A Picture of Alchemy
May 1, 2008 by caareteam
Liza Adebisi
1 May 2008
A Picture of Alchemy
By Michael Mallon
Resister Theatre
22 April – 11 May 2008
The Etcetera Theatre
265 Camden High Street
London, NW1 7BU
The Etcetera is a cosy room located on top of the Oxford Arms in the centre of Camden Town.
Yesterday I watched a cast of five actors perform to an audience of five people, in this small venue.
A Picture of Alchemy, written by Michael Mallon for Resister Theatre, is told on a modest stage without drapes, in front of a few red velvet benches.
The experience of the show is inevitably intimate.
It tells the story of five women, who share a male spiritual guide called Will. The women are all searching for answers, and the guide encourages them to find these answers within themselves. He watches them grow, enlightened and directed by his doctrine, and through observing them, he also finds a new enlightenment.
Most impressive is the set design, simple and adequate.
The audience is guided by the lighting through the chronology of the scenes; parts of the stage are lit alternately in order to follow the action in its temporal and spatial locations.
The script, Will’s lines in particular, are a clever aide-mémoire which echo the words of the contemporary self-help literature sold in the popular psychology section of most book stores.
The echoing effect is used elsewhere in the play. We have, for instance, the female characters who chant the learnt doctrine in unison, at the monotonous pace of a chorus, which is more typical of Greek drama than modern musicals. It is a relief to find that Michael Mallon’s comedy never really degenerates into a musical, because there are enough Wizards of Oz and Mamma Mias in the West End…and with all due respect, they run for ever. The play does involve songs on a couple of occasions, but the singing is kept to “an extravaganza of the character” or “a moment of wine bred effervescence”, it is not used as a story telling device.
Nevertheless the cast should be praised for their outstanding vocal skills, and especially for the energy they managed to maintain and transmit to a skeletal audience - skeletal, perhaps, because of the Liverpool – Chelsea football match.
Whatever the cause of the meagre number of spectators, such number is very little stimulus for the vivacity of the cast, and yet Resister Theatre animated their show with touching verve.
The characters were well interpreted and the script is original and refreshing.
