Lampedusa

Today's reports of hundreds of migrants drowned off the Italian island of Lampedusa lend a horrifying topicality to Anders Lustgarten's new play at the Soho Theatre.  But while applauding the author's skill and empathy in highlighting the issue, I don't find it convincing as a piece of theatre.

Lustgarten has written two parallel monologues. Stefano (Ferdy Roberts) is an Italian fisherman whose job is to fish bodies out of the Mediterranean, while Denise (Louise Mai Newberry) is a debt collector for a payday loan company in provincial England.  Both of them feel a combination of hostility and sympathy for those on the receiving end of what they do, and end up discovering fragments of human generosity and hope amid the wretchedness.  Each of them is a victim of a complex predicament, doing morally questionable jobs that nobody else will take, and each has a story to tell that builds up to a climax.

Unfortunately the form of the play doesn't match up to the content;  while the actors hit the right notes, they seem to speak for most of the time with a single authorial voice, not the voice of their characters.  Stefano the fisherman is too eloquent and literary, speaking of 'rocks dusted with peach and apricot'.  The play is essentially a pair of short stories whose real home is on the radio, not in the theatre, because there is very little to persuade the audience to keep its eyes open.  I closed mine for long stretches, and I don't think I missed much.

This verdict may seem a little harsh, given the praise that other reviewers have showered on the play.  But I think I found more real drama last night when I spent an evening listening to five short stories at the monthly meeting of Liars' League.  Some short stories are best approached on the page, but in the hands of skilled actors, others come to life in performance as theatrical monologues.  All of the five stories I heard last night were well written and well read by professional actors.  Two of the five came fully to life as theatre, capturing my visual attention and not letting it go for a second.  By comparison, Lampedusa feels to me to be an essentially literary exercise which is packed with insight and convincing journalistic detail, but which never hits any dramatic sparks off the audience.

Comments

[TLTheatreblog]

Hi John, some of what you find fault with, I found to be artful in my Traffic Light Theatregoer review! But it's good to chew over these things. It's true there's a feel of an exercise in rhetoric, the art of persuasion in the classical sense. There are clues, I think, the characters may be persuading rather than telling the truth. Having seen two plays now by the same writer, his writing seems quite sly, even grating, but, at its best, stylized for a reason, dramatic and worthwhile. Like reading a well-written review with which one may not always agree but is still compelling!:)