With a welcome Full House expected on Friday our first dress rehearsal guaranteed high pressure. Sunglasses and suitcases, nakedness and knickers, dancing and death all dominated proceedings to made for a highly charged and exciting performance.
Using a deliberate colour theme of red, white and black to single out individuals while simultaneously emphasising uniformity meant for superb lighting effects to take place. Chilling silhouettes and haunting red lights added to the menacing presence of the cast onstage. The Dress was quite simply chilling yet poignant, dark yet funny, moving and brilliant.
Seeing the choreography between scenes finally work as tightly as it promised to was a delight. Despite the music that is used being catchy and upbeat each song captures the mood of the play perfectly. The visual impact is quite something.
The heat was most certainly on with Karl who had to get naked for the first time in front of cast and crew. I think Wanda had booked a central seat on the front row… Not only did Karl have to deliver his lines expertly, he had to grapple with a big white sheet, a very sultry Sarah and of course timing his movement to the sounds of a creaking bed. Phew!!
The set, albeit simple, commanded its own level of pressure. With blocks and suitcases forming the entire set, each has to be positioned with strategic refinement. When each suitcase is as precarious as it promises to be stacked up high and full of ladies’ stockings and file paper, getting it right was critical. Fear of pulling a muscle or knocking them over was banished from the radar. It worked brilliantly! And looked amazing.
Review from the Birmingham Mail
Conventions challenged by fine play;
Terrorism CRESCENT THEATRE, BIRMINGHAM
John Slim
ARRIVING audiences are bemused but largely compliant when they unexpectedly arrive in the Crescent studio centre-stage and are asked to remain standing.
They discover eventually that they have become the crowd at an airport that has been brought to a halt by a bomb scare. All they lack is the suitcases.
It’s different. Even the programme is different, in that it tells you the nine players but offers no way of identifying them.
This does not matter: actors assume new identities, with few exceptions, with every scene.
Eventually, some of the scenes that have appeared to be freestanding stories are seen to be linked in what is a pot pourri of apparent bomb plots and very real bullying by individuals, either in the bedroom or in the workplace – that sort of terrorism.
Graeme Braidwood’s production is sharp and slick; sometimes surprising, as when it offers a slant on Marilyn Monroe’s offering of Happy Birthday to the President; sometimes too shrill for its own hopes of understandable audibility but always utterly riveting.
The authors are the Presnyakov Brothers.
I’m sure they would be impressed by this rendition, which continues until tomorrow.
Verdict: *****
March 27, 2009