Dea, Sutton Theatres

I thought the Guardian article was hilarious - felt like someone doing a very accurate parody of an embittered rarely performed playwright

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Saw this tonight, and liked alot of it! For me, it's a better production of Bond than the National's "Cleansed" was of Sarah Kane.

What I mean by this is that violence for both Bond and Kane emerges from emotion, from relatable human expression, despair in the case of Bond, love in the case of Kane.

But in the programatic and almost parodic violence of the recent production of "Cleansed," I could detect little love, little of the core of Kane's play, which was manipulated into a boring orgy of violence without a beating heart.

In "Dea," by contrast, every character feels recognisably human, driven by relatable passions, even whilst the most grotesque acts of violence are perpetrated. Consequently, when the production works, it feels like a cocktail of truth, rather than one of empty didacticism.

It didn't always work for me, hampered by some variable acting and some insistent cliches. The play is in three acts, separated by two intervals, with each act better than the last. The structure is similar to "Big and Small (Gross und Klein)" by Botho Strauss, in which a character meanders through different landscapes and milieus, finding rejection and despair. But where Strauss' Lotte, all superego, (played by Cate Blanchett at the Barbican) bore her suffering with grace, Bond's Dea, all id, (played by Helen Bang) resorts to violence.

Some spoilers follow. . .

In the first act landscape of "Home," we start where Euripides' play ended, with Dea smothering her children. Bond establishes a cliched pattern of how the id asserts itself to solve psychic stress: unhappy men rape people, unhappy women kill people. Dea's unhappiness with her husband leads her to kill her children, his unhappy reaction is to rape her, which leads to her having more children, one of whom is unhappy with her, growing up, so rapes her, leaving her unhappy with him, so. . . well, you can guess. This act failed to surprise, but Bond did establish the point that violence breeds violence;

In Act 2, Dea wanders into a landscape of "war." Here our 30 strong audience was depleted when a troupe of 5 twenty something females, gasping and covering their eyes, left en-masse after witnessing scenes of gang-rape and full frontal male masturbation of flaccid penises. Inspired by Abu Graib and the like, Bond suggested rape might be elevated into an "official" male response to "terrorism," a way of defiling the religious beliefs of "the enemy;"

It was in Act 3, however, in which Dea becomes a mad recluse in an "apocalyptic" landscape, like Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens," that the production came fully alive. A two-hander between two excellent actors, Helen Bang's Dea, carrying the dismembered head of her son, like Bertie Carvel's Agave in the Almeida's "Bakkhai," is joined in her blown-out caravan by David Clayton's equally damaged soldier deserter, Cliff, who once took orders from that same disembodied head. The two begin to trade personas as their psyches fracture. The resulting portrait of madness, two victims, both murderers, both lost, both found, together alone, made for an act so disturbing and desolate, that Bond's mishmash of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and himself at last felt distinctive and worthwhile.

3 stars

I found the first two acts dreary and depressing. I came out of Cleansed somewhat uplifted. The violence there felt real but was there to show hope and the power of love whereas in Dea it is used as a damnation of society and has no effect on the audience. The fact that one of the first things Dea does is strangle her children with no development of character whatsoever and there seems no force or pain attached so the artifice makes it quite easy to watch as an audience member. Throughout the first act the acting is atrocious, with any good will I had for the theatre and actors gone by the first interval. The second act was slightly more convincing but for me, it was just soldiers being awful. The third act could have been developed into a rather interesting play in it's own right,exploring madness with some rather wonderfully written dialogue. However, the pretentious nods to Shakespeare coupled with Bond's childish programme notes left me rather sick of the whole thing. A dramaturg and a different director could have done something interesting with this but instead it's a nasty evening.

VG

We must be strict and leave if its rubbish

Not if you risk messing yourself as a result!

Ha ha, no storm clouds whatsoever.

I made the mistake of thinking Parsley was preceded by storm clouds and Oh Fortuna once, so mistook the most miserable man in the room for him at a previous show.

Then, at another show, I mistook at a gentle chap with matinee idol looks and good cheer for Parsley.

I'm fact, Parsley has the air of an immensely tall bespectacled "nattily-dressed" (to quote Foxa) academic.

I had been chatting to two average sized blokes about what Philip Ridleys they had seen, when a bespectacled chap loomed up in the queue behind them, almost too tall to comfortably fit inside the room. I presumed him to have South Asian ancestors, though his sari-wearing posse were conspicuously absent, but given his confident bearing, an academic swagger that suggested he had six or seven phds, I thought here is Parsley, time to collect my five pounds!

So as not to be rude to Joel and Steve 2, who I had been chatting to for 15 minutes, I presumptuously said "here's a man who knows all about Philip Ridley," to invite Parsley into the conversation, and we took it from there. .

So "who pays me my five pounds?" is what I want to know!?