With all the fringy excitement going on north of the border you would be forgiven for thinking that during August all theatre companies shut up shop and take the first overnight bus to Edinburgh. When you’re surrounded by actors on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh it might feel as though that is the case, but there are still theatrical extravaganzas across the country. In London the Camden Fringe is in full swing, and on Friday I went to the Collection Theatre in Camden to see Elixir, by Blood, Love and Rhetoric. This is a company based in Prague, named after a quotation from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Written by Christy Hawkins it is a ‘fictional retelling of the adventures of Prague’s infamous English Wizards‘. The plot concerns two 16th century wizards, John Dee and Edward Kelley, who pretend to discover an elixir of youth to keep their patron Rudolf II from having them killed.
I was excited to see this new play as not only were the company inspired by Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece, but I fitted the target audience perfectly. ‘A play for lovers of costume comedy in the tradition of Blackadder’ said the blurb. I used to know the Blackadder scripts pretty much off by heart and they were funny, both in plot and language. I still smile when I remember the Lord High Executioner in charge of death warrants who ‘got careless one night and signed his name on the wrong dotted line‘. When the executioners came for him he tried to tell them that they had the wrong man, but ‘they didn’t, they had the right man and they had the form to prove it.‘ Would Elixir be able to match the comic inventiveness of Richard Curtis and Ben Elton?
Two musicians, playing cello and keyboard are on stage all the time, playing from before the play starts. It is a welcoming start to the drama, which soon features a collapsible kitchen steamer used as a chastity belt, the appearance of a unicorn and a false nose. With 12 actors and 2 musicians, as well as technical people controlling video projections, this is a big production for a fringe venue. The action follows the two wizards and their two competitors for the Emperor’s favour, Rabbi Loew and Tyco Brahe – who talks like the taunting French soldier in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. With fraudulent magic Loew and Brahe manage to fool the Emperor who then charges Dee and Kelley to produce an Elixir of Youth in order to stay alive.
The most humourous scene in the play is when the Emperor turns to rap to express himself and more of that inventiveness would have been welcome. To be compared to Curtis and Elton’s BBC gem I’d call for more creative wordplay and plotting. Where the comparison stands up best is in the costumes by Lukas Smid. We are in the Elizabethan period where men somehow make tights look like a reasonable fashion choice. Even the keyboard player carries off a ruff similar to the one that Blackadder claimed made his friend Lord Percy ‘look like a bird who had swallowed a plate’.
The Collection Theatre is above the Lord Stanley pub on Camden Park Road. It is an intimate, black space, with well-raked seats that give everyone a great view. There was a full house for the performance I saw, with people even sitting on cushions at the front of the stage. I didn’t find Elixir as funny as I had hoped, but it did bring an unusual moment in history to life.
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