THE DRAGON
By Yvgeny Schwartz
Tangram Theatre Company, Southwark Playhouse.
Performed in English
Intelligent, unsettling and ebullient.
The TIMES
Daniel Goldman’s high-spirited production…. has a certain oddball charm.
The Guardian
Unapologetically rough theatre — starkly staged, inclusive, anti-authoritarian.
Evening Standard
Tangram deliver the play with a massive charge of enthusiasm and inventiveness.
Playstosee
The Dragon is simultaneously a light-hearted rendition of a fairy tale and a very serious political satire that fully justifies a trip down to the Elephant and Castle.
British Theatre Guide
If the overall parable is clear enough, its enactment is still startling, and drag on the performance certainly does not.
Reviewsgate
Errant knight Lancelot arrives in a small Russian town to discover that a beautiful maiden is about to be sacrificed to the local dragon. When he attempts to intervene by challenging the dragon to a fight to the death, he is surprised that the whole village, led by the town Mayor and his son, would rather he bugger off and leave their dragon in peace. Notwithstanding, being the hero he is, he fights the dragon and wins… but sustains a mortal wound himself and dies.
Exactly a year later, the mayor is about to celebrate his wedding to Elsa, very much against her wishes, but no one will speak up. The reason: the mayor rules with an iron fist. In fact, he’s much worse than the dragon ever was. As the wedding approaches, an unexpected hero appears to save her.
Cast
Anthony Best (Mother), Justin Butcher (Dragon), Hannah Boyde (Mayor), Jo Hartland (Elsa), James Rowland (Lancelot), Peter Stickney (Henry), Rob Witcomb (Cat), James Richard Marshall (Chorus), Stella Taylor (Chorus), Charlotte Workman (Chorus)
Creative Team
Director: Daniel Goldman
Producer: Lora Krasteva
Stage Manager: Felix Andrew
The Dragon was a “flop”. It was a flop at the box office, it got some nice reviews but it was, as the critics noted, uneven in places. Sometimes you have to accept that you tried your best to do something exciting and interesting… and that you didn’t quite get there.
What we were trying to do was create a show where the audience might be invited to act to save the characters in the play and, if they did not, then be held responsible for the fate of the characters. But even that was made complicated by the fact that we built a repressive system into the play making it a literal lose lose situation for the audience. That’s to say, if they spoke out, they were “murdered” by the tyrants in power and asked/forced to leave the auditorium. If they didn’t speak out, they were blamed for their passivity.
It was an exploration of audience activity and passivity, an exploration we’d started with Fuente Ovejuna, and with many of the same actors, our interest was to go further and to a darker place, with The Dragon. We were trying to blur the lines between theatre and political activity, between audience, participant and person… and we did so with only limited success.
That said, I’m proud that we made a show that stuck in people’s guts. I think we made something that was unsettling and important, and even if it was a flop, I have no regrets. It was a fascinating production to put together and a huge learning curve and a show that I think was prescient in terms of the huge political shifts towards populist mdeia led right wing governments and Brexit and Trumpism that all emerged in the following couple of years.
All photos © Alex Brenner