London
THE MAN IN THE MOONE
Runs 55min No interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 September at New Diorama.
Lift-off for performance skills, but no clear target ahead.
Runs 55min No interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 September at New Diorama.
Lift-off for performance skills, but no clear target ahead.
Apparently, the finest prospect an Edinburgh Fringe company can see is the high road to London. Rhum and Clay is among the first to take that high road this year.
But their protagonist has his sights set further, and higher. As an opening visual sequence shows, the moon’s his ambition, aim, and dream. While colleagues in the office are shifting deals and downing drinks, he’s gazing star-struck beyond them.
At home, as his partner does all she can to keep him entangled and stop him getting away, his attention and gaze go right over her shoulder. She’s become expert at holding on to him, by hand, arm, leg or neck, as a child might be eternally trying to hang on to a helium-filled balloon. And receiving about the same amount of responsiveness, as he attempts to fly away free.
Except, he’s not helium-filled. The best escape he can find is a mountaineering expedition. It’s an intriguing image: ambitious ascent that remains earthbound – with its own ambiguity. This opening sequence is filled with images of space exploration, but it’s earthbound in its own way, being packed with Hollywood science-fiction sequences.
Such manufactured excitement, danger and imagined modernity offers an evidently unreal alternative to mundane life. And the piece, expertly performed as it is by the four young actors, would make a greater impact if, alongside the physical ingenuity, there were more of a dialectic within the material, further sense of ambiguity, or a critique of yearning for the moon.
A lover’s June moon soon brings to mind associations with cream cheese, jumping cows and barking dogs. But not here. Which is why the fun of the piece stays within individual scenes, where performance ideas are worked-through and expanded, rather than in the overall structure, where they are never complemented, contrasted and assembled into a larger whole.
There remains plenty to enjoy in the expert performances. But, ask why the show exists in this form, and it seems a matter of giving scope to the performers’ skills and routines, rather than to contribute to any wider understanding of this lunar person.
The Man: Julian Spooner.
The Explorer: Christopher Harrisson.
The Preacher: Daniel Wilcox.
The Spaceman: Matthew Wells.
Designer: Alberta Jones.
Lighting: Geoff Hense.
2013-09-14 06:53:06
