<<  -- 3 --  Wilfrid Mellers    SECOND SIGHT

In the first scene of Anabelle Arden's magically imaginative production we at first meet relatively 'unconscious' creatures from nature's progeny. Two exquisitely costumed dragonflies are exquisitely danced by Joy Constantinides and Nikolas Kafetjakis; cricket, mosquito, grasshopper and frog are mimed by children whose innocence has creaturely attributes, though a badger's set is visible in the background, and this badger is a very 'set' creature who smokes a human contrivance in the shape of a pipe. Significantly, he resembles one of the human characters, the Parson; and in the original, though not in this, production, was played by the same adultly ponderous bass. The central human character, the Forester, is a natural baritone who lives in and cares for the forest and its inhabitants, albeit with humanly biassed motivitation. The Forester's wife is allied to him in being his mate, but is more distrustful of the wild creatures, accepting only those creatures that, being domesticated, are to a degree corrupted. Christopher Purves and Gladwyn Taylor as Forester and Wife convey just the right ambivalence between 'conscious' power and pre-conscious vulnerability, while David Owen-Lewis as their faithful but dim-witted hound offers an acutely comic cameo, pointing the contrast between the dog's slavish mentality and the Vixen's free enterprise.

Continue >>