This was my first "promenade performance". Unlike normal theatre where the audience settles down in their plush seats and the set changes each act, here the audience moves around and each scene is in a new room. In this case the rooms were in the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall. An unlikely and unpromising sounding venue I admit. But you have to give new things a go. It could have been effectively sinister, being directed around the bare walls of these basements. A great setting for a prison drama, as indeed this was a drama set in prison. The prison contains one prisoner, a mad King Edmund as this was meant to be a sequel to King Lear - hard as almost everyone dies in Lear. So did it work?
No. The best I can say about it is that it only ran for 55 minutes. The faux Shakespearean dialogue was irritating, the drama desperately lacking. This was experimental theatre, and an experiment that went horribly wrong in the test tube. Embarrassingly bad really. A good play well-acted in the same venue could have worked well. But this wasn't it.
No comments:
Post a Comment