Scapegoat! (FringeTIX)
Spotlight Theatre Company @ Jah’z Lounge
7:00pm, Tue 19 Feb 2008
I arrive at The Jah’z Lounge, an intimate upstairs venue that holds maybe fifty, to find that I’m the last of the expected guests for the evening. To be fair, I did only have to walk across the lane from the Elephant & Castle, but the influence of the previous couple of pints (a celebration of Llysa’s birthday – Happy 21st, Llysa! :) meant that I timed my run just a little too… wrong.
No matter – the opening scene sets a sobering tone that straightens me up right away. We see The Man, curled near foetal at the back of the stage. The Woman – his interrogator, his lifeline, his (clichéd) only friend – appears, flanked by two guards. She demands answers for a crime it’s obvious he did not commit – it’s clear his only “crime” is being Muslim. He responds to her answers with questions; that first interrogation is brutally short.
We progress through several such scenes, each an opportunity to torture The Man, both psychologically and physically. First, subjugation; then starvation. Desperate and frantic, The Man carefully arranges his prayer mat, seeking East, before settling to pray for the first time since his incarceration. The audience collectively holds its breath… well, the paying audience, anyway. The three reviewers that I could see took the opportunity to scribble frantically in the half-light, missing the opportunity to revel in the high-point of the show.
We’re instinctively aware of the subterfuge being inflicted on The Man. We know that he’s not facing East. We know that the clinical coolness of The Woman dominates the proceedings, and will ultimately – brutally – win. And we know that his death is near; when it comes, it’s very matter-of-fact. Cool, clinical. The parting shot – “death is just another way to lose” – is almost perfunctory.
Performances are fine, hitting the mark more so than not; Sahil Choujar is convincingly defiant and confused as The Man, while Joanna Webb exudes the required frost. More questions are asked, though, of the characters of the mute guards – Who are they? How do they manage to serve so obediently under such an obviously aggressively oppressive rule?
Scapegoat! is unashamedly political – a quick chat with writer/director Tony Moore after the show revealed that the piece was spurred along by the Mohamed Haneef incarceration. And the blunt nature of the work leaves plenty of hoary spurs that could niggle the theatre-goer; it pulls no punches, but provides few surprises (apart from the fact that it ended so soon). But because it is so overt, because the audience can predict where the work will go, it allows a lot of the subtext to be created through imagination; the performances themselves almost become secondary.
But that’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the piece; in fact, it turned out to be exactly what I expect from a piece of Fringe theatre. But I can’t help but feel that opportunities to create moments of greater impact were missed; how the sirens that wake the man could have been delayed, to put the audience on edge, guessing. How seeing The Man pray in the gloom of the half-light would have bated breath just that little bit longer. In a work such as this, most of the performance takes place in the audience’s own heads; every opportunity should be taken to allow them freedom to roam the stage.