Trinity 8th Week has got to be the elephant’s graveyard of serious drama. All the big productions with your Chanyas and your Charlies have come and gone, most punters are too busy revising, drinking, or punting to venture to the theatre, while those who do would rather see something light-hearted in a garden. Meanwhile on George Street, undaunted by seasonal moods, Meg Jayanth is turning the OFS into a Sisters of Mercy video.
Genet set his play in a Parisian bordello during an unspecified revolution and Jayanth delocates it further by having all the cast dressed up in modern bondage gear. Unsurprisingly, this removes all the glamour from the setting. Anyone who’s ever been in the Gloucester Arms on a Saturday night will know what I mean. It’s just across Friar’s Entry from the Madding and I often try and tempt people there after shows as an alternative but summer’s really not the time for leather and PVC, now, is it?
Having dispensed with the city’s visual allure, Jayanth makes the play even less attractive by draining most of the excitement one usually associates with Parisian uprisings out of it. True, Jayanth and half a dozen-odd members of the cast and crew have just finished their finals, and while this swan-song is very much being put together on the trot, this is no excuse for the often plodding, occasionally leaden pace at which the play lumbers. The dialogue is abstract and denatured enough as it is, and while the rare moments of action come off well, they are so few and far between that they don’t do much more than wake up the audience. Much of the blame for this has to go to Melissa Julian-Jones, who, as Irma, the madam of the brothel, needs to hold the piece together and provide the crucial link between the whores on the inside and the pre- and post-revolutionary figures from out. Her acting aims for stylized, but overshoots it so far that she makes herself look ridiculous. She even manages to look over-the-top twirling strands of her hair. Moreover, she inflects the dialogue with so little that it turns into psycho-babble. Kimberley Trewhitt, as one of the whores, looked profoundly bored to be on stage with her. I sympathized.
As her former lover and the chief of police, Robert Morgan initially provides a nice contrast to Julian-Jones with an understated laconic menace that occasionally bubbles over and does so very well. Caleb Yong tries to make his court envoy’s lines similarly threatening, but instead comes off, camp as camp can be, as Dr. Fu Manchu. It’d work in a pantomime, maybe, and it did mildly amuse me before it got infuriating, but his scene with the coffin drags on interminably and by the end I was imagining him cackling through his Evil Plan To Take Over The World. Likewise, David Coghill’s Bishop seems to be going for the Brain (of Pinky and the Brain fame) as a washed-up sexual pervert, and while he’s very good at it, it’s hard to imagine him ever in a position of power as the script demands.
I’ll confess that I never had a goth phase, and, though the S&M theme and the mirrors reflecting the audience are ambitiously rendered, they’re really not to my taste. I don’t, however, think I’m alone there. In any case, the overbearing sense is of a production that’s missed its time. In another term this could have worked quite well, and with so many finalists on board, there’d be more time to make the pace snappier. As it is, though, The Balcony coughs and wheezes over the finish line. I know, goths’ familiarity with sunlight is passing at best, but for the rest of us, what with the weather, there are better ways to spend your last few weeks.
Max Seddon
