REPORT FROM ENGLAND: ‘BEAST ON THE MOON’ AT NOTTINGHAM PLAYHOUSE
Orlando Sentinel, FL
Nov 12 2007
A lot of Americans who followed the recent flap in Congress about
whether or not to recognize the Armenian genocide may have wondered
what all the fuss was about.
Whatever happened was a long time ago.
But whatever happened a long time ago becomes tangible in Beast on the
Moon, Richard Kalinoski’s 1995 drama, which we saw at the Nottingham
Playhouse Friday night.
Nottingham Playhouse seems to be Nottingham’s version of what we call
regional theater — a professional company with a 750-seat theater
it moved into in 1963. At the time, John Neville and Peter Ustinov
were two of the three artistic directors. Since then, Judi Dench,
Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham-Carter and Hugh Grant all have appeared
on this stage.
The company has sent productions touring through Europe and to
Japan and also has sent shows to the West End. In 1995, it cemented
a relationship with the visual arts by installing a commissioned
sculpture by Anish Kapoor called Sky Mirror — an amazing-looking,
10-ton dish of polished stainless steel, which reflects everything
around it. Click on the website and then click to view the Sky
Mirror. It’s cool.
Anyway, the current brochure lists five in-house productions
between August and March, including the annual Christmas pantomime
(Dick Whttington) and a co-production (with a company called Shared
Experience) of a two-part adaptation of War and Peace. (There’s also
a whole series of comedy and dance, along with a kids’ show and a
touring show.)
I’m sorry to miss that War and Peace, which doesn’t open until Feb. 1
— partly because it’s based on my favorite novel and partly because
it’s directed by Nancy Meckler, who did the wonderful RSC Comedy of
Errors we saw last week. But I was delighted by Beast on the Moon,
a play that also has its roots in war and also translates the effects
of that turmoil into decidedly human terms.
Descriptions I’ve read of Beast on the Moon call it a small play,
and it is: Beyond the three characters, there’s something very neat
about Kalinoski’s imagery and the way he ties everything up at the end.
That’s not a drawback, though — it just makes your sense of
satisfaction at the end all the keener.
The story is of an Armenian couple — Aram, who made his way from
Turkey to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by selling the rare stamps he found
in the lining of his dead father’s coat, and Seta, the 15-year-old
"picture bride" he has ordered from an orphanage’s catalogue.
Not surprisingly, the two don’t see eye to eye. Seta has been scarred
by starvation and torture. And Aram, now a portrait photographer,
has made a fetish of a photograph of his murdered family members —
whose heads he has removed from the photograph, to be replaced,
he hopes, by sons and daughters of his own.
The two are observed, first, by a mysterious older man looking back
at them through time, and later in the play by a boy who makes his
way into their home. Kalinoski’s conceit is a difficult one to pull
off — that boy and man are the same person and are played by the same
white-haired man. But actor Paul Greenwood, a Royal Shakespeare Company
veteran, does it marvelously here: With just a hand through his hair
and a change in posture, he becomes a brash little Bowery-Boy type,
and his character’s need only underscores that of Aram and Seta.
The other two actors, Karine Bedrossian and Youssef Kerkour, are also
fine — Bedrossian as a resourceful young woman who nonetheless still
clings to her doll, and Kerkour as the buttoned-up man who wants to
recreate his life as it was.
And their story so resembles others we still read in the news that
it’s hard to believe it happened such a long time ago. "They came
from a time that I want to understand," the older man says. In this
production, the understanding isn’t hard at all.