Star rating: ***
Under the guidance of writer/director/performer David Leddy, the ensemble from RSAMD's Contemporary Theatre Practice course devised this new piece. With the audience seated at tables cabaret-style, apparitions are possessed by the poetic ectoplasm of their creators; characters conjured up by Barrie, Coward, Ibsen, Lorca, Sartre Wilde and Williams, plus Turkish writer Mehmit Muhitten Sevilen, are all unleashed.
Hedda Gabler meets Peter Pan's grown-up Wendy, who morphs into a brooding Stanley Kowalski with Blithe Spirit's Madame Arcati presiding.
As Leddy's over-elucidating programme notes explain, all dialogue is quoted directly from its respective masterpiece with no additions.
Visually, it's consciously camp, oddly resembling the fancy-dress party in The Killing of Sister George. In terms of sound alone, though, its cacophony of sampled bon-mots means everything and nothing. The result, despite disclaimers to the contrary, is a linear narrative concerning a woman's place in the world that actually has a good half-dozen beginnings, middles and ends. In this parallel universe, words alone are rendered meaningless.
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