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A scene from Christie In Love |
Dark duo shine little light on their subjects
BEDBOUND & CHRISTIE IN LOVE
Lion and Unicorn
THE Lion and Unicorn is an excellent fringe theatre, largely because of its ambitious resident company, Giant Olive.
That the two plays currently showing at this venue – Bedbound and Christie in Love – are both uncharacteristically disappointing might have something to do with the fact that both were produced by outside theatre companies “in association with” Giant Olive.
Thematically, they seem out of keeping with the usual Lion and Unicorn fare, and while the producers have given their all (the sets in both productions are particularly innovative), this fails to compensate for problems within the plays themselves.
Both are too loud, too full of anger that goes nowhere. In place of mature dialogue that explains and explores, we are battered with a barrage of shouting, with ceaseless swearing and wantonly coarse imagery, and this fails to do justice to what are actually some rather serious issues.
The first play, a claustrophobic affair by Enda Walsh, concerns a psychopathic father and his sickly daughter, who spend their days confined to a small bed in their home in Ireland, drifting in and out of memories. The acting is good and the dialogue is in parts poetic, but this is spoiled by the sledgehammer approach alluded to above. The play’s bleak atmosphere is presumably intended to emphasise the poverty of the two characters’ lives, but it seems like a point laboured.
Christie in Love, about notorious serial killer John Reginald Christie, is the better of the two plays, yet it possesses some of the same failings as Bedbound. Just as it seems to be approaching some serious exploration of why Christie committed his crimes, of how society might be to blame or how we might make sense of murder, it slips back into pornographic displays of it subject’s perversions – something that, again, seems laboured, obvious and beside the point.
The Lion and Unicorn is due to stage several exciting productions in coming months; its Christmas production of Oliver Twist looks to be particularly dark, innovative and, er, twisted. But Bedbound and Christie show good theatres sometimes stage duds – and excessive darkness for the sake of it can lead to nothing but an abyss.
Until November 22
08444 771 000 |
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