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Portsmouth
News
The Guide, Friday January 5, 2007
Pinball’s
Wizard
Tommy
Havant
Arts Centre
Raw
energy, raw enthusiasm, raw talent. All entirely
appropriate to a project that grew from the
hard-rock world of the late 1960’s.
But although Dynamo Youth Theatre’s production
of Tommy is as loud as something by Pete Townshend
and The Who should be, it also has more refined
qualities.
They
emerge in such matters as use of psychedelic
colours and stylised movement, sensitivity
to period and creation of a stepped set help
manage a large cast in a small space.
And
they emerge, too, in the performances of the
actors who play Tommy at six, 12 and fully
grown.
The
boy traumatised when he sees his farther kill
his mother’s lover is played first by Dominic
Moss and Matthew Kenny, who not only display
admirable stillness but convey a true sense
of pathos.
The
abuse of the 12-year-old certainly as much
a part of the 21st century as it was of the
mid-20th is rightly painful to watch.
Richard
Bailey has the dominant role of the adult
Tommy who emerges from his trauma to become
a Pinball Wizard and a kind of spiritual leader
before deciding he just wants to be like everyone
else.
The
actor encompasses the character’s range of
moods well and his singing has all the required
power. That word ‘raw’ springs to mind again
not in a derogatory sense. On the first night,
some of the early singing was lost beneath
the sound of a pulsating band, and even when
that was tweaked, some performers had to force
their voices excessively.
But
the acting of the other principals is largely
admirable - notably by Louise Moyle as Tommy’s
mother and Callum West as his slimeball uncle.
Mike
Allen
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