A brutally honest yet fun insight into a young actress’s experience.
Racing Tortoise Tempo Slow is a one-woman semi-autobiographical show about a young actress’ struggles to get into theatre school, until she is helped by George, a giant tortoise. Yes, Benita as a giant tortoise is as charming and fun as you’d hope for. For a one-woman (and arguably, one-tortoise) show there is an incredibly high amount of energy — Benita C. Lambrechts’s physical performance is fun to watch and really works in the intimate performance space at The Golden Goose Theatre.
The start of the hour-and-a-half-long show is an homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey and introduces us to the show’s central conceit — our talking tortoise — and it’s an absolute delight to the audience. It’s incredible how Benita’s almost frantic energy gets us into the spirit of the show. I really enjoyed watching Benita as the tortoise, if anything, this narrative device might be underused: Why wouldn’t you want to use a giant tortoise as much as humanly (tortoise-ly?) possible.
Benita’s physical acting is truly sublime. There are several scenes where her dancing is captivating to the audience, and in these the sound and lighting design really stands out. The staging is very simple, only featuring a few pieces of trash, underlining the environmentalism theme of the play. Yet these are used in wildly diverse ways, whether we’re seeing a jellyfish or building a time machine.
My biggest reservation with the show was the tone… The tone tended to wildly vary from tongue-in-cheek to sincere. The show even mentions this, varying from the “tragedy of not getting into theatre school” to environmentalism and one of the trickiest issues of our time: “Why keep trying when failure is inevitable?”. I’m afraid to say the ending is a bit underwhelming; it seems that the fun tortoise-y moments fall more towards the start of the show. As we get later in the show the energy may have waned a bit, this could be easily lifted with a few more additions of the tortoise if Benita chooses to relook at the script.
Overall this show is a fun insight into Benita’s life from playing on the seaside of Norway to where we’ve found ourselves now.
REVIEWER: Josh Powell