Theatre review: Reptember - Duende / Faust / The Rape of Lucrece

Last trip to the New Diorama for now, for three monologues to conclude the Reptember season in which The Faction showcase their actors and creatives. Kate Sawyer is one of the company's regular members who most often impresses me, and she and director Rachel Valentine Smith have come up with the most innovative of the nine pieces in terms of staging. Lorca's Duende is a lecture on the titular, indefinable Spanish word, something akin to "je ne sais quoi" or "the X factor" but with an inherent melancholy. Sawyer arrives on stage dressed like a clown¹ to deliver the lecture, but freezes on seeing the audience. In a solution reminiscent of Analog.Ue, she plays a tape of herself speaking the words, while acting out the beats, playing slides and music to help illustrate her points. Lorca's essay makes some interesting points about the awareness of life's transitory nature being a vital component of great art; Sawyer and Valentine Smith update it to include the unlikely despair in Kylie Minogue's "Better The Devil You Know" and reveal something of a crush on Nick Cave. It's playful and innovative but with touches of the Duende it discusses.

Theatre review: Reptember - Prometheus Bound / Dog's Dialogue / John Gabriel Borkmann

Straight back to the New Diorama for another in its trilogy of trilogies, Reptember. As I mentioned in my earlier review, this sees The Faction adapt classic texts into monologues, and this bill opens with the most liberal adaptation so far: Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound provides only the inspiration for Will Gore's short play, which takes the story of eternal punishment and puts it in a much more human context: The company's artistic director Mark Leipacher takes to the stage as a Prometheus working behind a bar, but with a dark past as a terrorist and torturer. The people he once worked with are now running the country, but that doesn't mean he's safe from having his past come back to haunt him, and the punishments he one meted out are visited upon him in turn. It's an interesting idea but, opening with Leipacher standing up a ladder and apparently bound there, director Rachel Valentine Smith doesn't quite bring a sense of movement to the piece, and this static feeling infects the whole evening.

Theatre review: Reptember - The Man With the Flower in His Mouth / Medea / Metamorphosis

I've been plugging ambitious rep company The Faction for a few years now, but by the end of this year's season I was starting to wonder if their choices of text and style of production were in danger of becoming a bit predictable. Almost as if they heard me, for the first time they've announced a September repertory season at the New Diorama in addition to their usual January/February one, with a new direction both in style and presentation - and if the latter involves Tom Radford rolling sweatily around the floor with his top off that's just a bonus. Reptember is a trio of triple-bills, each of the 9 plays being adaptations - some looser than others - of classic works. But unlike most of the source material, these new versions are monologues, performed by regular members of the ensemble and a couple of guest actors.

Theatre review: Thebes

I don't think I've seen The Faction tackle Greek Tragedy before - surprising really, as the importance of the Chorus would seemingly make it a good match for a company built around an ensemble. If they've neglected the genre before they make up for it by doing three in one: Gareth Jandrell has taken the various plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles dealing with noted motherfucker Oedipus and his legacy, and knitted them into a single epic history of Thebes. We begin with the city's king Oedipus (Lachlan McCall) at the height of his hubris, angrily demanding that the killer of his predecessor be found, and dismissing all the signs pointing to the fact that he himself is the killer. When it becomes obvious that he fulfilled the prophecy to kill his father and marry (or fuck, in this no-nonsense translation) his mother (Kate Sawyer,) he blinds himself and sets out to die - but in the process leaves a dangerous power vacuum in his city.