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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
Crooked
Verdict: Girl on insanity's lip
London - Bush Theatre - 3 May to 3 June 06 - 20:00 (21:30)
Crooked is rejection drama from a cast of three (3F), running at 90 minutes without interval.
It's potentially a stunning play, spoiled at present by a wet-rag ending. Till that point, and disregarding the limp opening scene, it's electrifying drama from a mainly strong cast. There's a superb set, intriguing direction, and a script rippling with insight about the excluded.
Laney Waters is a deformed 14-year old girl, her back hunched, her mind disturbed, middle class, intelligent. Maribel Purdy is an obese 16-year old, working class, not bright, but not stupid. Both girls are shunned by their schoolmates, and find each other as friends.
Laney's deformity is said to be temporary, but she tells lies often. It's said to be from stress - due to her father Peter going mad and being committed to an institution by her mother Elise Waters, who has divorced him. Laney resents and loves her mother. Elise is sad at losing Peter - her lover, friend, husband - to insanity, and is bent on starting a new future. She's moved herself and Laney back to the house Elise grew up in, in the South (the play is set in America), from their previous, more sophisticated environment.
Laney lives in the world of her own short stories, disturbance veering to madness, drama, deceit and fiction, and isolation. Her state of mind, as revealed in the play, is part adolescent evolution, and part insanity.
Maribel Purdy's strong Christian faith - her father is the local car dealer and preacher - and friendliness to Laney allows a relationship to form between them. Elise despises Maribel for being fat, stupid, and not good enough for Laney. Laney thinks she feels sexually and lovingly towards Maribel, and adopts her faith. But this could be to antagonise her metropolitan, sociologically-reared mother.
The axes of the play are carefully set up - the three relationships between the 3 women are explored carefully in succeeding scenes. Maribel and Laney's relationship, as written and performed, feels almost tangibly authentic - with gentle, moving and passionate dimensions. Laney and Elise's relationship is fairly predictable mother / daughter / mother stuff, but necessary to keep the play going. The relationship between mother and daughter's friend is cleverly put across - the initially surprising tolerance masking some hypocrisy, but also affection.
The central character is Laney, and Amanda Hale delivers an astonishing performance, powering the play. Every nuance of sensitivity, fear, schemingness, fantasy, need is articulated, with seamless changes between the moods. Her acting is so electrifying, that the character appears to live outside of the play (the stage is closely surrounded on two sides by the audience, only the stage lights separating them), as if she'd just walked into the auditorium. What she brings out in the character is a child on the lip of madness. For all the traces of humour in the play, it has the feeling, from this character, of tragedy. The ending dismisses this as mere adolescence, but doesn't feel true - it contradicts too crassly the hanging-off-the-edge-of-sanity that Amanda Hale's interpretation presents so shockingly (and heartbreakingly).
Debbie Chazen evokes Maribel Purdy as a gentle, vulnerable and trusting - but warily so - woman. It's a powerful, and compellingly charming delivery, producing a character full of warmth and pert goodness - the writing cleverly avoids stereotypes to achieve this. The ending for this character also doesn't feel true - without revealing the detail, Debbie Chazen's Maribel, for all her emotional imagination and all-encompassing faith in God, seems way too experienced with the world's let-downs to react in this way to a minor betrayal.
The writer gives the actor of Elise Waters's part a tough task, because it's written as the least interesting of the characters. As everyone's had or got a mother, a mother in a play needs to be more interesting than the one sitting at home. This one is more or less a mother from central casting, saying the things mothers say and behaving like a mother, in this case with needs. The strikingly-beautiful Suzan Sylvester delivers Elise Waters within the constraints of the script, which keeps the character within narrow bounds. The American accents of the other two characters sound convincing, but Elise's sounds more British. Whether this is so - and different audience members may hear accents differently - combined with the weaker writing of this character, Elise doesn't feel as real as the other two characters.
Direction, from Mike Bradwell, is lively and extremely intense - with microscopic focus on the details of the relationships, giving the play its scorching quality. The combination of Libby Watson's fabulous Shaker interior set - built by Mark Cosgrove - with lilac-washed boards flying out in perspective, and a neon cross in the ceiling, James Farncombe's gorgeous washes of light, and Nick Manning's bouncy sound design, with its booming scene-change-covers - is a treat of expert design.
Catherine Trieschmann's script glows with perceptiveness and crisp dialogue that brings this perceptiveness into reality. The opening scene is badly dull, but the second the two girls get together, the play zooms into the stratosphere. Catherine Trieschmann ability with emotional intensity is extraordinary - shiver down the spine stuff - as in a scene where Laney embraces God and Maribel simultaneously, and in a solo scene where Laney slips to madness, among others. The play goes spectacularly until the last scene, which feels as if there was uncertainty as to how to end such a magnificent creation. That, to be fair - is true of many plays - but many plays fail creatively as a result. Certainly this superb playwright deserves all the praise she will undoubtedly receive for Crooked Unfortunately, the ending is often what is remembered, and even if it means tearing up the beautifully-printed book that comes with the play, it may be worth rewriting the last few pages.
Cast Credits: (alpha order): Debbie Chazen - Maribel Purdy. Amanda Hale - Laney Waters. Suzan Sylvester - Elise Waters.
Company Credits: Writer - Catherine Trieschmann. Director - Mike Bradwell. Designer - Libby Watson. Lighting Designer - James Farncombe. Sound Designer - Nick Manning. Assistant Director - Des Kennedy. Deputy Stage Manager - Julia Crammer. Set Builder - Mark Cosgrove (Cosgrove Associates). Press - Alexandra Gammie (AGPR). Graphic Design - Stem Design (www.stemdesign.co.uk). Thanks to: Claire (Sunday Times), Mike Bradwell, Arielle Tepper & the Summer Play Festival, Elena Hartwell, Vanessa Shealy, Katherine Sanderlin, Shelly Stover, Emily Ballou, Effie Johnson, Linsay Firman. History: Crooked was initially presented as part of the 2005 New York Summer Play Festival. British premiere - The Bush Theatre, London, 3 May 06. Company - Bush Theatre. Bush Theatre: Artistic Director - Mike Bradwell. Executive Producer - Fiona Clark. Finance Manager - Dave Smith. Literary Manager - Abigail Gonda. Marketing Manager - Nicki Marsh. Production Manager - Robert Holmes. Theatre Administrator - Nic Wass. Chief Technician - Sam Shortt. Resident Stage Manager - Ros Terry. Acting Literary Assistant - Will Kerley. Administrative Assistant - Lydia Fraser-Ward. Box Office Supervisor - Darren Elliott. Box Office Assistants - Rebecca Hartley, Gail MacLeod, Margaret-Ann Bain. Front Of House Duty Managers - Kellie Batchelor, Adrian Christopher, Siobhan King-Spooner, Catherine Nix-Collins, Lois Tucker. Duty Technicians - Helen Spall, Tom White. Associate Artists - Tanya Burns, Es Devlin, Richard Jordan,
Paul Miller. Sheila Lemon Writer In Residence - Jennifer Farmer
Pearson Writer In Residence - Jack Thorne, Steve Thompson
END
John Park
reviewed Tuesday 9 May 06 / The Bush Theatre
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
www.fringereport.com
