Times
Mr Ido has a problem. On his way home to give his six-years-old boy a birthday present, his path is blocked by foolish policemen and voracious television newsmen. They tell hime that an escaped prisoner, Ogoro, is holding his wife and child hostage. Finding that he has no aptitude for playing the victim, this side-parted salaryman instead takes action. He goes to the escaped prisoner's house and takes his wife and six-years-old son hostage. Does fighting fire with fire save the day? Does it hell. It launches Ido and Ogoro into a tit-for-tat standoff in which identities get blurred and people get hurt.
Not so much a revenge fantasy, more a revenge cheese-dream, this 75-minute play by Hideki Noda and Collin Teevan, based on a short story by Yasutaka Tsutsui, has returned to the Soho Theatre six years after first causing a stir here. You can see why it did: it boasts a brilliant central turn by Kathryn Hunter, who you buy into immediately as the buttoned-down but increasingly defiant Ido. And it takes you on a defiantly odd journey, from a kind of caffeinated satire at the start to something claustrophobic and strange as it slides towards its downbeat conclusion.
The opening half is terrifically skilful yet wearyingly wacky. Hunter, Noda, Clive Mendus and Glyn Pritchard boing and strut their way |
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around the orange-glass floor and mirrored backdrop of Miriam Buether's striking design. Noda's production is full of sharp stagecraft - the way the mirror will suddenly go transparent to revela scenes behind it, for example. There are also bits of bussiness, such as the polocemen's supercharged noodle-eating, in which the cast look too much like they are trying to be funny.
But as The BEE goes from something comical to something Liminal, it passes from being irritating to being fascinating. Barricading himself inside Ogoro's home, Mr Ido turns jailor, torturer, rapist. And because this rape is performed by a woman (Hunter) playing a man, and a man (Noda) playing a woman (Ogoro's stripper wife) it helps make this artfully repulsive rather than really repulsive, helps deepen and twist further the slow sense of nightmare. The whole cast negotiate the change of tone brilliantly.
So a bright and cute opening leads to somethings still playful, yet more murky and cruel. There is no easy way out of this cycle of revenge, for captors, for captives or audience. The Bee is a challenge, but it's one worth taking.
Dominic Maxwell |
