The Review - THEATRE by DAN FRANKLIN Published: 20 September 2007
A lesson in subversion that falls a little short of the mark
THE LESSON
Old Red Lion Theatre
THE Icarus Theatre Collective promise that “tales of mutilation, rape, and incest are not anathema to us, rather we choose to relish in what others shy away from, show what others daren’t, destroy boundaries when others would create rules.” Their take on Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist drama The Lesson is not as subversive as they might hope, but it does entertain. This taut hour-long production thrives on the tension between a pupil (Amy Loughton) and her new professor (John Eastman), contorting itself around notions of homogeneity, where notions of humanity’s plurality are ‘vague, confused’.
Eastman’s performance anchors the production; if at first his physical presence and affected enunciation bring to mind Sven Goran Eriksson, his giddying instruction of arithmetic – where addition equates to attraction and subtraction to subjugation – instils a latent menace which later erupts into fevered proselytising.
The professor’s impassioned critique of fascistic ideology, particularly the necessity of disintegration is aptly mirrored by the gradual destruction of the dank, claustrophobic set. Books are strewn everywhere, shelves collapse, and the canny deployment of all available surfaces as a blackboard makes the room a palimpsest for the language of power.
His instruction that the neo-Spanish language is the mother tongue of all the European languages, demonstrated by picking a series of action figures out of a box, is very funny, but tempered by the more chilling insistence that any over-arching rule of language is nothing more than the “vulgar empiricism of the plebs”.
Against such a domineering central performance, Julia Monrow as the maid, can only offer pale support, and Loughton’s fidgetiness seems cartoonish. Her incessant complaints about her ‘toothache’ are so infuriating that when the professor kills her in a manic outburst, it is hard not to sympathise with his exasperation.
The fact that the next pupil is already ringing the door as the maid attempts to clear the mess re-affirms that violence substantiated by such crazed and constricting reasoning will only perpetuate itself. Until September 29
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