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The Stage Company Facades
by Keith Waits
Riverside Studios
20 May 2008
A review by Allan Taylor for EXTRA! EXTRA!
As Catherine the Great does her tour of the Ukraine, Prince Potemkin commissions a set designer, Feydor Batushkia (Simon Ryerson) to build a series of canvases painted with rich architecture to fool Catherine into thinking that ‘New Russia’ is a more flourishing province. As the fervour of building continues, the men grow impatient that the fakes are overtaking the real buildings, and so they begin to build in secret. As the town starts to purge and get richer, will Feydor notice and how many facades there are? Written and directed by Keith Waits, I can’t help but feel that an outside eye would have been of unlimited help with this play. When a playwright writes their work, it can be all too easy to clutch onto it and refuse to relinquish the control to another director. In this insular thought process, Waits has kept a lot of elements that possibly, seemed clear in his mind, which, have not necessarily been communicated to the audience. As with all Russian plays, one has to feel the pre-Revolution tension, and there is a strong Socialist element that is touched on here, but not fully exploited. The plight of the workers juxtaposed with the self satisfying and facile greed of the aristocracy is the main issue, and yet Facades seems to skirt around this point, while belabouring others, keeping the action at a very slow pace in order to reveal what could have been crammed into one act with a more poignant and political point. There also seem to be a lot of overlapping issues, instead of focussing on one central theme; betrayal of a lover, duty to a nation, May to December relationships. All of these detract from the main thrust and, as a consequence, the conclusion seems to leap out of nowhere with no build up of tension and no empathy garnered for the tragic consequences. The basic set (some backwards turned canvasses) and limited music did nothing for the atmosphere, and the stage hands coming on and off between scenes did not help the inauthentic feel to this play. Described as a ‘parable’, I think this play might be better off viewed as a historical reconstruction offering an interesting perspective on an anomaly of Russian history. It might have worked better as a ‘Kafka-esque’ story with a bleak and hopeless ending about trying to complete the impossible task (to make the real seem like fake reality). Instead, the lack of clear intention and the hurry towards the conclusion (after a long first two acts) make Facades someone else’s interpretation of historical events.
Facades is showing until the 29th of May Performance time: 7.30pm, 25th of May 6pm, 26th of May 2.30pm Tickets £12.50/ £10 For more info, call 0208 237 1111
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