Ollie and the Minotaur (FringeTIX)
floogle @ one forty five
5:00pm, Sun 9 Mar 2008
Ollie and the Minotaur has a massive buzz around it; it seems to be a darling of critics and crowds alike, and I’ve yet to hear a less-than-exemplary word said about it. But I walk into the theatre at one forty five not knowing anything about the story; and I was very surprised to find that it’s simply three girls talking in a lounge.
There’s obviously more to it than that – emotional trauma galore, with some twists and turns and plenty of angst and tears. But, without giving the plot away, that’s about all there is to it.
And that all sounds pretty dismissive. It’s not supposed to be; I really, really enjoyed Ollie and the Minotaur. It’s fantastically tight writing, and all three actresses are superb – Thea (Wendy Bos) was gorgeously smug for the most part, Carla (Adriana Bonaccurso) provided huge grins with her variations in mood and volume, and Sarah Brokensha’s Bec – who I initially thought was the weakest of the three – wound up being the most memorable.
But…
The twist, the revelation, turns things a bit too quickly for me. In the context of the rest of the performance, I didn’t think the character’s responses were realistic, were believable. Let me, for the purposes of future reference, be quite explicit: Thea turns on Bec way too quickly. That she would do so to her best friend is undeniable, given the details of the reveal; but the speed with which it happened just didn’t feel Real to me.
This troubled me because – as previously mentioned – I thought the rest of Ollie and the Minotaur was excellent; still, it was already running well into arse-numbing time on a hot Sunday afternoon. But that one little factoid really made me wonder what all the fuss was about, what all the raving was about; yes, Ollie was great, but it wasn’t that great.