Pictured : Zak Asgard (Year 10) as the Scapegoat with Holly Mortimer as Lisa (top), The ensemble (middle) and Holly Mortimer in The Store, the setting for the second half of the performance (bottom).
Middle School Production
The Wonderful World of Dissocia
Mr Alastair Trevill
singing voice charmed, with deft musical skills from Louis Carrigan, and Theo Podger animating the gigantic bear). It is extremely hard to create a cohesive whole out of an episodic structure, and both directors and cast did extremely well to do just that, especially when considering the almost hallucinogenic quality of the writing. In fact, nowhere was this captured better than in the controlled chaos of the roller-diner scene, where all the mad characters converged and ended up on a bi-polar ‘high’ with hot dogs and paper plates flying around amidst a great crescendo of deluded, irrational, but perfectly reasoned insanity. Great work in particular from Sophie Pankhurst and Mia Hanson as rather glitzy tea ladies here. One could mention more – Frank Kauer’s ‘Victor’ was particularly oily and unreliable, for example – and forgive me if I don’t mention them all, but it was the orchestration of the ensemble that mattered here, and there was not a single weak link in that chain. Then silence. Another space. The Space in fact, acting as a ‘found’ space and hospital ward into which the audience were led, again, with frightening insistence by the maladjusted munchkins. Now we were on the ‘outside’, looking in, and invited to do so by the screened- off Perspex window containing Lisa’s hospital bed, and her series of visitors in a great piece of set design by Will Feasy from JAGS. This change in tone, scene, mood and intention is one of the hardest things technically to get right in the play, and, again, the cast belied their years by creating a convincingly antiseptic – but possibly even more cruel – world than the one that had gone before. I imagine that I was not the only one in the audience yearning for the colour and invention of that wonderful world of Dissocia that we had been plunged into only an hour before. A lost hour, perhaps? Extremely well done to the whole cast – a truly professional ensemble performance, convincing and disturbing throughout. Fabulous direction, too, from Emma Prendergast and Linda
‘ Don’t be boring!’ was the mantra that Antony Neilson, the originator of this play, kept repeating to himself as he wrote it in the summer of 2004*, and this fantastically talented cast certainly heeded his word. From the moment a rather nervous audience of expectant parents, wine in hand, were shepherded by strange, rather rude, munchkins in outlandish outfits into the dark space of the Edward Alleyn Theatre, we knew we were in for a strange and perhaps rather thrilling evening. Whispering psychotically, they pushed us forward. Out of the dry ice and greenish light (part of an excellent lighting design by Carol Morris) odd figures discussed how an hour had somehow been lost. A girl, not unlike Alice in Wonderland, laid claim to this lost hour. Another young woman, seemingly in some official capacity (the wonderful Scarlett Bryant), stepped forward and announced that we were all going to the wonderful world of Dissocia, and that was it: we were all down the rabbit hole. Thus ensued some of the best ensemble acting I have seen at the College. We were first treated to a completely useless bunch of blue-collar workers, who turned out to be the ‘insecurity guards’ (ably played by Flo Speight, Izer Onadim, Joey Fleming, Ossien Halford, Jonny Stone and Freddie Targett-Parker). Neilson’s method hinges on such puns, and soon a bizarre figure with wooden forelegs, ruminating upon some imaginary grass, gave the poor young woman (Lisa, played by a permanently bewildered Holly Mortimer) the literal run-around as he claimed zero responsibility for anything. He was, of course, the ‘scapegoat’ (groan); Zak Asgard here in fine form. Curiouser and Curiouser. Lisa became confronted, cajoled, scared, poked at, questioned and abused by a series of weirder and weirder creations... of her own mind, it appears... not least by the hideously nightmarish ‘Oath-taker’; a brilliant, macabre piece of costume- making, but also frightening conveyed by Tom Crossley underneath. Others looked on, or down, commenting harshly on Lisa’s own self-imposed mania. This was The Black Dog King (Lexi Jeffs), ruling over this unhinged psychological landscape. Only Lisa’s lovely teddy bear, calling up from deep childhood, had anything nice to say. This was my favourite part of the original production, and this cast executed the sweet, comic pathos of this scene beautifully (sterling work by Frank Kauer whose
Bloomfield. A memorable production, and a clear indication that drama is in rude health.
*I only know this because I managed to meet him after it transferred to The Royal Court about three years later, and it was then that I found out that he in fact was the concerned boyfriend (ably played here by Lexi Jeffs) who had no idea what was going on inside the mind of his then girlfriend, who had what is now known as ‘dissociative disorder’, a condition that involves breakdowns in perception, memory and even the patient’s identity.
102
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs