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From This is Derbyshire
11 November 2005
Soaps hung out to dry
Soap operas are put through a mangle in this witty satire, says Ashley Franklin in his considered review of Serial Killers.
When I stumble on TV soaps, I see cheap production values and largely mediocre actors playing miserable people shouting at other miserable people. Even if there's a spark of wit or the vestige of a human drama, there's never, ever, any closure. Essentially, it's all about ratings. Cynical? You bet I am, just like the people who bring us this guff. Just like those in Serial Killers.
Granted, Serial Killers doesn't provide a rounded conclusion - itself perhaps a comment on the never-ending story that is a soap opera - but at least I've enjoyed a new experience with fresh characters and, after seeing it, I can move on.
As a TV sitcom Down Under, Serial Killers was hailed as a "show that skewers everything and everyone connected with a soap opera". If anything, this production goes further: having skewered soap, it's taken it outside, beaten it to a soft mush and hung it out to dry.
Author James Griffin, a former soap writer, has bravely satirised the five-night-a-week medical drama Shortland Street to which he contributed, by airing his caustic views and sneering humour through six scriptwriters who must "feed the beast".
Actually, the script should have read "feed the fish" as reference is made to the actors as "pretty fish" in the aquarium that is our TV screen. The writers have the same fish circling the same sunken wreck for years on end and, conversely, can kill them off at any given moment.
Director David Freeman has prudently cast actors who have all done soaps even to the extent that Ben Steel, as the soon-to-be- written-out actor, experienced that fate for real on Home and Away; and Mark Little, who denounced soaps in a previous Qt feature, is on our screens at this moment, reprising Joe Mangel in Neighbours. Thus, some of his acidic lines leave an ironic stain.
What's more, Griffin's witty, clever writing in the first half has the writers contemptuously dismissing soaps and cruelly marking out their chief actor's fate while exposing their own egos, libidos, insecurities, conflicts and conceit. Little do they know it but they're up to their own lathered necks in a soap.
All this takes place in a workroom where screwed-up papers feel anachronistic in these days of computers but they serve to point up the chaos, while towering above them is a screen where cast and crew brilliantly create the fictional soap which judiciously breaks up the play and is as funny as it is painfully accurate.
The second half is the real killer: Ben Steel's rather vacuous soap star is both a funny and frightening figure who points a gun and rants at the writers: "You stole my world!" at which he is reminded: "All we did was write a story." This is where the play really triumphs, in deftly blurring the boundaries between the seen world and the screen world. What might have helped further would have been an insight into why soaps seem to matter so much. The characters might have been more sympathetic, too.
However, it's still a blackly comical, cynical treat of a comedy. Also, in exposing the cultural worthlessness of two-bit TV entertainment, the Derby Playhouse is promoting the power of flesh-and-blood theatre. | | |