Ceremony of the Innocent.
Written and directed by George Franklin with members of the Scrambled Prince Theatre Company. Musical direction by Gabriel Piras. Bakehouse Theatre Mainstage. Eltham High School Senior Drama Students. March 6-11 2017. Adelaide Fringe.
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
I am always excited to see well
directed, thoroughly committed and thought provoking Ensemble youth theatre
from senior high school students. Ceremony
of the Innocent is such a production. Inspired by the disastrous Children’s
Crusade of the thirteenth century, Ceremony of The Innocent
is a morality tale that examines the notion of faith, the phenomenon of
fanatical devotion and the nature of power.
The audience enters the theatre
to a wailing chorus of Gregorian chant beneath a tattered marquee and echoing
through the space like a howling wind of desolation. It is the chant of the
innocent subsumed by faith in a higher presence. The lights fade and a narrator
introduces the company of players and the chief protagonists in the drama.
There is the Harlot( Olivia Smith ), the Priest (McGregor Rose), and the leader
of the crusade, Nicholas (Oliver Zagorski). Although any account of the actual
crusade may be largely apocryphal, there is evidence to suggest that a young
shepherd persuaded people that he had had a visitation from God and was charged
to lead the faithful to the Holy Land to convert Muslims to Christianity. It is
a prophetic illumination of history’s fateful cycle.
The one hour drama is effectively
a moral and religious discourse on the nature of faith. The harlot lives by her
means to survive. The priest is beset by human weakness and doubt in his faith
and desperately asserting the rational in the face of the irrational
consequence of blind faith. Nicholas is possessed by a misguided faith in his
own powers and drives his faithful followers towards their doom at the hands of
merchants, slave traders and hunger and starvation. Gradually the crusade
collapses and the cult leaves its trail of delusion along the path to shattered
hope.
Ceremony of The Innocent is a carefully and skillfully constructed
ensemble performance. Every actor is immersed in the moment, and although the
play focuses primarily on the priest, played with conflicted intensity by a
member of the school’s Alumni, the Harlot and the delusionary self-appointed
prophet, the entire cast has devoted their talent and their time to create the
kind of performance work that should be the ambition of every senior school
drama department.
Musical director Gabriel Piras
and his student musicians have composed the music and songs, sung with passion
and force by the company or by the Harlot. It provides excellent accompaniment
from Tuba, trumpet, clarinet and drums, resembling at times a Brechtian
orchestra, supplying musical commentary to the action.
Ceremony of the Innocent is an
excellent example of Ensemble Theatre and a pertinent commentary on the nature
of fanaticism and religious idolatry in a century possessed and obsessed by
devotion to misguided, misinterpreted belief. It is a disturbing and
confronting expression of the frailty in human nature and a warning to all
faiths and all generations.
Scrambled Prince Theatre Company deserves
commendation for an interesting, well-performed and instructive dialectic. It
is a fine example of the kind of youth theatre that warrants its place in a
Fringe Festival..