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Act Now! Drama Company present
Something Wicked This Way Comes
from the works of William Shakespeare
adapted by David Hunt
Directed by David Hunt
Greenwich Playhouse
7 July - 12 July 2009
A review by Alexandra Carey for EXTRA! EXTRA!
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a selection of excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays collated and rearranged in such a way as to provide an exploration of the battle between good and evil, the consequences of the evil deeds of evil characters and the effects of evil on the innocent. The whole thing is held together by the three infamous witches from Macbeth, cast as the mistresses and orchestrators of all darkness. Its a dangerous concept; its taking scenes out of context, rejigging them, even reassigning lines. If I’m going to be totally honest I don’t think it worked. The use of the witches didn’t hold the piece together anywhere near coherently enough despite some nice moments, and there wasn’t a unified feel to the whole - with many different styles, scenes and characters. The danger with ‘exploring a theme’ theatrically is that it becomes more of an academic exercise and loses the dramatic interest - the sense of caring about the characters’ fates, understanding their journey and what they desire. This definitely happened here and at many times it felt more like I was playing ‘guess the Shakespeare play’ than being told a story. This feeling was compounded by the high stakes of all of the successive scenes. They were chosen for the crucial moments on display, and there was lots of variety in situation and approach, but little build up or development within the various characters and scenarios. It may have been more interesting to focus on a smaller number of characters and plays but explore their unfolding in more detail. This lack of sustained and developing dramatic conflict seemed conter-intuitive to the stated aims of the piece to explore the conflict between good and evil and the birth of evil. Unfortunately I think the key problem faced by David Hunt with this idea is that - as he himself says in the programme notes - Shakespeare is fascinated by evil in its many forms ,and so the vast majority of his works explore the idea in one way or another in great depth and with extraordinary subtlety. So really to reduce and collate this exploration can only be to reduce and curtail the depth and interest of it. It may have been a far better exploration of good and evil to simply have staged one complete play. Having said this I am aware that, to a certain extent, the play is also serving as a vehicle for the development and showcase of Act Now! Drama Company’s members within the company’s structure of performance style oriented short courses. The variety of characters and styles adopted by each actor was certainly demanding. Some performances and moments stood out: David Puckridge’s delightfully irreverent Edmund, Jess Leavins’ seductive 2nd witch and Lorraine Gilbert’s haunting and melancholy singing Isabella were most notable. The use of the repeated simple folk-style melody employed by the latter to tie into a different scene was a good example of the type of top-down continuity which was required to hold the piece together. I also thought the bold choices made with Lady Macbeth’s ‘unsexing’ scene and Lavinia’s costume were so interesting and, given the lack of story driven interest, I was longing for more of this sort of direction. Though I must say it seemed totally at odds with large sections of text when I couldn’t see anyone (from one side of the thrust seating) and a strangely prominent and unfortunately badly edited sound design. I think this is really the overall feel Something Wicked This Way Comes left me with - a real mixed bag. Excerpts of Shakespeare’s work can be truly engaging even without the full story when great performance and direction shine through. There were moments of this, but just not enough to keep me engaged.
Venue: Greenwich Playhouse, Greenwich Station Forecourt, 189 Greenwich High Road London SE10, 8JA Tickets:£12 (£10 concs) Box Office:Tel: 020 8858 9256 / Email: boxoffice@galleontheatre.co.uk
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