Low DownIn The Magic Tree, Irish-Indian playwright Ursula Rani Sarma evokes a cliff-edge ride along an emotional path with as many twists and turns in it as a mountain road in Cambodia, where the action ends up. At the beginning, we are introduced to the two central characters: Lamb (a young woman, running away from home) and Gordy (a young man, naïve, suggestible, different). It’s a stormy night and Gordy has followed Lamb into a deserted squat. They get talking. Both emerge as complex characters. Gordy is direct, almost autisticly so. He’s a synaesthete (‘I wanted to see what you smelled like’) and has an animal instinct for seeking out a spurious argument. Lamb, on the other hand, is evasive, contradictory and indirect. Gordy gradually starts to gain her trust, but when she leaves the room, Doc and Lenny (two young thugs) enter and we find out that Gordy is the newest recruit to their gang and that they are planning to gang rape Lamb. Doc and Lenny leave. Lamb returns and the relationship between Gordy and Lamb gradually develops. Gordy clearly wants to protect her, but Doc and Lenny burst in and force the action forward with dire consequences. ReviewWhile the journey Ursula Rani Sarma describes in the play is full of twists and turns, her writing is direct, bitingly acidic, clear and heartfelt. The connection between the animal world and the human world is an important one – and many parallels are made between human actions and animal actions. Gordy behaves like a guard dog, protecting and guarding the object of his devotion (Lamb) in practical terms and yet reasons like a human. Lamb tries to protect herself with torturous twists of fabricated tales, and we find out during the course of the play that when it comes to taking decisive action, she also has the intrinsic quality of a beast. They have that in common. They also both feel isolated, ostracised, on the margins of society, neither feeling they belong and while Gordy wants to belong to Lamb, she is caught between acknowledging the common ground they have between them and not wanting to face up to that reality. At the crucial point in the play, they end up reversing roles, with Lamb ultimately ending up protecting Gordy. How they both approach the common ground they have between them in terms of reason and emotion, and what they have within them in terms of the human and the beastly is part of what makes this play so compelling. The young cast of four used the space well, and presented the play with confidence and commitment, particularly in scenes involving direct exchanges of dialogue, especially in the more dramatic moments. However, monologues and reflective passages were tackled less successfully, my impression being that they lacked sufficient energy and imaginative impetus to carry the scenes over the footlights into the audience’s imagination as vividly as they could have been.
The minimal staging in this production is very effective, with the tree of the play’s title being constructed magically at the beginning of Act II a highlight. The action in this act is set in Cambodia, a setting in which the playwright finds more material to draw upon to illustrate the ongoing theme of man’s inhumanity to man. As the play draws to a close, dogs are heard barking in the distance, in an otherwise silent soundscape, perhaps as a subtle stark reminder of the loneliness humanity experiences when experiencing life in isolation from the rest of creation.
Reviewed by Leon Conrad 22 August 2008 Website :n/a |
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