Gilgamesh

By Robert Iles - 11th Apr 2006

I love the story of Gilgamesh but was sorely disappointed by this production. Despite some excellent stage work with clever choreography revealing beautiful visual images against a strongly coloured backdrop I was not convinced that the "whole" was equal to the "sum of the parts". There is always a problem with pieces that owe a lot to the "devised by cast" approach, especially where the cast are not particularly experienced .. here it seems to have resulted in a patchy production with no consistency of performance, style or presentation and dragged down by poor control of pace and lack of dynamic range. Shouting does not equal acting though at times I realise this was forced on the actors by the poor balance with the music. Enthusiasm without focus - I fear the cast had not fully grasped the nature and thread of the story.

Youth theatre is to be encouraged and, in general, the audience is made up of well-wishers so even a poor production will do more good than harm by introducing young people to the theatre - however, if you are going to charge a commercial price for the tickets the audience do deserve to get value .. just in case some of them do not know anyone on stage!