DON JUAN DELICIOUSLY MINES MODERN MORAL MELODRAMA - Otago Daily Times

Otago Daily Times
Reviewed by Barbara Frame
Performance: Friday May 29, 2009

DON Juan is bad: selfishly, irredeemably bad. He fornicates, takes drugs and lies. He’s serious, but only about himself. He schemes and lies. Hearts break. People die. Women adore him.

Yet Juan has his own code. He wants to live, but only as he pleases. Fearing death, he prefers it to changing his ways.

Playwright Patrick Marber’s Don Juan is the latest in a long, long line and descends most directly from Moliere’s Don Juan, ou Le Festin de Pierre. The device of the statue, in particular, doesn’t make complete sense without some knowledge of the play’s 17th-century antecedent.

Ross Jolly’s production emphasises the high melodrama: the comedy, the violence, the excess of just about everything. It brings out the dark side of this modern morality tale, which attacks preoccupations with trivia, “issues”, and the narcissistic blogging culture, and demands that we at least consider whether Don Juan’s approach to life isn’t more honest and refreshing.

Aaron Alexander plays him with Byronic charm and insolence. Most of the audience will relate more directly to his sidekick Stan (Gavin Rutherford), the keeper of the Blackberry which his boss’s conquests are recorded. He never quite figures his master out and is, when all’s said and done, in it for the money.

The action takes place on an opulently minimalist set featuring a decadently fuchsia-pink leather sofa.

Is Don Juan really someone the world would be better off without? If you want to know you’ll have to see this raucous, sexy, funny, demanding, stylish and definitely adults-only play, and try to figure it out for yourself.

FARCICAL SOCIAL COMMENTARY WITH PATHOS - Theatreview.org.nz

By Patrick Marber
Directed by Ross Jolly

at Fortune Theatre, Dunedin
Until 20 Jun 2009

Reviewed by Terry MacTavish, 2 Jun 2009

Mankind, and I use the word advisedly, never seems to get enough of the tale of the physically and financially privileged sex maniac. This irresistible seducer was the stuff of folk-legend long before Moliere adapted Tirso de Molina's Don Juan.

And now this latest interpretation by Patrick Marber updates the tale with clever relevance to contemporary London: an age in which Facebook and YouTube allow egotistical nobodies to force fame of a sort on a salivating world.

Is Don Juan anything special anymore? This raunchy Fortune production of Don Juan in Soho is sure to stir controversy.

The opening scene is quite orthodox: in time-honoured fashion lesser characters discuss the protagonist, Don Juan, and prepare us for something pretty special: "He's a cheating betraying lying dog ... broody Byronic bullshit ... I hate him!" This perspicacious narrator is Don Juan's PA Stan, 'paid to enable and facilitate his lifestyle', keeper of not the little black book, but the Blackberry.

The entry of DJ, as played with louche arrogant insolence by Aaron Alexander, actually lives up to his publicity. Sleek in evening dress and red satin waistcoat, Alexander inhabits his role with laid-back confidence.

We catch up with this master of seduction quite late in his career. For twenty years he has seduced matrons and ruined maidens, an addict who would do it with anything - "a hole in the ozone layer". Now he is just back from his honeymoon, with a woman he married because she was so virtuous there was no other way he could bed her, and he has discovered "there is no more frightening word in the dictionary than 'wife'."

Hence his urgent fornication with a Croatian supermodel. But his bride Elvira, whose philanthropic endeavours make Princess Di's Aids campaign look pitiful, is not a lady to let go easily. Nor will her brothers, and it is their determination to avenge the family honour that drives the plot.

The play could therefore be a simple revenge tragedy. Instead, it is a lively mixture of farce and wry social commentary, with a strange touch of the supernatural.

Under the direction of Ross Jolly, the farcical humour is emphasised, particularly in one hilarious episode in a hospital, when DJ is hitting on Mattie, while surreptitiously receiving oral gratification from Lottie. This reaches its peak in a wildly chaotic scene, involving the whole cast leaping over chairs and biting each other's legs in mad confusion.

For the remainder of this review please visit: www.theatreview.org.nz