• 4. A Brief History of Helen of Troy

or Everything will be Different

by Mark Schultz

Directed by Gordon Anderson

at Soho theatre

21 Dean Street London WI

Call + 44 20 (0) 870 429 6883 Tickets £10 - £20

Monday – Saturday 7.30pm

Running time 1 hours 45 mins with no intermission

Through Nov 26, 2005

       Eat Your Heart Out, Euripides

There’s a performance on the London stage tonight that will shock, amuse, move and melt the most hardened of cognoscenti. This is debutante Andrea Riseborough’s achingly vulnerable, feisty, funny portrayal of the impossible contradictions of a disturbed teenager. In her cruelly rejected Charlotte, alter ego of Hermione, daughter of Helen of Troy, who’s life she so understands, Miss Riseborough led from the front, giving a committed cast all they could wish for to be superb in support.

Director Gordon Anderson casts his audience as witnesses, and sensing that they will not be able to look away for a second, never lets them. With young New York playwright, Mark Shultz’s excoriating and brilliantly drawn portraits, and on Soutra Gilmour’s severe, disproportioned set, he relentlessly drives the heroine’s descent in an unstoppable rush, only pausing momentarily before the fall. After fifteen minutes short of two hours without intermission, and filled with food for the voyeur, the sated onlookers leave the theatre without needing anything more except, perhaps, a drink.

John Sharian’s magnetically powerful performance as Charlotte’s widower father was filled with seething discontent. Ryan Sampson, as the quintessential nerd who strikes back, showed fascinating levels of confusion. Jaimi Barbakoff as Charlotte’s heroine/role model friend, could have stepped out of a darkened episode of Friends. Christian Brassington’s testosterone-driven Freddie, to whom it falls to be the first to ‘enjoy’ Charlotte, and Hugh Lee’s earnest school counsellor completed the company.

The cast’s ear for the American idiom and delivery was utterly convincing, so that it was impossible to detect which was the only native accent.  The coming of age for portraying American characters was never more apparent than in this examination of what it is to be at odds with life in the USA of today. 

Presented in London as the destination stop on a UK tour, Actor’s Touring Company raise the bar for the companies and players that populate London’s West End.

Unmissable

Saul Reichlin

Chicago Stage Talk Radio Show/www.ChicagoCritic.com

10 Nov 2005