THEATER REVIEW- The Rover

The Rover, first produced in 1677, was rediscovered by the modern theater in the 1980’s. Since then, its author, Aphra Behn, has enjoyed (as much as one can enjoy things from over 300 years of top-soil) the modest notoriety that comes with being one of England’s first female writers. Her admirers include hip feminists with degrees in English literature, and she has apparently earned her place as the queen of amatory fiction, a predecessor to Romance novels (the sparse criterion for the genre being that they deal with love and are written for women by women). I believe that evolution has been kind to the amour; at least now stories chronicling the task of “shackling-the-notorious-playboy-to-your marriage-bed-through-nothing-but-the-use-of-your-womanly-good-looks-and-wit” does not involve several callously dismissible attempts at rape in the plot. My aversion to such “charming” scenes of the wild-child rover’s manly aggression, is clearly more modern than would have been advisable for the ideal reception of the script.

“The Rover” himself is a bawdy sailor named Willmore (played with a goodly amount of devil-may-care by Tom Hunter), out on the town cavorting with his friends. Among the party is the steadfast (a notable rarity) and unlucky Captain Belivile; his lady love, Florinda, is bound by the will of her forceful brother to marry another. Willmore is no slacker and in the short matter of two nights manages to seduce both Florinda’s sister, Hellena, and Angelica, a high priced courtesan. Mistaken identities cavort with broken vows in this fast-paced 90 minutes condensation of the original, which has lost nothing but its crippling dependency on patience in the adaptation. The dialogue is witty ("How the devil came you so drunk?” “How the devil came you so sober?"), but it is scarcely Shakespearian verse. A lighthearted comedy with a starkly gendered dichotomy that personally makes me resent the playful “all’s well that ends well” of which the entire time period reeks. At the same time, I am well aware at how the play could have been read in a very different light; at some point the unlucky fool Blunt vows to take his anger at one woman on all their wretched kind, and perhaps (after several more drinks and lessons in revisionist history) I can be taught to see that this is where Behn meant to suggest that stereotypes are wrong. All in all, amusing but underwhelming, perhaps I just can’t appreciate the good ol’ days as much as I should?

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Reservoir Dogs by The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre

These lovable Scottish socks are performing at the Edinburgh Festival, check them out at the Gilded Balloon.

There is something so timelessly irresistible about sock puppets. Maybe it's because we've all made them? Personally mine never sounded this good and quite honestly, spent a lot of time shaking hands with my feet (which betray my puppetry ambitions by going very cold, very quickly...especially when deprived of their cotton warmers).

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THEATER REVIEW- Attempt 3.4

Attempt 3.4 is one of those shows more accurately termed an experience; critic Tom Powell at Broadway Baby aptly describes it as more of a “live art installation rather than theatre.” The cast lays out the ambitious and mystifying intent of constructing “the city” in 60 minutes. The posters describe the four as the “architects of the apocalypse” and I’m waiting for something mildly religious and the poster of a fireman makes me think that it will have a feel-good message about the nobility of the human spirit….not quite.

From the first step of demarcating the square outlines of their performance space, the cast extends an invitation to the audience to participate in the commencing abstraction. The rest of the show is an emotional drive-by through the chaotic, personal, emotional, sensitive, lovable, laughable, and pathetic. Imagine if you took a box of magnetic poetry, scattered the words on the ground, and spent the rest of the day picking up the pieces out-loud; every strand and loose thought is either the beginning of a Nicole Krauss novel, or just a stand-alone quirky statement of how a poodle’s diet gets their hair so curly (spaghetti). Particularly potent are the themes of needing another’s attention (a voyeuristic window crush is abandoned), to being invisible in our trembling secrets.

In the square there is form, rules, and in this, a meaningful freedom of creativity and raw expression that Raz-mataz failed in achieving through their contrastingly shapeless production.

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