Red Dust Theatre @ Space Theatre
9:00pm, Sat 9 Mar 2002
Score: 4
Short Review: Why bother?
The opening of “Train Dancing” made me think that it was going to be another Mamu – actor Steve Hodder (playing Ulysses) strolls out and launches into a soliloquy about his heritage. Unfortunately, where Mamu was a warm and charming piece of theatre, “Train Dancing” is a verbose, metaphorical mess.
There’s a bit of singing (Hodder raps, whilst Jacinta Nampitjinpa Castle has a gorgeous voice), good live music, but the acting is generally only fair to average – mistakes ahoy. The plot is like a Shakespearean tragedy – boy meets girl (girl abused by parents), boy finds out girls’ parents are his parents, a bit of panto, then a big, bloody finale. The core themes of the piece seem confused, however; and the dialogue is – well, there’s plenty of it, and none of it is pretty. The excessive use of the ‘c’ word is obvious, and some of the sexual euphemisms are… creatively crap.
The direction is interesting – there’s some neat Lynch-like use of light and shadow, but at the end of the day, there’s no reason to see this show when there’s so much quality theatre around at the moment.