Review: Don John

Kneehigh Theatre
The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon, until 10th Jan 2009.

With their Brief Encounter still playing to wide acclaim in the West End, Kneehigh Theatre launched another inventive adaptation this week. Based on Mozart's Don Giovanni, Don John is the story of a seducer whose success lies in knowing how the body can overpower the mind. It's hard to imagine a more apt protagonist for Kneehigh's trademark brand of theatre: physical, provocative and performed to irresistible original music that occasionally sweeps its cast into a seemingly involuntary dance.

Like Mozart's tale, Emma Rice's adaptation sees three female victims broken by John's deceits: one he seduces away from her fiancé; one he tricks into believing he is someone else; one is a high-flyer distracted from business by passion. He can morph into every woman's fantasy, bearing an empty promise of salvation, but all he really offers is a moment's escape from a humdrum existence.

It doesn't get much more humdrum than the beige 1970s of this production. A stark but ingenious set - dominated by a large clunky box that transforms into different interiors - places the action firmly in depressed Britain, while an ensemble with mullets and knitted tank-tops are almost enough to explain why all these women throw themselves so recklessly at a man with a decent hair-cut.

Rice's Don John is a particularly acid version of the legendary womaniser, seeming to act out of loathing rather than gratification. Unlike Mozart's shallow villain - at his leisure until a dreaded apparition declares his judgement day - it is John's emptiness, and the addictions he uses to fill it, that become his downfall. This makes for a raw and sometimes brutal play, enhanced by the exposed round stage and bare rafters of its current home at The Courtyard Theatre.

Gisli Örn Gardarsson in the title role is more than competent at filling Don John's long leather boots - he doesn't so much act as exude the character. While the first half focuses on the three women, he prowls the edges of every scene with palpable sexual menace.

Thankfully there's plenty of quirkiness and comedy to stop the story's downward spiral from turning into wrist-slashing tragedy, though things do start to lose their way towards the end. The thumping moral commentary of the elaborate last scene is taken from Don Giovanni, but seems irrelevant to this contemporary Don John. Gardarsson's exceptional performance, as he puts on a floral dress and drinks himself to oblivion, shows us a far more real and terrible kind of Hell. Everything else is just noise.

Not for the first time in a Kneehigh show there are moments of theatrical overkill, so abstract that they detract from an otherwise brilliantly conceived and strongly cast production. But the odd bit of excess is to be expected from inventors, and these are some of the best.

Carla Evans - December 2008

For tour dates until March 2009:
www.kneehigh.co.uk/shows/don-john/tour-dates.php

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