Chalking up a success with a touch of Monty Python
Theatre
BEFORE the opening of Mark Thomson’s new production of Bertolt Brecht’s late-period masterpiece, seen here in a new translation by Alistair Beaton, the large ensemble cast begin to mill about the auditorium. Dressed down in jeans and hoodies, they chat with the audience as they enter, or else warm up their accordion playing in the box seats above Karen Tennant’s expansive set, left wide-open with pianos and a drum kit arranged around a gallows and some pillars.
As a plummy-voiced civil service type attempts to foster social engineering in a war-ravaged village, Sarah Swire’s rock diva narrator breezes on stage. The villagers become a multi-tasking musical theatre troupe, playing out the plight of servant girl Grusha, who flees an uprising with her Imelda Marcos-like mistress’s forgotten child after pledging herself to soldier Simon.
With Grusha’s survival dependent on others, her story eventually gives way to that of Azdak, a village eccentric turned accidental judge, who must decide the fate of both Grusha and the child her blood mother wants returned.
With the business of bad governments at a global premium just now, there is no better time for a production of this epic, which Thomson invests with warmth and sensitivity rarely seen in Brecht. With much of the cast cross-dressing with Monty Python-style glee, Christopher Fairbanks’s courtroom shenanigans borders on Carry On, while Amy Manson invests Grusha with a heady vulnerability.
It is Claire McKenzie’s live score, however, that powers the narrative, and Swire leads the cast with a mix of punk-folk fury, country laments and out-and-out swing in an all too necessary display of strength through joy. while bursts of noise alternated between psychedelia and grunge, but there was still enough of a groove present to be enjoyable.
More abrasive were Slaves, a Kent duo dealing in sing-song punk. The fact their set also featured a man dressed as a Buckfast-swigging manta ray indicated humour beneath primal guitar and drums tunes, and while Royal Blood comparisons are inevitable, the vocal style was more indebted to Ian Dury and PIL-era Lydon than anything else. Strikingly impressive.
If that set touched on British eccentricity, then Fat White Family were headbutting the Stooges and the Velvets. The Londoners might already be known for various shock-rock antics, but here their shamanic sound dominated attention.
While often veering close to disintegration, it also sounded surprisingly hefty, and although their melodic moments were notquite as good, they crafted a tremendously hazy din well worth getting lost in.
Which left Palma Violets, graduates from the 2013 tour and, according to the on-stage introduction, heralding the “dawning of a new age”. That’s either one of the all-time hilarious exaggerations or we can anticipate a brave new world powered by a sub-Libertines racket.
The foursome had some highlights – the garage thrust of Step Up For The Cool Cats and indie pop of Best Of Friends – but the songs weren’t brutal enough to succeed as sheer noise, nor melodic enough to charm, and the audience thinned out considerably as they played.
The impression was of a group relentlessly in pursuit of the average.
‘‘ With the business of bad governments at a global premium, there is no better time for a production of this epic