Scoop Review: Shipwrecked! An Entertainment

The amazing adventures of Louis de Rougemont that entertain the audience in Circa 2’s Shipwrecked make, as promised, a rollicking good yarn. Nick Blake, as Louis Rougement himself, set the tone of the occasion from the first moments when he swept onto the stage and set out the ground rules. He was the music hall compere jollying everybody along and we behaved as he told us to, and we loved it.

Darlene Mohekey and Jackson Coe, as the amazing people Rougemont encounters in his adventures, were glittering stars. They made sound effects, they were musicians, they did accents, they spoke other languages, they were fantastic animals, they were deafening, they were soft and gentle, they were crowd scenes, they were lovable characters and hateful individuals. There was never a dull moment. Darlene Mohokey does the voices with verve and originality, and her line up of suitors was truly seductive.

Gareth Farr’s music was wondrous, beautifully integrated, and performed with skill and verve, it almost constituted another character.

There was a lot in the detail. A row of battered charity shop desk lamps were in a line where we used to have footlights in the time of Louis Rougement and the lighting was controlled by the cast from a clutter of tangled wires and boxes just like the ones under your computer. Grandma’s old standard lamp with the bobbly shade played a magical role and some working lamps from the back of the garage swung about in the storm.

There was a frisson when emergency supplies were rolled out after the ship was wrecked. The water bottles and tinned food were the very things we are assembling in our newly urgent disaster kits.

A pile of books began as fairy tales the mother read to the sickly young Rougemont, the book stack became seating and was scattered in the chaos of the storm at sea but when the books were assembled as the dead Bruno it was achingly evocative of all that Bruno had meant to Rougemont and to his audience too.

The stage in Circa 2 is wider than the seating and the whole width was used. It had the miscellaneous furnishings, used in the action, at either end and the inner stage stepped down at the back contained piano, a great gong and other bits and pieces. The black back wall was wittily used as a chalk board. Everything was there for a purpose and necessary to the action but with so much going for this excellent piece of theatre what a pity there wasn’t an imaginative inspired set to match. It was as though they had fished some old mismatched props out of a store room and plonked them on the stage as required.

The action races along from the sick boy at the start to the psycho non-believers at the end. There are no flat bits, no gaps. It is witty, wordy, and clever. This is a real play, it is much much more than a yarn with actions, although it is certainly a yarn and a fascinating one at that.

ENDS

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