After the brilliant press night of The Golden Dragon at the Arcola, we thought we’d list the lovely bloggers who wrote about the show. If you have a blog you’d like added then please let us know. Here they are:
This is all intriguing and amusingly eccentric from the off, but as the evening progresses the production takes on a surprising depth and emotional power, adding up to a hugely resonant – and fairly devastating – anatomisation of globalisation and economic migration, and the exploitations resulting from each. But Schimmelpfennig doesn’t preach; he presents. And a beautiful sense of structure and design underpins the apparently scattershot approach as we gradually come to perceive the intricate web of interconnections that link these seemingly disparate lives.
Ramin Gray’s production resists the temptation to overplay the links between the stories, instead allowing a gradual sense of connectedness to emerge, the actors finding an extraordinary depth of humanity in the counterintuitive casting which works beautifully.
we got something like Georges Perec (La vie mode d’emploi) adapated by Bertolt Brecht and staged in the poor theatre style of Jerzy Grotowski, with plenty of stage directions spoken by the actors, men playing women, old actors playing young characters, undersized furniture…a good night of modern European theatre.
…a beguiling piece of theatre, well-crafted and directed on an aptly minimalist set.
The Golden Dragon itself could be anywhere in Europe, the point being that such places can be imagined as home-from-home for all sorts, and the extraction of a tooth a sign of cultural appropriation by heavy-handed means (vodka and a huge spanner, to be exact). But that’s less important than the fun generated and the fleet, skilful theatricality of the event.
this was a clever and quirky piece of theatre which attempted to step away from the conventional presentation
Along with a couple of publication reviews too …