Theatre / Reviews
Review: Alas! Poor Yorick, Tobacco Factory Theatres – ‘Experimental and surreal, but doesn’t quite land’
Even in experimental theatre, it’s still a rare-ish thing for an audience to banter with performers before the show begins – the fourth wall not being broken, but actually not existing at all.
When David Woods and Jon Haynes step out into the Tobacco Factory auditorium and chat casually to the front row, at first we can’t be sure that the play hasn’t started. Could this be a clever feint, a set-up for what is to follow?
Actually, no. It isn’t. Woods makes it clear that this is a ‘free’ 10 minutes in which the performers will josh about the production, how they’d like to cast audience members, a bit about cancel culture and a light-hearted riff on what might ‘trigger’ us tonight.
Then they ask for the sheet containing production information to be handed round. This is handy for your reviewer, naturally, but upon reading it is nothing less than a heartfelt and honest plea for financial support.
David and Jon’s company, Ridiculusmus, has, it seems, been existing in a hole deeper than that in which the eponymous Yorick currently resides. Two destructive fires and an equally inflammable approach to arts funding have apparently left the company on the bones of its arse. That they’re here at all, and performing, appears to be something of a miracle.
So that’s the backstory, and an important one it is too. However, I’m not wholly convinced that in terms of the play itself, the end justifies the means. The blurb tells us that “If the Two Ronnies were cast as the Gravediggers in Shakespeare’s Hamlet re-written by Samuel Beckett you might have something like Ridiculusmus’s Alas! Poor Yorick”.
Certainly, the play has identifiable elements of Messrs Barker, Corbett and Beckett, with a heavy dash of Hamlet, of course. Two laconic gravediggers mooch about their workplace, the bigger guy dominating the little fella. There is an almost-talking donkey and a sense that, like Vladimir and Estragon, we’re waiting for something to happen.
But the genius of ‘Godot’ is that so much happens while we’re waiting for something to happen. In ‘Yorick’, we seem to be getting close to that – but every time we do, the play shies away from it, leaving a sense of something rushed, half-finished – almost scared of the laughter that will undoubtedly come if its inherently funny bones are fully exposed.
And, just as we’re about to witness the piece becoming truly interesting and engaging, both humorously and philosophically, there is an immediate about-turn. All the action we’ve witnessed is literally sent into reverse, the whole performance so far played backwards to the beginning.
Why? What is the reasoning here? It may be absurdist, existential, and surreal, but do these reasons truly justify such a disappointing result? I’m not sure I’m convinced and, on hearing the ‘umms’ and ‘hmms’ from the departing audience, I don’t think I’m alone.
Alas! Poor Yorick is at Tobacco Factory Theatres on April 22-23 at 7.30pm. Visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com for tickets.
All photos: John Saunders
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