‘Panic’ by John Bohannon

Burton Taylor Theatre to Saturday 25th May 2002

‘Is honey sweet?’
Not necessarily, according to this witty, yet profound, play of Bohannon’s. Incorporating Ovid’s myth of Pan and Syrynx, and set in a garden shop, the tale revolves around the motivations for, and events leading up to, the murder of a young woman who starts work at the shop. When a Private Detective who works for WOXICA (Wider Oxfordshire Investigation of Cult Activities) starts questioning Cathy about why her colleague has gone missing, you may never look at a hydrangea plant in the same light again…

The acting in this play, coupled with the direction and overall production, is excellent. The background music and flashes of lightning between scene changes lend a charged atmosphere to intense and realistic acting, which is interspersed with humour throughout the play.

Joe Henry played a strong Private Detective Nigel, and captured the satirical Dick-Barton-type investigation well with the dead pan manner in which he coined such phrases as ‘Seven women go missing over a fifty year period…could there be a connection…’ The two ‘lads’ working in the shop had good comic timing too. I was surprised at how well the physical, satirical and even more bizarre types of humour blended with each other throughout the play, such as when Sarah strolls onto the stage after two of her colleagues’ intense ‘dancing’ to passionate drum-beats, and upon finding nobody in the office says, ‘Hey? It’s too early for drum solos…’ Reina Hardy gives a wonderfully convincing performance as Sarah, the naïve virgin who ‘wants to be like Britney’, and who is manipulated unwittingly into contemplating sex - watch out for the disturbingly bizarre, yet brilliant, vision she has of her colleagues near the end…or is it a vision?

Carly Vandenberg gives a spectacularly agile performance as Cathy, a ‘victim’ of Mr. Capri’s cult, even being whirled by her lover onto an audience member at one point in the play (bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘audience participation’) and she gets the balance between arch and arrogant just right. Mr. Capri is magnetic and the way he prowls like a wounded and hungry animal almost deceives the audience into believing the character to be naïvely gentle as well. The strangely fascinating tension he and his witch wife, Mrs Capri (Celine Vacher) maintain throughout the performance heightens the drama and comedy to a large extent, particularly when the two are combined in Vacher’s beautiful monotone: ‘I had a baby, but it was cursed… so I left it on the mountain to die’

The combination of a continuous building of tension, followed by quick comic deflation of this make ‘Panic’ an excellent piece of entertainment. You will not only enjoy it, but at the end will be left wondering whether this really was a straight-forward case of murder after all… so: ‘please mind the gap between this play and reality…’

Henrietta Stackpole 23.05.02