OFS Studio, Tue June 12th - Sat June 16th 2007

Having mixed reviews in the Student Press, I wasn't sure what to expect with this play. One paper seemed to being singing its praises, the other tearing it to pieces. Both failed to do it justice.

Their disagreement is caused by the feeling you are left with at the interval, that it is either really good or really bad. This is nowhere more true than in the character of the Chief of Police. At times Robert Morgan's portrayal makes little sense, the character doesn't seem to cohere. It is not until later that you realise that in such judgements, you too have been drawn into the world of delusion and trickery that is Madam Irma's House of Illusions. Morgan's subtlety of performance in a part that could easily be overplayed is noteworthy.

Such a sense of confusion is testament to the brilliant acting throughout the entire cast, which fights against a poor translation to present a stimulating piece of theatre.

Madam Irma is played with delightful perversion by Melissa Julian-Jones. Her character has the same lack of coherence as Morgan, but it is precisely this dichotomy between burlesque mistress and matron that highlights the perversity of her maternal moments, and causes the distinction between reality and illusion to be further blurred.

Time should also be taken to commend Jonathan Totman's excellent performance as the idiosyncratic Judge.

If you go to The Balcony expecting a goth-romp in a PVC-filled brothel, you'll be disappointed. If you go expecting a dark, stimulating, philosophical plays which at times is also funny - a play that forces the audience to share in its illusion - you'll be more than happy.

George 11 Jun 2007

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Jim Batty June 12, 2007

Set in a brothel, with a revolution raging outside, Jean Genet’s influential and notoriously difficult play The Balcony offers a juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, with a constantly shifting boundary between the two as the violence of a war fought on the streets edges closer to the doors of personal privacy, represented here by Genet in the form of a brothel. Enjoying a surge in popularity as a consequence of the bloodthirsty and erotically invigorating scenes outside, the fantasies of the mediocre men of the area are catered for in meticulous detail by the girls of the brothel, whose faux-confessions and willingness to engage in bestial scenarios enable the clients to invert their impotent real-world personas and become instead judges, bishops and generals. Played out as a series of interwoven vignettes, the narrative comes gradually to the suggestion that the fantasists are potentially the ideal candidates for their respective roles in the real world, leading to an impossible fusion of identities. Sitting temporally somewhere between Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, Genet’s exploration of simulation and its potential to usurp reality as the primary mode of experience is remarkable in its intuitive interpretation of the unfolding media society, questioning the very notion of authenticity in an age of endless reproduction.

The play is absurdly long, though, creeping as it does toward the three hour mark (although Genet’s original was longer even than this). Given that it is being performed in the hot and close space of the Old Fire Station, the whole experience has the potential to become rather trying. This is not a work to be tackled lightly, and the overriding impression of this production is that it is perhaps a little too ambitious for its own good. The acting is extremely variable, ranging from the competent to the really quite wretched, which doesn’t help. Genet’s dialogue is ruthlessly unforgiving and, in the wrong hands, ends up sounding absurd for all the wrong reasons. His insistence that exaggeration should be a key technique in the performance of the play is reliant on the ability of the actors to contrast exaggeration with realist restraint in order to fully expose the slippery boundaries between the self and its distorted mirror image, but for some, Genet’s carefully conceived distinction is clearly a challenge too far. With a strong, professional cast, The Balcony could make for a compelling text, but here it finds itself struggling to find a suitably mature voice. The woefully misjudged inclusion of a dire singer/guitarist at the beginning of the second act also draws attention to the dominance of creative enthusiasm over experience.

That said, the main players do, on the whole, make a commendable stab at keeping things together during the epic running time. In particular, Melissa Julian-Jones’ portrayal of brothel-keeper Madame Irma is cohesive throughout, offering a largely convincing blend of experience and naiveté as the paper-thin wall between truth and falsity is worn away. There is, though, as with so many student productions, a lack of plausibility when presenting images of the sordid, particularly for the male characters, whose hedonistic cynicism is supposedly the product of bitter experience. Sadly, the audience are no more likely to believe the fresh-faced boys here are genuine brothel-crawlers than they are to be fooled by the false beards worn by the three wise men in a school nativity play. Consequently, a certain necessary authenticity is lacking, leaving the whole thing resembling a distorted, self-gratifying, fantasy-driven imitation of the play, rather than the play itself. Which may, after all that, be oddly appropriate.

This is an utterly misjudged adaptation of a play which really does deserve better. Worth going to if you want to have a laugh at the expense of the cast (be sure to heckle the *terrible* musician at the beginning of act 2), but otherwise rubbish.

David 12 Jun 2007

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