DIARY OF A SOMEBODY: A Review

DIARY OF A SOMEBODY: JOHN LAHR 

UNC-Chapel Hill. January 28^th 2012. 8pm – 10pm

If you read his diaries, all will be explained.

Room 102 of Chapel Hill’s Centre for Dramatic Art is a punitive, white-washed room in a very big building. Yet, in the diminutive space, the LAB!Theatre presents a simplistic stage – two walls covered by six heavily postered panels in an ‘L’ shape, a multi-use table covered by a sheet and a single desk with chair in the corner of the ‘L’. The audience enters as the cast face the panels, lightly touching the photos and words plastered there, occasionally shuffling close together and making lascivious faces at one another. Finally, two split away from the wall, one sits at the desk, the other coming forward to the table and opening his mouth to speak. This is Jack Utrata, playing Joe Orton, his first lines taken straight from the diaries of a dead man.

Based on the last few months before Kenneth Halliwell murdered his lover, British playwright Joe Orton, in 1967, the play was directed by Glasgow exchange student, John May, for the UNC-Chapel Hill LAB!Theatre. ‘Diary of a Somebody’ was a controversial performance to choose for the first LAB! show of the year, polarising audience opinions from its opening night.

May admitted that this was one of the things that he aimed to do, ‘North Carolina is terribly conservative, I wanted to force them to face something that would make them uncomfortable.’

As promiscuous as he was promising, Joe Ortan’s life allows the play to confront contemporary issues as well as those from the origins of the 1960s sexual revolution. At UNC, this is particularly poignant with the ever-looming threat of Amendment One. However, May insisted that his desire to put on the play was also to do with the fact that it was the first time the play would be performed in America in thirty years.

Indeed, it is hard to tell how much of the effect of the play is Lahr and how much is direction. With five cast members, three of whom play thirty different roles, the performance accentuates the idea that this play written from the diaries of a playwright does not come from the perspective of the playwright. These ‘thirty others’ are faceless, sometimes nameless and unimportant to the true narrator behind the play, notably suggested by their costumes: half one outfit, half another. The  room, as small as it is, emphasises the intimacy of the two primary characters as well as juxtaposing the privacy of the diary form with the publicity of the stage. As all the elements are drawn together: the setting, the characters, the action – we realise that the play is a murderer’s excuse. Even as Halliwell’s repeated plea becomes a desperate  rage, Lahr’s writing becomes a confession, the audience his jury.

This is comedy at its darkest, character acting at its finest and LAB! living up to their reputation. 

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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