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Lothario lacks charm in this cliché-ridden golden turkey
DON JOHN
BATTERSEA ARTS CENTRE
IN September 2000, a relatively small touring theatre company called Kneehigh staged a production of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Red Shoes at the Lyric Hammersmith.
It was a witty, subtle and endlessly inventive show, that pushed the boundaries of what
theatre could achieve.
Nine years on, with a 1970s reworking of Mozart’s masterpiece at the Battersea Arts Centre, how has Kneehigh changed?
The budget and sheer scale of the enterprise is considerably bigger, thanks to the patronage of the RSC and Bristol Old Vic, but somewhere along the road the spark has been lost, replaced with a clichéd, lumbering, misanthropic mess that would be a poor cousin to Peter Stringfellow, let alone Don Giovanni.
It is hard to know where to begin with a golden turkey of such spectacular proportions. The first sign of impending doom is the faux-naif schoolboy
narrator, who crams his overlong pronunciations with glib similes.
The second death knell is the songs. Despite some fine atmospheric background music, you will not be humming any of Stu Barker’s ska and punk-inflected ditties during or after their rendition, nor, I suspect, will you be seeing the soundtrack CD in HMV any time soon. Then there is Don John. Almost every inhabitant in this glum Yorkshire province is a stereotype – the craven vicar and his frustrated, brandy-sneaking wife, the eastern European cleaner and her gormless suitor – but Tristan Sturrock, in his best European exchange student impersonation, goes one further, managing to strip all charm from the lothario who cuts a sway through the town’s female population.
In Emma Rice’s production, petulance stands for dynamism, and rape, though part of the original story, here supercedes every one of John’s seductions.
It may be too late for Don John to practise virtue in moderation, but Kneehigh could give it a try. As what might generously be called the story builds towards its final, destructive climax (ahem), the characters clamber over Vicki Mortimer’s impressive shipping crate set, looking down on the action unfolding below while a group of choric women chalk up the names of John’s conquests and dance (well) in one party scene after another.
Don John is, in truth, a small package with a lot of wrapping, some of which is quite beautiful. But as the father of one of John’s conquests tells him, after John has killed him, “care is all there is.”
Sadly, we, the audience, have none.
Until May 9
0207 223 2223 |
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