Edited by Patricia Stammers, Monday, 3 Mar 2014, 09:55
The performance by three members of Live Canon was better than the chicken I began in the canteen but not so pleasing as the KitKat.
I like performers to look as though they want a passionate response, to experience those moments of anticipation when the imagination is charged by the promise of an imminent drama. The actors wandering on and off stage shabbily dressed in their everyday threads, looked like stage hands.
There was no curtain, no costume and an audience of two until the others arrived several minutes late. Ah! Perhaps the latecomers were part of the act. The actors are now so cool and so modest that they want to be taken for members of the audience? Shame one of them forgot his lines.
The poetry was recited and much was written by Derek Wallcott a poet who creates lively metaphors and similies by the mile but does not write them into a framework that I can accept. I mean the story of his poems does not do the imagery justice.
'A bonfire lowers it's gaze.' (Walcott) Fab except eyes and eyebrows don't rustle. You imagine the rustle of charred wood settling into the embers and nearly accept the metaphor of fire to describe a man becoming disillusioned with love for Helen of Troy but the next lines are scathing,
'when through her smoke - grey
eyes, I saw the white trash that was
Helen;'
you start wondering what sort of god the 'I' person thinks himself. Presumably the 'I' person is Menelaus and Derek Walcott is giving us unusual insight, that is not present in the Odyssey or the Iliad (Lattimore trans.) into Menelaus's feelings.
The trouble is Menelaus does not have an unforgettable part in the action like Achilles, Diomedes et al. and so you find yourself wondering why Walcott chose to write about the unlovely thoughts of a peripheral figure.
You could hear every word, when they remembered them and they seemed to enjoy themselves a bit. Perhaps they put the show together in a rush. I would have dressed the two young men and a woman, as itinerant bards.
Essex University Lakeside Theatre
The performance by three members of Live Canon was better than the chicken I began in the canteen but not so pleasing as the KitKat.
I like performers to look as though they want a passionate response, to experience those moments of anticipation when the imagination is charged by the promise of an imminent drama. The actors wandering on and off stage shabbily dressed in their everyday threads, looked like stage hands.
There was no curtain, no costume and an audience of two until the others arrived several minutes late. Ah! Perhaps the latecomers were part of the act. The actors are now so cool and so modest that they want to be taken for members of the audience? Shame one of them forgot his lines.
The poetry was recited and much was written by Derek Wallcott a poet who creates lively metaphors and similies by the mile but does not write them into a framework that I can accept. I mean the story of his poems does not do the imagery justice.
'A bonfire lowers it's gaze.' (Walcott) Fab except eyes and eyebrows don't rustle. You imagine the rustle of charred wood settling into the embers and nearly accept the metaphor of fire to describe a man becoming disillusioned with love for Helen of Troy but the next lines are scathing,
'when through her smoke - grey
eyes, I saw the white trash that was
Helen;'
you start wondering what sort of god the 'I' person thinks himself. Presumably the 'I' person is Menelaus and Derek Walcott is giving us unusual insight, that is not present in the Odyssey or the Iliad (Lattimore trans.) into Menelaus's feelings.
The trouble is Menelaus does not have an unforgettable part in the action like Achilles, Diomedes et al. and so you find yourself wondering why Walcott chose to write about the unlovely thoughts of a peripheral figure.
You could hear every word, when they remembered them and they seemed to enjoy themselves a bit. Perhaps they put the show together in a rush. I would have dressed the two young men and a woman, as itinerant bards.
References; Omeros, Derek Walcott
Homer, Odyssey and Iliad, Trans. Lattimore