REVIEWS

Festival Performance: Lucia Melts
The Herald 23/08/04

The tender Dutch touch on love
The Scotsman 23/08/04

PRESS QUOTES

Self-conciously quirky, tg STAN is here exploring everyday, instantly recognisable melodramas in a bright, light and utterly refreshing style, where informality invites empathy and warmth. Given its subject, Lucia Melts is curiously and really rather wonderfully life-affirming, too. Anger is vanquished and replaced by a joie de vivre that recognises its own ridiculous beauty. It’s a delightful parody of true romance, with all the self-destructive trimmings attached. If it recognises that nothing lasts forever, Lucia Melts remains a goofy, kooky but ultimately loving replay of the tenderest of traps.
Festival Performance: Lucia Melts , The Herald, Neil Cooper, 23/08/04


Even at its simplest, this would be a wise and deeply intelligent study. But what makes Lucia Melts such a powerful and exciting contribution to this year’s smash-hit Festival series of Royal Bank Lates, is the boldness with which it frees the actors from the need to waste energy creating the illusion that the audience is not there, and that they are "really" in an Antwerp flat. Instead, in a thrilling combination of informality and supreme skill, they work with and to the audience, moving openly in and out of character, in a situation so achingly familiar to us all.
Theatre group STAN, who produced Lucia Melts, is a collective of Flanders-based writers and actors whose hugely successful work - famously without a director - surely raises questions about the conventions of theatre production.
The tender Dutch touch on love , The Scotsman, Joyce McMillan, 23/08/04