A
Play that stands far apart. An art ban? A dastardly plan! Fact. A small lady stands, says 'A'. Style melee; detested. The pen expended pell-mell strews mess. Gist is trippy; ; tight; kitsch; silly. Fin. Mocks soppy folly of post-tory totty. Worth door toll? Not so! Regardless of your opinion of the finished piece, you must respect the author of Vowel Play. Or at any rate, write a mile in his shows before you do. The first four (like Joe Richards, I'm missing U) paragraphs of this review prove that to make sense of out such a restricted lingual palette takes at least massive, obsessional, commitment on a scale that, as you can tell, totally eludes me. What is left though, once this novelty has worn off? Four women talking into microphones on an otherwise empty stage. There is nothing to complain about in any of these performances and the actors deserve every accolade for bringing their vocabulary restricted characters to life. The unnaturally constructed lines actually sound credible and that the characters interactions work at all is a great credit to them. The characters themselves, as written, though, are less satisfactory. They are stereotypes of women, talking about stereotypes of men and all are, for the most part, lazy. It is a shame that the inventiveness of the form should be let down by more pedestrian content, and it makes it appear that the author was more interested in playing linguistic games and experimenting with restriction than in creating rounded and absorbing theatre. There is nothing especially wrong with the concept, but it seems unfair of the author and director to have staged what amounted to performance art, while convincing the cast they were in a dramatic play.
I
'm split, do I leave Vowel Play disappointed and complaining about the half hour forever lost, or do I applaud a group of young performers for succeeding in creating a devilishly complex piece. See? Split. The ensemble lost kudos instantly, by excluding the 5th most important vowel in the ENTIRE ALPHABET. Sure there are only about 14 words in the dictionary that contain only U's in the vowel department. But even a character sat at the back blurting out the occasional random (yet relevant) word would have kept me happy. I understand the difficulty of the piece, I really do. But the epic scale of the text demands something as epic to do it justice. We were equally, however, given something that resembled Loose Women - The Stage Show - for some reason in the form of a radio play. Anyway, bitching over. I'm gonna say nice things now. Leaving the auditorium I foolishly blurted out "I could probably write something like that if given only one vowel". I now feel I should give it a go. Ahem. A and crap... that's hard... damn damn arrgh all a man has... Yeah maybe these girls deseve all the credit they get!! Hats off to them U up... us... July... gusty... dusty... busty erm maybe not.
u
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