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Missing Persons- Four Tragedies and Roy Keane |
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Andrew Haydon |
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Well-known RSC stalwart Greg Hicks performing five brief monologues by the acclaimed translator and playwright Colin Teevan should be one of the more sure-fire quality offerings on the Fringe; and so it is. Teevan has taken the stories of
four Greek tragedies and reworked them into modern poetic monologues - roughly
the same sort of thing as Neil LaBute's Bash; except in Teevan's hands, rather
than attempting to make some childish points about how everyone's bad, the
stories take on new resonances building on the old, and acquire some beautiful
writing into the bargain. Greg Hicks brings to the piece
the benefit of many long years experience of playing the great tragic roles,
and one of the finest, oddest voices in theatre. Just the right side of
actorly, his verse-speaking is pretty much unsurpassed on the contemporary
stage. The smallness of the studio space, the nearness of the audience, and
the newness of the script seem to have given him scope to achieve one of his
best performances of recent years. To close, Hicks, returns to the stage as an Irish
football fan, to deliver a frenetic account of footballer Roy Keane's decision
not to play with the Irish national side in the Japan/Korea world cup, and the
hitherto unexplored parallels between this and the stories of both Achilles
and Philoctetes in the Trojan War. While at times the structure of
the piece is a little uneven, individual moments of beauty in the writing more
than compensate, while Hicks, as always, is a spectacularly good performer.
It's nice to see small-scale side-projects like this alongside the more
commercial ventures at the Fringe, bridging the gap, and raising the bar for
younger companies, while reminding more established acts that bigger doesn't
always equal better.
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