Live Acts on Stage - by Michael Gow and square the circle - SBW Stables Theatre - 09/12/05

Ethan Switch - Saturday, 10 December 2005 - Print Version

Free alcohol blocks the entrance of the Stables Theatre. Chattering drunks move, mill and mull like horses ready to stud and make expensively cheap glue. Women, men, all the same. Plastic cups in hand, they watch each other's eyes turn pink and flush their systems with copious amounts of ghostless spirits.

People collecting tickets best watch out for the women with overbearing breasts and men with cock-forth crotches; eager to rise concern, slow in allowing passage to the box office. Anything that comes between them, the liquor and the floor are bound for stares of contempt.

Particles of clay and ground chokes its way through the lungs. A haze machine is the air conditioning unit for those with rougher tastes. Hell is other people and there are other people here. Dirt packs out the floor of the stage, a set up of the scenes already craft out for the cast.

Greek mythology with an urban feel and sense of timing down to 90 minutes. Live Acts on Stage bears the warning of nudity, coarse language, cigarette smoke and that haze machine. No one said anything about the need to see the shepherd take leave of the sheep and present his own answer to the situation at hand.

Violence is nowhere if not for the play of gods, devils and mortals. Struggle as they may to contain their own lust and driven to carnal acts of the flesh. Men on men, men on unwilling women, men on men again and the cycle of love and bodily fluids continues apace.

Nine actors in over thirty roles. Overlap is inevitable, the pace is fast and keeping up is a matter for the keen and eager. Those also with a memory span longer than a few minutes. So quick is the change that at times they lose their roles and walk around as amorphous mounds spouting lines from the sides of their mouths for the different characters they portray. Only two of the women keep a hold on their characters, never changing into others outside the skinning of deception.

Ethan Switch