Throats at The Pleasance Theatre, North Road
Until 27 March
Call 020 7609 1800 or visit www.pleasance.co.uk/islington
If you’re going to do absurdist, you might as well go all out. Throats is the first play by Gerald Thomas on the UK stage in 33 years, and accordingly he has gone to the full extreme of free association, flailing and screaming. Even a hardened Dada-slash-Beckett fan would agree that something isn’t quite right here.
For anyone not quite sure about absurdism (including myself), a couple of seconds of blacked-out stage with disconnected voices chanting “what do you see? A lakeful of virgins,” is enough to make you wonder what you are doing with your Friday evening.
Fourth wall smashed?
As far as aesthetics go, the production design is superb. Angular, rusted and broken shards of wall line the back of the stage and thin gauze curtain the front. The lighting changes eerily from gruesome red washes to sharp white spots.
Gratuitous gore
Yet this only serves to make the play even more of a let-down. There is no plot to speak of. A long dining table stretches the length of the stage, on which is perched the disembodied head of actor Lucy Laing. Actors emerge from the wings while Laing jerks and twitches on the table.
A creepy butler smears stage blood onto his bald bonce and pours out glasses of red wine. A heavily pregnant woman’s bump suddenly deflates like a balloon. Kevin Golding plays a black orthodox Jew and Dan Ben Zenou a Brazilian footballer who temporarily becomes John Galliano before switching back again (oh, the wit of the contemporary reference).
They ramble through disconnected skits and lines repetitive enough that you keep hoping they will come together to actually mean something. But try as I might I could not link the story of a blind boy with chest pains being given directions, together with a sporadic air-raid siren going off.
Confusing play, confused cast
The cast appeared to join me in my misgivings, looking a little embarrassed and nonplussed by the whole thing.
In the disjointed, jerkily delivered, hour-and-a-half of script, there was one very apt line: “Theatre is indeed a torture chamber”. As far as Throats is concerned, I couldn’t agree more.
Two stars.
?
Gerald Thomas return to the stage only reinforces whatever reasons why he left a few years ago and could perhaps have give a bit more thought to a first production on this side. The great cast could not hold such dialogue disaster and failed to engage the audience, although there was some ‘ambience’ to it.
Trying not to get ‘too heavy’ here but productions like this only alienate the public doing more harm to theatre then one realises.