DARK SUBLIME
Brighton Little Theatre has a great reputation for producing some very fine productions that have often defied that somewhat demeaning title of “am-dram”. Last night was no exception. Dark Sublime by Michael Dennis is a demanding piece of work that not only commands a great deal of skill from both cast and director, it also demands a great deal from the set design and technical abilities of the company who not only have to deal with the present but also a fictional past set in a rather shaky TV Sci-Fi series.
The result is both complex in comedy and tragedy. The whole has echoes of The Killing of Sister George, The Big Bang Theory and Red Dwarf… no, let me change the last reference. Red Dwarf was meant to be funny, let me change that to Blake’s Seven which was so unintentionally funny.
Marianne is the fading star of the TV series Dark Sublime and she is made aware of the fact that she has become a bit of a cult by the arrival of Oli, a sad 21 year old geek, queer and suffering from unrequited love. Kate is Marianne’s ex-lover but closest friend still, she has moved on in many ways and has met Suzanne, the new woman in her life who offers an alternative to that long lost romantic love.
And so they “boldly go” on a journey of often painful self discovery but a journey that is more than tinged with comedy.
Patti Griffiths is excellent, her fiery and booze soaked Marianne is sick of her past and cannot believe that something as throw-away as Dark Sublime is held in such high esteem by so many. And her anecdotes about life as a soap star are delivered with panache and with period accuracy, memories of Pebble Mill and Farm House Kitchen certainly hit the spot for me, Dorothy Sleightholmes books are still my favourite source of recipes!
Tess Gill play Kate with a believable resignation, a job she clearly hates and more than a touch of sadness as she tries to move on.
Robert Purchese invests a great amount of energy into playing geeky Oli, a young man who subjugates his dissatisfaction with his reality with a passion for a sci-fi fantasy world into which fans have imbued deep and meaningful ideas, most of which Marianne declares were totally unintentional, much to his disappointment, he really wants to believe that the stories were about trade unionism and female emancipation.
The present scenes are interspersed with scenes from Dark Sublime and Steven Adams delivers the space craft’s leader Vykar with the sort of camp butchness that was so common in the genre. And the voice of Kosley play with a Brummy accent by Sarah Leedham has echoes of the aforementioned Red Dwarf and a touch of 2001 too.
Things start to spiral out of control after Kate introduces a new girlfriend Suzanne played by Kate Purnell into the mix, a finely depicted levelling influence on the whole affair.
Persuaded to attend a sci-fi convention Marianne’s issues come to a head, Oli opens up about his own life and Bob, the actor who plays Vykar make a brief appearance as does a fan dressed as a lobster, the indignities that befall members of a production team!
In the penultimate scene Dark Sublime plays out a final denouement, the cast taking on all of the roles and Marianne is sensationally the camp and evil Ragana, Patti Griffiths giving the scene her all.
I thoroughly enjoyed the piece, but in particular the performances. The play itself is somewhat cluttered in both structure and in content, perhaps one too many themes to deal with and in that perhaps some of those themes are not as thoroughly explored as they might be. But overall it’s an excellent evening of entertainment, well direct by Joseph Bentley and staged by a company that certainly deserves that great reputation I mentioned at the start.
Andrew Kay
Brighton Little Theatre
16 March
Rating:
