The magnificent Merchants’ Hall on Hanover Street provides a setting too grandiose in the extreme for Best Rest Theatre Company’s production of their new play, ‘Frank and Ferdinand’.
Loosely based on the story of the Pied Piper, the plot centres on the four children left behind by the piper as they give their statements to the ‘gendarmerie’, a puzzling choice of name in a Germanic setting. The period of the play is also ambiguous, a mythical age in which people refer to ‘the elders’ or ‘the colonists’ and double maths lessons in the same breath. The idea behind the play is interesting, to ‘discover how myths and legends are formed’, but its merits go little further.
The opening scene is promising, recalling that of Berkoff’s ‘The Trial’ – our protagonist is accused but for what crime is left uncertain. Unfortunately, it remains uncertain throughout, as the role of each character is rather crudely but never satisfactorily defined. The dialogue is unnatural and often pretentious, with gratuitous references to Shakespeare or Bach, which doesn’t help the actors. There are credible performances from the lame boy and the blind girl, but even they never really draw sympathy, and the rest of the young cast is ordinary: the ‘gendarme’ never seems threatening enough and her timing is poor; brothers Sebastian and Aloysius are caricatures; and the chorus is almost entirely redundant.
The staging is equally unimaginative and the actors struggle with the large space allowing the blocking to become repetitive and dull. The tableau towards the end is a nice nod towards theatrical technique but again fails to add anything to the piece. Just as unnecessary is the way every actor fixes their monologues on the back of the auditorium leaving the audience of seven sitting on the first two rows feeling excluded from the performance.
The allocated 50 minutes was pushed to over an hour despite several missed opportunities to end the play more satisfactorily and within the time. Of course, the play could only end with one of the characters exclaiming ‘The End’ with her melodramatic dying breath – though not before she had summarised the plot, attempted to lay out the link to the Pied Piper and explicitly listed the alleged morals of the story, including ‘always pay your debts’. Best Rest have an hour-long debt to this audience.
