10 OUT OF 12 - ADC THEATRE
Theatre is a visual art. Or should be. A good production – even a modest one – should be good to look or at least have lots of eye interest to support the text.
Though that be that the case, then clearly nobody had told the student actors at the ADC. Their production of 10 Out of 12’ had all the visual interest of a blank canvas.
The play by acclaimed American writer Anne Washburn was written in 2015 and shows what happens under the bonnet of a theatrical production. We are in a final tech rehearsal of some unnamed melodrama (possibly inspired by Edgar Allen Poe). This is backstage mayhem – rather like Noises Off without the laughs. Or maybe there should have been laughs. But the small ADC audience was unusually silent.
To be fair, the play is something of an oddity. The main action, if it is action, is endless tech stops – lighting cues, sound checks, floor cleaning (more of that later) undertaken by actors wearing ‘cans’ and talking to unseen guys on the control desk. The play within a play is really not worth writing home or anywhere else about. There is a bit of bitchy interplay between the director-as-god character and his actors. And in the second half tensions rise but from a very very low base.
Strange though the play might be, it was not helped by a production that was lifeless, sluggish and (I hate to say it) tedious. The tech crew seen on stage spent most of the play sitting down on stage blocks, their sight lines obscured and of course very little engagement with the audience. I say ‘of course’ because one of the regular weaknesses of AmDram is that (a) actors are held in glued position downstage (b) they talk to each other often facing away from the poor paying public (c) energy levels are on low ‘simmer’ or ‘cool wash’ settings. This production embraced each of these weaknesses with equal relish. Of the many annoyances in this show was the poor backstage ‘ASM’ who had to brush the floor incessantly throughout the show. This is taking OCD far too far and i for one never want to see a broad yard brush again.
So here was a kind of theatrical negative jackpot: a questionable play poorly produced. Some of the actors had a good go at making their paper-thin characters work (not their fault). I suspect this show was created in a hurry but that was nothing like the hurry your reviewer took on as he fled from the building into a lively much more visually exciting Cambridge. We don’t give star rating here but if I had to; ‘10 out of 12’ would get ‘1 out 12’
