It is often easy to think that a top quality set and good technical support can make a performance great in and of itself; shows like Turandot exist to demonstrate that this is not the case. In the beautiful New Town Theatre with a wonderfully inventive set and often-wonderful live music and projection, Turandot still manages to perhaps be the most hopelessly ridiculous piece of theatre I have ever seen.The play’s plot seems to be a documentation of Puccini’s conception of the titular opera, whilst providing an abstract glimpse at the plot. However, this is a plot lost almost entirely in a ridiculously episodic and peculiar set up. A very odd cast, complimented by the most dead pan narrator I have ever heard, expose these moments in the opera and the story behind it with utterly ridiculous stunts; a series of dolls on sticks march across the stage, a drag queen decapitates and injects a series of fruit and a woman gets her breasts out in a final scene that had no punch whatsoever. What any of things have to say about the cryptic narrator’s points about Puccini and Turandot is very much open to debate beyond murder and riddles, and there is no greater paradox than this show’s very existence.There are a variety of scenes that crawl to a sluggish halt long after they should have been euthanised. A scrap between the two male cast members, and their drunken rendition of ’Nessun Dorma’ particularly spring to mind. There were a variety of times I scanned my fellow audience in desperate hope somebody else was looking around for somebody to share in their vexation.The show brings up some fascinating points here and there. But for whatever reason something has gone horribly, horribly wrong, and a piece of disjointed and flawed theatre, trying to mask these issues by seeming ‘avant garde’, has been allowed to take to the stage.
