PRESS

The Grand Ceremonial

LYRIC STUDIO

Six-O-Six TC's latest production is a British première of a macabre mid-'60s comedy of manners from the neglected founder of the 'Theatre of Panic', French-domiciled, Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal. Arrabal's penchant is for rummaging around in the dark recesses of our motives - agh! It's ugly down there! – and it's best to read this play as a dark fairytale played out on the level of the subconscious. The founder team of producer Shane Walter, director Gordon Anderson and designer Tom Hadley has done wonders with a difficult , possibly dated text : it's a compulsive (not to say convulsive), beautifully modulated, unsettling and dementedly funny evening of nightmare.
It starts in Beckett register. Dorian Lough's 'Monster', a hunchback in a shabby dead-man's suit, waits for an aeon on a park bench (accompanied only by the pulsing electronic music of Robin 'Scanner' Rimbaud) before the arrival of Joanna Thirsk's middle-class Sil. This is no meeting-cute: their 'perverse' mating ritual is mapped out in a series of electrifying and beautifully acted gambits and counter-plays of exquisitely absurd logic. Thirsk slowly sheds her apparel.
As the pace hots up, and the tone curdles, we are introduced to the Monster's flat. No wonder he‘s a serial-killer – the blow-up doll-filled flat is presided over by Joanna Bacon‘s Mother (in her platinum crop and vamp dress, Bacon beautifully plays her like a comedic cross between Violet Kray and Cruella de Vil). Now the company launches a black farce of ultra-Ortonesque dimensions which punches all hell out of the nostrums of sexual politics. Arrabal's play makes a murky equation between sex and death, but the final impression is of deep compassion. An eye-opening revival.
Wally Hammond.


Published weekly by :
Time Out Magazine Ltd, Universal House,
251 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P0AB

* * *

The Grand Ceremonial

Theatre

606 THEATRE Lyric Studio, Hammersmith

There are some baffling things going on in Hammersmith in the slippery form of Fernando Arrabal's loquacious mind play. Written in 1965, the piece has the feel of an extended game of Chinese whispers in which ideas resurface in ever more contorted shapes from one scene to the next. It is only when you get to the end that the nature of the riddle (to which there is, of course, no solution) becomes clear. In 606 Theatre's production, however, it reveals itself as a work that is as preoccupied with candour as artful capers. Though Arrabal ends tip in a realm where private fantasy has eclipsed a more pedestrian reality, the events that precede it are bound together by a bizarre dream logic. The effect is by turn intriguing, infuriating and chilling, and a graphic example of what the playwright called his "Théâtre Panique".

At first sight the scene looks set for a textbook case-study from the school of tile absurd. A man meets a woman on a park-bench. He has a deformed body, a monstrous mother and a welldeveloped fetish for whips, chains and plastic dolls. She has an overzealous lover and an appetite for sadomasochistic fantasies. With just a nod to its absurdist forebears Arrabal's play rushes on, taking its hearings from points of uneasy eroticism, and building tip its distinctive claustrophobic world in which the characters hover oil the edge of an abyss. Through this landscape drift the mangled spectres of childhood trauma, blasphemy, Oedipal longing and Freudian castration anxiety, offering a grotesque, unnerving tinge to a world in which happiness and security are inextricably linked to fear and death.

Though the play fizzes with perturbing enigmas, the Spanish playwright balances his tawdry philosophy with a robust humour. In Jean Benedetti's translation, the writing is witty and buoyant, with a quickfire dialogue and sudden comic changes of style. Arrabal's world is at once perverse yet alluring, and 606 Theatre knows exactly how to balance these qualities in a sultry yet charged atmosphere. As the action transfers indoors, Dorian Lough's strikingly detailed performance as Cavanosa (the man on the bench) lends the character moments of calm dignity. Attaining a sort of humanity through deficiency, he reveals chinks of vulnerability behind a tough facade, without loosening his grip on the drama's cruel comedy.

There are times when the play could do with a bit more narrative dynamic and when its occasionally antiquated absurdity works better in the mind's eye than on stage. Gordon Anderson's direction sometimes lets the tension sag, but largely grasps the unforced rhythm of the piece, creating a dowdy, crazy atmosphere where the playful and macabre form an arresting mix with the ritualistic. The stylistic tic that drives the production, however, is the intensity of the performances by tile cast of four. Against the playful perspective of Tom Hadley's filmic backdrop, they forge a minutely observed and oddly affecting evening with an acrid aftertaste.

Kate Stratton

n To 15 July (boxoffice: 0181 741 2311)