Seduced by Hedda

Saturday, 2nd April 2005

There’s a peculiar new trilogy at Theatro Technis whose full title is longer than this sentence. The production is the brainchild of someone called Cradeaux Alexander. That’s not a misprint. Like his name, everything about his show seems wilfully perverse. The first of the three plays, all by Heiner M�ller, involves two ill-lit actors spouting drivel at each other. The next is a master-and-servant romp set in pre-1789 France. A simple text bizarrely complicated by the decision to share the two roles between four actors. That’s not a misprint either. Every line is delivered by a pair of voices speaking together. Bonkers. In the final piece, the director performs a version of Medea, alone on stage, reciting various voices into various microphones, stark naked. All we learn from this is that vanity is the sibling of madness. Cradeaux Alexander has christened his production company ‘iMind’. Another eccentricity. That lower-case ‘i’ means that any sentence beginning with the company’s name will look misspelled. iMind about that quite a lot. It’s a standard achievement of the fringe to annoy a reviewer during a show but to irritate him while he’s back at his typewriter takes a special talent.

Sharman Macdonald’s new play The Girl with Red Hair is a big, sprawling, generous-hearted, emotionally stirring pile of tosh. Four disparate sets of people, vaguely connected to each other, conduct rambling conversations on a Fife beach. The scenery is a junkyard of conflicting effects. Everything we see is poorly integrated. So is everything we hear. Macdonald has a single knack: a scatty, long-suffering God-fixated female voice. She can’t imagine a man. She can’t tell a story, nor can she create dramatic architecture. Her wittering morons are barely able to engage each other in their confessions, let alone interest us. Their chatter feels more like a series of soliloquies forced into the same room.

You might contend that this is what conversation consists of, but Macdonald is too haphazard an artist to make an argument on those lines. Instead, all she makes is copious supplies of boredom. But this isn't the heightened, poetic ennui of Ibsen, it's the humdrum bus-stop slackness of time passing. In other words, this is the kind of experience that makes you want to run off and write a play.