FestBuzz

What: A Clock­work Orange by EatThe­Baby Pro­duc­tions
Where: C, Cham­bers St
When: 10pm Wed 5  —  22 Aug
How Much: £7.50-£10.50

In 140 char­ac­ters or less: “A Clock­work Orange: a tightly wound and pre­cise (time)piece of chore­og­ra­phy marred by a less than an organic team.”

First, a dis­claimer: I haven’t seen the film A Clock­work Orange. Despite being aware of the iconog­ra­phy, a great fan of Kubrick’s work, and gen­er­ally not averse to strong scenes of vio­lence, after read­ing the novel by Anthony Burgess some ten years ago I was left suit­ably shocked enough never to want to see any­thing from it visu­ally depicted: my imag­i­na­tion and Burgess’ dense text had left me bereft enough.

So it was odd that I found myself on my way to see this play of the novel. I arrived with no visual expec­ta­tions and there­fore EatTheBaby’s sparse but care­ful use of colour and mix-and-match uni­forms was an intrigu­ing take on the tone of the source material.

Now seems a timely moment to res­ur­rect a work as much about the social anx­i­ety grow­ing around the per­ceived role of young peo­ple in soci­ety and the ori­gin of evil, as about the polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion of art and cen­sor­ship. With the media’s cur­rent fix­a­tion on knife crime and the safety of “our chil­dren” it seems more appro­pri­ate than ever to address the moral cor­rup­tion of youth and the role of the state in the upbring­ing and edu­ca­tion of children.

Alex’s jour­ney from glee­ful and child­ish ultra-violence with his gang of droogs through his encoun­ters with mul­ti­ple pos­si­ble sal­va­tions, be it church, state, fam­ily, love or sci­ence, is a series of set scenes ren­dered as sketches with car­i­ca­tured author­ity fig­ures and uni­formed goons. The satir­i­cal ele­ments of the text are brought to the fore, though with a lit­tle work on tim­ing and deliv­ery this black com­edy could eas­ily be played for stronger laughs.

The high­light of EatTheBaby’s pro­duc­tion was the excel­lent fight scenes: tightly chore­o­graphed and truly quite shock­ing. The sin­is­ter silence of the thugs, be they gang mem­bers, police, sci­en­tists or pris­on­ers, was chill­ing, and the dis­tress of the vic­tims was played with trou­bling sincerity.

The only thing this pro­duc­tion lacked (but will prob­a­bly increase in as the fes­ti­val goes on) was effi­cient tim­ing out­side the fights. Dur­ing spo­ken scenes the actors were turn-taking rather than inter­act­ing and there was no tan­gi­ble chem­istry between them. Jacob Taee does a good job of chan­nelling teenage angst (it’s easy to for­get Alex is just sev­en­teen) along­side a more vit­ri­olic hatred of author­ity, but there’s some­thing lack­ing in the cast’s reac­tions to him.

How­ever, over­all this is a cre­atively directed and good retelling of a clas­sic text. The pro­duc­tion high­lights the time­less nature of the debate about state and the indi­vid­ual and avoids invok­ing a sim­plis­tic moral response from the audience.

Fes­t­buzz Rating:

Words: Elise Bramich

Photo: Adam Levy