Theatre Review
Waxwing Theatre presents NO ONE SEES THE VIDEO
by Martin Crimp
Directed by Ed Bartram
Assistant director: Diego Iudicissa
Rosemary Branch Theatre
21 - 31 May, 2008
A review by David Hermann for EXTRA! EXTRA!
So you like Martin Crimp. You recently went to see The City at the Royal Court, compared it to The Country eight years ago and found it to be a masterpiece. You consider Attempts on her Life a watershed in British theatre - damn it, in theatre everywhere - and you believe that Crimp’s ongoing themes of emotional emptiness, social disorientation and fraught interpersonal relationships are the most accurate exploration of the human condition modern writing has to offer. So far so good. Really, though, you wish you knew all of his plays, including all the early ones, but, like me, you were ten years old when No one Sees the Video came out and had more important things to contemplate than the human condition. And now you simply haven’t the time to pop down to Sam French’s, buy a copy and stage it in your own head starring all your favourite actors. Well, bugger! What now? This is where Ed Bartram and his newly established company Waxwing Theatre come in, whose mission, according to the director’s notes is “...to rediscover early masterpieces by well-known writers.” Fantastic! “I think”, Bartram goes on, “people get stuck with putting on the same plays by the same writers, and if you really want to understand a playwright it’s not just their more famous plays that are worth looking at.” How very true. And, how very lucky that Bartram, for his first production on the London fringe, has assembled a cast of unbelievably good actors. Unbelievably good because the degree of professionalism most of them exhibit is at odds with the fact that they are all relatively unknown. Stephanie Goodfellow in particular lays down a stunning - no, actually jaw-dropping performance as jilted housewife Elizabeth, a desperately unhappy woman who enters the grubby, morally compromised world of the new economy by becoming a marketing researcher in the employ of equally desperate Colin (James Finnegan), a sad salesman-type with paedophilic tendencies who worms his way into Elizabeth’s life for the sole purpose of getting closer to her fifteen-year-old daughter Jo (Lindesay Mace). It is a delight to watch Finnegan and Goodfellow play opposite each other. Their carefully balanced game of listening and response generates a degree of truth that would hold up on any stage, anywhere, and on any screen, any size. They sit comfortably within Crimp’s condensed, powerful language and cope exceptionally well with the text’s many aposiopeses - a hazard that can trip up the most experienced players, and something Crimp has since cut down on, it seems. Part of the attraction of Crimp’s writing is that themes like the Lolita-plot are introduced and left to linger for a while before fading away gently without reaching a dramatic conclusion. Here is an author who discards the need for ultimate judgement by inviting his audience to derive a sense of right and wrong solely from the rich, flowing dialogue. We emerge deprived of solace and resolution but savouring the play’s strong emotional aftertaste. What makes watching No one sees the Video so worthwhile is the fact that Crimp’s modus operandi lies relatively bare in comparison to his latest work The City, which is so clipped, cropped and boiled down to the bone that any analysis of dramatic mechanism becomes inordinately difficult. So: this cleverly chosen revival does exactly what Ed Bartram intended. Congratulations. The consistent excellence of the cast and an almost spotless production (There was, for example, a somewhat half-hearted and apparently senseless “reverse-play” sequence in which the actors moved backwards while a video projection was being rewound. Surely, a production of such quality can do without these A-Level drama shenanigans. My humble advice: bin it!) Combined with simple but effective lighting (Sally Ferguson) and an unmistakably 90s soundtrack (compiled by Nina Welch) makes this the kind of show that erases the boundaries between Fringe, Off West End and West End. I predict and hope sincerely that everyone involved will go very far, indeed. Keep an eye out for Waxwing Theatre productions, folks, because this one’s a winner. Also, I can’t help recommending that you make a complete night of it and eat at the Rosemary Branch, because their food is simply delicious and the Pub’s unique atmosphere will remind you why you live in London.
Box Office: 020 7704 6665
7.30pm £12.00/£8.00 (concessions)
Rosemary Branch Theatre London N1 3DT
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