Not so hot.
As playwright Marius von Mayenburg recognises, there is nothing quite so unsettling as the marriage of the familiar and the alien. His distorted image of family life, in a household eating itself from the inside out, achieves just that. Kurt, trapped in a perpetual, fetishised puberty, has a passion for just two things: the destructive beauty of fire and the equally destructive beauty of his sister, Olga. Desperate to shatter the shell of childhood, Olga cradles that fire in cupped hands, getting closer and closer to her sibling while their parents find a mode of reconnection through shared obliviousness.
The approach taken to this queasy cocktail of strangeness by JMK Award-winning director Sam Pritchard is one of dislocated, uncertain semi-naturalism. Members of Mayenburg’s clammily claustrophobic family sit in chairs facing out at the audience or lie in bed at opposite edges of the stage, crudely implying distance and lack of connection, only to slide back into straightforward realism in the next moment. If nothing else, it demonstrates an eye for the theatrical image, framed within Amanda Stoodley’s under-realised plywood Ikea bookcase of a set where the scenes crash inelegantly from portrait to portrait, each filled with the detritus of shiny theatrical objects that Pritchard has gathered in magpie fashion. Occasionally striking moments are captured with flash-bulb brevity, mashed within the confused whole.
There are hints of a conceptual interpretation of Mayenburg’s disturbing text, but no one concept ultimately emerges from the debris. The production plays with distance and closeness, with watching and listening with the idea of sealing oneself in, which Rupert Simonian’s troubled Kurt speaks of with feverish intensity. However, it is clumsily evoked by a barrier of red tape, yet another potentially interesting visual technique but one that is borrowed without its use being fully developed. Stoodley’s design is perhaps structured to comment on the household it contains – something about the bland, mass produced emptiness of the modern home – but instead it becomes little more than a receptacle for the ideas that Pritchard has gathered and jammed together.
The text itself is not aided by Maja Zade’s somewhat flat translation. Stuttering along in clunky phrases, the dialogue has an awkward edge that is arguably appropriate to the aura of strangeness that emanates from the piece, but whose ungainliness becomes more and more wearing. For a play dealing with fiery content, it is often rendered cold and dull.
Likewise, the gloss of emotional blankness pasted over Aimeé-Ffion Edwards’ Olga initially sets up an intriguing tension with the extremes of erotic excitement and repulsion that her speech expresses. But this too is repeated to such an unvarying extent that it begins to grate. As the nightmarish mutates into the tedious, it eventually becomes little more than a restless waiting game for this image of dysfunction to go up in flames.
Fireface runs at the Young Vic until 20th October.
Image by Jane Hobson
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