Review of FIVE by Dustin Wills (English Theatre Of Rome, July 21-23, 28-30)
by Caroline Prosser (staff) | Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
The cast and director hanging out on a rehearsal break
FIVE, directed by Dustin Wills with Keri Boyd (New York), Amy Briggs (England), Chase Crossno (Angola), Sofia Ruiz (Mexico), and Emily Tyndall (Texas).
“Magic”, in the words of young director Dustin Wills, brought his new play FIVE together after a mad-dash three weeks of ensemble writing at theatre proprietor Gaby Ford’s ‘writer’s retreat’. Not perhaps the most conventional way of writing a play but it appears to be the preferred method of Wills – and an approach favoured at the English Theatre. FIVE is Dustin Wills’s third production as part of their commitment to supporting young directors and new writing.
Five actresses devised and wrote their own highly personal female character, which they themselves act. They also contributed to each other’s characters assembling the texts in a piece-by-piece way, cutting and editing as they went along in the way teams of screenwriters work, and it does feel perhaps more like watching a film (or a series of films) than a play.
FIVE continues on a theme that Wills has been involved with in his other plays: female identity (coming after Ophelia, a feminised retelling of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and The Moths, a journey through the mind of Virginia Woolf). The set and structure aim to break the boundary between the performers and audience, and involve the public being split into five groups upon arrival. The groups circulate around different rooms, each containing a single actress and an allocated time by stopwatch.
Making use of all of the English Theatre, the experience is of visiting a house – intensified by hearing background noise of what is going on in the other rooms. We visit character’s bedrooms and even the theatre’s own kitchen.
Each character is trapped by some kind of tie to their room with some managing to finally leave and others not. All are in some way linked to another character, either directly (through a voyeuristic obsession) or indirectly (by opening another person’s post). Family relationships, sexuality and madness are reoccurring themes. What all the characters all have in common is wanting something they cannot have.
Some performances are more successful than others but one of the most entertaining was British actress Amy Briggs whose repressed dinner party hostess Eleanor was the funniest – and nicely offset the more ‘American’, spilling-out confessional style of the other characters. Mona, played by Chase Crossno, the run-down and type-set young wife who spies on her eccentric neighbour was also a memorable performance.
One of the play’s best moments is its finale, when all five of the characters come together and characters confront each other and conflicts begin to become resolved. It seems more of a ‘work in progress’ than an end-product, an experiment with strengths and weaknesses which will intrigue its audience even if it leaves a yearning for something more. FIVE is currently showing at the English Theatre of Rome.
Teatro L´Arciliuto
P.za Montevecchio 5, near p.za Navona
