The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Royal & Derngate, Northampton

The Duke of Milan strides round the stage in a pair of be-ribboned PVC knee boots, his hands sheathed in fingerless black leather gloves. This is a Milan of flashbulbs and high fashion overseen by a Karl Lagerfeld-esque colossus, the kind a man who tweezes sushi into his mouth while barking at hapless underlings. Music pounds and bodies writhe and somewhere beneath the din and the flicker there is a trace of Shakespeare.

There’s a sense of disconnect to Matthew Dunster’s new production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a piece made in collaboration with RashDash. Dunster is clearly enamoured with the company – after seeing their work at the Edinburgh Fringe, he was determined to create something with them – but while many of their most appealing traits, their energy, their physicality, have made their way into this broad reworking of Shakespeare’s early comedy, so have some of the company’s limitations, the messiness of intention, and, chiefly, the way in which they knit together – or rather frequently fail to – the text with the choreography.

There were similar issues with RashDash’s previous pieces, Another Someone and Scary Gorgeous. The imaginative physical sequences always seemed to sit above and apart from the narrative – and the same is true here; only when working with an established text, rather than a piece of their own devising, it feels all the more marked.

The production is lively and bright, musical and colourful, but there’s often a sense that the words are secondary to the visuals. RashDash’s Abbi Greenland and Helen Goalen play, respectively, Julia, Proteus’ homely Veronese sweetheart, and Sylvia, the glamorous daughter of the Milanese Duke; while Julia flutters over her lover’s every letter, Sylvia is the pouting, strutting object of much male attention and fascination, a woman on a – literal – pedestal, with her near-naked image splashed across banners.

In comparison to the throb and debauchery of Milan, Verona is depicted as suburban and small fry, a town populated by beaming kids in well-pressed khakis; in the over-stretched opening scene, the titular two gentlemen brandish guitars and sing a peppy song about seeking fortune and freedom elsewhere. There’s wit and invention in such devices, but a lack of subtlety, the point is forced home, the comparisons are laboured. There are long periods given over to music and movement where no one speaks a word of verse, and there’s an adolescent quality to some of the humour, a seeming belief that all this cussing and snorting and stripping is more daring than it is.

Clemmie Sveaas plays Proteus’ inept servant, Launce, as an escapee from Ugly Betty toting a plastic lapdog in a designer handbag, but her scenes soon start to grate and this is before she ends up relieving herself in a plastic cup. By making this clownish secondary character female and by focusing the audience’s attentions firmly on Julia and Sylvia over the various gentlemen, the production seems to be tugging in an interesting direction, but this is neither a fully feminised or feminist account of the text and some of the choices seem to have been made for visual appeal rather than to make a particular point.

In fact there seems to be two conflicting desires at work here. On one hand it feels like an attempt to stage a frothy homage to the play, in the vein of Ten Things I Hate About You or Clueless, and in these moments the text feels like an obstacle. This is frustrating, as some of the more successful episodes come when the background noise subsides and the words are given room. This is most evident in the morally knotty final scenes when Sylvia is threatened with rape and then seemingly bartered; Dunster’s production plays up the sinister implications of this transaction, but then undoes the power of these closing moments by ending on a song and giving the women back their voices.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: Another Someone at the Bedlam

My first inclination, when I discover that a show claims to be “about happiness”, is to bolt, to flee. But I’m ever so glad I didn’t give into the urge because, tangled and messy as it is, this is one of the more uplifting and exciting productions on this year’s Fringe.

The central story is not unfamiliar. Holly is a recent law graduate with ambitions to be a barrister. When she moves into a new flat she is initially finds her neighbours, Alicia and Jim, somewhat off-putting but becomes friends - of sorts - with them anyway.


Alicia convinces Jim and Holly to go on a date and they click, soon becoming a couple. But while Holly equates happiness with ambition and success, Jim is content where he is, working as a waiter, seeing where life takes him. This is too big a hurdle for Holly and they split.

Music and dance ripple through the entire production. It’s an intensely physical piece. The performers tumble and roll and wrestle, wrapped in one another, supporting each other’s weight and then springing apart. The music is supplied live by musician Becky Wilkie, who also acts as an occasional narrator and supplier of wry asides about the characters. As Holly’s emotional life is opened up to the audience the piece becomes more dreamlike and opaque, with her caught in a forest of coloured silk dressed in a faded pink princess dress. It’s an evocative sequence that captures the wonder of childhood without being heavy-handed.

Another Someone is the work of Leeds-based dance theatre company RashDash. They made their Edinburgh debut at last year’s Fringe with a piece called The Honeymoon, a show that while full of energy was unable to sustain itself; this new work, whilst maintaining a clear sense of their identity as a company, shows a marked improvement in terms of structure and story-telling.

It’s still a flawed work. They never quite succeed in making all the elements knit together seamlessly – it’s still possible to see the joins – and the more conventional scenes between Holly, Jim and Alicia suffer from a lack of originality when placed besides the lively dance sequences. Yet this scene-setting is necessary and they grasp that. This piece connects with the audience in a way The Honeymoon never quite managed.

The trio of actors, Abbi Greenland, Helen Goalen and Marc Graham, are convincing as their characters yet also adept at the more physical scenes, and though it sometimes stumbles, the whole piece ends on a percussive high. It also shows clear evidence of a company evolving in skill and confidence in a way that is immensely pleasing to see.

Reviewed for musicOMH