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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
RIBBON
Verdict: Tu-Tu Divine
Edinburgh - Underbelly - August 02
The Underbelly
Ribbon's about the world of dance, and if ballet and all things Terpsichorean make you reach for the sick bucket, see this engaging two-hander and embrace the tu-tu of life.
Quite what a girl has to endure before she can stand up on her own two points is revealed here in funny, sharply observed - and touching - detail. But like all finely written plays, it's only slightly about its subject.
Ribbon's about life. It's about first love: the anticipation, the reality. It's about the breaking-in of dreams: we expect to be judged on merit, but bullshit - to quote Thomas Edwards's excellent and awful dance teacher - is what the world understands.
It's about how we build and damage relationships. How we can't keep what we do from the private world of love, and how the accomplice of the heart is hurt by our obsession. Ribbon's about obsession too, the quality without which, it makes clear, no artist survives.
Wrapped inside the tight narrative, there are some priceless vignettes: Edwards making a papier mâché cast of Traube's breast ('The left one's slightly better than the right' / 'I'd always thought they were both the same'); Traube and Edwards dancing a disintegrating Swan Lake.
Edwards and Traube interact effortlessly with drama and humour. Lucy Traube gives a warm and witty performance as a woman learning something about dance but a whole lot more about life. Thomas Edwards is truly superb as everybody else, including her cajoling dance teacher, her very odd and quickly discarded first lad, a randy but impatient main lover, infuriating female flat-mate, gay class-mate, and a delightfully camp mother.
This superb piece of writing is an object-lesson in editing too, saying in its very short 45 minutes far more than many plays three times the size. And you come out feeling good.
Written and directed by Lucy Traube. Produced by Gag Theatre Company. Lighting and technicals by Underbelly staff.
END
John Park
reviewed at The Underbelly / Saturday 3 August 2002
related topic - Lucy Traube's Edinburgh 02 diary Everything About Ribbon
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
www.fringereport.com
