home
|
about
|
news
|
contents
|
gossip
|
photographs
|
venues
|
brighton
|
dublin
|
edinburgh
|
film
|
features
|
interviews
|
awards
|
fashion
|
recipes
|
no more drinks
|
newsletter
|
links
|
contact
Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
What Do You Do The Night After You've Saved The Universe?
Verdict: Superheroes under the cape
What do You Do the Night After You Save the Universe? is a new one-hour, one-act comedy play by award-winning author Terry Newman.
Five characters seek to answer the play's title. They're super-heroes who have successfully saved all sentient life in the cosmos from oblivion. The answer, it turns out, is not much. As a result, the play is no plot / all character development.
It borrows from the stock format of a whodunnit. Each character is examined to reveal past, inner motivations, worries, hopes for the future. Each super-hero tells his or her story while sitting round drinking beer and eating pizza. What they discover is that each is not an unmitigated hero. Whatever super-power it is that makes each special seems to have come from a tragic past.
For some of them, it was an accidental by-product out of a deeply-buried insecurity or immaturity. For others, it came from a tragic breaking-away from parents. Becoming a super-hero was just like maturing into adult-hood for a normal person. For each of them, the super-power is both a cross, and something each would not dream of giving up. And it doesn't make them particularly special. Each still has an alter-ego who has to struggle through the world, getting a job, kicking the pricks.
There's the worry of retirement, as super-powers decline - and possibly ending up in a flat, forgotten. Super-powerdom seems to be characterised by loneliness - and it's not just super-heroes who sometimes feel alone.
It seem at first a very simple play, which belies its subtlety. In a drama where all the plot happens off-stage before or after the on-stage dialog, Terry Newman reproduces the entire hero-cycle just as plainly as, say, The Lion King. The character is born, loses parents in a tragic way, finally comes to psychological grips with their loss and the character's need to take their place - and goes on to full adult-hood and the restarting of the cycle as a parent.
And he does it by dressing the heroes in silly cartoon costumes with capes.
Cast Credits: (alpha order): Mark Knight. Alyssa Kyria. Phil Ormerod. Victoria Townsend.
Company Credits: Writer - Terry Newman. Director - Philip Lunn. Technical Director - Ross McGivern. Venue Credits: Artistic Director - Emma Taylor. Acting Artistic Director - Louis Brownhill. Technical Director - Ross McGivern. Manager - The Bridge House - Tracy Allum.
END
(C) Brad Hall 2005
reviewed 6 May 05 / Canal Café Theatre
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
www.fringereport.com
