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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
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Blood Brothers
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The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
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London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Description: Aboriginal walk through memory, dreams and fear from Matt Cameron.
The surrealistic title of this fascinating memory-play by the Australian Matt Cameron, signals its liberation from tired conventions of realistic theatre.
Soutra Gilmore's raked stage design suggests the runway for a plane about to take off. The play itself climbs to wild heights of dream, fantasy and memory and leaves you stumbling, true to life, though not to realism, in a no-man's-land of uncertainty.
Cameron takes his basic leap of inspiration from two mysterious disasters: a never-explained TWA plane crash and the case of an Australian woman who had to wear a pressurised body suit after being set alight by her boyfriend.
Ranging between past and present, relying upon dreams' coincidences, Cameron links these two events through the figure of Titus, a young man who was killed in the TWA crash or went missing. The play implies that the motives for people's extreme behaviour are as unfathomable and hard to elucidate as the reasons for a plane's downfall.
The first scene sets a tone of ominous and eerie surrealism: the plane crashes before our very ears, moments after Irene, Titus's burned, bandaged girl-friend has a premonition of the disaster; Titus, a passenger on the doomed flight, suddenly materialises in a picture being painted by his onearmed father.
The young man then assumes human form, his skin peeling in the crash's fire, as he flails at T S Eliot's "still-point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless". Scenes from Titus's childhood, with vignettes of his mother's frustration and his father Stanley's aggressive hostility, are reenacted in parallel to a search for the young man's body. Cameron reaches heights of the visionary macabre when Stanley and Irene trawl through the plane's debris. "Breathe normally though death is imminent," the flight attendant gruesomely instructs.
No illumination is achieved through the glass eye's fallible perspective. But Erica Whyman's production, though handicapped by its crass decision to go for British accents, casts a nightmarish glow. Ian Drysdale and Sandy McDade as Titus and Irene are riveting exponents of Cameron's remarkable imagination.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
