Summertime brings not only copious supplies of fruit and vegetables but a rich choice of theatre treats at a modest cost. The month-long Camden Fringe opened yesterday -- a brilliant alternative to Edinburgh and far better value for money. This is one of London's premier stage festivals and the most important fringe theatre season of the year, though its geographic centre in a single London borough Camden Town means that most professional critics don't go near it. Meanwhile the National Theatre, like a large elephant stumbling into a shallow duckpond, is also trying with decidedly mixed results to get in on the fringe act.
My fringe day began by seeing Love and Other Games at the Etcetera in Camden Town. I have to declare an interest here because Lisa Fulthorpe's four short plays were initially read at Player-Playwrights a few months ago, so I know the cast and creative team. What Lisa has achieved looks deceptively simple, but is in fact very difficult: writing four two-handers about human relationships, each 15 minutes long. The writing is brilliantly economical, leaving out unneeded exposition and background and telling short stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end. Former lovers bump into each other in the street and briefly try to rekindle a past relationship; a girl suddenly realises that her workshy party-loving boyfriend is never ever going to settle down to a job or a family; a busy working wife walks out on her supposedly creative househusband when his paranoid jealousy gets out of hand; and the morning after a Saturday one-night stand reveals an alarming gap between a boy keen to depart and a girl determined he should stick around for Songs of Praise. There's an absolute minimum of scenery and some rather uneven lighting, but the acting by Fiona Boylan, Christopher Tester, Olivia Hill and James Sutherland is pitch-perfect. Director John Higgins has worked with Katie Mitchell, which is not much of a plus in my book, but his creative contribution here is faultless. The show costs £6, lasts an hour and you can queue up with teenage Goths from all over Europe to get a tattoo in Camden High Street afterwards. The run is unfortunately a very short one until August 4 only.
Down on the South Bank the National has opened up its Paintframe workshop where scenery is normally built for a summer season of four plays that lasts until September 10. I saw the second pair of plays, Nightwatchman by Prasanna Puwanarajah and There is a War by Tom Basden. Although the surroundings are industrial concrete the technical resources are lavish and up to the standard of the NT's permanent stages. Low-budget fringe theatre it certainly ain't -- these productions clearly have budgets running in to the high tens of thousands. Both plays seem to me to be underwritten and overproduced, with technical gimmickry overshadowing the actors.
Nightwatchman is 45-minute monologue spoken by Abirami, a Lancashire-born woman cricketer from a Sri Lankan Tamil family who has been called up to play for England in a Test match at Lord's against Sri Lanka. The stage is a cricket net where she pitches herself against a bowling machine, flashing the bat and mostly connecting with a satisfying clunk, occasionally missing and doubling up with pain. Technically it's a tour de force -- we see everything except the actual ball, with even the stumps being knocked over when she misses. But the context is not just cricket but politics, and the monologue is addressed to her father. If you want to know about the dilemma of multiple identities and divided loyalties, Abirami is a test case -- fervently English and patriotic, but equally angry about the brutal Sri Lankan government and the terrorist Tamil Tigers which many of her fellow Tamils in England support. Abi's controlled fury is well conveyed by Stephanie Street, whose aggressive pull shots are straight out of the Kevin Pietersen repertoire. This is the debut play by an actor who has been seen in several NT productions, including Emperor and Galilean. I'm interested in both cricket and in Sri Lanka -- I travelled there to watch England play a Test match in 2003 -- so this play spoke to me. But to anyone who doesn't know who Mike Atherton is and who has never heard of Sri Lanka's bloody civil war, it won't make much dramatic sense. The play is about 10 or 15 minutes too long, and repeats itself too often; the central character's story doesn't develop in a clear arc, and the expensive technical design isn't really necessary. This monologue would work better in a fringe theatre with just three stumps, a bat and two pads, leaving space for the audience's imagination to create the bowling machine. Here, despite Polly Findlay's direction, Stephanie Street's powerful performance, and the happy coincidence of England thrashing India in a Test match in Nottingham on the day I saw it, it seems over-exposed.
Tom Basden's There is a War, directed by Lyndsey Turner, suffers from the same over-use of technical fol-de-rols which leave no space for the audience to exercise its collective imagination. There are explosions, blank rounds, the whiff of cordite, flashing lights, fake blood, fake body parts, helicopters dropping chaff, real AK-47s and sniper rifles and a large cast, some of whom have very little to do. The script is absolutely dire, the worst piece of writing I have ever come across in many years of visiting the NT. For a theatre whose literary department receives thousands of new plays every year, it is mystifying why this one was picked for performance. Basden is a comedian and his play has quite a few jokes, but the absurdist comedy never rises above the level of Radio 4 on a bad night. War is hell, of course, but we don't need comedians to tell us that. Without the bangs and explosions and stage design, the inadequacies of the author's writing would be cruelly exposed. Nobody who has ever been near a war zone would recognise anything remotely authentic about this glib piece of writing. The actors, notably Phoebe Fox as a doctor, do their best to make sense of what it's about, but are overshadowed by the stage and sound design.
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