Arcola Theatre Archives - Page 16 of 27

★★★

“a hilarious, poignant, confronting and insightful watch”

Based on Jean Genet’s ‘The Maids’ CASA, London’s Festival of Latin American Arts presents the award winning play, ‘The Only Thing A Great Actress Needs Is A Desire To Succeed’, by the Mexican based theatre company Vaca 35.

This multi award winning play brings to light the sobering reality of life in servitude for marginalised women. In your face, loud and adventurous, this production interacts with the audience via multiple senses: sound, sight, smell and even touch (if you’re close enough) making it an incredibly visceral and tangible experience.

Directed by Damián Cervantes with actresses Diana Magallón and Maricarmen Ruíz playing the maids, Vaca 35 created an intimacy that felt as though we were voyeurs spying through the key hole of the servant’s quarters; witnessing the inner machinations of stir crazy serfs. It made for a hilarious, poignant, confronting and insightful watch. The play centres on the combative yet tender, co-dependent relationship between two women who manage the mundanity of their daily lives through fantasy and the monotony of chores. Staged in the unconventional space of the Arcola dressing room, the tiny arena all the more, heightened the claustrophobic, repetitive routine these maids partake in to generate a more bearable existence.

Without forcefully doing so, this play invites audiences to step into the shoes of another culture, country and lifestyle and still feel at home. This is why theatre is so powerful. Divisive assumptions are gently dismantled when a production, such as this, illuminates how similar we all are via our quirky and relatable idiosyncrasies.

It is incredible to believe that Vaca 35 have performed this play 297 times and by the end of this week they will surpass 300 performances. With such high octane energy and intensity, it boggles the mind to imagine how these actresses maintain such a fresh and vibrant portrayal each night. It’s well worth it though and their, obvious, desire to succeed has most certainly paid off.

Reviewed by Pippin

Photography by David Monteith-Hodge

Radio

Arcola Theatre

Reviewed – 24th June 2019

★★★★

“a performance that convincingly and loyally wrings the emotion from the text”

“Maybe you wanna see an effect? A piece of magic?” Charlie Fairbanks (Adam Gillen) asks us, explaining that magicians prefer to use the term ‘effect’ rather than ‘trick’. What they create are illusions by taking advantage of how we perceive and process information. A dove fluttering from a hat is used to draw an audience’s attention away from the actual trick. Just as some believe the moon landing was a trick (fake news half a century before the phrase was coined) by the American Government to distract us from Vietnam and the Cold War. It is this merging of the global and the personal that informs Al Smith’s writing in “Radio” that enables us to connect instantly to the play.

Smith’s father worked for the US space programme and helped to choose the landing sites on the surface of the moon for Apollo 11. He grew up hearing his stories about that time, and about the highs and lows of that era in the States. By extension, “Radio” is about fathers and sons, pride and protest, love and war; a kind of love-letter to his own father and to a lost era. Alone on the stage, Adam Gillen treats the writing with reverence in a performance that convincingly and loyally wrings the emotion from the text. It is no small challenge to keep an audience clinging to your words (and there’s a fair few of them) for eighty minutes. And Gillen does it with style, honesty and subtlety. Director Josh Roche avoids gimmickry and allows the actor’s storytelling to take centre stage.

Charlie Fairbanks was born at noon, in June of 1950 in Kansas, in the dead centre of the 20th century and in the dead centre of the United States. The trouble is that the centre has a habit of shifting. As does the focus of the story. But that is not a criticism; Gillen’s anecdotal flair adds spontaneity so that the flow of the narrative never ebbs as it meanders and side streams. The strands of his story overlap, like fragments of clarity from a continually spinning radio dial, in a performance that crackles with understated energy.

While chasing his own dreams of becoming an astronaut, Charlie navigates the American Dream and the twists and turns of his changing world – from JFK’s assassination, Vietnam, the cold war and, central to the play, the space race. His is a heartwarming story of reaching for the moon, and of the effects of seeing our world from afar. The real achievement of the moon landing, says Charlie at the close of the monologue, wasn’t that we got there but that, in getting there, we realised the value of all we left behind.

And like the cycle of the moon, we are back at the start – with an echo of Charlie’s opening question. But by now we have the answer. It doesn’t take an illusionist’s trickery to know that we have just seen a piece of magic.

Arcola Theatre

Reviewed – 22nd July 2019

★★★

“a hilarious, poignant, confronting and insightful watch”

Based on Jean Genet’s ‘The Maids’ CASA, London’s Festival of Latin American Arts presents the award winning play, ‘The Only Thing A Great Actress Needs Is A Desire To Succeed’, by the Mexican based theatre company Vaca 35.

Reviewed by Pippin

Photography by David Monteith-Hodge

The Only Thing a Great Actress Needs is a Great Play and the Desire to Succeed

Arcola Theatre until 26th July as part of the CASA Festival 2019

Previously reviewed at this venue:

Arcola Theatre

Reviewed – 24th June 2019

★★★★

“a performance that convincingly and loyally wrings the emotion from the text”

And like the cycle of the moon, we are back at the start – with an echo of Charlie’s opening question. But by now we have the answer. It doesn’t take an illusionist’s trickery to know that we have just seen a piece of magic.

Reviewed by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Helen Maybanks

Radio

Arcola Theatre until 13th July

Previously reviewed at this venue: