The Times
Wednesday 11 September
1996
Wall St blues
Bartleby,
Pleasance, King's Cross
Melville's novella Bartleby tells
of a mild-mannered young man who obtains a position in a respectable
Wall Street Law Office, where he works with sober efficiency
until, one day, he finds he can do so no longer. When his employer,
Mr Standard, asks the reason, all he will answer is: "I
would prefer not to."
He sits at his desk; he stands staring out of the window; he
does nothing. The other clerks are variously outraged but months
pass before Standard, a man of compassion, can bring himself
to dismiss the man. When Bartleby won't leave the premises Standard
is obliged to move his firm elsewhere. Bartleby is conveyed to
prison where, courteous to the end, he perishes.
We are left to assume that he became paralysed with horror at
the endless dreary life of a copy-clerk, trapped in a street
of walls. His polite expression of revolt disconcerts a system
that requires unquestioning subservience, and in Jonathan Holloway's
production for Red Shift, Simon Startin with his strangely unfocused
gaze upon his anxious employer (Edward Halsted, excellent), he
conveys passive desperation to a quite astonishing degree.
The entire production was one of the strongest offerings at this
year's Edinburgh Fringe, and Larry Lane's adaptation preserves
the artful delicacy in Melville's storytelling. Recommended.
The Independent
21 August 1996
Bartleby
After a three-year break from
the Festival, Red Shift returns with a beautifully designed adaptation
of Herman Melville's novella. Dealing as it does with the inexplicable
decline of a 19th century scrivener, Barlteby is not an obvious
text to stage, but this exacting production translated the uncanny
flavour of Melville's story into an entertaining and provoking
drama. Set in a Wall Street legal practice, the play paints a
satirical cartoon of three copyists, scribbling their lives away
under their benevolent boss, Standard. Their hectic, repetitive
world is disrupted by the arrival of Bartleby, who gorges himself
on work before wasting away with the refrain: "I would prefer
not to."
Simply choreographed and tightly paced, Red Shift's production
builds from comedy to unease as Bartleby's meek insubordination
spreads from business to the most basic of social contracts (speaking,
moving, eating). With his shoulders hunched around his ears,
Simon Startin gives a wonderfully spare performance as the unobtrusive
anti-hero, whose tragic abnegation of life finally raises questions
about the dehumanising effects of industrialisation and the limits
of the liberal conscience.
Liese Spencer
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The Scotsman
17 August 1996
Bartleby
* * * *
Red Shift, Theatre Workshop
Theatre
Who is Bartleby, this silent,
unsettling presence? Oppressed Everyman, a cipher for all the
underdogs who ever walked the cruel streets? Lost soul adrift
in unreachable lunacy? The very Devil himself? Each possibility
lurks in Red Shift's brooding and brilliantly compressed fable,
drawn from Herman Melville's eponymous tale.
Red Shift's elegant expressionistic adaptations were once regular
highlights of the Fringe. They return here with new energy, a
new embrace of moral complexity and minimalist excellence and
intensity of staging: 19th century New York is unfussily and
economically created here.
Bartleby is a scrivener, a copyist who comes to work in a Wall
Street office, then descends into silence, strange refusals,
and eventual destitution. He weighs on the conscience, he weighs
upon sanity, he weighs in the balance the stuff of our humanity.
Disciplined as ever under Jonathan Holloway's direction, the
small troupe offers bright tight vigour and plenty of entertaining
period detail. Simon Startin, hunched and other-worldly, is the
still centre. He lends a quasi-autistic air to Bartleby, locked
in his world, beyond bustling reach. This is an important story,
immaculately done. It is not yet selling out. It should, and
it will.
Catherine Lockerbie
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