ONYSOS THE WILD. To 25 September.

London

ONYSOS THE WILD
by Laurent Gaude translated by Dominique Chevallier and Adrian Penketh

Theatre 503 To 25 September 2005
Tue-Sat 8pm Sun 5pm
Runs 1hr 25min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7978 7040
www.theatre503.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 18 September

Some people never go away.Twice-born when his father Zeus reconstituted the butchered baby by ancient Greek divine microsurgery from an undamaged heart, Onysos toured the ancient world bringing wildness and turning women into raw-meat eating furies. For he's theatre's old patron Dionysus in another guise. One thing the account of his travels in Laurent Gaude's monologue (which speaks beautifully in this joint translation) doesn't explain is how he fetches up on a 21st century New York subway station bench, where the night lull allows his tale to be told. Presumably, we'd be told if we needed to know.

This unwashed, can-popping figure was doubtless as disreputable to respectability in his original world as he'd appear in smart NY today. Grizzled as he is in Chris Porter's appearance, he speaks with a calm authority and sense of experience. But, taking up the animal movements that are part of his nature, slinking under a seat, scratching his paws on a wall or loping around the space, there's a sense of Onysos' destructive will. He claims within himself the wolf, lion, bear and jackal for a start, creatures wild and cunning.

For all he thrusts himself into people's lives and is adept at the personality-transformation of women Onysos sees himself as an outsider, the derelict on the subway bench; I too have an ebony skin, he says. And this places the force of wild destruction with the inevitable (in the Western world) modern reference, the twin-towers attack of 2001. It's tricky; the people who perpetrated the Al Quaeda kamikaze pilots were presumably the opposite of Dionysiac in their approaches to life, not to mention alcohol.

But Gaude's hitting on a wider connection, the impulses to order and disorder, and the mix of creative and destructive in them. With Porter's performance catching the intelligent ordering of experience vocally and Onysos' violent potential in movement, Charlotte Damigos' set creating an underworld with the sense of dark tunnels around, aided by Richard Williamson's localised lighting, the production by Severine Ruset is alert to the script's mix of immediacy and recall from distant times.

Onysos: Chris Porter

Director: Severine Ruset
Designer: Charlotte Damigos
Lighting: Richard Williamson

2005-09-22 12:32:20