Student productions can often elicit a ‘meh’, lukewarm response from those who are not affiliated in some way with the cast & crew, but this final year show from LIPA Sixth Form students manages to pull off the rare feat of making an audience marvel at the competency, skill and sheer exuberance of the production and cast.
The director’s notes state that the play is ‘a comment on the past, a parable for the present and a warning for the future’. I studied Ui at university 33 years ago – this sly, chilling satire, transposing the rise to power of Hitler & the Nazis in 1930s Germany to gangland 1920s Chicago – and it retains its power to widen the eyes, especially now, in the age of the despots I don’t even need to name. I could appreciate the play aesthetically in my teens; I knew about Brecht’s alienation effect (don’t engage the emotions too much, don’t lose yourself in the story, it’s the head/intellect that the work should appeal to) but this version, although satisfying Brecht’s philosophy that the audience be conscious & critical observers, still manages to be emotionally affecting, despite the tender years of the cast. It’s the best sort of failure – either by accident or design – that we are moved by the look of pain and incredulity on Roma’s face as best friend Ui orders his death, and that we care about the vulnerable and frightened as they are ruthlessly swatted out of Ui’s path.
I baulk instinctively at the hackneyed phrase ‘tour de force’, but the sheer barrage of inventive set piece after set piece, the use of spartan props & the bare but effective simplicity of the staging (Ui’s first declamatory speech sees him on a swivel chair, being rotated by two cast members as we see those familiar arm movements & gestures slowly but solidly taking shape) is eerily effective.
Alex Starke’s Ui stays just the right side of caricature – being alternately comic, threatening and insecure – but his performance grows in quiet menace and megalomania and at the climax of the play is genuinely unsettling. And this actor, like the rest of the cast, is just 18.
I was with two people who didn’t know the play at all, but they found this version of the two hours long, wordy play, lacking in poetic language, highly intelligible; the actors gave the dialogue a clarity, consistency and energy that I’ve seen matched only by the theatre company Complicité – and that’s really saying something.
Director Tim Lynskey is a veteran Liverpool actor & director (his company Big Wow achieved legendary status on Merseyside with their physical theatre productions); now a tutor at LIPA Sixth Form, he brings his physical theatre & clowning skills, spry wit and playfulness to this production, which seems to be stitched together with love. It spills out into the programme credits as banners, props, set and costume have all been sourced or created by the cast.
There’s a swagger to this production, a burgeoning confidence and nerve. The gender-blind casting and in-the-round production create a bursting energy and envelops - and implicates - us all. And in the end the audience were almost all coerced into becoming National Socialists. We left with the words, “Whoever is not for me is against me” ringing in our ears. Sounds familiar?
In this compelling, ever-current and cautionary tale told by the young using a text written over seventy years ago, the LIPA Sixth Form class of 2019 did themselves proud.
Reviewer - Tracy Ryan
on - 4/6/19
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