Artified soap opera

Press, 9 May 1979, Page 6

Artified soap opera

By

HOWARD McNAUGHTON

“Shots,” written and directed by .Alan Trus-tsH-Cullen; Auckland . Teachers’ College The- | atricks, Ngaio Marsh I Theatre, May 8. When a play demands a wide range of expressive de--vices, great care must be; taken about their co-ordina-tion so that elements do,not spin off tangentially. When; the author of such a script; is also its director, the risk | of unintentional fragmenta- ’ tion must be higher. Such seems to be the problem with the first big dramatic oroduction of this year’s national students’ arts festival. "Shots” is a play which deliberately exploits two layers of stereotype: the depressive former beauty ■ queen and over-com-1

pensating bad poet to whom she was once married. (Finally, the play transcends neither stereotype and the 'effect of multiplying all the (cliches out is simply artified isoap opera. I The production thus falls . victim to its own apparent (target but the means by which it achieves this are not uninteresting. As the beauty queen. Patrea Petroff grapples with a difficult piece of schizoid charaterisation and manages the depressive present-tense facet competently. However, she is continually up-staged by the photographic presentation of her younger self so that the effect is, inevitably, parody rather than irony. As the second-rate poet; (and seducer of the young),; Andrew Dunn has to get I through torrents of pre-, . tentious verbiage which hei I accompanies with highly!

histrionic acting style: he seems to have a case to argue in his defence but the style of the thing reduces his behaviour to crudely unsympathetic perversity. The tangents which distract the audience from the apparent core of the drama involve issues of perspective, style, and over-ex-plicitness. Both central characters are “haunted by ‘shots’ of their past” and it is extremely difficult dramaturgically to fuse together two subjective territories: O’Neill managed it in “Long Day’s Journey” and he used not sharply defined images of the haunting past but a blurred fog-world in which no single image of joy or i destruction crystallises fully, iln "Shots” everything has lan impossible clarity, peri spectives become confused, .and the total effect is striIdency.