Flesh Eating Tiger 2016 (Owl & Cat) – theatre review

Now reworked, with a new creative team, this play was the first performed by The Owl and Cat Theatre, when Gabrielle Savrone and Thomas Ian Doyle took over the venue from Jason Cavanagh at the start of last year.

A woman, a playwright, has been married for eight years but has fallen deeply in love with a man other than her husband. He is an alcoholic that isn’t sure about his sexuality and rejects her advances, much to her chagrin. Theirs is an intense, passionate and violent relationship characterised by verbal and physical abuse, of which bad language is a natural corollary.

That is as much as I could make out about Flesh Eating Tiger – written by American playwright Amy Tofte – which remained a mystifying puzzle to me for its 70 minutes. I kept hoping that at some point all the threads would come together, but they didn’t. It was just a series of 22 vignettes about the characters’ lives.

At times – many times – I despised what I was watching, simply because it was so esoteric and certainly not because of the acting. Amy Gubana plays the volatile woman and Marcus Molyneaux the confused male, both of whom perform the complex work admirably. There is a density about the material – a great deal of text is crammed into the play – with Gubana and Molyneaux switching seamlessly from sweet and playful to angry and frustrated.

The stage is relatively bare, save for the constant, a couple of black stools and a small cocktail table and there is nothing, apart for a white sheet, a few books and clothing changes, to draw attention away from the verbiage.

The Owl and Cat Creative Director and Owner Gabrielle Savrone directs and will take Flesh Eating Tiger to the USA later this year as a featured performance at The Last Frontier Theatre Conference. That is an annual get together on American theatre in Valdez, Alaska in which selected works are read by actors in front of an audience and then critiqued by professionals, academics and the public. Perhaps, and I certainly hope this is the case, they will make more of it than I did for – let’s face it – I was just perplexed.

I don’t mind having to think about any piece of art, but by the end of this flight of fancy I was all but ready for people in little white coats to drag me away kicking and screaming. As much as it gained my attention because of the passions laid bare, Flesh Eating Tiger failed because it didn’t make sense to me. I would have loved to have questioned the playwright and asked her what she was saying and what reaction she expected apart from the quizzical and clueless.

It is playing at The Owl and Cat Theatre, 34 Swan Street Richmond until 4th June.

Alex First