DOUBLE TAKE
La Dispute and Les Acteurs
Once, in the court of TFTV, a dispute began between a prince and his love (you decide who is who). To settle the argument, they reared a group of students over a period of two years, taught them methods and practitioners and then split them into two. The argument? Could they make a hilarious comedy. One group, they gave a story that mirrored their own, La Dispute, the other, they gave a story that mirrored the actors journey, Les Acteurs. The students toiled with the stories - their strange language, the characters, the setting - and over time they steeled themselves to present the sum of their problems on the grandest stage of them all, La Scenic.
*******
TFTV's Third Years are back, this time on the same bill. As everyone has probably seen from social media, one play, La Dispute, contains a prince manipulating four orphans - two girls, two boys - to see if a specific gender is more likely to cheat than the other. The second, Les Acteurs, contains a comedy within a comedy where characters trick each other to their own ends, but in a far more harmless way than it sounds.
The plays themselves seem evenly written but the difference boils down to what has been added to them. There are flashes of brilliance in both: the dancing bow at the end of Les Acteurs; the Notary's entrance; the jumping companionship in La Dispute; the hand kissing throughout La Dispute. But the overall problem with these plays is a lack of fun. The audience was having a great time but the actors themselves seemed too fixed in the play itself. Yes, an assessed piece of work; yes, the first night; yes, nerves. But what I wanted to see was actors mirroring the pieces themselves; most characters spend a lot of time enjoying themselves but I never believed the actors were having fun.
Several times in La Dispute, for example, I missed lines because actors were trying to talk over the audience laughing. In Les Acteurs, nobody seemed aware that what they were saying was funny: it was like the Devil Wears Prada with Kristen Stewart instead of Emily Blunt. This will, hopefully, improve now the first night has gone and now the groups are getting good feedback, they will be more confident in the performances so they can trust in what they have and begin to enjoy these plays.
This sense of fun affects almost all the aspects. None of the actors are missing the beats or misjudging their character wildly but the actors who stand out are invariably the ones who seem to be having the most fun on stage, to me anyway - Jason Ryall, Symone Thompson, Emily Thane, Joe Winstone. The sets are lovely and inventive but there is no fun to them; Anna Mawn has deliberately not made the structure perfect but you can see the foundations of it, it doesn't feel like it quite fits the atmosphere. The see-through material of Becky Dryden-Jones makes the entrances visible but generally seems unused in the production, the concept of something being visible to audience but invisible to characters generally being ignored.
The music in both productions (Becky Robinson and Martha Godfrey, respectively) is sparse but well-timed and used to good effect. Similarly, the lighting does a solid job in illuminating the stage and setting the tone for the scenes (Katie Wilkinson and George Killick). For La Dispute, director Rosie O'Sullivan does a very good job of focusing the action whilst reminding us of the hierarchy on stage - keeping the Prince and Hermiane up top, watching over the orphans but also Mesrou and Carise. In Les Acteurs, James Dixon keeps the pace quick and the play never seems to stall but I wonder whether more could have been done to help the actors in terms of props or larger set pieces, just to give them more options, particularly in the rehearsal for the comedy play.
These are good productions, definitely the funniest of the performances I've seen at TFTV, and confidence will only raise the standard. In a busy week for theatre, the Third Years more than hold their own.
No comments:
Post a Comment