cast list
Jenny Jules
Karl Collins
directed by
Indhu Rubasingham
|  |
From Fifth Avenue to Skid Row, Fabulation charts the fall of Undine, a New York PR diva, who is forced to return to her family in Brooklyn after her husband, the unctuous Argentine, Hervé leaves her penniless and pregnant.
This riches to rags cautionary tale, returning after its sell out success at the Tricycle earlier this year, follows Undine Barnes Calles, a buppie ( black yuppie) as she swaps Gucci for the ghetto when Herve absconds with all her cash. Imagine how Ab Fab's Eddie would handle being turfed out by the bailiffs and you can surmise how Undine handles loosing her black bourgeoisie status.
Undine - real name Sharona Watkins - is a vainglorious, social climber, even claiming her family are dead rather than face up to her roots and it is impossible not to revel in her comeuppance as she is arrested for heroin possession, does battle with social services, ends up in rehab as part of a court order and faces the prospect of being a single mum.
Playwright Lynne Nottage trots out a comedy troupe of stereotypes; home girls from the block, the gangsta rapper ex and the ditzy PR, to make sure the laughter always flows. But the best and most incongruous character is the crack addicted Grandma, who's barking demands: "Gimme my Works," and "I need smack and I need it now!" left the woman next to me agog.
What pushes Fabulation beyond soap opera melodrama and hysterical mocking satire is the way you are drawn in by the comedy only to be smacked by some depressing truths. As Undine battles with the inept social services, you glimpse the dire straits and Kafkaesque bureaucracy, that entrap people. Despair is everywhere in this production like when Flow, Undine's (possibly mad) Desert Storm Vet brother, meets a young black who has no idea who Nelson Mandela is, and it's there too in the words of the world weary Grandma who realises that age has brought her neither wisdom or peace and so chooses to escape her circumstances by shooting up. It's in these moments that the show's irreverent patina shatters, jarring the audience back into a reality where poverty and lack of opportunity just ain't funny.
Jenny Jules owns the stage as the highly strung, Undine, a savvy wisecracker, delivering all her audience asides with flair and panache, you also get the feeling that she loves the drama and spectacle of the crisis. She is truly magnificent in this role.
Karl Collin's Herve was the perfect pastiche; all slicked back hair, fiery temper and heavy accent. And watching him seduce Undine with a swift Tango is excruciating, but wildly entertaining. Clever casting also means Collin plays Guy, the sincere but dopey reformed addict Undine, the once thrusting termagant meets in drug rehab and finally falls for, giving this tale a happy, if schmaltzy and highly improbable ending
Fabulation - or The Re-education of Undine, as it's subtitled - is a rip-roaring, fast paced production, brimming with schadenfreude that had them hooting in the aisle as the snooty Undine comes undone. However it is the shards of dialogue revealing just how bleak life on the wrong side of the tracks is, and why you would go to extra-ordinary lengths to insulate yourself against it, that are the production's most insidious legacy.
|
