The Queen of Spades
Arcola Theatre
With their staging of Pushkin’s classic novella of the young military engineer driven mad by his quest for a gambler’s secret, Fusebox marry sights and sounds to emphasise The Queen of Spades‘ dream-like quality. The result is an enjoyably playful take on an elaborate and at times sinister story, told by three actors through the cheeky rhymes of Raymond Blankenhorn’s verse adaptation.
When Hermann finds himself excluded from the gambling table for want of funds, his mind turns to a story of an ageing Countess, who alone is said to possess the knowledge of a three card bet which promises to reverse his financial fortunes forever. Hermann sets out through the streets of St Petersburg to extract the secret from her using any means necessary, breaking hearts and minds along the way.
Benjamin Way is perhaps slightly too likeable as the obsessive young engineer, and despite occasional glimpses of ruthlessness and a haunting final image of madness, Hermann seems like such a well-meaning chap that his fatal terrorising of the Countess feels completely absurd. Yet through Jen Holt’s angry reaction to his mercenary treatment of her as the Countess’s naïve ward Liza, we get a stronger sense of his callousness in pursuing the prize, and Holt and Way’s poetic wooing and brief, mimed romance offer an amusing diversion. As the Countess, Norma Cohen strikes an almost vaudevillian figure, commanding the room with compelling physicality and elaborate costumes, although she turns out to be not quite as formidable as her put-upon ward would lead us to believe.
Fusebox founder Max Hoehn directs a dynamic production in the small performance space of the Arcola studio, where the design elements work just as hard as the actors to convey the fantastical and dark world of Pushkin’s supernatural story. Actors emerge and are enfolded in designer Valentina Ricci’s snowy mountains of soft, sleep-inducing sheets, which in turn are transformed by Edmund Sutton’s lighting design into gambling den and morgue, asylum and bedroom. Equally striking is composer Daniel Saleeb’s evocative sound scape, where romantic melodies descend into discordant shrieks from which a babbling street noise emerges, each passage marking a new stage on the sinister journey of Hermann’s obsession.
By the time Hermann’s fate is decided at the card table, all of the production elements combine to create a powerful feeling of disorientation, and what has seemed like a romp is revealed to be a much darker delight indeed.
The Queens of Spades runs at the Arcola Theatre from 12th October – 12th November 2011.
Photo: Nick Coupe
Posted on October 19, 2011
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