Review: BED PEACE: THE BATTLE OF YOHN & JOKO, Cockpit Theatre

We're fifty years in the past at the Montreal Bed-In, with John Lennon despairing over the state of the world and Yoko Ono encouraging him to spread the love, so evident between them, outwards to his adoring fans. But such things prove rather easier to say than to do in Rocky Rodriguez Jr's ambitious play with music.

Reality bites when John's fragile ego and natural abrasiveness butts up against lives described by an Angela Davis figure (Amelia Parillon), who schools him in the ideological nuances of American racism and feminism. John instinctively understands her points, but, after a life spent in Liverpool, Hamburg and under an unprecedented media spotlight, these are matters of which he has no experience. The gaucheness that never really left Lennon surfaces as aggression and bridges require re-building.

Theatre needs new voices and new approaches to familiar stories, but not every experiment can work - and this one doesn't. By all means tear up the theatrical rulebook, but make sure you put something there to replace it.

For example, Helen Foster's hippy chick narrator cheerfully breaks the fourth wall to get the audience involved, but we're so scattered on three sides of the space that she ends up speaking not to us as a group, but as individuals - a singalong finale is a good idea, but confine the audience to one block of seats to get that sense of togetherness.

The second half's loose structure ensures that there's lots of room for improvisation, but the cast need to know how to do improvisation. It's not the same as free form work in the rehearsal space - cues need to be picked up, points carried, a thread spun.

The first half's harder edged politics slides from conversations into declamations - often shouted - so ideas are presented, but not interrogated. The drama ebbs away as one character vents while the others look on - they might as well be sitting with us really. Are these real people - or merely mouthpieces for standpoints we know well.

Craig Edgley gets the Lennon look and almost pathological need for ego stroking about right, though the Beatle's devilish humour and often poetic turn of phrase seldom break through the politics and the frustration. Jung Sun Den Hollander captures some of Yoko's playfulness and her devotion to John, but there's no sense of her being an activist and artist in her own right, nor of her extraordinary stewardship of the Lennon legacy, something much appreciated in Lennon's city of birth. It's a real pity that this Yoko could be just about anyone with a difficult partner - because she was not, and is not.

So while the the story may be "devised using techniques created by Rocky Rodriguez Jr." - and it will be interesting to see if they are pursued in future projects because some fascinating terrain has been uncovered lying between the past and the present - we still need a story. We need conversations, character development, empathy, dramatic tension, plot - not just forums for speeches to which assent or dissent are the only available responses.

Bed Peace: The Battle of Yohn and Joko is at the Cockpit Theatre until 28 April.

Photo Lidia Crisafulli

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