Lost in translation?
Theatre: Life X 3, Manoel Theatre
What an utter disaster! Just when one thought that a quiet night in, curled up in front of the telly was just the thing and that your demanding six-year-old had just been transported to the Land of Nod, your superior and his wife, dressed to the nines, turn up for dinner, on the wrong day! Two couples in three not so contrasting situations, in each of which they vaguely swapped characters producing three not so different outcomes. At least that was what seemed to be the object of the exercise. The changes however were indeed so subtle that the endings were not as radically different so as to make each version a new revelation which is what effective theatre is all about. The result was fuzzy and one left the theatre wondering precisely why one had spent a couple of hours fidgeting in it for!
Since John Fowles's alternative endings for The French Lieutenant's Woman, we have seen retake after retake; the gimmick has been flogged to death. In Life X 3 by French playwright Yasmina Reza and directed by Jon Rosser at the Manoel Theatre last week, we had a triple bill which, unfortunately did not have any of the impact that was implied once the object of the opus sunk in after trying to decipher the dizzy conversation about astral planes which is also subject to interdepartmental skullduggery and cutthroat competition as much as the most mundane job!
In his Director's Note Mr Rosser declared that he found the play very, very funny. One would imagine that the sparkling wit and brilliant repartee would be such that we would be heaving in our seats and dabbing our eyes; sadly, apart from the occasional titter at the more slapstick bits, the audience, me included, was ominously silent. The wit, if it was there, was, most of the time, definitely, way above our heads!
Something must have been lost in translation; possibly the original French prose may have been more slick and elegant or, possibly, French humour is radically different and possibly more subtle, however the entire exercise went sadly flat. By the time the third version of the disastrous evening started I found myself praying that it would soon be over. The astral conversation, that only poor Ines seemed to make any sense of, didn't help at all. The play's progression was generally disjointed, stilted and uncomfortable.
Be that as it may, the quartet of actors had to assume a somewhat different character three times over which is no mean feat. Out of the four my praise goes unreservedly to Vanessa Macdonald's Ines. Ines' role was pivotal to the action as it was always she who brought things to a head either by being imperiously forthright, candidly drunk or unknowingly perceptive. Alex Grech's Henri did not convey the contrasts that the three versions of the same character demanded while Anthony Ellul's Hubert was consistently obnoxious and, had he been playing The Weakest Link, would have been the first to be sent off by Ann Robinson. Coryse Borg's Sonia was flat; not an ideal vehicle for Ms Borg's usually riveting talents. We had a few flashes of what she is capable of while Hubert mauled her but apart from that the character itself let her down. Above all we had the amplified presence of the child, Arnaud, played by Jacob Grech, whose caprices and demands, although exercised from somewhere offstage, were the most effective and determining factors that steered the action of the three versions.
Life X 3 was, in the end, a most unsatisfactory, irrelevantly puzzling and exasperating experience; a play that had best been left alone somewhere in Montparnasse.
Since John Fowles's alternative endings for The French Lieutenant's Woman, we have seen retake after retake; the gimmick has been flogged to death. In Life X 3 by French playwright Yasmina Reza and directed by Jon Rosser at the Manoel Theatre last week, we had a triple bill which, unfortunately did not have any of the impact that was implied once the object of the opus sunk in after trying to decipher the dizzy conversation about astral planes which is also subject to interdepartmental skullduggery and cutthroat competition as much as the most mundane job!
In his Director's Note Mr Rosser declared that he found the play very, very funny. One would imagine that the sparkling wit and brilliant repartee would be such that we would be heaving in our seats and dabbing our eyes; sadly, apart from the occasional titter at the more slapstick bits, the audience, me included, was ominously silent. The wit, if it was there, was, most of the time, definitely, way above our heads!
Something must have been lost in translation; possibly the original French prose may have been more slick and elegant or, possibly, French humour is radically different and possibly more subtle, however the entire exercise went sadly flat. By the time the third version of the disastrous evening started I found myself praying that it would soon be over. The astral conversation, that only poor Ines seemed to make any sense of, didn't help at all. The play's progression was generally disjointed, stilted and uncomfortable.
Be that as it may, the quartet of actors had to assume a somewhat different character three times over which is no mean feat. Out of the four my praise goes unreservedly to Vanessa Macdonald's Ines. Ines' role was pivotal to the action as it was always she who brought things to a head either by being imperiously forthright, candidly drunk or unknowingly perceptive. Alex Grech's Henri did not convey the contrasts that the three versions of the same character demanded while Anthony Ellul's Hubert was consistently obnoxious and, had he been playing The Weakest Link, would have been the first to be sent off by Ann Robinson. Coryse Borg's Sonia was flat; not an ideal vehicle for Ms Borg's usually riveting talents. We had a few flashes of what she is capable of while Hubert mauled her but apart from that the character itself let her down. Above all we had the amplified presence of the child, Arnaud, played by Jacob Grech, whose caprices and demands, although exercised from somewhere offstage, were the most effective and determining factors that steered the action of the three versions.
Life X 3 was, in the end, a most unsatisfactory, irrelevantly puzzling and exasperating experience; a play that had best been left alone somewhere in Montparnasse.