Anna and Rose: Weapons of Mass Seduction

Published Thursday 21 August 2008 at 15:15 by Alistair Smith

There is one thing above all others that alerts me to a potential turkey - shows in which the lead actor is also director and writer.

It’s not that all such plays are bad, just that the risk of disappointment seems to increase exponentially when one person is in charge of all of the important decisions.

Anna and Rose manages to achieve the double whammy of having its two lead performers (off stage as well as onstage sisters, I’m guessing from their surnames) double up as writer, director, producer and choreographer.

It is the most thorough endorsement possible of the aforementioned rule. This was - and I’m trying to be polite here - utterly disappointing.

While the premise - the real life story of two sisters on a killing spree in colonial north Africa - is potentially intriguing, the execution is awful (and I don’t use that word lightly) in every possible way.

The script is meandering, occasionally incomprehensible and inexplicably broken up by bouts of random song and dance, the acting is almost universally hammy, the sound overloud and ill-chosen, and the accents some of the worst I have ever heard on stage.

While the production purports to be set in Casablanca, the only voices I could properly discern were from either Eastern Europe (this was an attempted Spanish accent, I believe) or the East Midlands (the performer’s natural voice, perhaps).

A staggeringly poor production that never gets anywhere near attaining an even basic professional standard.