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Cloaca

  • opened: 9/28/2004
  • closed: 12/11/2004
  • Old Vic
  • Box Office: 0870 060 6635
  • Details: To 11 Dec 2004
  • Summary: Visit theARCHIVE to hear a discussion. Kevin Spacey kicks off his tenure as artistic director of the Old Vic by directing the British premiere of Dutch playwright Maria Goos' dark comedy about four male friends in crisis. A very shaky start to Kevin Spacey's tenure as artistic director of the Old Vic, if the reviews are to be believed. Opening for business with a new play by an unknown Dutch writer - Maria Goos - bearing the Roman word for sewer as its title has given the critics no end of opportunity to turn their noses up in mild disgust. Cloaca is set in a chic Amsterdam apartment where Pieter (Stephen Tompkinson), a gay local government official, is in crisis - he's been allowed to take a painting a year from the city's art depository; now that it's transpired they're worth something, his employers want them back, but he's already sold four of them. On hand to offer feeble male help are his fortysomething mates from university days: Jan (Hugh Bonneville) an egotistical politician, Tom (Adrian Lukis) an unhinged lawyer and Maarten (Neil Pearson) a pretentious theatre director. Spacey himself directs, but he's fighting a losing battle with the script, commentators argue. The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer was incandescent: 'On a stage made famous by great productions of Shakespeare comes this trite, manipulative and sentimental black comedy that makes Yasmina Reza's slight but enjoyable Art look like a profound masterpiece.' He continued: 'I've had more fun lying in gutters than sitting through this comedy. The jokes aren't up to much, and even the sight of the middle-aged chaps performing a silly ska dance routine from their youth and an attractive prostitute (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) doing a strip routine aren't enough to compensate for scenes in which the chaps reveal their many inadequacies with toe-curling candour..' He concluded: 'Cloaca, I'm afraid, is a stinker, slick, superficial and as unappealing as its title.' In the Guardian, Michael Billington awarded two stars: 'My real problem was that I could never believe in the past friendship of Goos' quarrelsome quartet. What on earth, apart from an apparent liking for Blues Brothers comedy, did they ever have in common? It may be Goos' point that men coarsen with age but there seems nothing to bind this foursome together except the demands of the dramatic situation. What Goos has written, in fact, is a sitcom with attitude; and, as in sitcom, she desperately tries to keep the plot afloat by giving the men contradictory qualities.' In the Independent, Paul Taylor shrugged his shoulders: 'In launching the first production of his debut season as artistic director of the Old Vic, Kevin Spacey can't be accused of relying on a dead cert, even if the play was the Netherlands' biggest theatrical hit for 30 years. What emerges is a curiously underwhelming affair - a kind of portrait by numbers of the male mid-life crisis, with the occasional flash of piquant female perception.. and the intermittent telling detail about the emotional limitations and betrayals in male friendships.' In the Times, Benedict Nightingale hummed and sighed: 'It's brave of Kevin Spacey to begin his reign as the Old Vic's artistic supremo with his own production of a play called Cloaca, which is a Latin word meaning canal for waste liquids, drain or even sewer. You can imagine the glee with which our crueller critics would seize on the title if Maria Goos's play were, well, mere detritus. As it is, its worst fault is that, though nominally a comedy of darkish shade, it's a bit earnest, a mite didactic and less funny than a classy cast had led one to hope.' Alastair Macaulay in the Financial Times thought it so poor that it 'casts a sudden cloud of dreadful doubt over Spacey's whole regime.. You get Cloaca's point in the first 15 minutes: men are emotional cripples, lousy at listening and worse at emotion. And I was soon bored with the creakiness with which Goos reiterates it. She keeps reverting to lifestyle satire - her four male characters, all in their early 40s and all friends since they were about 20, deliver set-piece comedy-turn speeches about bicycle pumps, cats, impotence; it feels like early Ayckbourn, only without the craft.' In the Mail on Sunday Georgina Brown thought it all too implausible: 'Men, in my humble experience, talk about anything but their penises or their marriages when left alone together. They stick to cricket or safe yarns spun decades ago... Even the most superficial TV sitcom digs deeper,' she added, damningly. In the Sunday Express, Mark Shenton handed out two stars: 'There are occasional shafts of humour and insight that pierce the play's gloomy heart and Spacey's own production is acted with real conviction but there's ultimately no dramatic pay-off to the stress we're asked vicariously to absorb.' In the Sunday Times, Victoria Segal acknowledged that 'the mere frisson that surrounds this season is bankably precious. Yet Cloaca, despite its dankly disturbing title, is an unsatisfying experience, splashing about in stagnant shallows when there are deeper, darker tunnels to be explored.' Kate Bassett in the Sunday Independent applauded the bravery of the choice, but little else: 'ULtimately, this piece lacks originality and, if Pieter's buddies are a disappointment, so is Goos. Her only female character is a skimpy bit part - a hooker who gets her own back with a one-line gag - while the men's set monologues are unbelievably artificial and tautologous to the point of constipation.' In the Sunday Telegraph, Catherine Shoard added another damning review: 'Written by the Dutch author Maria Goos, a writer unknown in this country - deservedly, as it turns out - Cloaca is mid-life drivel of the wateriest sort. Like Yasmina Reza's Art, it's about male friendship and fortysomething disillusion and takes as its starting point a dispute over a painting. But unlike Art, it's maudlin, muddled and dull.'
  • Author: Maria Goos
  • Director: Kevin Spacey
  • Composer:
  • Lyricist: Set Designer: Rob Jones
  • Lighting Designer: Mark Henderson
  • Costume Designer:
  • Choreographer:
  • Cast Details: Stephen Tompkinson (Pieter); Hugh Bonneville (Jan); Adrian Lukis (Tom); Neil Pearson (Maarten); Ingeborga Dapkunaite (Woman).