Street dance is the reason to see Rumble, an updated Romeo and Juliet by the German company Renegade Theatre. In one solo, Marcel “Speedy” Gebhard flips into a handstand, then moves from hand to hand – not just shifting his weight, but springing easily, turning in a circle with the lightness of a waltz step. In the play’s dissection of the imperialistic, might-is-right mentality, the original audiences would have seen a coded criticism of Spain. Dazzling as the title character in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, William Houston continues to chew the scenery with relish in his portrayal of another over-reaching fanatic.Flaminius is the Roman ambassador who uses threats, torture and sanctions against any state that is minded to offer sanctuary to Antiochus, the charismatic Middle Eastern ruler recently emerged from two decades of hiding.
In The Roykeaneiad, the comic piece that rounds off the evening, Hicks appears as a drunken Irish football fan who likens Roy Keane’s huffy World Cup walk-out to Achilles’ sulks in his tent in The Iliad This last drama sums up the problems of the project The parallels feel very forced coming from an ordinary Joe. Instead of performing a provocative balancing act between the modern and the mythic, these pieces tend to fall between two stools.A word of welcome for Josie Rourke’s persuasive production of Believe What You Will, the controversial 1631 play by Philip Massinger that has just transferred from Stratford. The best of the bunch is The Last Word, in which the actor is quietly devastating as a post-feminist male Medea, a creepily despairing, lone Father For Justice who takes revenge on his faithless spouse to self-defeating extremes.
The One Within finds present-day echoes of Sophocles’ Ajax in the madness of an Irish Republican warrior who can’t cope with the new realities. Valentin even turned about and lifted his jacket to demonstrate that he was lacking in that department.One can’t imagine a British group indulging in such antics without coming across as a novelty act.
Maybe it’s American showmanship, but Cuber and Valentin did not just get away with it, but used it to augment their musicality.. Beleaguered masculinity is a recurring theme in Missing Persons, a series of short verse-monologues in which the Irish author Colin Teevan puts an ancient Greek slant on contemporary cases of men at bay. The combination of Teevan, with his creditable track record in this line of work, and the actor Greg Hicks, with his distinguished CV, augured well, but I regret to report that, for the most part, I found the result uncomfortable in the wrong way. But no businessman would conduct a meeting with such wild abandon as Valentin, who strutted round the stage like a man possessed, shouted out to the audience and, at one point, conducted an on-mic conversation with Cuber about the relative sizes of their “asses”. In his suit and tie, he could have been a businessman about to give a presentation. Valentin truly has all the chops that a flautist ought to possess, and then some.He flutter-tongued, and sang down his flute while overblowing, producing harmonics (“Did you hear what I did?” he asked in the interval – “I played three notes at the same time!”); he disassembled his instrument and continued playing with merely the mouthpiece; and he conclusively proved that, despite its lightness of tone, the flute doesn’t have to be a milksop instrument.Much of the evening’s entertainment came from his bizarre behaviour.
