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The Spinoff
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
Review: Wrest is too much show
Sam Brooks reviews the new show from Red Leap, a visually stunning mix of theatre and dance. A mundane breakfast, repeated ad nauseam. A coat check in a club. A bloody operating table. A woman pulled in two in a moment at a bus stop. These are images that show up in Red Leap's new show, Wrest, a hybrid of theatre and dance exploring early motherhood. These are also the images that have lingered with me long after the show. They aren't necessarily the images that you might associate with the setting of Wrest, which is set in a neo-noir world that feels closer to Cyberpunk 2077 or Deus Ex than the modern day. They also aren't the images you would associate with the actual narrative of Wrest, which follows a woman – or really, two women, played by Shavorn Mortimer and Ariāna Osborne – literally and sometimes metaphorically finding themselves. Wrest is two shows in one, and too often, these two shows seem in conflict with each other rather than in conversation. The show about motherhood is moving, with a vibrant physicality. The neo-noir mystery allows the show to play inside a rich, familiar, canvas. Too often, however, the mystery is put on pause to develop a visual language, which makes the sequences where the mystery takes centre stage feel perfunctory and even explanatory, rather than evocative. Neither is bad, although I prefer the show about motherhood to the mystery, but they seldom feel connected to each other. The best thing about a Red Leap show is that they demand a lot of the artists they work with, and the artists – on and offstage – absolutely rise to the occasion. While the neo-noir setting lends itself to impressive imagery and an undeniable style, it distracts from the themes of motherhood and identity that Wrest is clearly more interested in exploring. It's not necessarily a question of genre – noir is a broad church of interrogations into various human conditions – but of balance. As the leads, Mortimer and Osborne nail two sides of the same coin. They match each other's physicality and vocal musicality – even though the show has scant dialogue – without being exact mirrors of each other. Mortimer wrangles with the show's centrepiece adeptly, and it's a moment that risks becoming the show's thematic statement just in case the audience have missed it, but she grounds it in an aching humanity that makes the preceding 75 minutes feel worth it, even cohesive. The ensemble is, as is usual for Red Leap, excellent, with Shadon Meredith's specific character work being especially impressive; he moves like a dancer, not like an actor working with choreography. Red Leap is also a company that never fails to deliver, visually and aurally. It goes, then, that the production design, courtesy of Rachel Marlow at Filament 11, is world-class. Sets that would be centrepieces in other productions seem to pop out of nowhere, and disappear just as quickly. A full nightclub is simply (to the audience) spun into focus and then spun out of focus. It is seamless, and impressive. It's in the design that the two shows sitting inside Wrest feel like they actually could belong together. The coldness, even the meaninglessness of the neo-noir world that the two women inhabit, is a rich palette for the lack of direction the characters feel. Where the show really reaches out and grabs you is in the body horror moments – amped up by Eden Mulholland's haunting score – a reminder that some of the most seemingly natural and normal things that a human might go through can be the most absolutely horrific when viewed from afar, or examined from a different direction. The images are so beautiful, so specific, and so rich, but they are so unsupported by the narrative that they end up feeling less like pieces of live performance and movement and more like paintings in a gallery. The designers are working at the height of their ability here, but the story is too generic, and too confusing, that it ends up forming its own kind of fourth wall, placing the audience at a remove when we should be invested. It also doesn't help that the show is very light on dialogue in a genre that is famous for its intricate, musical patter. Noir is the rare genre that can get away with the audience walking away not understanding everything that happened, and dance is an artform that lingers in the same lack of comprehension, but it doesn't feel intentional here. As complaints go, 'too much show' is not the worst one. There is so much at play in Wrest that the genuinely moving, and distressing, exploration of motherhood is hidden. There's so much good in this show, but it's not necessarily the kind of good that fits on the same stage. I'd love to see Red Leap tackle a neo-noir, and play with this cinematic language more onstage. I'd also love to see them continue to explore this thematic territory, I could see a thousand shows about motherhood and still want to see more. In this case, however, I found myself wanting to – apologies – wrest Wrest from itself.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Silent Hill 4, Deus Ex And F.E.A.R. Among Latest Games To Enter GOG's Preservation Program
The disappearance and unavailability of classic titles is causing an existential crisis in all of video gaming. Last November, in response, online PC games store GOG announced a Preservation Program, where over 100 games are promised ongoing support to be sold and run on modern machines forever. It was announced last night that the beloved Silent Hill 4: The Room, best PC game of all time Deus Ex, and originalFEAR would be among 20 new games joining the scheme. And the rest of the names aren't small, either. In February, when one of the scourges of preservation, Warner Bros. (a company that shelves finished movies such that they may never be seen by anyone, while deleting vast archives of classic animations from its streaming services, alongside closing down game studios that have created some of the best games of recent times), GOG reacted to the news of the closure of Monolith with an announcement that it will attempt to save as many of the studio's games as it's able via the Preservation Program. The first of these, FEAR, is now in. Meanwhile, 2004's Silent Hill 4 has joined the program with the addition of 'restored scenes that were never available on PC before,' according to a press release from GOG. This includes missing 'hauntings,' the strange events that occur, which GOG found were in the PC code but never included—their engineers have dug them out and got them working. Alongside those two headliners are some other classic games that could easily merit the same moniker. Stone-cold classics like Deus Ex,Fallout 2, Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption, Alone In The Dark 1 to 3, and all eight original Ultima games are also now included, meaning they will be constantly maintained to work on modern PCs for as long as GOG exists (and, the company told me, it has plans in place to ensure preservation can continue if it was to go away). Oh, and Crystal Dynamic's first threeTomb Raiders. Here's the full list of new additions. It's worth noting most of these are currently at least 75 percent off in GOG's current sale: Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption Tomb Raider: Underworld, Anniversary and Legend Alone in the Dark: The Trilogy 1+2+3 Ultima™ 1+2+3 Ultima™ 4+5+6 Ultima™ 8 Gold Edition Wing Commander™ 1+2 Deus Ex GOTY Edition Jagged Alliance 2 Fallout 2 Privateer 2: The Darkening Port Royale 3 Gold Alien Breed + Tower Assault Cannon Fodderand Cannon Fodder 2 . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'It's like Die Hard but with more comedy': Immersive FPS Skin Deep has talking cats, banana traps, and enemies you can disable by making them sneeze
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Space piracy is a real problem in the future, but luckily there's a new and exciting loss prevention system to meet the needs of cautious space travelers. That's where you come in. In Skin Deep, you're Nina Pasadena, a former assassin turned insurance commando, part of the deluxe insurance package for corporate starships. You're frozen and stuck in a drawer on the ship, to be defrosted and put into action if pirates show up and try to kidnap the crew. Skin Deep is an immersive FPS from Blendo Games, maker of Quadrilateral Cowboy and Gravity Bone. Basically, it's like Deus Ex or Dishonored, but you can set banana peel traps for enemies to slip on and throw pepper in people's faces to make them sneeze so much they can't fight back. Also, you work for a company run by talking cats. (It's the future.) "It's very light and very goofy," said Brendan Chung, creative director of Blendo Games, in the Annapurna Interactive Showcase today. "But it treats this light and goofy stuff very sincerely and very earnestly." "It's like Die Hard but with more comedy," said Blendo Games programmer Sanjay Madhav. Unfortunately, the cryotech process that turns you into an insurance popsicle doesn't allow you to freeze your weapons, so you'll have to make do with whatever you find on the ship or can take from the pirates. A banana found in a locker can become a slippery trap. Ragweed thrown at someone will stun them with sneezes (though if you step into the "pepper cloud" it'll also cause you to sneeze, which can alert guards). There are traditional weapons like pistols and rifles to grab, but isn't it more fun to turn on a gas vent, lure a dimwitted pirate over to it, flick on a lighter, and roast him like a Christmas goose? There's a lot of neat systems you can glimpse in the trailer, like eliminating a pirate, taking his walkie-talkie, and then mimicking his voice when the pirate boss asks him to check in. You can also fake your own death by making it appear you've been purged from the ventilation system into space, so the pirates will stop looking for you. The pirates are pretty crafty themselves, though: the trailer shows one being killed, at which point his head is automatically encased in a cryo-dome so it can be placed onto a regenerated body, essentially making him immortal. The solution to that? Flush his head down the toilet. Standard insurance procedure. Skip Deep uses the Doom 3 engine, which is 20 years old and gives the game a "timeless look" according to Chung. Announced way back in 2018, it's finally almost here: Skin Deep launches on April 30. There's a demo on Steam available now.
