Noonday Demons
14 July 2015
1 Star
Reviewed by James Garden
This evening, I went to see a production of Noonday Demons, at the Kings’ Head Theatre, and that’s what I thought I was going to see.
This was not the case. I heard Noonday Demons at the Kings’ Head Theatre, and the vocal work was pretty good. The play’s plot itself is fairly simple—one religious hermit in what seems to be Egypt in the early days of the Coptic church tries to kick out another religious hermit from his cave by proving he is more holy. It’s not laugh out loud funny, and yet it was utterly curious that many people were nearly falling out of their seats—especially a woman sat directly in front of me who found it particularly funny. It’s not as if the jokes went over my head, I got them, I just didn’t find them laugh out loud hilarious. They were interesting, at best.
However, despite the fact that I sat in a seat, seat C6 to be precise, facing what clearly looked like two actors on a stage in the Kings’ Head Theatre, in its brand new thrust formation, I saw very little of the production. Why (I hear you ask through the system of tubes known as the internet?)
Because lighting designer, Seth Rook Williams, decided it was a pretty neat idea to focus his back lighting on my seat. As a lighting designer, who worked frequently back in Canada, I know how lighting instruments are focused— the focus point of an instrument is clear when you are in it, because you can see what looks like the centre of a flower in the middle of the barrel. And when that instrument is turned off, the ghost of that flower remains for a few seconds.
One instrument was focused directly on me, and the one next to it was focused just next to me. I was not in the first row, I was in the third. And rather far away from these two instruments, in the grand scheme of things.
The upshot of this is that I didn’t see the first actor’s face for the first ten minutes of the play, just by the laws of physics and biology, and then when the first scene was complete, I saw the afterglow of these two lights in my vision long after they were turned down, because for some reason at the end of the first scene the designer and director, Mary Franklin, thought it was also a pretty neat idea to flash these lights from 0 to what felt like FL several times.
As the second scene progressed, Ms. Franklin also thought it was a pretty neat idea to fill the theatre with fog. This might’ve been an interesting move, but for the fact that, again, there were long stretches where I couldn’t see the actors faces at all. What is the point of a play on stage when you can’t actually see it?
I wish I could have actually seen these actors through the majority of the play, because their vocal work sounded pretty good. I have seen the intruding monk, Jake Curran, in previous work, including the actually laugh out loud funny Diary of a Nobody. I wish I could have seen him throughout this performance.
As I was leaving the theatre, the Artistic Director of the King’s Head quietly addressed the director of the piece in front of me, with a very warm “well done.” I all of a sudden understood why the woman in front of me was laughing so hard throughout the performance and nearly falling out of her seat—it was her show.
This single moment, as I exited the theatre, was the only moment of the entire experience that made me chuckle.
Noonday Demons runs at the Kings Head Theatre until 2nd August 2015
