Visiting Time @ Ramshorn

Watch your back. That’s the message of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Visit, produced for the Gilmorehill Theatre by new company Acting Cubed, and with more people skint than ever before it could hardly be a more apposite.

 

Acting Cubed are fresh from the Ramshorn’s Art of Acting course, and with their name suggesting a new perspective on acting, a new dimension in acting, The Visit promises to be quite a radical production. The show brings together a wealth of talent around a well chosen text, and the result is some excellent key performances making good use of a well designed space, moving fairly slickly from scene to scene despite the logistics of the enormous semi-professional cast and the gloriously abundant set. With a doorstop of a program, and more credits than Lord of the Rings, The Visit is a big, fun, traditional show, but not quite everything I’d hoped for.

 

The themes of the text have been hammered out so many times on stage and film it’s hard not to want something a little different. There are gestures towards the surreal horror of the crowd, the blithely smiling brutality that you find in Dogville, The Wicker Man, The Trial etc., but these moments tend to either be lost in, or clash with, the prevailing pedestrian naturalism of the whole. Given the supposed barren poverty of the scene, I would’ve liked fewer things on stage, fewer high-tech vapour emitting cigarettes for example, to make room for stronger and more consistent devices. When a spare actor started pretending to be a tree I couldn’t help thinking that more development with a smaller cast might get the company a little closer to cubing the acting with its next show.