Throats

Synopsis

After thirty-three years touring more than fifteen countries with his New York and Brazilian Dry Opera Company, Throats announces his comeback and the birth of the London Dry Opera Company. The production marks the arrival of this groundbreaking, controversial and inspiring director and playwright to the London stage for the first time. Throats introduces us to victims of a violent collision: uncertainty and confusion reign in this strange setting. Is this just a temporary state of mind? Throats is a funny, dark and surprising journey filled with contemporary free-associations.

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Richard Voyce - 6 March 2011:

Theatre is a beast of many parts; words, music, set, lighting, sound, actors, plot, sometimes even message. There has been theatre where one or more of these has been absent. Theatre without sets for example. Throats at The Pleasance Theatre has a rather good set by Jan-Eric Skevik. However, the story that I came out of the Pleasance Theatre thinking about last night was a simple one, that of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Someone needs to stand up to Gerald Thomas, look him squarely in the eye and say that rarely can there have ever been presented before a paying public a piece which is, as a whole, so completely devoid of any artistic merit as that which it was my misfortune to see last night. As the writer, Thomas seems also to have been the director, it does not take a genius to see at whose door the blame should lie. It is true that the cast fought bravely, and indeed should be congratulated for their game attempt at making sense of this hodge-podge of inane ramblings. The cast did what they needed to do. They tried to present Throats in the best light possible. Sadly, the exercise was a fruitless as trying to polish a turd. It should be noted that the music as underscoring was, if anything, the highlight of the evening, but even this could not lift the otherwise cold and lifeless corpse to anything other than the meekest of stirrings. The actors, however, were game, and indeed Angus Brown, the Brian Glover de nos jours, seemed to be just what the piece needed, but was sadly underused. Daniel Ben Zenou provided a sexy and homoerotic presence; strange, as the gay stereotype we were meant to see was Adam Napier, who was, for some inexplicable and wholly unnecessary reason kitted out in a completely superfluous leather-and-high-heels combination which only served to point out the innately homophobic content of Gerald Thomas’s writing. It was like listening to the incoherent burbling of the school bully in the lower sixth common room in 1974. Kevin Golding as the black-Jew was not needed, and the female parts could have been completely interchangeable, but were played with determination by Antonia Davies, Lucy Lang, and Maria De Lima, however, the lack of impact was not their fault. They looked, and acted, like the cast of The Rocky Horror Show transplanted, shocked, to somewhere they didn’t want to be. The blame lies entirely at the hand, or more properly the pen, of religiously-fixated Gerald Thomas, who seems somehow to have got the idea that he has something new, and/or important to say. I have a shock for him. On the evidence of last night, he doesn’t. It isn’t clear where the money for this production came from, but I can only assume that the bulk of it must have come from Thomas himself, given that the play as presented is so far up itself it’s positively ‘proctological’. Experimental theatre such as this was an interesting diversion in its day, but its day has long past. The road it travelled was, ultimately, a cul-de-sac. Even trying to reanimate the corpse with references to John Galliano, and September 11th – in rather poor taste, given that London has suffered terrorist attacks rather more recently – couldn’t make this ‘work’ either topical or coherent. It really is a crying shame that far better work is left to fall by the wayside whilst such dross as this floats to the top of the barrel, like some over-aerated lump of ordure. I can only be thankful that on this particular night the ‘show’ (for want of a better word) provided gainful employment to so many evidently talented on-stage, and theatre staff, and that I and the three people with me, who constituted around twenty per cent of the audience on a Saturday evening performance, had paid only 99p each for the dubious honour of being privileged to attend such self-centred drivel. Thank you Whatsonastage.com for the opportunity of allowing me to see work by this man, Gerald Thomas – a writer of whom I had not previously heard - who seems to have made his career completely by surfing on the coat-tails of other, far more talented, individuals. He seems to have wished to provoke a response in his – meagre – audience. He did. I will be sure to avoid any further theatrical experience with his name attached to it. ...

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