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SCMP Reporter

Hot Dogs And Eternal Triangles Tripitaka Theatre Co.

Fringe Club, January 29 Hot Dogs and Eternal Triangles was fun, fast and frivolous, but ultimately there was too much going on in this new play by Penny Casdaghi for the ideas to work fully.

  With a cast of six (all very able) actors, playing three dogs on various degrees of heat and their owners, Hot Dogs is the largest overseas show at the Fringe festival this year.

  It is the story of Shuyi, who makes an unconventional marriage with Jason.

   When a woman turns up from Shuyi's past there are unseen complications for all three humans - plus pets.

  While the adults get confused about issues of love, sex and gender reassignment, the dogs just keep on sniffing each other's bottoms.

  The only thing that did not come in threes was the dimension. Characterisation was rather flat, which meant the moments of mythical surrealism - including the appearance of masked Cerberus to indicate the hell of Shuyi's rejection - could not evoke any sense of tragedy.

  After all, if we are to have a faithless Jason, then we should at least have a fabulously furious Medea.

  When Chowee Leow appeared as the sexy, fluffy bichon frise, Natasha, with a funny line in Singlish, he lifted the energy of the whole room.

  Natasha eats Whiskas cat meat with a spoon ('I'm not like other dogs' Leow informs us with a flirtatious wink) and is horrified by the idea of falling pregnant ('What would I do with eight tits-la?').

  Under Ivan Heng's direction this mix between Four (actually two) Weddings and a Funeral and 101 Dalmatians, with some Cage aux Folles thrown in, had moments of pure comedy.

  But a tighter script and plot would have made it a better piece of theatre about how we are all just human beings underneath. Or dogs, of course.

Victoria Finlay British But Sexy Earl Okin Fringe Club. January 31 One-man band Earl Okin gives a nod and a salacious wink to the old theatrical cliche 'no sex please, we're British' throughout his evening of music and rambling chat.

   Winking is something he does a lot of, winking and pouting. He's a consummate winker. And Sir Peter Ustinov has nothing to fear in the raconteurs' stakes.

   The title of his show, of course, is doubly ironic. Brits aren't supposed to be sexy (at least the men), and Okin begins by sending himself up as the unlikely sex symbol he is not. He never stops either.

   His constant banging on about sex - in silly jokes, schoolboy-humour snippets and mid-number whines and groans - wears thin after the first five minutes, and to an audience of 20 in a small room it can be embarrassing.

   Then again, there are always a couple of 'whoopers' to lap up the remaining 55 minutes.

   Furiously camp, Okin, with the look of an Alan Whicker-Dennis Norden cross-breed, is an accomplished Spanish guitarist and pianist. His lament on the state of his instrument, It's Not a Steinway, to the tune of My Way, is a winner. So too is his sneer at the archetypal, dreary, Maurice Chevalier love song, delivered in a Parisian accent.

   Best are his astounding trumpet and trombone impressions, carried off while he plays guitar - and so convincing they almost sound taped. But Okin's show requires a late-night audience in its cups, in a crowded bar - which he didn't have here.

    Then he could get away with telling the same smutty joke repeatedly, and it wouldn't be so obvious that his half-hour's worth of material was being stretched to fit a space twice the size.

    Given those circumstances Okin might have raised his game, instead of raising eyebrows with his pre-show billing as 'The Most Performed Artist in the Fringe's 50 Years'. Or perhaps that was just another limp joke. Steve McCarty Le Bel Indifferent Fringe Club, January 31 Alone in a hotel room in the middle of the night, a nightclub singer waits for a faithless lover to return. When he does come back, he sits down and reads the newspaper, not replying to a torrent of reproaches and accusations. His only response to the tirade is - silence. Finally he goes out, and the abandoned protagonist, left alone again, descends into despair and madness.

  This is Cocteau's Le Bel Indifferent: an archetypal (perhaps stereotypical) tale of woman as victim. In this production, director Tanya Cawthorne stands the stereotype on its head; the solo part of the woman is played by a man, Mark Allen.

   His gender is emphasised by the nude scene at the beginning: the singer performs La Vie en Rose in a frilly black evening frock and Lulu-style pale blue wig, then strips to reveal a naked male - posing seductively bottom-up on the sofa before slipping into a pair of androgynous satin pyjamas.

    This was, for me, the defining image of the evening. This gender-bending concept emphasises universal emotions, as the director intended; jealousy, insecurity and powerlessness in love are not confined to women.

   The sexual ambiguity both of the singer and his invisible lover further underlines the ambiguities of Cocteau's script: is the lover's temporary return real or imagined? Is the infidelity - even, perhaps, the faithless lover - a fantasy?     And yet - the tortured insecurity of this character is somehow at odds with the image of male beauty so confidently displayed at the beginning. It's hard to believe in Allen as a loser in the game of love. Aggression, anger, and contempt were well conveyed in an energetically physical performance, but dramatic tension was sometimes missing. A more gradual build-up of emotion would have made the final explosion more effective.

    It's difficult to interact on stage with an absent character (real or imaginary). This was an appealing performance, with welcome flashes of irony, but the empty chair of the 'other' remained empty.



Hot Dogs And Eternal Triangles