Review: Islands at Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, Hexham

Apr 26 2010 by David Whetstone, The Journal

HEXHAM’S resident theatre company, Théâtre Sans Frontières, lives up to its name with this multi-national, multi-lingual bout of island hopping.

A collaboration with theatre companies in Cyprus, Tenerife and Berlin, it unites actors from all those places, along with two (John Cobb and Becky Jameson) from the North East, under German director Franziska Schütz.

TSF has a close relationship with Canadian theatre director Robert Lepage whose latest play, Lipsynch, it is still involved with.

This is very much in the Lepage mould with a large cast of far-flung characters brought together by random events.

A pair of female tourist friends, one from Newcastle and one from Berlin, find the body of a woman on a Tenerife beach.

The local doctor who attends the scene strikes up a relationship with the Geordie lass.

His earnest sister, meanwhile, is working for a charity devoted to good works in Africa, where the dead woman came from.

She is in constant computer contact with the German architect who will design some school buildings for the charity.

Coincidentally, he is involved with the Geordie’s beach companion.

Meanwhile (there are a lot of ‘meanwhiles’) a little religious chappie is setting out from the Outer Hebrides to take up his place on Antony Gormley’s plinth in Trafalgar Square, one of the hundreds who took part in last summer’s participation arts event, One & Other.

As he trudges across Britain, he strives to persuade people that Sunday is still special.

You have to keep your wits about you as the action flits from place to place, reminding yourself who’s connected to who and why.

The production makes the point very clearly that there are natural islands and those we construct ourselves.

Put once-divided and marooned Berlin into this category, along with the noxious plastic rubbish slick that floats in the Pacific.

And we can also become like islands ourselves on this crowded planet.

The little Scotsman, high on the plinth, finds himself alone with his cause while the German architect starts to go dotty locked in his digital world.

Islands is a very ambitious undertaking and it mostly works well.

There are no dull moments and some are very funny, such as the scene in which immigrants in a British citizenship class, run by Becky Jameson’s character, Joanne, try to get to grips with Guy Fawkes and grouse shooting.

If the first night performance seemed a tad long it might have been due to a technical hitch which held up proceedings for 10 minutes.