The rather long and somewhat confusing title of this afternoon's presentation of 'Trial By Media And Death By Dispensing' by the first year students of Arden Theatre School's Theatre And Performance course, was their own adaptation and reworking of Berkoff's The Trial.
This one-hour exercise in boundary-pushing started with majority of the cast already on the thrust style stage, with the audience seated on two opposing sides, whilst a line of mirrors down the centre of the stage mirrored the action back to us, and a large screen on a third side of the stage showed the whole stage for us. Dark blue hues and calming music surrounded this, and cameras, video cameras, microphones, and goodness knows what else, adorned the perimeters.
Sadly there were not any programmes available this afternon (a QR code to download on mobile phone was provided) so I am unable to credit anyone; however, this young and enthusiastic cast gave very intense and committed performances as pretty much every contemporary theatre technique was thrown at it in order to give the students as much experience as possible as well as teach them just exactly how far theatre can be pushed outside the box! Everything from Deconstruction to Metatheatre, whilst this truly multi-media presentation was not without its challenges for the students.
Dressed identically in black trousers, white shirs and ties, the cast took turns to narrate, to act the protagonist, and we even had a couple of songs performed live with keyboardist. I have to confess it was disjointed at times, with so many points of action, one did not really know where the focal point of the action was. This was made even more difficult to understand since those who were unmic'd were not articulating or projecting sufficiently enough.
A sincere and challenging production which reminded me very much of my own student shows when I was at Drama School more than 30 years' ago!
No comments:
Post a Comment