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Coventry Belgrade Theatre **** The Arrival,
a touring stage work adapted from the acclaimed illustrated novel by
Australian writer Shaun Tan, is billed not as a play, but as a
circus-theatre production. Perhaps that's as well,
for its interpreters or adapters, scriptwriter Sita Bramachari and
director, Kristine Landon-Smith, co-Artistic Directors of the
flourishing, award-winning Tamasha theatre company (the word, of
Farsi/Persian origin, means ‘commotion', ‘bustle', ‘excitement' or
‘making a stir', and also denotes an Indian folk art form), have
produced, whatever is on paper - just a dozen pages of spoken exchanges
or soliloquy - only a flailing, butterfly attempt at some kind of
meaningful story. That may be the purpose. What they give us
instead is a dignified central black figure, Dele (the distinguished,
almost Mandela-like Charlie Folurunsho), who – now elderly – runs or has
managed (we gather) a kind of refuge for immigrants in Finsbury, Folorunsho steadies the show. With him we meet a
Vietnamese woman - ‘I have been working as housekeeper since eight years
old' - and Chinese girl, who spends a chunk of the evening
heartrendingly lamenting, while Dele, engaging poetry taken, one
assumes, from Tan's touching Australian original, becomes a kind of
Jedermann, wafting through and sometimes influencing the smidgeons
of immigrant life he encounters. The most effective actual theatre scene is the
storm which (as in The Tempest's prologue) nearly tears their
ship apart. Great excitement ensues, superbly enacted, during which
Felix Cross's specially commissioned score, tiresomely and misjudgedly
ubiquitous elsewhere (it clouded the snippets of dialogue we were aching
for), rightly had a field day, and the choreographed antics were quite
brilliant. So too was a curious, Lowry-like scene of a
behatted cast walking and dodging and wheeling in magnificently managed
patterns: a classic set piece, performed with the precision of ballet. For this show was entirely centred on the
extraordinarily talented ensemble Circus Space, whose acrobatics, with
climbing ropes, a high wire and dangling hoop was not just spectacular,
but top rate. The performers are young, or youngish; they ascend with
alacrity, descend with terrifying gravity-defying tumbles, dangle and
twangle and indulge in new-fangled high-flying that has all the
freshness of youthfulness. As spectacle, this show, with its compact cast of eight, was quite marvellous. Language was one thing that communicated itself: Folorunsho and Antoinette Akodolu's sing-song (I assume) west African, the Chinese girl's plaints, a Greek cast member's Hellenic lilt, created the sense of alienated intermingling, striving to unite, that was one of the show's themes. The dignified Dele played by Charlie Folurunsho But not all fares well. Shaun Tan explained, in
conversation, ‘The Arrival began life as a long set of written
notes based on researched immigrant stories. I was trying to find points
of intersection – those feelings and situations that seemed universal to
all immigrants, like homesickness or bureaucratic troubles, confronting
food and difficulty with language or customs.' So far so good; Tan as an illustrator, an
outstanding one, wanted to put words on the back burner and concentrate
on the visual. This staging just does that; but as a result, we learn
little about character, about experiences in depth, about encounters;
about any kind of meaningful – as opposed to sketchy - ‘arrival', in
fact. Here are a series of cameos, and of vignettes, that appear to add
up to very little; plenty of the words were obfuscated, or at least
distracted from, by the often quite banal score. No, the heroes were three. The set designer, Adam
Wiltshire, produced a clever delimiting, domineering, almost
quayside-like timbered backset (with underused side stairs) that opened
up cleverly for a Staten- or Ellis-island sequence, whose ‘officialdom'
(Tan's ‘bureaucratic troubles') sadly amounted to very little in this
mostly nondescript script. Andy Purves, the lighting designer, picked
out characters in changing light artfully, never intruding but always
enhancing, picking out, lending stature, and showing off the acrobatics
to dazzling effect. And choreographer Freddie Opoku-Addaie, who spent
part of his childhood in Ghana, was recently an associate artist at the
Royal Opera House and is now artistic director of Jagged Antics, working
with Circus consultant Glen Stewart, a specialist in ‘artistic
gymnastics' and acrobatics, produced wonder after visual wonder. Rope climbing is slightly ‘in' at present: it
creates a frame, or eye-catching prologue, to several effective shows
(Thomas Guthrie's staging of Purcell's King Arthur at the Bridge
House Theatre, So one is left, to a degree, with an Emperor
without his clothes. Silences play a role here, and rightly so: they are
part of Tan's original conception. But the most aching silence was the
sheer deficiency of narrative. We cared about these individuals because
we, the audience, were supporting them, the cast. Those sturdy ropes
held them up. The tenuous story didn't.
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