Review-Victims and Preachers-Performance Exchange
30-5-14
By: Tom Hope
'Victims and Preachers' makes big claims but packages them in small parcels - twenty, according to the programme notes (but I counted an extra one). For a show lasting barely 1 hour (without interval), that's an average of less than 3 minutes per piece.
Each is a vignette addressing in some way the theme of 'Victims and Preachers' (which the Fringe’s website expands thus: ‘The world is shrinking, and time is running out for the weak, the downtrodden, the forgotten, the dispossessed and the marginalised. Preachers certainly have charisma, but they may not have all the answers, and anyway, they aren’t listening. Enter an array of tyrants, villains, ghosts, clowns, clergy, politicians, money men and their friends...’)
In presenting these vignettes, the approach is variegated (it’s not simply ‘one damn monologue after another’) and always tangential, sometimes without seeming to touch. (Half way through, the person next to me asked 'What's it about?' and all I could think to respond was 'Victims and Preachers'.)
It's a one man show and Dan Foley is a seasoned performer with a special interest in cross-over dramatic forms. Interspersing the Sophocles, Chekhov and Shakespeare is Balinese shadow puppetry and Kabuki. There's his own work in the mix too, I assume (but nothing is credited in the programme notes which simply list out the title of each piece).
The production values are high, with a tryptych set (table/chair, shadow screen and pulpit/lectern) creating a range of spaces from which to deliver each piece, supported by subtly effective soundscapes. And Foley's delivery is sufficiently assured that when (occasionally) you can't hear a particular monologue because of its mumbling and/or ranting qualities, you can assume it's for a reason, even if you're not sure what that reason is...
The question remains: does it add up to more than a sum of its parts? I'm not sure it does. And I think that's its point.
As we take our seats, we can't ignore the ball-peen hammer downstage centre; the opening piece ('Hammer') relates the murder of a 21 year old student Jonathan Hensan by Laurence Fisher of no fixed abode using a ball-peen hammer; and the next two pieces 'Dracula' and 'Semar Beats The Thief') reference blood and hammer blows... So an expectation is set for the eventual (re-or-de)construction of this particular narrative - but there the hammer rests until the show's close, as if to say 'make sense of that, if you will!'
If you are looking for a masterful display of 'five finger dramatic exercises', this production ticks plenty of boxes and you should leave well satisfied. If you are looking for something which knits the separate story strands into a singular raiment, you are likely to be left wanting significantly more.
If instead you take 'Victims and Preachers' as a clutch of dramatic pebbles dropped into a philosophical pond to create an ever more complex cross-rippling pattern of thoughts and feelings, you are (probably) getting as much from it as Dan Foley would dare to expect.
At just $130 for a standard ticket, that seems a reasonable deal. And, of course, watching this 21 pebble 'salute' could in turn set off pebble-dashed hammer blows in your own mind which could in turn make that ticket price seem insignificant indeed...
Victims and Preachers is playing at the Fringe Club through May 31st. For more information, click here.
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