michele celeste >english reviews 2

"My Goat approaches human cruelty and weakness humanistically, placing people under too close a scrutiny to allow for broad judgmentalism. In the process of entertaining, these plays succeed in humanising evil through its everyday absurdity and pathos. Celeste wanted to invest My Goat with those qualities which, to many minds, made his Hanging the President the most powerful new play of 1988. They are qualities which many playwrights try to place naturally on the stage but fail. One the writer calls "humour in desperation"; the other, its graver corollary, "the transcendent tenacity of hope." Sam Willets, What's On.

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TIME OUT
THE COCKPIT

The concept of a merry-go-round of Middle East splinter groups trading hostages like groceries with Mrs Average Arab seems utterly preposterous. But inspired by a British TV documentary Michele Celeste (who is beginning to make a virtue of hostage plays. cf Hanging the President), has written an intriguing satire about an Arab woman and her male Spanish kidnap victim in a bombed-out block of flats in West Beirut circa 1982. James Christopher.

THE STAGE,
September 29, 1994

THE COCKPIT
My Goat

THERE'S a market for hostages. A stockmarket to be precise. Just like currencies, stocks and shares so the value of a hostage varies according to nationality and the varying political and economic strengths of the particular country - in this case an Arab war zone.
In this witty two hander, Michele Celeste has created a comic parable between a Spanish/German archeologist, Carlos who is held hostage by Shazab, a pregnant Lebanese. "Without a hostage you are nothing," Sbazah tells Carlos whom she sees as her bargaining card with the rival factions holding her own dear husband, Yasef.
And so, stuck amidst the rubble ruins of no man's land, between ever changing enemy lines, Shazah, a passionate and distraught Anna Savva and Carlos a homesick, bewildered and increasingly angry Jonathan Arun are locked together, as curfews and ceasefires continually frustrate any rescue or peace.
With a skilled mixture of humour and seriousness, Celeste guides the relationship between Shazah and Carlos
from mutual antipathy to a grudging respect and eventually a reluctant fondness.
Shazah's goat, Kiddie, may have received the fresher water and better scraps at the start of the play, but by the end, it's the goat that's dead meat - not Carlos. Only with the surprise shock of a truce do captive and captor really have the opportunitY to look at one another and realise that, underneath it all, they are not so dissimilar.
My Goat may be short, small and straightforward but it is perfectly formed. A little dynamo of a play. Nicola Kemp

CITY LIMITS, June 7, 1990

HANGING THE PRESIDENT

by Michele Celeste
directed by Ian Brown
presented by Traverse Theatre (BAC)

Traverse Theatre's much vaunted production comes to London with its dynamism intact. Michele Celeste's award-winning play focuses full-frame on the psychological death-throes of two Afrikaaners awaiting execution in the grim confines of a tiny, South African prison-cell. To its immense credit, the play largely eschews familiar anti-apartheid polemic, allowing `comment' to merge through relentless action. As the clock ticks, so the border between fantasy and reality gradually disintegrates and a horrific, debased power struggle ensues, replete with sexual and physical violence of almost de Sadean intensity. The arrival of a third prisoner
- a black activist accused of murder - pitches the bizarre morality of dominance and suppression into frightening confusion. This is unashamedly ferocious theatre, a frenzied `dance of death' redolent of Genet in the complexity and potency of its images. It craves more physical intimacy than BAC provides, but colossal performances and taut direction nevertheless succeed in dragging the audience into the vortex of claustrophobia and desperation. Those seeking sheer, uncompromising theatre should look no further than this.
JULIAN RICHARDS