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Malvern Theatres
**** TRUMAN Capote’s heroine, Holly Golightly,
is a tortured and lost soul who is trying to find herself in a world of
alienation, prostitution and criminality. She has run away from her
husband, she is emotionally needy and leading a totally superficial
glitzy life in the big city. She is exploited by various men, she gets
entangled with criminal gangs and the drug culture and she is totally
out of her depth. The struggles Holly undergoes begin eventually to
evoke a limited amount of sympathy from us as an audience, but this is
indeed limited because of her superficiality and silliness. In fact if
the story suffers it is because the plot is limited and there are no
characters with whom we really identify strongly. One of the problems facing a playwright who is
trying to dramatise a novel or indeed a film for the theatre is that the
theatre is not able to provide us with multiple locations and settings
so easily. Consequently the designer has produced a truly impressive
array of sets that fly in from above and roll in and out from either
side with great slickness and frequency. However these snappy changes do not help us to
identify so strongly with the characters, neither do the characters
provide us with a great deal of light humour. Because of these factors
the play struggles to work effectively as a theatrical piece, despite
the fact that there are some very impressive features to the show. The use of lighting and costume are of a
particularly high order and complement the set design in making a strong
visual impact. There is a whole range of effects – spotlights,
silhouettes and atmospheric scenes; the simplicity of three or four
reporters writing reports in their pads is brought alive by the lighting
design and their costumes. Bob the Cat added charm to the evening, popping
in and out on several occasions with remarkably apt discipline! The blonde and curly-locked Holly is strikingly
unlike the girl in the poster who has long, straight and black hair. Her
singing was delightful, her diction occasionally lacked clarity. The
characterisations of all the cast were strong, clear and sharp, the
acting was generally of a high order throughout the play. Overall however this was disappointing evening,
not because the direction, the acting or the design could have been
bettered. It was simply that we were not massively amused or emotionally
engaged. We are presented with a superficial and glitzy world where
Holly has to put on makeup to read a letter, where the lostness of the
characters does not move us profoundly and where we are left with a
sense that this made a better novel or film than it does a theatrical
piece. To 12-10-16 Timothy Crow 11-10-16
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