Let me declare up front that I was injured during this show. Some of the actors, careering about on the forestage, crashed into a heavy part of the set and sent it thumping into the front row of the audience. Being of lightning reflex and athletic demeanour I managed to adjust slightly so it merely bashed my shin causing bruising and abrasion. Had I not moved it may have broken my leg.I mention this up front not to get your sympathy, but so I might reassure you that it didnt effect what I thought of this show. It was merely a symptom of one of the most extraordinary evenings I have ever spent at the Fringe.Livewire Theatre Company have hit on a clever conceit, and transferred Dickens extraordinary tale of the struggle of a young orphan to survive in a hostile world to Berlin in 1945 as the war comes to a close and the Allies take over. Things started well, and the opening sequence involving the large cast setting the scene in a well choreographed and performed sequence boded well for the next hour and a half. No such luck. What followed was one of the most self-indulgent pieces of work Ive ever seen. Every scene was relentlessly and remorselessly ploughed through with angst and shouting and tears. God, so many tears. Some of these actors (including the very young ones) can certainly act, but needed to be reined in. Shouting doesnt equal emotion. Crying doesnt equal sad. Even so, the first half of the piece went quite well, and included more slick chorography and original songs in the style of Kurt Weil. But the more it went on the more absurd proceedings got. The choreography and songs gave way to scene upon scene of unrelenting gloom. There isnt one joke or light moment in the whole piece. The script is bizarre, the characters speaking in a hybrid of Dickensian English and Brief Encounteresque exchanges mostly in dreadful German accents! The best actors in the world couldnt make this stuff work.Symptomatic of this melodramatic and frantic mayhem is that the actors often dont look safe on stage. Theres much throwing around of other character by Bill Sykes and others. It looked undisciplined and unsafe, and unless the actors are careful someone might get hurt... Oh, too late.Im sure this company mean well. There is a paragraph in the program that says they wanted to tread carefully because they were dealing with a serious and sensitive historical period. They miss the mark. Evoking the names of real people who died at Auschwitz and other horror camps at then end, following on from all this faux hysteria and weeping and pretend violence is almost obscene. Underscoring it (as with most of the 'dramatic' scenes) with swelling music is simply a cheap trick.At the end the warm applause had almost died down to nothing when the cast came back on for a second call. Embarrassing. To make matters worse in order to bolster the re-welcome they obviously thought they deserved a couple of the younger actors wolf-whistled from the back.As I left one of the young kids from the cast came and apologised for the incident with the set. Not one of the adults, you understand. A child. The others were all too busy being greeted by friends and family in the audience telling them how wonderful they were.They werent.
