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Wishbone
- Interference Group: Wishbone |
| Andrew Chippindale | |
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Interference has the potential to be much better than it currently is. It contains fragments of an intriguing show; an American girl looking for her brother in 1972 West Berlin, his lover - a postcard photographer, eerie, half-seen images of a spooky Uncle Sam figure, a wallet that bursts into flames when opened and all the time the persistent noise of de-tuned radio static. Unfortunately the way that these fragments have been cobbled together does them no favours. There are overlong blackouts aplenty and some pretty shoddy trundling round of tables. Beyond this the show does not appear to have decided what it really wants to do. It starts off with oblique snapshots, performed for no good reason in tiny cubicles behind a gauze onto which '70s postcards are periodically projected. Then there is some niftily performed, yet pointless, interplay between the girl and her brother's lover done at separate tables with them not looking at each other (How many shows this year are going to employ this hackneyed device? - and how many are going to make any real sense of why they do it, other than that it is trendy and 'kind of says something about how people don't really, like, connect'?). All perfectly nice, but one is losing patience. After more oblique fragments and more going back into the little cubicles for some more vignettes, the show suddenly decides to switch modes into Le Carre territory for some rapid and disappointing exposition about how the girl's brother is in fact not a lefty-gay but a right-wing American infiltrator who has framed his erstwhile lover for an arson attack that he commits, in order to increase Anti-Communist feeling among West Berliners. This sudden descent of a plot onto the fragments does make sense of them, but reduces them to much less than they could have been before they were all neatly pigeonholed. As if the company lost faith in symbolism and decided what we all needed was a good hard dose of banality. It seems a shame that some well performed fun stuff gets offed in a silly scramble to make a more understandable piece. 31 July to 25
August.
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