Review: Miracle, Leicester Square Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Reza du Wet’s play is like cling-film: thin, transparent, but not entirely without the potential for perverse enjoyment. That’s not to say that Miracle falls into the so-bad-it’s-good category, rather that, in spite of almost everything (natural laws included), it remains just about watchable on its own terms.

A troupe of travelling actors pitch themselves in a crypt in the home-town of their leading man Abel, preparing to give a performance of the medieval morality play, Everyman. Under the stick-and-carrot leadership of actor-manager Du Pre (Tim Woodward, thesping it up like its 1955), the bickering escalates with the arrival of Abel’s coldly congenial ex-wife. Before long, real life imitates art: death makes its presence and purpose known only for Everyman – I mean, Abel – to escape its claws at the last.

Stephen Stead’s translation more or less strips the original of its South African setting, presumably to imbue the work with universality. However, given that the location remains implicit – outside large dogs howl over a barren landscape – the actual effect is to purge it of real pertinence. The multiplicity behind the troupe of actors – and the power politics therein – targets on a general system of government rather than a specific regime and, in doing so, blurs into triviality.

The real criminal in all this, however, is the space itself, which simply won’t allow for our presence to go unacknowledged. Belle Mundi’s design, serviceable though it is, feels like a museum approximation with its clutter of vague gothic crap and painted on stones.

All of which might not be so problematic were the acting style consistent – both with its surroundings and itself. As it is we get Woodward pulling off playing up while Susannah York, as a vintage ‘dahling’ actress, doesn’t. York is fine when acting herself, but her attempts at reaction are so open-mouthed and wide-eyed that, each time, one fears she may have suffered a stroke. Similarly, as the pregnant Lennie, Kate Colebrook downplays sweetly, where Rowan Schlosberg does so to the extent that he forgets to engage us at all. In fact, as Abel, Schlosberg drips with such melancholy that each line seems the opener to a lament for a lost generation. Only Christopher Dingli as the sizzled Antoine pitches his performance at the right level.

And yet, despite all this and the niggling touch of Scooby Doo about proceedings, its not a frustrating watch. Linnie Reedman keeps the pace snappy and hurtles through the plot with a lightness of touch that circumvents its more awkward clunks. Joe Evans’ dusty accordion soundtrack, though it could do with more than two repeated motifs, manages a neat eeriness without which the melodrama would collapse.

Neither can get around the fact that de Wet’s play is a curious relic: more mirage than miracle.