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Carry on in paradise Pitcairn
Malvern Theatres
** THERE'S nothing more disappointing than
when a good idea for a play manages to miss the point and sully it with
unnecessary salaciousness. Pitcairn performed by the Chichester Festival
Theatre is unfortunately that. It's a story based on the island of Pitcairn
where mutineers from The Bounty have settled after hijacking a group of
Polynesian women and men to be their wives and workhands respectively. What starts off delving into the utopia of
equality that senior officer Fletcher Christian hopes and fails to
create with his ship hands quickly divulges into unnecessary swearing
and eroticism. Rather than the play being a clever look at power
struggles, as in Lord of the Flies, it becomes centred purely
around sex. There's dances with dildos, women constantly
talking about different sexual positions and a grotesque rape scene. It was more like an X-rated Carry On Up The
Pitcairn than the intelligent, thought-provoking drama it had the
potential to be. It was a shame because there were poignant
moments that gave an insight into how each of these different sections
of society brought to the island would have felt. Moments like why Polynesian women were willing to
sleep with English sailors in order to get an iron nail or the irony of
ship hands wanting to get rid of hierarchies on the island, but not when
it came to Polynesians. The young cast was enthusiastic but that could
not compensate for the tedious smut and I ended up counting down the
minutes for it to be over. Disappointing. To 22-11-14 Alison Brinkworth
18-11-14
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