REVIEW: The Flies, Bunker Theatre ✭

Jean-Paul Sartre is well known as a philosopher, rather less famous as a playwright.  And yet, one of his early works for the stage, ‘Huis clos’ (‘No Exit’), has found a permanent place in the international repertory.  It is a remarkable achievement for someone who in 1944 had hitherto only produced a few attempts, including this sprawling, ramshackle re-telling of part of the Oresteia.  ‘Les Mouches’ makes just about every mistake a playwright can make in creating a text for performance in the theatre: it is messy, the plotting is leaden, the exposition interminable, the action minimal and then – when it does occur – hurriedly botched, and so on.  Ostensibly sold to us as a response to Nazi occupation, there is nothing much of that evident here.  Also pitched as a ‘rock opera’, there is precious little singing, and when that does occur it doesn’t really reach anything like the stature of rock music.  Undeterred, it was brought to the London fringe 10 years ago by the little dual-language company, Exchange Theatre, who have elected to celebrate this anniversary by bringing it back again.

Well, last time around it did win an Offie Award.  Looking at this present production, however, it is doubtful whether it will be quite as successful in its second run.  Whatever success the director, David Furlong, originally had with this challenging piece seems to have deserted him this time around, at least as far as the English-language version of the production is concerned, the one I saw last night.  There is also a French-language version being given by the same company (though not always in the same roles) at selected performances [check performance information for details, if you feel so inclined].

The problems do not stop there.  The design of the set by Ninon Fandre is nothing if not cluttered, a mood also adopted by Sarah Habib’s costumes.  Now, I have seen many performances in this space, some of the very finest I have ever seen, and it is fair to say that those which have done best have cleared the decks as much as possible to give the maximum freedom for interaction between actors and audience – rather like the ‘open space’ of Shakespeare’s Globe.  Here, the action is ringed by banks of video projections (Jason Greenberg’s) and a lot of rubbish.  It might function better on another kind of stage: here it is a blockage and a distraction.  There is also the much-touted on-stage band (Billy Boguard, guitar; Thomas Broda, drums; Elo Elso, bass), who play and play and play a kind of almost unending underscore, in a loosely West Coast rock kinda way.  It’s pleasant, but could really belong almost anywhere EXCEPT in the forced, stilted neo-classical language chosen by the translator for this piece.

Every time the cast open their drama-school educated mouths to speak, we are not in the modern, distressed, dystopian landscape the designers serve up.  Absolutely not.  We are rather in the same austere world of Racine and Corneille dishing up intrigues and plots from the classical repertory as a metaphor for fun and games at the court of the sun king.  This sits together all rather oddly.  Meanwhile, the cast have to do the best they can.

Meena Rayann takes up the demanding role of Electra.  She may have cut the mustard in ‘Game of Thrones’ but this is a much more difficult role to portray, and she is all at sea with it.  She also has to sing along to the music of the competent rock band, and there – also- she runs into difficulties.  Paco Esquire is credited with being Music Director, but he’s not been able to help his performers much.  The same goes for the ‘Elvis  impersonator’ number Samy Elkhatib is asked to put over as his rather wooden Orestes, and for the chorus of Furies, Fanny Dulin (also a producer of the company and a creditable Clytemnestra, but saddled with a bumpy French accent causing many lines to emerge garbled), Soraya Spiers and Christopher Runciman.  The latter is almost alone in having the – English language – vocal equipment to make himself comfortably heard in the tricky acoustics of this subterranean former carpark, how he will fare when he switches to French I can only imagine.  Complicating matters still more, the microphones of the Furies didn’t work on press night, for their single – rather promising, but raggedly staged – number.  No sound designer is credited, which may help to explain that particular problem.

Raul Fernandes as Jupiter, a deus very much a long way out of his machina, was exceptional in that he gained visibly and audibly in conviction as the performance went on, which may or may not have something to do with the actual amount of rehearsal that has been done.  Otherwise, many actors suffered from missed or over-shot cues, fluffs and all manner of pitfalls that really need sorting out in the rehearsal room.  Juliet Dante’s tutor suffered noticeably in this respect.  Particularly bewildering is the habit adopted by so many of the cast to aim their speeches on this thrust stage in the one direction NOT occupied by any of the audience: the back wall.  Bizarre.

So, all in all, this, I think, is a production in trouble.  It’s sad to have to award a star in such unfortunate circumstances, but if one has to be given, then there’s not much option about what to give it.