Ken Bentley

Reviews

When an allegation of sexual harassment arises there will always be two sides to the story and, when there is no one to witness the event, judgement must be cast on the stronger of the two arguments.

But, as Firebrand’s performance of Oleanna proves, even when the scandalous circumstances are viewed from beginning to end, the ruling is not always clear-cut.

Since its first performance in 1992, David Mamet’s highly contoversial play, in which a student accuses her professor of rape, has shocked.

Today, the highly charged production performed by the two-member cast, Michelle Witton and John Peters, is equally unsettling.

Firebrand have used gender politics as a tool through which to explore the power of language. The audience learns how the meaning of words can be misconstrued due to our own inherent subjectivity. By encouraging us to understand the plight of both protagonists, Oleanna serves as an effective lesson in objectivity.

Witton and Peters’ task is by no means a breeze. From beginning to end Carol (the student) and John (the professor) are caught in a relentless struggle with themselves and each other. Both characters have serious personal as well as public problems to tackle, neither of which are happily resolved by the end.

Wittons’ and Peters’ delivery of the complex script is impressive.

Their Mid-Western American accents have been grasped with ease; their physical and verbal interchange is fast and fluid; and both succeed in keeping the stage tension consistently high.

Set in the small and intimate White Bear Theatre, the audience cannot help but be drawn into the battle. This is not a play which provides fantastical escapism, instead it challenges all who watch with its realistic confrontation. Prepare for an interrogation into the mind.

Kate Pain

Despite all the hard work of this carefully crafted production, David Mamet’s play about the pompous professor laid low by his crusading student is already looking like yesterday’s issue. Director Ken Bentley makes a passionate plea for the work to be considered less as an expression of gender conflict, and more as one for the struggle in control of language, but he needn’t be so protective of Mamet, who uses the Aristotelian structure of male-hubris-meeting-female-nemesis to say exactly what he wants.

The trouble lies not in the ability of the play to speak for itself but in the fact that the two characters are so pitifully unsympathetic. He is an ill-mannered, self-regarding bore who loves nothing better than the sound of his own voice; she is an insidiously frigid dim-wit who likes nothing better than the sound of her own dogma. Their linguistic intractability is moreover structural to the play as the two characters chip away at each other with metronomically repetitive tropes: ‘Do you see, do you see, do you see?’

Bentley’s analytical direction studiously exposes the play’s micro and macro mechanisms, carefully ascribing physical mannerisms to verbal inflections. It is a meticulous task which Michelle Witton and John Peters not only carry off, but also naturalise. Peters embodies the rhythm of the dialogue right down to his digits as the pompous prof, and Witton is all winsome, tortured malice as his butter-wouldn’t-melt student. But the closer the play examines the issues of power and political correctitude, the less you care for either of them. Never mind that this is the original American ending, these two characters deserve each other: if it was written by Jean-Paul Sartre, he’d have married them off. However, this fine production doesn’t deserve the play.

Patrick Marmion
Time Out