Riparian entertainment - review

What happens when a human couple, ostensibly relaxing on a beach, is confronted by a pair of giant lizards? When these lizards that materialise from the sea are able to talk, the confrontation is nothing short of bizarre. Only a playwright of the calibre of the legendary Edward Albee, creator of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Goat or who is Sylvia? can pull off something as improbably allegorical; and then, only just!

This pair of reptiles go by the impossibly mundane names of Sarah and Leslie, are far from being the primordially indifferent species that we think lizards are and betray a deep affection for each other that teaches that Love with a capital L pervades all aspects of creation; even the most unlikely.

Seascape, a romantic comedy, was written in 1975 and is now, by theatre standards, a pretty old play. I am still partially at a loss why Albee chose reptiles to create a foil to explain the meaning of life and love to an audience who will perforce remain bemused at what is meant by a romantic comedy. Like many top flight plays Seascape will not provide solutions but provoke thought.

FM Theatre Productions' Seascape, starring Denise Mulholland as Nancy, Edward Mercieca as Charlie, the human couple, and Pia Zammit as Sarah and Paul Portelli as Leslie, the reptilian duo, was directed by Chris Gatt. Let me start off by stating in no uncertain terms that visually the "lizardry" was amazing. Noel Zarb, costumes, along with Anton Farrugia and Justin Buhagiar, make-up and prosthetics, excelled themselves by creating the most wonderfully lifelike pair of lizards. That the reptilian moves and traits were acted splendidly is an understatement. Mr Portelli's long mannerist frame and Ms Zammit's comparatively petite one competed in action that ranged from frenzied scuttling, to slow deliberate choreographic prose that was in fact rivetingly beautiful.

The human couple was in my opinion far too young-looking to carry off that attitude to life which today is popularly encapsulated in the series of books in the 1001 Things To Do Before You Die. A couple that looked and were in fact much older, well past retiring age in fact, would have made the magical Albee prose even more poignant than it was. Charlie and Nancy should have been anything between 60 and 70 in age. The fact that they looked robustly and healthily middle-aged worked against an audience fully realising the pathos of the play itself.

It is in fact this rich beauty of language that sparkles and shines throughout. Nancy's lines are full of it and Ms Mulholland again pulled off a coup by showing, as she did in Laughing Wild, that she can hold an audience spellbound for hours in the most long drawn out soliloquies. Nancy still wishes to tackle the "glaciers and crags" of life while Charlie has reached the penultimate stage in Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man and has wrapped himself in an emotional cocoon in unconscious anticipation of death. Mr Mercieca is still too young and vital to pull off "second childishness and mere oblivion" convincingly. His vehement protests and furious outbursts when provoked by Nancy who keeps trying to break down his defences with the tenacity of a Rottweiler, are far too spunky to be those of a man who is content to fall into the "vegetable and lump" category of human being no matter how much he tried!

Not an easy play to interpret and one that although subtitled as a romantic comedy is as prickly as the lizards themselves. Imagine calling a fish-hating lizard a bigot? It is the hallucinatory atmosphere conjured up by the talking, feeling and thinking reptiles that forces the human couple to come to terms with their mortality and come to a full realisation and appreciation of every precious moment left to them together. Do we really need a couple of lizards to teach us about love? As we get bogged down by a hundred thousand distractions and petty details, yes, maybe we do need something as outlandish and bizarre as a couple of humanised lizards to jolt us out of our complacency and live to the full each day of our lives as if it were our last.