Theatre Review

Cartoon de Salvo

Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories

Lyric Hammersmith

15 May to 7 June 2008

Couzens

A review by Tim Jeeves for EXTRA! EXTRA!

It was always going to be difficult to review this.
There were even times in the last few weeks when I wondered if perhaps I shouldn’t have a word with Extra! Extra! HQ and see if they had another agent – someone bolder and more adventurous than myself – who would be willing to write a few hundred words about this particular outing onto the capital’s theatrical landscape.

But now, having seen the latest offering from Cartoon de Salvo, I’m particularly pleased that I didn’t give in to my cowardice, though must confess that the review is still no easier to write.
The reason for my difficulty? Well, I’m pleased to say that it’s neither some age-old excuse of writer’s block nor personal involvement of a too intimate kind with a member of the cast.

No, the problem arises in that the play I saw was entirely unlike the play that is being performed tonight, tomorrow night and the night after that (all of which will be equally dissimilar from the next).

Now of course, this is one of the joys of theatre – the ‘liveness’ of the art, the presentation of a different form to a different audience each time a show is enacted. But the difference I am talking about here is a little more fundamental than such sentimentality.

The show was unique and one–off. Once the title had been chosen from suggestions by the audience (‘The Forgotten One’ being the titular preference on press night) and once the three songs that were to punctuate the play had also been selected from a chalkboard listing the company’s repertoire, that was it – off the company embarked, on a voyage that no one, including themselves, knew quite where it was going to go until arriving.

And in this lay the company’s biggest strength.
When the lights went up after the initial calibration of the story and we were confronted by a man balancing on a chair, his legs and arms swaying precariously, the bond between audience and performer was stronger than it ever usually can be in a piece of end-on theatre.

Little did we know that we were witnessing Captain Dave on the bridge of his spacecraft, 300 days into an international space mission that was about to go disastrously wrong. And few would have surmised that Dave’s immediate future would involve two squawking aliens with tentacle faces and rotating waists and a penchant for setting off false distress signals. And even less did we suspect that back home, Dave’s daughter Jennifer would be getting embroiled in a messy relationship with on-the-run murderer Tall Jesse.

And at that point, with the performers having as much idea as we did about how things were going to develop, did theatrical moments at their most wonderful begin to present themselves.

Of course, as you can probably tell from my synopsis, the story that unfolded wasn’t exactly Shakespeare. Though, at a push, you might be able to make readings concerned with colonialism, the family, or perhaps the media, don’t be expecting any kind of highbrow intellectualism in the presented narrative.

But even if such expectation is avoided, it can be hard at times to remember that this is purely spontaneous theatre, largely because it is so much better than a lot of what is shown after extensive rehearsal - whilst testament to the considerable ability of the company, this can also work against them at times.

When your focus slips away and the play is judged against more conventional standards then it can feel slightly weak and not as narratively tight as it should be.

But such moments are few and far between.
In contrast, it’s when the sense of play is at its foremost, when theatre is presented at its most bare, when the situation presented would never be shown if it was a rehearsed piece that the performance is at its most splendid.

A personal highlight was the performers’ discussion, half-in/half-out of character, about how the play should proceed – weighing up which would be easier to improvise (kidnapping the alien captain) versus the more narratively exciting (taking advantage of the fact that the aliens have no understanding of time). Another instance of the form working as it should came when Captain Dave addresses his fellow spaceman, the Alien Chief and the alien called Inky in quick succession, demanding that the single performer playing these three characters change between them in rapid and awkward succession.

It’s these times, when we can’t forget the genius of what we’re witnessing. that are the high points of the play and fortunately the company sprinkles them abundantly throughout the hour and a half of each show, creating more than enough moments of wonder to make the piece very highly recommended even if you won’t be seeing what I’ve just written about.

£12 (£9 concessions)

Box Office: 0871 22 117 29

www.lyric.co.uk

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