Kissing the Floor is a very loose adaptation of Antigone – the geography of kingdoms, the culturally-loaded names and even the togas have all been dropped in favour of the modern world and popular culture. And, of course, there is the ever so slight addition of that topical elephant in the room, paedophilia. As if death, war and crazy incestuous parents weren’t difficult enough.
“What did you do to your hair?” Not exactly something that you’d expect from a paedophile meeting his sister for the first time in six years, but then again, what else can be said? The cast in Kissing the Floor are faced with a tight-rope walk between issues of abominable proportions and the natural, normal capacities of modern-day humans. Somehow, in amongst their nattering about Hollywood films, Annie and her “kinda different” brother Paul have to navigate their deep familial love for each other around the moral minefield of his crimes and urges. All this, squeezed into a few words and awkward pauses, with the occasional shudder. In some respects, I felt the dialogue was a little too stiff, a little too strained, especially when it should have been relaxed – but maybe that was the point.
You might think that a narrator figure might relieve some of this tension, perhaps give a little enlightenment. In fact, this performance has two, but the catch is that they are both characters who have simply stepped away from the action for a minute, only to rave about it and dump a wheelbarrow full of yet more rotten, seeping emotional compost onto each viewer’s head. The cynical, sarcastic Izzie may take centre stage long enough to thoroughly blacken our thoughts of Paul with her sickened words, but her subsequent pleas to her sister Annie are refuted by am idealistically loyal sense of kinship, although Annie herself knows, perhaps better than anyone, her brother’s monstrous tendencies.
On the one hand, I expected a play with such delicate content to be slightly more sensational, in that it might try and present a stronger case for the humanity of criminals. Instead, the struggle was fairly equal, if not slightly conventional in Annie’s losing battle against an unforgiving society. But then again, what else is to be expected from a Greek tragedy? The fact that there is no one giving Annie a medal for her defiant and desperate love for her repulsive brother is eerily piteous. Moreover, without her failure, there would be nothing to be pitied, and no chance of a reconciliation (at least in emotion if not in social changes). Thus the mad method of the Greek tragedy unravels itself in this modern, thought-provoking adaptation.
FOUR STARS
