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Miss Blossom Callahann Jive Nightclub Wed 8 March After a successful run at the Bakehouse last year, acclaimed playwright Stephen House's 'Miss Blossom...' is restoring itself for the Fringe, and the production is as penetratingly bleak as ever. Blossom (Jacqy Phillips) is the dweller of an undersized, inner-city room and the harbourer of various illicit substances and shifty men, facts that, we are clearly shown, are viciously self-perpetuating. She augments her objectively depressing life situation with memories (of dubious integrity) of forgone beauty and success as some kind of ballerina-singer compound. Her under-world is a nasty and brutish place where cruelty and deception are required to survive, and when potentially life-destroying controversy comes to Blossom's door the scene is set for a great tangle of trickery, counter-trickery, and exploitation. The segment of the social underclass recreated here is, despite probable unfamiliarity to occupiers of other classes, of supreme clarity and convincingness. It is characterised by its attraction of the opposite forces of authority and chaos, both seeking to provide their own divergent paths out of the desperate mire of poverty. But the conflict between Blossom and Max The Cat (Rory Walker) seems simply to reproduce the desperation, holding all its pitiable constituents in a state of limbo from which they are unlikely ever to escape. Ensuring that all this is communicated with force and precision is House's laudably adroit and pointed writing and the cast's brilliantly exact performing. All of the latter are exceptional but Phillips' work somehow surpasses, giving physical expression to House's material that allows its meaning uninhibited, incisive delivery to the mind of the viewer.  |
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