Melbourne bloggers are out in force at the festival, many of them seeing things that Ms TN, despite her most heroic efforts, is missing. Tim Crouch's The Oak Tree seems to get a pretty universal thumbs down - Born Dancin' - who's still alive and conscious after his Fringe adventures - Long Sentence and Ming all have lively and deeply interesting objections. I won't see this one, as I'm booked for his other show, England, on Thursday. Check out too Chris Boyd's midnight musings at The Morning After, and don't miss Jana's reflections on Batsheva Dance Company. (I liked her response to Patti Smith, too - very appropriate). And I almost forgot Michael Magnusson at On Stage... Outside the blogs, although with some bloggers in tow (hello Avi!), Australian Stage Online is providing very thorough coverage.
This more than makes up for the fact that the Age seems to have all but given up online arts reviews. So far they've only uploaded a review of Crouch's show. And this in the Century of the Fruitbat, er, the 21st Century! No doubt such coverage confirms the wisdom that we on the interwebs are not interested in the arts...
I couldn't see how "The Oak Tree" was different from an actor doing a cold read. Admittedly I've never seen an actor do a cold read and my guess is that most of the audience hadn't either. But if that's all it was, it hardly seems cutting edge. And if it was more than that, I didn't get it.
ReplyDeleteWith the second actor being unrehearsed, there would of course be variation in how the role is played. But given the material, I couldn't see why there wouldn't be just as much variation in how rehearshed actors played the role. It is probably fascinating to Crouch to see how so many good actors play the role differently. But surely any writer would be fascinated to see how different actors play their material even though they would see far fewer do it than Crouch would get to see. And your average theatre goer is only going to see it once, so it's not going to make any difference to them.
And I couldn't see how the material would be of any less interest if the second actor were rehearsed rather than coming in cold. I'm not saying that the material wasn't of some interest. I'm only saying that I couldn't see why it wouldn't have been just as interesting with a rehearsed second actor.
Hi NTG - I actually answered this a couple of days ago, but it seems not to have registered on the cybermachine. Ah well. I saw England (of which more tomorrow) and read the program only after seeing the show. Reading the supposed intentions was perhaps a mistake, since up to then I was quite happy to accept the show as it was: but it didn't, for me, do much of what it claimed to do, in terms of questioning "liveness", in ways that seem parallel with what you say here.
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