The Exquisite New Adventures Of Mata Hari at the Old Fire Station 'til Saturday 30th October The year is 1966 and Section Ten, a top secret branch of the MI5, wages a bitter war with an organisation known as The Secret Vatican, allegedly a branch of the real Vatican. Both organisations race to discover and recreate an ancient and extinct 'language of Eden'. The bumbling Boswell (John Doy) is recruited as a double agent, only to be continually rescued by the enigmatic agent known by the code-name Mata Hari (Jessica Stretch), who aspires to an avenger-like dynamism in a man's world. The plot is, to say the least, complicated, working on the rather obscure central premise of a pure ancient language of Eden in which there is no gap between expression and the expressed; signifier and signified. The Babel Fragment is what everyone is fighting over, for it holds the crucial code. As this concept is not explained in full until Veal's enthusiastic tirade well into the second half, I found myself wondering what all the fuss was about. The eponymous Mata Hari is a symbolic figure in this play of assumed
identity, where nothing and nobody is what it appears. Just as Veal's
fanatical vision denounces a civilisation in which language cannot
live up to the object it refers to, so do the characters in this play
always drift away from our conception of them. These code names shield
a character and intentions that refuse to be pinned down. The play
thus twists and turns as the characters metamorphose in the most unexpected
ways. Not exquisite, but certainly interesting, this production will leave you unravelling the story for days afterwards. Jane Labous. |