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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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Alice through the touch screen In the world, but not of the world Alice's Adventures in Www.land Stage2 Crescent Studio Theatre **** LEWIS Carroll's Victorian children's
classic opened up a world of bizarre characters where language and words
battle with reason and everyone is mad . . . as a hatter, otherwise, as
the Cheshire Cat tells us, they wouldn't be there. And Stage2's reworking of Alice treads the same
weird and illogical paths as the original although I suspect that it
introduces an extra element with a generational gap and it also brings
in a sadness, which may or may not have been intentional. Alice, played by the
excellent Georgia Homer, is tired of school and boring text books and
finds escape in her laptop and the world of her namesake in Wonderland
except our modern Alice's escape is to a world of tweets, of hash tags,
likes, @, trending and hyperlinks – the
Www.land
of social media . . . and that is where demographics come in. The older the audience, and the younger
strangely, the less likely they are to use social media, only one per
cent of users are over 65 while, remarkably, only five per cent are
under 17. More than half fall between 25 and 44 and, interestingly, the
majority of users are women. (Source: Pingdom 2012) So for any performance there will be audience
members who will find Www.land an alien
world speaking in a foreign language and using unfamiliar conventions –
which is perhaps where the sadness comes in with the realisation that a
civilisation that could give us the language of Shakespeare and the
James I Bible is now giving us the vacuous world of social media and txt
spk, with its ugly, inelegant stripped down linguistics and an obsession
with celebrity and trivia. Some of Carroll's clever games with language are
still there though such as Alice's discussion about who she is with The
Caterpillar, played confidently by Leah Martindale, or a complex
monologue from Peter Collier as a splendid Mad Hatter which even had
smatterings of rap. Both speeches create the problem for both
learning and performing of being largely nonsense with a flow and rhythm
that depends upon the actor rather than any logical structure and both
youngsters delivered their difficult lines with aplomb, the Hatter aided
by a suitable loopy March Hare played by Annabelle Quirin and the
weirdly hooded Anonymouse played by Gabriel Hudson.
Fine performances too from the fish and frog
footmen, Alex Thompson-Carse and Luca Hoffman, keepers of passwords and
random letters to foil trawling bots such as automated spammers – told
you it was another language. Then we had the King of Hearts, Tom Baker
and his loony queen, Sarah Quinn, who goes in for screaming and
beheading in a big way. Less violent are the strange pairing of The Mock
Turtle and The Griffin, or The Gryphon, played by George Bandy and
Joshua Gordon, discussing the merits or otherwise of modern schools and
teachers and discovering . . . girls, which is enough for the nerdy
Turtle to remove his glasses and try for cool and hip. There are many more notable efforts from the
large number of characters. 23 in all, who must have worked hard and
long to reach the level of precision needed for many scenes, and, as
this is Stage2 who work on the Ben Hur principle of casting, there is
also a huge chorus of 31. Leading us through at the start is Meg Luesley as
The White Rabbit while taking over as the guide is Tom Butler as a
wonderful Cheshire Cat. His grinning, rather floppy manner reminded me
much of a youthful Christopher Biggins as he beamed and bumbled around
the stage. With such a large cast it needs a lot of
discipline to prevent it all descending into a mob but director Lucy
Bailey-Wright keeps a firm grip on things – as do her charges who seem
to know exactly what they are doing at all times. A notable feature of Stage2 productions is that
the cast are always acting. There is no standing around looking bored,
staring into space, looking for mates in the audience, waiting to say a
line or exit left, everyone on stage always seems to have a purpose, to
be part of the scene, taking an interest, even if the purpose is merely
to look as if you have a purpose.
Technically it is a challenging production based
around a simple set of Alice's bedroom in the background and a stage of
blocks decorated with large with common social media ascii characters
such as @ and #. Above is a large projection screen with a video
screen at either side which brought in another element as we first saw
Alice's search for Carroll's Alice, allowing her to break out of her
world into that of Www.land, and then
whole conversations seen as tweets on the huge projection screen. Synchronising with pre-recorded video or music is
a skill that takes no prisoners and full marks to the cast here for not
only coming in on cue with their on screen tweets but also getting
virtually every word right. This live/video mix became even more impressive
in a final musical number when the entire cast of thousands – all right
54 – filled the stage with a none too easy dance which synchronised
exactly with the same dance filmed with the same cast to the same music
in the same costumes at Millennium Point in what was a classy piece of
staging. There are a couple of moments when pauses were a fraction too long and a couple of graphics that perhaps needed more polish but the combination of mediums largely worked well. The graphics and video were apparently created by a group from the technical team and then lighting designer and production manager Chris Cuthbert pulled it all together. This is not a play in the conventional sense and
combines live acting with video, graphics and music ranging from Police
and Roxanne to Puccini and Turandot in what is a multi-media performance
as Alice explores a whole universe of different worlds out in the
cyberspace of social media. Through her we discover that it is a world that
is not always welcoming, and despite living only within computers, is
not always logical or even fair. The result is a clever piece of
theatre, well presented and acted, as you would expect from Stage2, but
at the end you somehow felt it had been a somewhat superficial
experience – but perhaps that is what social media is all about. Roger Clarke |
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