oh fringe oh dear – Point Blank

Right. I promised myself I’d never give a show a bad review, certainly not this early in my theatre-going-and-reviewing adventure. But I went to see Point Blank, in Project last night. And I didn’t enjoy it. Neither did my lovely friend Christina who was so kind as to pay into the show for me, due to my excessive poverty. I was really surprised, considering the blurb in the festival guide looked so fascinating. Maybe I just missed the point of the piece, I’m not sure.

Basically what happens is you’re presented with what is essentially, a power-point presentation of images collected by a 19 year old Finnish character. She’s nervous. Leaves a lot of dead air. Instantly believable as a real person as opposed to an actress, but only because she seems ill prepared and nervous. There’s very few laughs, and though that’s not neccessary in all theatre, I think the lack of it in this peice made it appear as though it took itself far too seriously. It is dark, but an awkward kind of dark. I’m actually finding it quite hard to describe. The most important thing to note is that its not real. It seems real, but it’s not real. The photographs, or the sequences of photographs, by which she is attempting to define her life, are fascinating though. Admittedly, I was a little jolted by the sheer quantity of them that are shown to you on the projected ‘desktop’. Nada has been taking photographs with a 200 zoom lens for years, spying on people’s lives and trying to construct her own existence through that. She is unemotional, and her logic is skewed and cold. Perhaps this is how she is meant to be portrayed – emotionless, void, trapped in a time of her life where she’s afraid to make any decisions just in case they might be the wrong ones. So in observing, and obsessively watching others and recording their behaviour – she tries to map out options for herself. She’s seeking a role-model; someone who’ll give her an example of living that she likes and feels as though she can emulate.

It literally is performed as though it’s a self-help power-point session. If the character was more likable, maybe this would have worked for me. But she was stunted and naive and cold and for whatever reason, I just couldn’t relate to her.

Now in fairness this is just my opinion, you could go and absolutely fall in love with her and want her to find the right path. I went, watched her try and find her path and by the end, unfortunately, didn’t really care what happened to her. I feel kind of like an awful person for thinking this, but theatre like any other art form, is down to taste. And characters are designed so people either like, or don’t like them. This time was the latter. If you are going to part with sixteen or fourteen euro to go to see this show, you’ll leave remembering the photographs, and the people who are captured in them. It’s nearly worth seeing for them alone, as opposed to the little heroes journey of personal discovery that Nada is attempting. The approach is innovative and unique, certainly, and perhaps with a different hostess could have been extremely moving. Tuesday was the last night of the run.

Tonight I’m going to La Clique and am very excited, because I’ve never really been to anything like it before. Expect a big fat review tomorrow, or tonight. If y’all are interested in what I had to say about Rough, it’s in issue 3, yesterday’s issue, of Oh, Fringe! In the Fringe Factory today I coloured in a picture of Mario on the wall. I love journalism.

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