Review Theatre: The Falcon | Rosemary Branch | Dabid Klempner | Tom Warner

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The Review - THEATRE by HOWARD LOXTON
Published: 19 November 2009

The Falcon

Spanish romance fails to take flight

THE FALCON
Rosemary Branch

THIS new play by David Klempner is about a runaway soldier and a gypsy girl who meet in a hayloft.
He plays the trumpet and she decides he’ll be useful to accompany her dancing and attract customers for fortune reading, story-telling and selling things.
Though she mocks his apparent innocence she’s beautiful and he instantly falls for her, and from teasing they move to wild lovemaking. She anticipates a splendid future, but we have to wait until almost the end of the play before anything really happens.
The falcon of the title actually comes from a tale by Boccaccio – one of several stories she tells him, though it is difficult to see who in this play the falcon represents.
The lovers are stylishly played by Tom Warner and Alex Topham Tyerman, but are more like story-book characters than people who are struggling for survival, both far too carefully spoken for their backgrounds.
Some enthusiastic sexual romping – with blackouts to spare blushes at crucial moments, livens things up in the second act, and when a third character appears to add a touch of harsh reality (a much more realistic performance from Paul Mooney), the plot takes on a more dramatic edge.
Attractive music matches the soldier’s trumpet and the gypsy girl dances, though neither really matches the setting in Spain, but it is all beautifully presented in a glow of golden light on a set that makes you believe a ladder really leads down to a room beneath.
That must place considerable demands on the actors in this intimate theatre.
There are laughs along the way and the dialogue is scattered with clever sounding comment that makes you feel the dramatist may be saying something important, but it isn’t made clear, and he is better wordsmith than he is dramatist.
Until November 21
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