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Christmas Lunch
Verdict: Depressing
London - King's Head - 13-31 Dec 05 - 13:00 (13:55)
Christmas Lunch is a 1-hour performance of three one-act plays at the King's Head.
Two of the plays are adaptations of traditional Christmas stories - by Charles Dickens and O Henry - which resonate with the traditional atmosphere of the venue (charm point: real coal fires in the gratings), and the complimentary mulled wine and mince pies. The other is by Emma Vuletic - a live woman, rather than a dead man. It is set during the Christmas holiday season, and echoes the same themes.
Each play is located in a triangulation point of the Anglo-Saxon world - England, America, and Australia. Each follows the agenda set for Christmas by Charles Dickens, who 'took the Christ out of Christmas', and replaced Him with family togetherness; the holiday is not about God and sinners reconciled, but of sinners overcoming their alienation from each other. Each poses a similar tragic situation - of a man who tears apart his family and dooms himself to lonely, hopeless old age by some fatal secret he nurses in his heart. Each offers a different resolution, each more or less satisfactory.
In the Dickens play, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, the tragic character finds final peace by choosing to let go of his regrets over a lost love decades before, to forget his personal narrative, and seek amnesia instead. In doing so, he not only forgets who he is, but loses his second chance, and lets down those who share his story. This story is a true tragedy; there is no symbolic coming together of man and woman at the end, no hint of rebirth and life perpetually self-renewing.
Five-Thirty by Emma Vuletic, set in Sydney, is even more disturbing, as its style is modern and realistic - rather than typically Victorian with two-dimensional characters, schematic dialog and hammy acting. After 15 years of anguished wondering, an abandoned wife and mother embarks on a pilgrimage from the outback to the big city. She seeks the truth behind whatever awful secret caused her husband to leave. She tries to take back home the ageing, broken man she finds, unemployed and living in a homeless men's hostel. She never is able to get her husband to reveal what terrible thing made him depart. Indeed, he is unable to reveal it to himself, leaving his body when he tells it to his therapist. Similarly he cannot stand to be intimate with family, and his idea of heaven is to be alone in the quiet and dark. In the end, he does return home with his wife, but only for a melancholy visit before returning once again to the city and his life of comfortable degradation. It provides some measure of reconciliation and closure, but the grim secret will never be known, and it is too late to put the family back together. The tragedy is now complete, as the father has no hope to hold out for his wife and their retarded son, the flawed legacy of his flawed existence.
By now, some may be so depressed, they might wish they'd gone to a panto. Initially making it worse, The Gift of the Magi portrays a young couple, newly wed, on the brink of tragedy rather than looking back on the decayed remains many years after. Unknown to his wife, the young man has been hiding from her the fact that he lost his job months before, and they are on the brink of disaster. A dock-worker plays the part of angel or deus ex machina, when he tells the distraught husband that the best gift he can give his wife for Chistmas is the truth. The tragic ending is averted, the marriage is saved, and there is confidence that life will renew itself - the hope and salvation central to the message of Christmas.
Some careful thought clearly went into the choice of stories and into their adaptations. The acting is generally as good as the vehicles allow. The New World accents are mostly pretty good, if somewhat over-the-top. It will be interesting to see what the Debut Theatre Company does next.
Cast Credits: (alpha order): Elisa Boyd. Tom Jude. Amanda Lieberman. Ciaran McConville. Andrew McDonald.
Benjamin Smith.
Company Credits: Writers - The Haunted Man by Charles Dickens; The Gift of the Magi by O Henry; Five-Thirty by Emma Vuletic. Adaptor (Haunted Man) - Elizabeth Park. Adaptor (Magi) - Ciaran McConville. Director (Haunted Man, Magi) - Jane Briers. Director (Five-Thirty) - Jamie Harper. Designer - Tasmin Ayers. Press Information -Robert Keeley. Company - Debut Theatre Company: Artistic Director - Elizabeth Park. Associate Directors - Ciaran McConville & Daniel Weyman.
END
(c) Brad Hall 2005
reviewed 29 December 05 / King's Head
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2010
