Pomona

Delayed post from Nov 2015 

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It's been a while since I've been to the Temporary Theatre. This time we arrived to see a piece staged in the round, with high hopes of tension and unease for our Saturday night entertainment. 

It started well, with heavy whirring sounds and strobe effects. We are met with a tale that hangs in the balance of chance, it seems, as our protagonist rolls dice to summon the answers she's looking for. The opening scenes show a man who seems to be homeless, throwing his ego around with a bag of McNuggets in hand, as a young girl approaches him whilst searching for her missing sister. We get the sense that there is more to this man than we first think. 

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The tension soon dissolved with the arrival of the loveable, comical Charlie who offers a lust for adventure and friendship.....The slick entrances and exits were the only thing keeping the momentum going as we spiralled towards the end.

The story however, became less and less chilling and more and more confusing. We follow our characters through endless rounds of Dungeons and Dragons unsure of whether to take them as a metaphor for this make-believe, elaborate concrete jungle. 

We never really know where our leading lady ends up, what the purpose of her journey has been. as she escapes the clutches of whatever lurks beneath the hatches and doors of Pomona - although I'm aware that's probably the point. Has she pondered through the dungeon to find her sister or has she, all this time been looking for herself? All seems not to be quite as it should. By this time the masked monster has lost its horror, as we meet the meek woman underneath the mask and understand that she is in fact as naive as we are. It was a little underwhelming by the time the ending came - it seemed that no-one, wherever they were in the chain of command, had any idea what was really going on here - which of course meant that we as an audience remained ignorant too.

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That meant that the tension that had been created at first, soon diffused to nothing and all we were left with were some fast entrances and exits, a lot of hearsay and the revelation that the McNugget man is implicit in this apparently menacing unknown plot.  It's a shame it didn't quite live up to its Lovecraft tin, but at another roll of the dice. Perhaps it might.