PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Bristol Old Vic Basement (Sat 21 May, 2011)

THEATRE It’s a stunningly simplistic and spankingly brilliant idea. And tonight, as its brief Old Vic run draws to a close and ‘Fairymonsterghost’ prepares for a raucous tour of lucky local schools, the whole thing stinks beautifully of Bristol. Writer Tim Crouch – who cut his theatrical teeth in the city and usually performs tonight’s trio of one-man plays himself – takes a backseat (though he returns in November for part four of his potentially limitless anti-canon with ‘I, Malvolio’) and hands the scripts over to BOV’s newly-installed associate director John Retallack and three nascent Bristol actors.

To recap, then: FMG comprises three well-known Shakespeare plays, re-told, in a manner, by three characters previously dashed to the margins – Peaseblossom, the ever-willing fairy of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; Caliban, the enslaved ‘monster’ orphan (‘The Tempest’) and Banquo, the mistrusting, murdered thane of ‘Macbeth’. Given the freedom to reinvent splendidly layered backstories and splice modern day English patter with the juiciest bits of Bardic dialogue, the three stories work well: Kate Mayne, in her first professional stage role, is staggeringly accomplished as Peaseblossom, flitting in and out of her fitful dreamscapes with a beguiling lightness of touch and asexual innocence, chirpily deconstructing her hazy, crazy midsummer eve with warmth and wonder.

Adam Peck’s burly, bearded Banquo bemoans the broken friendship that consigned him to his bloody grave, standing solid, booming out his tale with seething self-loathing and accusatory vim, positing the audience as Macbeth ("what if the Weird Sisters had said to me, what they said to you") whilst swilling his hands through a deep-bottomed bucket of thick blood (from where he later plucks something grizzlier still). And in the middle, the pick of the bunch – Jimmy Whiteaker’s feral, twitching Caliban; lithe, loose-limbed, a-leaping; laying out a life of abandonment, entrapment and abuse with a fierce, primal energy and, with the merest flash of his wild, room-devouring eyes, an ability to unsettle or enchant, and often both simultaneously.

There’s plenty here for adoring Shakeophiles as well as the younger audience for whom much of this is intended and the conceit works best when Crouch/Retallack tackle the text head-on, letting each character’s story develop in situ with gloriously visceral crowd-pleasing flourishes (an electric guitar here, a familiar nightmare or two there) and diverting visual humour. Whilst there are occasional spell-breaking moments when it feels a little like hand-holding exposition, overall this is loaded with ideas and stuffed with so much well-intended fun that only the most pompous of purist could dare accuse it of sacrilege. (Joe Spurgeon)

Copyright Joe Spurgeon 2011