STRWRS NOT THIS IS – Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts

In space no one can hear you mime

The directors claim to have created out of a threefold basis: working with a well known classic story, deeper character work and doing something amazing and limitless. And the musical…

It is evident how the last decades devising methods now implode in the contemporary faces of theater. This constant need for deconstruction, fragmentation, hobby-like “postmodernism” in the sense of everything’s total relativism and a hard-won “both” instead of “either or” …
In the hands of an artistic team with greater dexterity and less peeking on collage experiments fashionable around 2004, this production might have been a reasonably multicoloured history, instead of doing a calvary raid into popular culture’s most facile suburbs, according to the Holy edict of ticketing statistics .
The nine graduating students from the Mime-acting (two paradoxical contrast magnificent concept of the same name) department of SADA, twist and turn all these fashionable items as a knife into our senses: performance lecture, problematization of their “private” and “the role’s” character, the laboriously acquired “open “aesthetics where everything will be announced, described and commented (preferably in an unprovoked sarcastic style), and finally the” poor “aesthetics in terms of set design and costume (if I see one more theatrical production with young people dressed as a somewhat dated jeans out of Diesel commercials, I’ll SCREAM …).
The individual actors’ actions, which could have been successful in another set, drown in Carina Reich’s and Bogdan Szyber’s officious overworked attempt to “experiment”.
The student’s heroic accomplishments in their quite impossible situation requires special mention. Nathalie Alvarez Yoda proves by a sudoku-like 17point investigation of the origins of Hilda Rydman dramatically overacting C-3PO, whose coaching of Alice Hillbom Rudfeldts claustrophobia suffering R2D2 provokes a debate about who we should feel most sorry for. Julia Gumpert makes a stoic attempt to seamlessly bring a gender perspective to Princess Leia. Hanna Bylund bares bottom in Jabba the Hutt, Alexander Lindman conducts final duel between the Empire and the Rebel spacecraft fleets – in its entirety – and Rickard Hasslinger gives us a Wookie workshop. All this while Daniel Lindman Agora Weekender runs a purist-perspective on STaRWaR’S original action and characters and Py Huss Wallin tries to unite the fairytale magic with the drab everyday trot.
No shadow falls on these young performers, all too often exhibiting shimmering theatrical abilities.
And no one but these young brilliant performers can rescue this half-finished, soon exploding Death Star of a concept…
It’s when I attending productions like these I recall Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s immortal proverb: “Perfection is Achieved Not When there is nothing more to add But when there is nothing left to take away.”.

Bogumil Strelovic
Theater Magazin Giesen