Browse reviews

Brighton Fringe 2014

Beauty’s Legacy

The Keeper's Daughter

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Venue: Dukebox Theatre.  3 Waterloo St.  Brighton BN3 1AQ

Festival:


Low Down

A collage – some new, exciting and creative pieces, mixed in with some bits of recycled old tat – cobbled together to create something that has a life of its own. That definition could describe the Brighton Fringe, of which this is the first show I’ve seen this year, or it could be the monster created by Victor Frankenstein, or indeed it could be this review itself …

‘Beauty’s Legacy’ is a retelling of the Frankenstein story – though the ‘F’ word is never mentioned. Instead, we have Professor Victor, who’s been working away in his laboratory to create – ‘the genetically perfect human being’. It’s a manic, hour-long romp, set in the very near future (there are ‘hover-tube’ trains, but they still announce – "Mind the Gap"), and a lot of it is very funny indeed.

 

Review

As always in this kind of tale, the mad Professor has helpers – his wife Constance and his bumbling assistant Lance. Simon-Anthony Rhoden plays Lance with a slightly squeaky voice and a completely over-the-top black wig that has the shape and texture of an old fashioned floor mop. Professor Victor is running out of time and money for his project, and he needs a quick result, so he decides to use his gene machine on his hapless assistant.

‘Beauty’s Legacy’ is the perfect scale for the Dukebox. The three actors are squeezed onto the tiny stage, and the audience is right up against them, so it had the intensity of a stand-up comedy gig when Victor asked us – "Who here in this room has been told they’re not good enough?". A few hands went up, and Victor leaned out towards them – "I think this happens because … you’re not good enough".

Mark Finbow has dark hair and a rather narrow face, and in his black shirt and thin blue tie under his white lab coat he made Victor look the classic rogue scientist. Like a modern Mephistopheles, he offered us ‘genetic perfection’, and with a flourish he announced – "I can make people perfect. This is my legacy to you. This is – Lancelot".

As well as the three actors, they had somehow found room for three screens on the stage. Like hospital bed screens, portable, but covered in pages from tabloid newspapers taped together – more collage. These worked to define room spaces or doorways, and hid character movements around the stage. The transformed Lancelot stepped out from behind one of these, a superman, and there was a shocked gasp from the audience.

Gone was the black mop; Lancelot had Simon-Anthony Roden’s own hair, cut very short, and his voice had become deeper and richer. His muscular torso was sheathed (that’s really the only word that will do here) from neck to upper thigh in a sort of skin-tight one-piece cycling outfit. Impressive in any instance, but this one was in some shimmering gold material.

Gone was the black mop; Lancelot had Simon-Anthony Roden’s own hair, cut very short, and his voice had become deeper and richer. His muscular torso was sheathed (that’s really the only word that will do here) from neck to upper thigh in a sort of skin-tight one-piece cycling outfit. Impressive in any instance, but this one was in some shimmering gold material.

See how I’ve re-used that paragraph to swell out my review and make it look – bigger? Well, that’s what they did with Lance. Padded out the bit that Victor, looking downwards, refers to as Lancelot’s ‘package’. "Quite foreboding. A package of foreboding". (At least, I assume they padded it out …)

Victor’s wife Constance is horrified by what her husband has done to Lance, but there’s more than just a nod to ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ in this production, and like everyone else she can’t keep her eyes off his ‘package’. Frankenstein’s creation went on a killing spree – in this updated version Lance gets taken up by celebrity culture –     Talk shows – "Today in Celebrity News: Who knew that science could be sexy?",    Television – "With a smile like this I could sell toothpaste.  With a voice like this I could win X Factor.  With buns like these I could crack coconuts".

Eloise Secker played Constance, and a few minor roles too, alternating between comedy and pathos as the occasion demanded. At once point, as a momentary character called Janice, she tells of having a sexual encounter on the hover-tube – "I don’t know what came over me. Well, I do actually – it was Lance". (no wonder it’s got an ’18+’ notice on the flyer …) Their delivery was sometimes a bit fast to catch the words clearly, but all three actors know how to work an audience.

I mentioned pathos – it seems that Victor has been driven to produce perfect human beings by the death of his and Constance’s baby boy. At one point she takes Victor’s lab coat and folds it into a small bundle so that it becomes their blanketed baby which she cradles in her arms. A very moving moment – and then almost instantly we snapped back to the absurdity of Victor threatening Lance with a gun, which in reality was a child’s tiny plastic toy firing sucker darts.

It’s hard to do subtle lighting at the Dukebox, and it wasn’t wanted here. This production drenched the stage in reds, greens or blues, or the frontal white spotlight that made it so much like stand-up. The three newspaper screens allowed a lot of locations to be ‘sketched in’, and on several occasions they were used with backlighting to make a kind of shadow theatre.

But the shadow parts didn’t work at all. The light wasn’t bright enough to be effective through the newsprint, and the Dukebox stage isn’t deep enough for a lamp to cast proper shadows. The actors were moving and interacting behind the screens, but all we saw from the front was a confused blur. Obviously this is a touring production, and the effect might well be better on a different stage.

There’s a great deal of physicality in the show – the three dance, jump and sing their way through the lines. A lot of sound, too, especially during the movement sections but also when the actors are doing their version of TV and radio ads – lively rhythmic music by what their flyer describes as ‘pop noir soulsters Mirrors’. At one point Lance starts a Church – "Society needs me", and like an evangelist prayer meeting we were shouting out "Hallelujah" and "Amen" like true believers.

So it’s hard to define ‘Beauty’s Legacy’. It’s a modern take on a classic story, it’s a musical show with lots of movement and physicality, and it has a lot of the audience interaction of stand-up comedy. Most importantly, it got a lot of laughs from the audience. The props and staging are terribly crude, but there’s a knowing professionalism behind the amateur façade. I learned afterwards that Mark Finbow had written the show, and that he and Simon-Anthony Roden had studied together at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.   The Keeper’s Daughter is a company to watch out for, I think.

 

 

Published