Naima Khan is left shuddering after Leopoldville and utterly befuddled by My Balloon Beats Your Astronaut.
Leopoldville
Jacqueline McCarrick's Leopoldville headlines Papatango's New Writing Festival at Tristan Bates Theatre, having won their 2010 New Writing Competition. Impossible to shake off, the effects of this show plaster themselves on its audience and serves Papatango well as a showcase of the talent imbued in their productions. Leopoldville follows a group of friends whose boredom leads them to a pub in an border town of strained 1990s Ireland.
Intending to drink and steal anything of worth, their ill-thought out crime spirals horrifically at the hands of their fierce assumed leader Devlin, played with frightening perturbation by Jack Ashton. Working with a stellar script occasionally garbled in thick Irish accents, the ensemble cast, playing a group of self-confessed scum, mesmerise their audience and make skin crawl. So much so, that they leave you unable to meet their eyes as they emerge smiling from the wings to take their bows.
McCarrick's main feats are honing in on the unsettling nature of this group's dynamic and revealing universal elements of vulnerability and class perception. More than egging each other on, the boys intimidate and threaten but also admire one another. They are strangely wary of each other but have found a way to belong together. Declaring every town like their own and blaming home for their hardened regard for the world, they are simultaneously protective, kind, and cruel. George Turvey's direction varies the pace and alludes to just the right amount of off-stage action to highlight the fragility amidst the brutality of what's happening on stage.
Played for the most part in real time, the cast succeed in sustaining tension. They fill the theatre with an impending sense of doom and hold their fixated audience in a perpetual state of quiet unease. Stand-out performances come from Drew Webb who highlights the multiple facets of Terry, the only boy with just enough aspiration to ease himself out from between his rock and hard place. Russell Simpson will catch your eye for the compelling delivery of his dialogue and for elucidating the heart in the group's fickle camaraderie. Expect to leave shaken.
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