BANK OF SCOTLAND INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN'S THEATRE FESTIVAL 2004.
BISON & SONS
by Pauline Mol
translated by Rina Vergano
Theatr Iolo To 11 June
Garage Theatre Edinburgh, Tron Glasgow (Changing Room) then Spectrum Theatre Inverness 7 June 1.30pm and Shetland schools performances 9-11 June
Runs 50min No interval
TICKETS: 01463 221842 (Spectrum)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 June Glasgow
A strong production from Wales raising a variety of questions through a serious, comic-edged story.Theatr Iolo's vivid production of this play for 12+ reveals the Bison brothers, whose father has gone to the bank, with a decreasing likelihood of his coming back.
Big Boy's left in charge of the seed-merchant business, mixing an incipient adult sense of responsibility with lapses into childhood misbehaviour, sometimes seconding the openly brutal Luigi.
He's working out his puzzled violent feelings by bullying vulnerable Benny, repeatedly tricking the innocent lad out of a balloon, apparently to play with him, but always bursting it.
The themes of Pauline Mol's play have been worked over before - Lord of the Flies being perhaps the most famous examination of young people left to their own devices and society. And the metaphorical implications of the Bison business seem asserted more as authorial statement than arising from the characters' concsciousness - seed as source of future life, or in a soured version, of all that's decaying.
But young audiences come fresh to work, especially when it tours schools, and respond to something created out of their own age. The conflicts and inventions by which the trio pass the time (a touch of the Godots here) and work out the anxieties which arise have serious notes but can acquire a comic edge.
Moods are neatly mixed, with , for example, a humorous version of dad's visit to gain bank funding, obviously picked up from Westerns. It works because the comedy never unhitches from the sense of young people drawing on their experience of adult ways (even if gained second-hand via TV) to come to terms with aspects of life they don't comprehend, but which they sense could threaten their way of life.
It's left open how long things have been going on like this - and whether the roles they adopt are entirely new, or part of a longer process. The mess they make of spaghetti (the way they fling it about goes pasta joke) could hint at attempts to reproduce a routine that's gone awry some time ago.
But provoking possibilities rather than suggesting complete patterns is what such work for young people is all about. Theatr Iolo's strong cast and production don't rely on simplistic character-types; each brother has moments where they express concerns and show strengths - even Luigi's behaviour has an explanation in his particularly strong sense of loss over his mother. A fine production in-the-round of an interesting piece.
2004-06-06 17:57:38