I feel kinda lucky to have been given the opportunity to see this – it’s a production of Joseph Heller’s play by the Oxford University Drama Group that’s headed for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. My stepdad works in the Yorkshire Air Museum and they wanted to “try it out” somewhere before the real production: they couldn’t have picked a better location, a big ol’ air hangar full of wartime aircraft.

I have no idea how they’re going to stage it in Edinburgh, but I’ve gotta say, this setting, and the very cosy audience seating (there can’t have been many more than 50 people there, and we were in three blocks forming a semi-circle round the ‘stage’, with the actors entering from all angles) was something special. This play thrives on chaos and this whole seating arrangement really puts you in the thick of it.

The cast is around 10-strong but pretty much everyone plays a number of different characters. Again, this adds a lot to the chaotic nature of the play. Someone will die onstage only to come back on as another character – then that character suddenly “dies”, or like, everyone thinks he’s dead, only he’s not … uh, it’s hard to explain, but I just love the chaos. I had issues with the disjointed nature of the movie version of Catch-22, but as a play it makes so much more sense. When people are juggling this stuff live right in front of you, you can really appreciate more the complexity of the back-and-forth catch-22 dialogues.

The actors were all great, I mean it’s a testiment to the whole production that even though the audience was small, it never felt at all uncomfortable, people were laughing all the way through.

Like I said, I don’t know how they’re gonna stage this in Edinburgh. I think it’ll work just as well anywhere since the play has so many great lines, it’s very funny stuff. I really don’t think they could beat this air hangar setting though, it was a pretty awesome thing to witness. I’m not a play person in general, I’d always choose an overblown musical extravaganza over a pure theatrical talky drama type deal, but it’s always great to get swept away by an unexpected staging, and this thing really worked for me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 at 11:49 pm in Theatre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.