London Fringe Festival 2010

Kenneth Chisholm

12 New Reviews

Day 8

June 25

The Frank Diary of Anne

By Chloe Ariane Whitehorn

Played Chloe Ariane Whitehorn

Fishbowl Theatre

The McManus Studio

** ½ / 4

This one-woman show is a mildly amusing and touching play about love, disillusionment and the emotional fallout from the combined collective experience.

The play has an interesting technique where the live performance monologues feel spontaneous – amusingly emotional tales told with a naiveté about her life. Meanwhile, her projected YouTube recordings are more formal and downbeat as the true implications of the events past sink in. In that framework, you can see a growing emotional burden as you see Anne tell her tales with a growing despair. However, the performance seems to ramble a bit as it becomes close to a bubbly drone at times. Your attention wanders with the anecdotes. At least there are some interesting stunts with lighting to suggest other characters that livens it up.

However, the ending is haunting as the clash of light, costume and a dark central prop come together as Anne faces a powerful temptation to share her brother's fate. Unfortunately, the song recording at that moment, At Last, was played too loudly and it was very difficult to understand what she was saying for the big finish. That kind of error diluted the dramatic power of the ending and Ms. Whitehorn would be well advised to make appropriate adjustments for future shows.

Dying Hard

Compiled by Elliott Leyton

Edited by Mikaela Dyke

Played by Mikaela Dyke

Forest Productions

Wolf Performance Hall

*** / 4

This show feels like Barry Broadfoot's classic historical anecdote collections like Ten Lost Years brought to life with marvelous performing by Dyke that unfortunately is too faithful to its sources for its own good.

This show features intriguing and heartbreaking tales of Newfoundland miners in small communities who took advantage of the job opportunities of the fluorspar mines in the 1960’s. However, they paid a far greater price than they ever imagined working for companies that barely cared about them. Those stories reminded me of the notorious asbestos mines of Quebec in the Duplessis era that created the Quiet Revolution, but here there is no hope of such a revolt by either the people or the workers. Instead, there is only quiet suffering, inadequate compensation and horrific diseases wrought by unacceptable working conditions that could only be faced with despairing resignation. Most of the portions of society – miner, wife and others – are given equally enlightening voices as far as the play's limits can allow.

Unfortunately, while Dyke is amazingly protean with the roles she plays with quiet confidence, she overdoes capturing their tics and accents. As a result, too much is barely comprehensible with thick regional dialects making following the monologues a counter-productive struggle. I don't propose bowdlerizing the testimony, but some basic language concessions to the needs of the audience would go a long way to improve the show without needing subtitles or a translator.

With that in mind, the show is a still an eye-opener of a labour tragedy that has been ignored for too long.

TH3 Trilogy of B03 & Ang3lina

By Len Cuthbert

Played by Sarah Elisabeth Abbott and Ray Wiersma

3BNA.info

Fanshawe College Theatre

*** / 4

Although the first of the trilogy begins with a tiresome comedy cliché, the whole show is a fun display of creative humour.

The Maladroit Romeo is a Playwright's Cabaret piece showing one of the inadvertently most expensive proposals in history. While it takes a well timed dare with some gross out humour that pays off, the rest of the piece is not so inspired. Instead, it's yet a male doofus trying to pop the question and not once does he ever consider some appropriate honesty like a rational human being. Stuart McLean's Dave stores in The Vinyl Cafe are driving this kind of humour into the ground in Canada and it's not much to ask for a writer to try something different. However, the players work the trodden field as best they can and the play is short enough to not make it too much of a misfire.

Enzymatic Lucidity however is a much more worthy effort as a surreal horror comedy. Using the more challengingly surreal concept of interlocking nightmares, the film plays with reality in such a way that it credits the audience's intelligence with respect. In service of that, Ray Wiersma is a scream as an ordinary man driven to ever intensifying awaking distraction by his inescapable repeating scares as he frantically tries to deal with them.

One Year One Day is a partial return to the male doofus, but it has a more original setting that feels more believable. In that, the mistake Bob makes in the beginning is an enjoyable intricacy that unfolds like an ornate mosaic with the characters' growing apprehension. After that, the players layer that with an amusing cross-purpose conversation as each of their latent medical concerns meet and then skew off like a weave of misunderstanding and fear. In that, Sarah Elisabeth Abbott shines here beginning with an ill tempered poise that borders on the clichéd battleaxe into a woman who is genuinely worried even as she deals with the shock of her own surprise. In the end, the sketch concludes with a surprising charm much like the classic Honeymooners, but with better dialogue.

Emma

By Marion Johnson

Based on the novel by Jane Austen

Directed Don Fleckser

Played by Ellen Denny, Andrew Johnson, Miriam Cummings, Alex Prinzen, Mara Fraccaro, Jonathon Gysbers, Natalie Brown, Ryan Collins and Renee Borg.

Regency Players

Wolf Performance Hall

*** ½ / 4

The Jane Austen novels have enjoyed a shelf-life and sustained popularity that outstrip all of its time. This play is a simplified and entertaining distillation of the appeal of this particular Austen novel.

A great deal of the intriguing part of the play is how the games of charm and landing the right husband take on the ambiance of social hierarchical diplomacy as a high stakes social contact sport. Considering that the women of that time and social circle have little else to try for in their lives, you'll understand how love can become an unsettlingly utilitarian and a simple date can mean everything for the future.

Within those parameters, the players have created a fun condensed version of the novel with well appointed charm and grace. Considering how Ellen Denny manages to play the title character as a bookish snob and still be sympathetic is a testament to her acting talent. Likewise, Andrew Johnson is terrific as her counterpart, wise and well versed in gentlemanly tact, even if his dealings with Emma try his patience beyond the breaking point. When they finally reconcile, it is as a meeting of the minds that will be as satisfying as the book has been for centuries.

Project G Force: Remastered

By Project G Force

Played by Thomas Bogad, Norah Cuzzocrea, Laura DiTrolio and Matt Loop

Channel Surfing Productions

Fanshawe College Theatre

** / 4

The Channel Surfing Troupe's comedy tends to work best when it has a strong theme to base their sketch comedy on for the whole show. Unfortunately, they don't follow that and have comedy that regrettably is too often derivative and fails to take prime opportunities with its advertised theme.

The literature suggests a strong Beatles theme and that itself is a fun idea to base some humour on with their history and the cartoonish humour of their animated projects for instance. Unfortunately, just as Sgt. Pepper barely used the concept album theme beyond the opening and the beginning for an easy framing device, the main meat of the show is woefully near random ideas using the frame of the band trying to perform together one last time ala Abbey Road. Then my hopes for this firm foundation sank beginning with a painfully derivative personal financial advice sketch, already covered years ago on Saturday Night Live. It certain didn't have anything Beatle-like about it.

While the rest of the audience may have laughed at the follow sketches, I just saw them throw away their chances for something really engaging as promised. Even when they did their strongest regular sketch with Thomas Bogad's German character as a genuinely funny TV show host, the prime idea of using The Beatles' formative early period in Hamburg was wasted for something irrelevant.

While the ending is mildly entertaining with their grousing that their name was upstaged for a guinea pig movie and the Beatle music montage, I struggled to keep my eyes open through the show expecting something special and got the largely mundane instead.

The Man Who Fell In Love with a Tuba

By Joey Ouellette

Played by Terry McConnell and Joey Ouellette

Purple Theatre Co.

The Spriet Family Theatre

** ½ / 4

Seeing this show is an oddly enthralling, if nonsensical experience about an ugly simpleton finding love in some wrong places with even worse choices.

Terry McConnel plays a bizarre lead character who is a disheveled zoo elephant wrangler who seems to have no grip of reality and the consequences of his actions. For all his weirdness, he is still oddly affecting as a man over his head with everyday life and finding solace in a world full of people are who arguably stranger than him. That makes him bizarrely almost the sanest of the bunch, playing out a love for a musical instrument that throws everything in his life upside down. In that, you'll be deciding on how much you want to sympathize with him, or wonder just how really sane anybody is in this story.

Complementing this strange talent is some genuinely inspired tuba playing that does far more than you'd ever dream for that instrument. Whether it is playing Ravel's Boléro or simulating an elephant's sounds with incredible lifelike ability, that virtuoso playing carries allof the bizarreness home to make you accept Tom's weirdo story in its own terms.

Whether you are laughing or staring agape at the odd man in an odder world, you will never be bored by it as the tuba honks smooth melody in your romanticism and imagination.

Bought and Souled

By Diane Vanden Hoven

Played by Lynda Martens and Michael Wilmot

Supporting Roles

The Arts Project Theatre

**** / 4

While the play starts like a conventional comedy with the inherent drama of an auction, the story immediately becomes far more bizarre and inspired in a wondrously creative story.

The story has a fascinating start, with the bids of Oscar and Beatrice go back and forth like a very expensive table tennis game. However, the real drama is when the rivals confront each other over the contested vase that means far more than just the craftsmanship and the money involved. As the characters open up, the debate over the physical becomes a bargaining for the metaphysical as the cynical Oscar trades his soul for Beatrice.

From that, the story goes from a standard comedy into a Twilight Zone-like experience as Oscar faces consequences he never expected with his transaction as he learns what he really values. In doing so, the characters trade positions as a kind of auction house purgatory where everything, and yet seemingly nothing, is on the block.

In doing so, you will be entranced at where this kind of trading will take the characters and where the plot will lead. The shifting realities become like a surreal puzzle box of perceptions that smack of a modern day Dante's Divine Comedy with a magical intensity complete with a cute reference to an ongoing Soul Train that just needs Don Cornelius' yodel. As the suspense builds in the new bids in an otherworldly auction, you will wonder what will happen with the characters' changed values and desperate priorities that lead to a satsifying conclusion.

To tell that tale in less than 45 minutes is a tribute to compact storytelling and the imagination to make that work.

ONEymoon – A Honeymoon For One

by Christel Bartelse & Jimmy Hogg

Directed by Jimmy Hogg

Played by Christel Bartelse

The McManus Studio

*** / 4

With marriage variants like the gay kind gaining acceptance, this play is an interesting idea on the institution with a unusual experiment of a solo variant, with some interesting venting of her darker issues.

While Bartelse doesn't explain the actual point of this self-marriage idea in any great detail, she goes through the ceremonial motions with an amusing enthusiasm. The fact that she involves the audience, even pulling two males out for her purposes, is a matter of one's taste for audience participation. When she goes on her Oneymoon, the joke continues lyrically both in how serious she is about this and the bad memories, like an internet date from hell that drove her to make this strange choice of self-matrimony.

However, the play goes into truly memorable gyrations as her more hedonistic antics catch up with her. At that point, she is literally tap dancing around her problems with frantic energy that is the comedic highlight of the show.

All in all, a show with all the quirky insight and humour would expect from Christel Bartelse.

39

By Andrew Woolner

Played by Andrew Woolner

The Yokohama Theatre Group

The McManus Studio

*** / 4

This is a gloriously challenging play with highly complex storytelling that creates a deeply immersive and imaginative experience ranking with the best of science fiction.

Presented as the court testimony of an astronaut known only as 39, a man decades out of his time in a radically different post-scarcity world, this story has an imagination that honours the best traditions of Isaac Asimov and Ursala K. Le Guin. Although the testimony the character gives to a strange court is difficult to follow, it still has intriguing ideas of what people would value in a time with possessions are meaningless and even experiences can be managed to an inhuman degree. However, Woolner grounds the story with an appealing humanity as he imperfectly tries to cope with this new world and its priorities while explaining his past

In service of that story, the play has the best stagecraft of the festival. Using only a futuristic chair to suggest both a futuristic ship and a courtroom, a rear projection with carefully chosen images along with carefully timed sound recordings and lots of smoke, you will cast into a future that will spark your imagination. Just as the 2009 film, Moon, starring Sam Rockwell created a completely believable setting with a miniscule budget, this play succeeds less in sucking you into its own distinctive world.

This is not a story for listening with half an ear or for any lazy audience, but if you make the effort, you will have an experience truly out of this world.

Silly Goose

By Lucy Williams

Directed by Peter Pownal

Played by Lesly Quesnelle and Lucy Williams

Ride A Wild Horse Productions

The Arts Project Theatre

**** / 4

This is a moving and deeply imaginative drama of two old estranged friends meeting to discuss family and old grievances, or do they?

In the first few minutes, the play seems a polite little teacup drama, only to turn completely on its ear when the apparent reality of the conversation reveals itself. With that surprise, the play puts you off balance for a drama that seems like a senior citizen version of The Sixth Sense with its own special style. In that context, the play takes on a beautifully surreal quality where the nature of its reality is as intriguingly enigmatic as the human heart. All the while, the play never truly states how much of this is real or is only in the mind of living. For that, the play places its trust in the audience to make up its own mind, or to accept the ambiguity.

Regardless, Williams and Quesnelle take the thespian possibilities of the plot and run with them as the great actors perform with excellent timing of dialogue and sincerity of emotion. They verbally joust with earthy dialogue that shifts from the argumentative to the friendly with a surprising consistency of character. In that sense, they will captivate you as they come to terms with their pasts and find some hope for something about the future.

The stagecraft has a brilliant subtlety such as in Williams’s character is missing an essential form of clothing that actually makes her apparent state of being obvious. Beyond that, some careful lighting is all that is needed to give her an otherworldly presence that still could be just a matter of one person’s selective perception.

Trust the Fringe to have such great writing and actors take the mundane and make it truly special.

New Talent

By Brian Morton

Directed by Brian Morton

Played by Anna Ross, Gregory Cruikshank and Brian Morton

Theatre Erebus Inc.

The Arts Project Theatre

*** / 4

The business of prostitution is a whispered affair that can be more than the stereotypical street walker, if still damaging for some in its own way. This play is a fascinating look at a somewhat best case scenario of the business that is as realistic a look as you could want short of arranging a transaction yourself.

Compared to the typical sleazy assumptions, this portrayal is almost documentary-like of how an “escort service” is as a business equally from the pimp, prostitute and john points of view. Just the extended scene where the pimp (played by Brian Morton) explains the operation to Christine the newbie is an eye-opener of how it can be ideally handled with a surprising amount of grace and consideration. The apparent honesty and professional charm Morton's character has clashes spectacularly with the necessary mercenary element which makes for an insightful combination you'd never expect.

Furthermore, the actual depiction the appointment is about as genteel as you can get with Curishank playing a “john” you'll suspect was arranged to be the prostitution version of training wheels with his gentle insecurities and politeness. Regardless, don't go to this play without expecting to see all elements of the situation without sugarcoating or obscuring the activity to any significant degree. Unfortunately, while Anna Ross has an innocent charm as Christine complimenting her beauty, she is so thin that it disturbingly suggests she has a life threatening case of anorexia.

At the same time, there is an inescapable feeling of subtle violation and pollution, using the analogy of a serious Hamilton chemical fire is superb as displayed on a well timed videorecording. No one will call this play a whitewash of the trade, but it creates a balanced look without needless moralistic condemnation, even as it reveals the spiritual cost all of its own.

Despite how much sugarcoating about solicitation, it still gives a remarkably frank look at the trade that will tell you a lot about it.

Gunpowder

By Jayson McDonald

Played by Jayson McDonald

Stars and Hearts

Fanshawe College Theatre

*** ½ / 4

While his main character is derivative, Jayson McDonald has otherwise done it again with a great one-man show about a mystery with a distinctively comical existential twist.

From the first jolt, McDonald sets the show's tone with a distinctive efficiency as a different kind of mystery, namely a version of himself as both victim and suspect. That being said, his Det. Phox is obviously a Canadian riff on Inspector Clouseau, but McDonald's originality shines elsewhere. That comes in the variety of secondary characters who take on a variety of quirks that keep you off kilter for the strangeness yet to come, while still keeping an essential unity to the chapters. However, the true highpoint is the climax where the story surges to a truly surreal conclusion that breaks the fourth wall, and then starts mangling the rest of the structure with gleeful abandon.

In service of those characters, McDonald has outdone himself with uproarious pantomime that creates such elaborate settings with just a chair and some artful direction with the lights. To create so much from so little is the mark of a great performer and a blessing Londoners should enjoy.

Kenneth Chisholm is a local freelance writer living in London, Ontario. In addition to numerous published magazine stories, he is a noted drama critic for the London theatre scene with a focus on alternative productions.