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At the end of the Eglesfield Players' performance of an Indian Affair,
the actors come on stage to take their curtain call. They look bashful,
even ashamed; the audience disbelieving. The play has lasted just 27 minutes.
That's it. Eventually someone begins to clap.
A shame, because it isn't often we get to see a play by Gil Vicente (one
of Portugal's premier dramatists) in this country. An Indian Affair is
a light-hearted farce concerning a wife left at home by a husband voyaging
to India. Adapted by Oliver Henman from A.J. Lappin's out of print translation,
the scene initially seems set for a fresh and exciting experience - video
is projected on the back wall to represent the husband's voyage between
scenes, a raised platform is to represent both the wife's balcony and
the prow of the husband's ship. We are promised a "snapshot"
of the three years between the husband departure and subsequent return
distilled into one night.
One admires the above ambition because that's all there is to admire.
That's all the play is: 27 minutes of ambition. The video projected between
scenes runs into several problems. If the vaguely exotic images are meant
to be suggestive of the husband's voyage and the strange lands he encounters,
then why on earth, in a Renaissance-era play, are we given incongruous
modern images, bicycles and the like? And why play the video again after
the husband has returned? The video segments also go on far too long,
breaking up the dramatic action. A cynic might remark that this was an
attempt to bolster the play's running time. Acting is mediocre at best,
but this seems due far more to the paucity of direction (which, at times,
threatens, to leave the actors almost static) than the abilities of the
evidently capable actors. Most of the acting seems rushed - it is generally
unsympathetic (actors act AT rather than OFF each other) and the cast
fail by and large to bring out the humour behind their lines.
This is a play about the effect of distance upon relationships. Never
once did I feel that one of the characters cared about another. Constanca,
the wife, seems to consider her husband's three year absence as akin to
him having just popped down the chippy. More than that, the play is meant
to be funny. Even scenes recognisably earmarked as comic scenes (Constanca
having to juggle two lovers) failed to raise more than a titter.
When a play is this short, and still charges us the standard admission,
the audience is entitled to feel cheated when it is not of the utmost
quality. This play falls some way short. Why did the Eglesfield players,
who claim they would like to perform more Portuguese theatre, not perform
two or three of Vicente's one-act plays together?
The program notes inform us that the director Kieran Pugh "began
dancing at the age of nine and trained in Birmingham with the Royal Ballet".
I humbly suggest that he return to his true calling.
Munzar Sharif & Alex Murphy, 28.01.03
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