Sardonic, Suspenseful, Surreal
The Oxford Playhouse Ault Company (OPAC) found a truly fascinating piece to work with. The Oxford Playhouse was transformed as a venue from its usual proscenium arch into a traverse stage, offering an intriguing entrance to the space. The staging was simple, which allowed it to be transformed with ease between locations without too much difficulty. The lowering of a sign here to denote a shop or hotel, a change of light for the forest. Along with this, due to the audience being seated on the stage, bearing witness to all entrance doors and a very varied props table, it felt very Brechtian. The company could have pushed this further into their costumes, too, stripping back to just a single piece of clothing to denote a character, but the costumes were a good touch to ground the period.
Overall, all the performers worked very well together; the disparaging state of the town of Güllen was clear from the start with the miserable old men who have nothing better to do than fight over the ends of cigarettes and watch the trains go by (no offence to trainspotters). The dry and bleak humour landed well throughout the piece; there were a few occasions when the show felt a little muted, but still managed to keep the audience engaged. Anthony Evans Pughe’s performance of Anton Shill was a great anchor to the play throughout, witnessing the townsfolk’s descent into madness while he tries his best to maintain his fibre. His energy suited the second act, where Anton becomes resigned to the fate befalling him, but for the first act it could have used more drive to emphasise his happy ignorance, his desperation to be kept safe and his anger at his fellow villagers.
Catherine Smith’s Claire was enigmatic and ominous from the very beginning, giving off some rather spidery qualities, perhaps even a little nod to Bluebeard with her seemingly unending number of dead husbands. There may have been a touch too much hinting at what was to come in her first scene, a little overly pointed when it came to morbid questions, but this did also add to the surreal feeling to the piece. When it came to surreal, David Scott and Christopher Eddie managed to add the spook factor with their Blind Men, but it may have been even more effective if they had made a choice to either echo the last word the other had said or master speaking at the same time, as it appeared more like a struggle to predict when the other was going to speak.
The piece kept a good balance, with some lovely comedic moments to break up the oppressive feel of the show and a lovely nod to Bob Fosse’s choreography adding to the population of Güllen’s spiralling insanity and excess. The piece brought to mind the town of Innsmouth with its slowly escalating oppressiveness and gruesome intent, while also showing the death of small towns in a modern world and the insidious nature of capitalism. The line “Everyone is buying with credit.” Landing excellently. There were many other excellent moments, interactions between characters, but too many to name all here.
The show was only on for one day, the 11th of July, but I was glad to catch it. It is not a show I was familiar with and the OPAC have a lot to be proud of with their performance. The team drove the show well and build a lovely horror-scape as each villager fell victim to the same madness.