Translator: Stephen Greenhorn
Director: Nadia Latif
Reviewer: Honour BayesStudio 2 in The Arcola Theatre has been carpeted within an inch of its life. It gives the impression of a comfortable if slightly frumpy aunt’s front room, a 1000 miles away from the ragged punk posters which paper the entrance to this bizarrely suffocating space. It is here, where present day reality and past tattered dreams clash, that the eponymous Paola and Raymond bring to life the overwhelming image of Serge, Paola’s old flame and Raymond’s half brother who has left them both with permanent memories and scars.
Raymond has come to teach Paola’s son to play the drums and as each lesson progresses he slowly starts to tease joint memories of Serge out of an initially reluctant Paola. Soon a torrent of memories is unleashed, perceptively mirrored in Lorna Ritchie’s overflowing compartments which hold the debris of family life and are pushed underneath the carpeted living room floor. However hard a flustered Paola may try to push them back in, her belongings and her memories remain present. Slowly and painfully what emerges are both the towering memory of Serge and also the fragile shadows of Paola and Raymond’s younger selves in a piece which effectively evokes the brittle but exhilarating punk era in the midst of the safely carpeted and oh so adult 21st Century.
Holly Atkins as Paola and Anthony Shuster as Raymond play this duality with complete fluidity, successfully creating people whose current identities are fringed with the indelible mark of their youth. Atkins is both the flat shoe wearing, multi-tasking mother and also the stiletto wearing groupie, her school concerns for her children tempered with the acidic and prickly force of her younger ‘crazy’ self. Shuster’s Raymond oozes with frustration at a brother who was always somehow better than himself. With every wounded or longing word he shows the helpless observer that young Raymond was and that he ultimately always will be; watching the carnage unfold, despising it and yet clearly desperate to be part of it, he is still unable to touch Paola even now.
Although it is a testimony to Arne Sierens’ play that Serge is a dynamic force within this piece, sadly the emotional connection which each performer has with this absentee persona is strangely not present in Atkins and Shuster’s on stage interactions. The most powerful moments are during monologues of memory when Paola or Raymond speaks of Serge and their relationships with him. Their battles for these memories in real time are slightly stilted however and although at moments whilst tossing and turning memories and questioning realities they fall successfully into Sierens’ undulating language, director Nadia Latif seems unable to help them to completely lift these duets off the page and create something alive together.
Our constant focus on performers such as Pete Doherty and the outpouring of interest in Richey James when he was officially declared dead earlier in November, clearly show that we are still obsessed with the idea of a destructive rock idol and the rock and roll hedonism of the punk aesthetic. Arne’s play brings to life multicolour violent and vibrant memories which shimmer before our eyes and two intriguing and well drawn characters to take us back to those vital times. But ultimately in the true spirit of rock and roll this play dies too young, leaving us on a tearful Paola and a frustrated Raymond, one tragically different from the past and the other tragically the same, and very little else. It lays bare it’s protagonists but does nothing with them once they are exposed. This play is a brilliant flavour of the times and at 1 hour as punchy and vibrant as any punk album but in the end The Ballard of Crazy Paola is unsatisfyingly short lived.
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