelter. A terrorist 'dirty bomb' has gone off in central London and Mark has rescued Louise. Louise has no memory of the bomb going off at the pub where they were both drinking at the time or in fact how she got to the shelter.
Mark's back is burnt and his descriptions of the world outside the shelter are both ghastly and vivid. They may well be the only survivors. They must remain under ground for at least three weeks waiting for the nuclear fall-out to dissipate. Mark is always prepared for the worst and has everything he thinks they will need to survive; tinned chilli, Dungeons and Dragons and a knife - now all they need to do is to wait until it's safe to go outside. Can they survive the attack? Can they survive each other?
As the play progresses the audience learns that Mark, the awkward, shy office nerd, an outsider is in love with Louise, the popular girl, liked by all. As the pressure of confinement takes its toll on the two characters it becomes clear that Mark's unrequited love is dangerously unhealthy. Perhaps for the first time in Mark's life, whilst they are in the shelter, he is in control. It is his shelter, he controls when they eat and what they eat, how they pass the time and what conversations they have.
Daniel Clarke said 'Kelly has brilliantly taken the political and examined it through the personal. He has created a microcosm of society - Kelly's play looks at territory and control - Mark believes that what he wants is right and that what he thinks is the best. He will do whatever he has to, to make Louise see things the same way as him. The audience are in for an intense roller coaster ride of an emotional journey. This is intense challenging theatre'.
After the End plays in the Bakehouse Theatre 255 Angas Street Adelaide from February 25th (preview) to March 22nd. Tickets are priced from $20 (preview) to $35/25 and may be purchased from FringeTix, online and at the door.
Like most playwrights he has some curious early work written for two actors, two handed plays or two-handers we call them. Two-handers are cheaper to produce in the theatre compared to a cast of more than two and they are very challenging tricky things to write. After The End was first produced in 2004 hot on the heels of Debris; both plays position a world for the audience that present a man and a woman in an unreal situation. Both plays deal with pain, love and loss.
The modern British theatrical aesthetic tends to be dour, grey and severe. Imagine being inspired by Pinter and Jo Orton for example and having a canon that includes Edward Bond and Steven Berkoff, there's a lot of darkness and quite a bit of confrontational imagery thrown in when you consider the playing field.
Bond for example, shocked audiences by presenting a punk character on stage tossing a brick into a baby pram, playwright Sarah Kane gave audiences incredibly violent stage action including rape and murder, Berkoff had actors spitting on the audience: uncanny as it seems it's sincerely a barrel of laughs depending on the mood you're in, but as I watch it, I can really relate to the phrase Stiff upper lip. Alluding to the infamous habit of Britons avoiding showing any emotion - thus compelling playwrights, word-smiths and performance-artists to be outlandishly confrontational just to get a rise out of an audience.
Kelly's play After The End features in the 2009 Adelaide Fringe, playing at The Bakehouse Theatre in Angas Street. A highly wrought situation that seems suspiciously obvious and horrifically real from the first scene plays out over ninety minutes in real time, a week or more in the staged reality.
Louise a young woman (Hannah Norris) has come-around after being unconscious to discover she's in a cold steely bomb shelter with a bloke she knows from the pub Mark (Nick Pelomis); he's telling her about his dreadful experience, what he saw as he saved her life by bringing her here to his shelter. Charred humans still fighting for their lives as blackened chunks of them crumble.
Essentially Mark is describing an apocalyptic bomb blast and Louise is trying to reconcile this with her feelings. After all, she's stuck down in this tiny cold space with a dull loser.
Director Daniel Clarke has combined the talents of designer Wendy Todd, sound designer Jason Sweeny and lighting designer Sue Grey-Gardner to come up with an authentic but subtle set, everything is pared down to the bare minimum, lights are well focused and utilized in order to assist the many scene changes, the sound is well constructed highly atmospheric yet superbly unassuming.
The production is still fresh in its season (it plays until March 22) and the performances are somewhat imbalanced at the moment; the play, being a two-hander relies heavily on convincing performances. While the character of Louise has a remarkably startling journey, Mark's journey is deeply complex and perhaps a little easier to emotionally generalize from an acting point of view.
Sometimes an actor plays the ultimate betrayal of a character by restricting their emotional range because of what their character is in the circumstance; for instance say the character is a murderer and an actor plays against being like a murderer to assist with the dynamic tension of the text, this can back-fire and make a performance seem lacking in natural human variety and virtues. It can make a character seem two dimensional. It is a difficult balance to achieve, particularly so with a dark comic vein running through a play. Pelomis has not yet quite found the balance in Mark, which grapples and grates a little with Norris' Louise who is buoyant and consistently believable. This is something that will improve as the season unrolls.
Clarke takes us as authentically through the play as he can, and both actors deliver committed performances, shockingly so within this particular genre of British theatre where violent sexual imagery is de rigeur. Ultimately it's an early play of a now career-playwright who is getting a lot of attention, this play is one of the reasons why people took an interest in him in the first place but I wouldn't call it a great play at all. It's an interesting play structurally and it shows a fair command of dialogue laced with sharp dark humour. It's nonsensical and unreal for all its bold attempts at suspending our disbelief in a similar way to a horror movie where you watch characters doing something you know is going to be a bad idea but they do it anyway. You know those moments in a cinema or watching a DVD and you're saying "Don't go out there!" and of course - they go out there...
Although the story seems like a no-brainer pretty early on and it's not until the last scene when the twist that made Kelly an interesting playwright in the early days develops; it is predictable but dramatically compelling enough to arrest the attention. It is not a production one enjoys for the content as the story unfolds - it's a highly pitched power struggle between a man and a woman saying something about pain, love, loss and the universality of sad lonely people. Not at all uplifting and very intense = Not a happy night out at the theatre unless you want to be shocked and disturbed. If you feel like being mortally horrified you'll love it; otherwise it's great food for thought.
What would you do if you woke up with a whining bore in a locked bomb shelter?
David Jobling
Posted January 15, 2009
If you were the last woman on earth, who would you choose for the last man? For poor Louise it's not the gorgeous, intelligent man of her dreams. Instead, she is trapped with her rather unnerving work colleague Mark.
Daniel Clarke presents the first professional Australian production of the critically acclaimed play After the End by one of the UK's most successful contemporary playwrights Dennis Kelly for the 2009 Adelaide Fringe.
Daniel Clarke the Artistic Director of the Adelaide Lesbian and Gay Cultural and Arts Feast Festival produced a hit show in the 2006 Adelaide Fringe, The Bogus Woman, this production is Daniel's first directorial outing in South Australia since living and working as a theatre director in the UK for 4 years. After the End stars Hannah Norris and Nick Pelomis, with designs by Wendy Todd, lighting by Sue Grey-Gardner and sound design by Jason Sweeney. The production has received support from Arts SA and the Adelaide Festival Centre's InSpace: Development Program.
Louise (Hannah Norris) wakes to find herself with her work colleague, Mark, (Nick Pelomis) in his 1980s backyard nuclear bomb shelter. A terrorist 'dirty bomb' has gone off in central London and Mark has rescued Louise. Louise has no memory of the bomb going off at the pub where they were both drinking at the time or in fact how she got to the shelter.
Mark's back is burnt and his descriptions of the world outside the shelter are both ghastly and vivid. They may well be the only survivors. They must remain under ground for at least three weeks waiting for the nuclear fall-out to dissipate. Mark is always prepared for the worst and has everything he thinks they will need to survive; tinned chilli, Dungeons and Dragons and a knife - now all they need to do is to wait until it's safe to go outside. Can they survive the attack? Can they survive each other?
As the play progresses the audience learns that Mark, the awkward, shy office nerd, an outsider is in love with Louise, the popular girl, liked by all. As the pressure of confinement takes its toll on the two characters it becomes clear that Mark's unrequited love is dangerously unhealthy. Perhaps for the first time in Mark's life, whilst they are in the shelter, he is in control. It is his shelter, he controls when they eat and what they eat, how they pass the time and what conversations they have.
Daniel Clarke said 'Kelly has brilliantly taken the political and examined it through the personal. He has created a microcosm of society - Kelly's play looks at territory and control - Mark believes that what he wants is right and that what he thinks is the best. He will do whatever he has to, to make Louise see things the same way as him. The audience are in for an intense roller coaster ride of an emotional journey. This is intense challenging theatre'.
After the End plays in the Bakehouse Theatre 255 Angas Street Adelaide from February 25th (preview) to March 22nd. Tickets are priced from $20 (preview) to $35/25 and may be purchased from FringeTix, online and at the door.
| 44 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
David Jobling
