Antimony with the Stronghold Theatre Company

By FRANCES TILL

39-41 MacKELVIE, PONSONBY - Antimony is a silvery-white, brittle crystalline, solid sulfide used in Biblical times as both medicine and cosmetic, widely reputed to poison those who used it as adornment.

Not your bit of ordinary kohl, then, and neither is this Stronghold Theatre Company's multi-media production.

Set in an uncertain country just after a war and before a peace, the play is a complex skein of metaphors given a highly stylised stage life through five figures engaged in a story that is part Graham Greene and part Isabel Allende.

Within the rigid limits set by writer/director Simon Taylor, the actors do best in moments of extended monologue or emotional focus when the character emerges from the idea.

Most of those moments accrue to Seth (Jeff Gane), who is the shabby, mad, insightful chef de station at the abandoned embassy of a foreign power that propped up a puppet government now deposed by forces supported by yet another foreign power.

Ruth (Chanel Liquori), another beneficiary of this dynamic, exquisitely manifests the "body politic". She presents herself early as a hostage to Seth in hopes of having her brother's name excised from an infamous "list", and most of the play centres on the dynamic between these two as events outside, and eventually inside, the building alter their relationship and their metaphors.

It's an interesting plot and there's some memorable language, but the stilted, metronomic handling of dialogue sacrifices dramatic tension to a precocious regard for concept: no character is allowed to speak until another is finished, even when they are in heated argument and interrupting one another mid-sentence.

The multi-media aspect of the show, by Dominic Taylor, is well handled and has film merit on its own.

Producer Kim Renshaw has worked magic on the venue, a commercial warehouse on the verge of being demolished, and organised a production that gets high marks for being an interesting evening well off the trodden path.

Caution: dress warmly.