Da Market Fire
Nico on May 20 2006 at 9:25 pm | Filed under: Productions
Emille Hunt’s new play, Da Market Fire, plays until tomorrow night at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (old Shirley Street Theatre).
Curtain is 8:00 p.m.
Reviews welcome.
When I arrived at the National Centre for the Performing Arts on Saturday night I was quite impressed. There was difficulty finding parking and I was quite pleased to see that so many people had come out to see a new Bahamian play. People have said that theatre in the country is dead but after seeing this crowd I thought that there must be a desire to see Bahamian theatre and this was a good sign.
The level at which I was impressed quickly faded as the evening’s entertainment, Da Market Fire, began. I have to be honest at the outset and say that I will not be able to comment on how the evening’s entertainment ended because I did not (could not) return to the theatre after the intermission.
I remember being somewhat critical of Women Talk, which was the last production that I saw at the Performing Arts Centre, but in comparison to what I witnessed last evening, Women Talk was a masterpiece. If this work is what is passing for theatre these days then theatre is dead. Almost every aspect of this work was, for a lack of a better word, bad. The writing, the direction, some of the acting, the sound etc.
I’ll start off with what I can relate to the most and that is the direction, or lack thereof. The director could not decide if this was to be presentational or representational work so at times the actors spoke to each other and at other times to the audience. There were numerous occasions when actors pulled focus away from the scene in play, something that a director should have total control over. One specific case of this was the gentleman sitting in the box on stage left who kept doing “bits†as other scenes were happening and pulling the attention of the audience in his direction. There was very little character development and the interaction between the characters that did exist was stilted at best. The closest thing to something satisfying in the direction department was the opening prologue. Practically everything else went downhill from there. The fact that a director thinks his audience is stupid is something that really bothers me. A case in point was one of the gay characters. It was quite obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence that there were two gay characters but the director either allowed or encouraged one of those characters to walk around with a jar of Vaseline so that the audience, who I guess was too dumb to understand, could figure out that that character was gay.
As for the play, I have to ask the question, was it really a play? It played more like a series of skits that were pulled together and I saw very little character development possible from what was written. I will therefore not say much about the acting because I can’t really blame the actors for what transpired in this work. That fault must be shared with the writer and the director. I feel that the actors tried and did the best they could do with what they had been given.
On to the sound used in this production. These days when most people have home systems that sound as good as some professional studios, it’s incredible that an audience should have to sit through music cues coming through the distorted speakers that were used in this theatre.
For the sake of the audience I really hope that the play got better during the second act because I don’t see how it could have gotten any worse. I hope that what I saw last night is not an indication of what Track Road Theatre has in store for the Bahamian public in the future. This production is a far cry from any work of theirs that I’ve ever seen. I have been critical and also full of praise in the past but what I saw tonight was some of the worst amateurish theatre that I’ve seen in The Bahamas in years and not at all worthy of this company.
More reviews/responses can be found by following these links:
Nadine Thomas-Brown, The Nassau Guardian, May 18, 2006
No byline, The Nassau Guardian, May 20 2006