BA Acting

Wounds to the Face ***

It's 11 years since Howard Barker's poetic meditation on face values received its debut in Edinburgh as the most unlikely Fringe act ever. Then, Barker's fierce series of interlocking variations on a theme was seen in a production by Stephen Wrentmore for Barker's own Wrestling School company. Now, RSAMD may be in a mess about many things, but let's hope the 10 final-year students in Hugh Hodgart and Liam Brennan's production can take some of the play's sacred and profane complexity out into the world with them.

With the audience seated informally on the New Athenaeum stage as the fire curtain falls, perceptions of who's watching who are flipped on their head from the off. The woman putting on her make-up at the mirror as she prepares to face the world sets the tone for a highly-charged catwalk of bomb-blasted soldiers, hooded terrorists, pin-up boy freedom fighters who can't decide between God and revolution, prisoners who've lost their youth and masked mystery men with irresistible allure. Image, public or otherwise, is everything.

Like the plastic surgeon who attempts to nip, tuck, remake and remodel their subject, Barker's linguistic knife appears even closer to the bone than it was on the play's first outing. Hodgart and Brennan's actors relish the opportunity to bring such notions into life as they race about Kirsty McCabe's mirror-lined set.

If there's a tendency at times to treat each scene as set-piece audition speeches, it's only because the language is such a delicious mix of anger, intellect and eroticism flipping over each other in an instant, colliding the next in a dramatic exercise of considerable sound and fury.

The Herald
22 May 2008

Wounds to the Face ***

WITH storm clouds of controversy and underfunding swirling around Scotland's drama schools, it's good to see the final-year students at the RSAMD testing themselves against the best. Howard Barker is perhaps the most brilliant and least compromising of all living British playwrights; and if his 1995 piece Wounds to the Face is not exactly his weightiest work, it still presents a formidable, disturbing challenge.

Structured in 14 short, episodic scenes, this powerful contemporary text examines the relationship between physical appearance and identity in merciless detail, considering the ruined faces of, among others, a war-wounded soldier, a discontented woman and an old philanderer disfigured by the pox; it also considers the sheer, casual cruelty of youth and beauty. Hugh Hodgart and Liam Brennan's production – in a towering theatre space created on the stage of the New Athenaeum – looks breathtakingly fine, with a spectacular design by Kirsty McCabe (superbly lit by Andrew Smart) that makes magnificent use of giant portrait mirrors, and tall, soaring poster images.

Where the production falters is in its tone. There's far too much conventional "acting" and characterisation, not nearly enough Brechtian dryness and distance, combined with the ruthless focus on the play's themes, made possible by that harder, clearer performance style.

Nonetheless, Jenny Hulse shows terrific promise in a clutch of key female roles and, if this Barker sometimes looks frighteningly like the kind of bourgeois British theatre he hates, it still makes for a fascinating and absorbing evening.

The Scotsman
22 May 2008

The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol ***

This epic drama about a French peasant woman makes an interesting project for final-year acting students. Within the first few minutes, the disabled title character is born when an actress is tipped out of a bathtub; then the actor playing her brother takes on the role of a pig and is made into sausages.

Based on a story by the Marxist English writer John Berger, the play was originally devised by Theatre de Complicite, a French company known for its physical storytelling. Neil Doherty's production boasts some brilliantly inventive touches, but after a fast-paced first act full of novelty and energy, the more static, wordy scenes charting the second and third of the title's three lives are less engaging.

Lucie Cabrol's name is mentioned only a handful of times, even though the play follows her through seven decades. Early on, her malicious younger brother dubs her "cocadrille" - meaning born of a cock's egg, and suggestive of supernatural powers - and in time all of the play's characters and even its narrator come to refer to the abused heroine by her nickname. Ashley Pontius is physically impressive as the young Lucie - her brief affair with Stuart Martin's Jean is illustrated with a startlingly primal sex scene - but it's when Roisin Gallagher takes over as an older incarnation of the character that her humanity is revealed. While it allows for a smooth transition between the two actresses, the fact that only Lucie speaks with a French accent proves distracting. Other sounds created on stage are extremely effective: singing, chattering, the chopping of an axe and planks slamming on to the ground.