Interval Drinks

She Stoops to Conquer at the National Theatre

2012-02-02T08:37:00.001-08:00

Oliver Goldsmith was not reputed to be a great conversationalist. Dr Johnson remarked that “the misfortune of Goldsmith in conversation is this, he goes on without knowing how he is to get off.” Surrounded by the great talkers of the age, ‘Noll’, with his fondness for fine things and his funny, sunken face, tended to gabble and was the subject of mockery and affection in equal measure.

Marlow, the dandyish protagonist of Goldsmith’s frothy 1773 comedy, is also socially ill at ease, at least in certain circumstances. Presented with a woman of fortune, his tongue ties itself in knots and he becomes so overcome he can barely bring himself to look her in the face; show him a comely barmaid however and he turns into Blackadder’s Flashheart in a lemon yellow frock coat, all thrust and trouser. So in order to snag her prize (or at the very least have him look at her), Kate Hardcastle, the daughter of a country squire, decides to adopt a broad accent, an apron and a playful manner, something she is only too happy to do.

Though he’s a keen observer of snobbery and pretension, Goldsmith’s play is intriguingly free of malice or cruelty, his satire soft-edged. The characters, though flawed, are all amiable in their way, and even the central misunderstanding, in which Marlow mistakes the Hardcastles’ home for a country inn and his potential father-in-law for its landlord, is the result of a mischievous rather than malicious prank. The humour comes as much at the expense of the town fops as the country folk and even Kate’s spoiled, layabout half-brother Tony Lumpkin is not a bad sort, not really.

The playing is by necessity pretty broad. There is little room for nuance here, but some lay it on thicker than others. Harry Hadden-Paton and John Heffernan make a sublime double act as Marlow and his friend Hastings, the two city interlopers. They give the impression of friendship – there’s a scene where the two are eating fruit where they spark wickedly off one another – and, Heffernan in particular, conveys a sense of basic decency and concern for his Marlow’s happiness.

Steve Pemberton resists the urge to turn the eccentric Mr Hardcastle into a League grotesque and is instead genial and (mostly) good-humoured in the role; this is in stark contrast to Sophie Thompson’s performance as Mrs Hardcastle, which is so far over the top that the top is now just a little speck in the field below. She is less a character than a collage of Tourettian facial tics and extravagant vowel-mangling in attempt to demonstrate to her guests that she is not just another one of the ‘rustics.’ Katherine Kelly takes a far more naturalistic approach as Kate, suggesting that her ‘barmaid’ persona is an existing facet of her character and, as a result, lessening the sense of deception in her behaviour. The production also sidesteps the slightly murky aspect of Marlow’s thirst for women lower down the social ladder than he.

These fluctuations of tone and pitch eventually start to have an effect on Jamie Lloyd’s production, which feels less cohesive than it might. But what it lacks in tightness and lightness it makes up for in occasional joyous flourishes, in well-staged musical interludes, in the interplay between Hadden-Paton and Heffernan (there can be few actors who can milk as much as he from a single utterance of the word ‘booby’) and in its abiding sense of generosity and warmth.

Reviewed for Exeunt

L’immediat at the Barbican

2012-01-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

It begins with a crash. A spotlight smashes down from above, narrowly missing a performer. Created by Camille Boitel, L’immediat presents a world where things tumble and buckle and crumble with regularity; where nothing is fixed, nothing safe.

The opening skit is recognisably domestic. A woman arrives home from work. As she starts to unpack, first the table, then the bed, and then the entire room start to fall apart around her. Chunks of wall start to collapse. The table concertinas into a pile of wooden slats: even her trousers are disobedient, ending up around her ankles. It’s farcical and ingeniously choreographed, yet also melancholic, shoulder-shrugging, resigned to chaos and upset.

Then the whole stage starts to unpick itself, coming undone like a game of Mousetrap in reverse. Towers of cardboard boxes fall to earth, the lighting rig plummets, the stage becomes a sea of things: clutter, mess to be swept away. It’s astonishing to watch, heart-in-mouth stuff, at times seemingly perilous, as the Barbican stage is slowly stripped bare. In such moments the piece achieves a glorious union between the choreographically audacious and the thematically potent: nothing is solid, nothing is steady; if you lean on something it will only collapse under your weight.

It’s a hard balance to sustain and the production doesn’t manage it, though nor does it seem to try to. Subsequent sequences involve limbs which seem to rebel against their owners and even the stage seems to sway like a ship at sea, a pinball world on permanent tilt. Eerie dissonant sounds spill from some corner of the stage, cracked and fractured, a needle stuck in its groove. The performers, rendered bear-like and genderless under heavy fur coats hop in and out of hungry wardrobes; they writhe and wriggle on their bellies, they bend in odd, improbable ways.

These later scenes have a faintly post-apocalyptic whiff: after the fall, comes the levelling. The performers scrabble around the stage, stuck, repeating the same sets of movements. Sometimes they are ambushed by furniture; one woman seems in danger of floating away entirely and needs to be physically held down, grounded.

There’s wit and brilliance in much of this, particularly in the pervading sense of chaos and decay that, by necessity, must require a huge degree of precision and care to pull off. But the production seems to sail past a number of possible end points, galloping onwards but never quite replicating the gleeful, gasp-inducing effectiveness of that first scene of collapse. Running gags are overused with a sense of diminishing returns (there’s only so many times a startled man leaping out of a wardrobe can raise a smile) and though Boitel skilfully knits the philosophic with the farcical, there’s a – perhaps apt – sense of burnout before the piece is through.

Part of the London International Mime Festival. Reviewed for Exeunt.

Lovesong at the Lyric Hammersmith

2012-01-16T10:48:00.000-08:00

It’s a strange sound: the damp rabbity snuffling of a roomful of people attempting to hold back tears. It’s a sound that runs through much of Frantic Assembly’s moving new production, twining with the music: Abi Morgan’s play is often incredibly tender and touching, but there are times when it feels a bit mechanical in its methods, a little too insistent on making the audience weep.

As a screen writer, Morgan’s work includes both Steve McQueen’s Shame and recent Thatcher biopic, The Iron Lady, and – political subject matter aside – her latest work for the stage shares some common ground with the latter film in its delicate exploration on the erosion of aging.

A married couple, Margaret and William, are shown at two points in their life: in the early years of their marriage, after their emigration to the US, and in what turns out to be their last days together. The optimism of youth slowly seeps out of them as life’s many small disappointments take their toll. Their new life in America isn’t as glittering as they’d hoped and though they both want to have children, they never come. Margaret takes a job, against her husband’s wishes, and both of them toy with the idea of having affairs. These scenes are interlaced with those of them at a later point of their lives. The elder Margaret and William have led a comfortable, if childless, existence, have come to terms with the hand that has been dealt to them and now face the prospect of life without one another

Some of the most piercing moments are wordless. Frantic Assembly’s Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett allow the couples to catch glimpses of each other across time. Siân Phillips, who plays the elderly Margaret, is shown dancing with Edward Bennett, her husband as he once was, bearing each other’s weight and leaning into one another. The four performers, pyjama-clad, tumble in and out of each other’s grasp; clasping each other, clinging to each other, but unable to hold on for long.

The cast all give well-judged performances even if the script doesn’t give Bennett and Leanne Rowe, as the younger Margaret, quite as much to work with. Philips’s performance is the most wrenching; at one point she is shown trying on a pair of once-treasured shoes, but she’s unable to walk in them and the frustration and anger she feels at her frail and disloyal body is painful to watch. Sam Cox, in comparison, exercises admirable restraint as the older William making his moments of emotional eruption all the more potent.

This is a production that walks a very fine line. Inevitably, given the subject matter, it has the capacity to tap into people’s personal experiences of loss and there are times when it feels too overt in its manipulation of the audience’s emotions. It deals unashamedly in sentiment and at times can feel a little thematically overcooked: there’s a lot of talk of dead things, ancient cave paintings and the linearity, or otherwise, of time. The movement sequences too, while beautifully executed, are occasionally distracting. The piece is at its strongest as a portrait of the way in which a relationship evolves over the years. The older Margaret and William have come to know each other’s habits intimately. The sense of familiarity which the younger William saw as a source of suffocation has become a comfort. These two people have reached a point in their lives when they have only each other – and now they must prepare themselves to part.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Twelfth Night at the New Diorama Theatre

2012-01-09T13:01:00.000-08:00

In a scene, perhaps not owing overmuch to Shakespeare but none the worse for it, Orsino and his courtiers are first glimpsed hanging out together in a sauna clad only in white towels, while a disguised Viola hovers amongst them, shifting from foot to foot, fully (cross-)dressed and uncertain where to look. Before she can make her departure, she even receives an unexpected glimpse of her master’s assets which makes her go as pink as the polo shirt she now sports as Cesario.

It’s one of many playful and inventive touches in Faction Theatre’s hugely endearing production of Shakespeare’s comedy, the first in an ambitious repertory season that also includes Schiller’s Mary Stuart and Strindberg’s Miss Julie.

The company previously tackled the play in 2009 and many of the same cast return, albeit in different roles. Stripping the performance space back to a bare black box and using hardly any props, Mark Leipacher’s production has a pleasing visual unity: the eleven-strong company come together to create the box tree behind which Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek conceal themselves, their fingers fanning like branches gently blown by the breeze; they also become the waves which wash Viola and Sebastian onto Illyria’s shores and, in a particularly chilling touch, they crowd together to create the oubliette within which Malvolio is confined, their seemingly disembodied hands curling around his body and pressing against his face, creating an intense sensation of claustrophobia.

Gareth Fordred’s militaristic Malvolio stands out among a capable ensemble cast. He wears his hair greasily slicked to one side and his leg in a calliper, which brings an extra degree of rigidity to his movements and manner and makes the moment when he believes Olivia has praised his gait feel all the more cruel. His bug-eyed, manic delight on receiving this misleading epistle is quite wrenching to watch and, dignity swiftly abandoned, he all but treads on the front row’s toes as he gleefully recalls each one her compliments; as a result his later, hobbling humiliation is all the more piercing.

As Belch and Aguecheek, Richard Delaney and Jonny McPherson transcend their respective moustaches (one sports a ratty Chaplin toothbrush, the other the salt-and-pepper lip-wig of a gouty colonel) to form a lively double-act. The production also neatly conveys the sense that these men, and Malvolio too, are veterans of a past conflict. Derval Mellett’s Olivia revels in her post-coital undoing at the hands of Sebastian, switching the black of mourning for something more vibrant with almost unseemly haste, her hair tumbling around her shoulders and her eyes brimming with bedroom heat. In comparison Kate Sawyer makes a rather understated Viola and appears as bemused and alarmed by Olivia’s advances towards her as by Aguecheek’s wobbly attempt to engage her in a duel. Lachlan McCall’s Feste brings a contemporary freshness to the play’s songs, plucking them out on his banjo.

There’s an occasional roughness to the verse speaking, and the odd dropped line, but this economical, intelligent take on the play doesn’t suffer for it. Indeed the rawness helps the audience to connect with the text and to get swept up in the plight of the characters. Through the company’s easy, relaxed way with the play – and the simple fanning of hands – a door is opened and you are invited in.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Snow Queen at the Rose Theatre

2011-12-23T06:27:00.000-08:00

The set alone is a source of wonder. Paper artist, Su Blackwell, in her first design project for the stage has created a delicate, wintry world of trees, cottages and lampposts that appear to have been snipped from the pages of a paperback. Black lettering nests against white, making an apt and charming backdrop for Charles Way’s adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy story.

Young Gerda is a nervy girl, prone to panic attacks and terrified of her bad-tempered schoolmaster father, Mr Overskou. When her classmates take turns to dance in front of one another, she can’t bring herself to join in and her best friend Cei has to calm her down. Though Cei and Gerda have been friends and playmates all their lives, Mr Overskou disapproves of the boy’s dreamy ways and forbids them to see one another; it is then that Cei falls under the Snow Queen’s spell. A shard of mirror pierces his heart and he becomes cold and cruel before being whisked off to the Queen’s winter palace and forced to piece together the shattered fragments of her magic mirror. But though the townspeople believe Cei to have drowned, Gerda refuses to accept this and sets off to find him.

Way’s adaptation has Gerda travel through the changing seasons with winter forever on her tail. In spring she encounters talking flowers and a secateurs-wielding gardener; in summer she encounters a gaggle of Hooray Henry types and in autumn she encounters a robber gang and an ageing reindeer. There’s much wit and invention in the visual detail (umbrellas turn into autumn leaves, paper butterflies alight on paper trees, billowing white fabric is used to create a downhill sleigh ride) and some gentle humour in the writing. Gerda grows slowly in confidence and strength as the story progresses, declining to give up her red boots to the spoilt Sloaney teen princess and taking on the robber queen in a dance contest, but the production doesn’t overplay her emotional growth and this aspect of the writing is handled with a pleasingly light touch.

If anything Natascha Metherell’s production is too gentle and sedate. It has its moments of comedy and its moments of chill but there are a few too many slack patches that cause outbreaks of fidgeting amongst the younger members of the audience. Sara Stewart’s towering, ice-eyed Snow Queen is also the source of some genuine cries of alarm and, in one child’s case, a fountaining of frightened, urgent tears. The production seems better pitched at slightly older children than at the very young.

Some strong performances help compensate for occasional failings in pace. Bettrys Jones is compelling as Gerda, her initial anxiety and fretfulness slowly transforming into maturity and strength, and there is some good support from Michael Matus as the menacing Mr Overskou (who also cameos as a decidedly camp daffodil) and Deirdra Morris as the archetypal kindly, wise grandmother. What’s missing, despite all its considerable polish, is any real emotional tug or genuine sense of peril; it’s all a little too neat and tidy and lacks the wild fringes of the best children’s theatre.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Ladykillers at the Gielgud Theatre

2011-12-09T15:30:00.000-08:00

Though Graham Linehan’s stage adaptation of this classic 1955 Ealing comedy is superficially appealing on a number of levels, taken as a whole it doesn't quite satisfy.

Peter Capaldi plays the reptilian Professor Marcus – first revealed to the audience in silhouette – the head of a criminal gang who hides out in the Kings Cross house of kindly Mrs Wilberforce (Marcia Warren) under the pretence of being members of a string quintet.

It's hard to fault the cast, but while the film celebrates the triumph of something fundamentally English in a murky post-war world, Linehan seems far more interested in mining the story for its comic potential. As a result the production is stuffed with recurring gags and physical comedy, but there's something very broad about the way the whole thing is pitched and it only really hits its stride in the second half, when the robbery has been committed and the silliness gives way to something more sinister. As tension mounts between the gang members and they begin to turn against one another, Sean Foley’s production takes on the dark air of a fairy tale. There's also more than a trace of the contemporary heist movie to proceedings: Reservoir Dogs is cited as an inspiration and there’s even, I believe, a visual reference to The Taking of Pelham 123.

Linehan deviates from the film in some entertaining ways; a sequence in which the gang are forced to perform for Mrs Wilberforce’s elderly friends and have to try and pass their ineptitude off as musical experimentation is particularly amusing. But the piece never sustains this level of invention and at points comes close to pantomime.

Michael Taylor’s gloriously skewed, expressionistic set creates a sense of physical and moral subsidence which the production never fully capitalises on but the cast are clearly enjoying themselves which goes some way to compensate for the occasional sags in pacing and the overlabouring of some of the jokes. Warren is deliciously dithery as Mrs Wilberforce, fragile yet far more formidable than the men around her will credit, and Capaldi clearly relishes his villainous role, stalking the stage like a Lotte Reiniger shadow puppet, revelling in each hike of an eyebrow and each long-legged stride. Clive Rowe, James Fleet, Ben Miller and Stephen Wight are also on good form as, respectively, the slow-witted but well-meaning One Round; the nervy Major with a fondness for women’s formal wear; the volatile Romanian gangster with a near pathological dislike of old ladies; and the amphetamine-driven Harry, who comes across like a more docile version of Brighton Rock’s Pinkie Brown with a penchant for housework.

Reviewed for Theatermania

Riot Acts at Richmix

2011-11-30T09:33:00.000-08:00

A collection of words written in response to Penned in the Margins' Riot Acts, itself a form of response to the summer's riots. The evening featured new work in scratch form from Luke Wright, The Hurly Burly, Sophie Woolley and Greg McLaren. You can read the full piece on Exeunt.

Judgement Day at The Print Room

2011-11-27T04:31:00.000-08:00

Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken, takes the form of a heightened and poetic piece of self-examination, a man looking back at his life and work through a convex lens. A sense of finality pulses through the writing, a kind of breathless urgency.

Condensed and retitled by Mike Poulton, the play concerns Arnold Rubek, an aging sculptor who, having made both his reputation and his fortune many years ago with his masterwork, Judgement Day, is now enjoying the trapping of his success. Though he is respected and materially well off, Maia, his attractive and (much) younger wife resents him and he is all too aware that his days of producing great work are behind him.

He contents himself on commercial projects, corporate hackwork, sculpting bankers and merchants, and has tied himself to a young woman who bores him. In private moments he invites her to sit on his knee with a rather queasy Humbert Humbert tilt to his voice, but it’s clear that whatever affection once existed between them has long since turned to dust.

When his former muse, the mysterious Irena, appears at their mountain retreat, he is obliged to look back at the man – and the artist – he once was. Irena is a living ghost, a limbo-locked figure who feels that Rubek’s use of her image, her life, was an act of violation. While he has moved on without a backward glance, she has remained, trapped, drifting wraith-like through the mountain mist like an ageing Lucy Westenra; Rubek has drained something vital from her and she can neither forgive nor forget. She refers to his masterpiece as “their child” and is appalled at the thought of its existence apart from herself.

Rubek is obliged, for the first time it seems, to consider her role in its creation. The play pulls no punches in its depiction of the sculptor as a supremely self-involved and emotionally blinkered individual. Michael Pennington plays him with a calm naturalism, his voice rich and telling, providing a solid balance to Penny Downie’s more heightened and manic performance as Irena; shrouded in white, the pins working their way loose from her hair, she is by turns menacing and pathetic. Though at times her performance feels too stylised, there is a potent energy when she is on stage with Pennington. They both feel gripped by some deeper force. As a result the relationship between Sara Vickers’ Maia and her would-be lover, Philip Correia’s randy Baron, is eclipsed.

Poulton brings out the humour and humanity of Ibsen’s play, grounding it in the recognisable and counterbalancing its more abstract passages. James Dacre’s production is intense without being unrelenting. It takes this big, at times unwieldy play and makes it work in a small space. In this he’s aided by Mike Britton’s elegant traverse set which provides a sleek and contemporary frame of cool mountain blue for the period costumes (the wine-red of Maia’s skirts look particularly striking against this background). A single rock and a building mist are all it takes to transport the characters to a place precipitous in more than one sense. As the play draws to a close, Rubek and Irena are left to face each other and the unknown, reaching upwards into night.

Reviewed for Exeunt

We are Three Sisters at the Rose Theatre

2011-11-19T05:52:00.000-08:00

“We are three sisters.” It is like an incantation. Surrounded by wind-lashed moorland, with tombstones looming at the window, the Brontë sisters wrote words that would survive them, in the process becoming semi-mythic themselves. Blake Morrison’s play for Northern Broadsides acknowledges the pull that the sisters’ lives still exert, the need to keep repeating and retelling their story.

Morrison draws deliberately on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, transporting events and people from the Brontës’ lives into a Chekhovian framework. It’s an elegant device, particularly because the parallels between the two sets of women were not entirely accidental and Chekhov may, at least in part, have been influenced by the inhabitants of the Haworth parsonage.

Though the play stands up well on its own as a piece of biographical drama, there’s pleasure to be taken in appreciating the many ways Morrison has woven together the Brontës’ world with that of the Prozorovs: the sibling harmonies and rivalries, the proximity of death – both plays begin with the remembering of a parent’s funeral. But it doesn’t adhere to its source too closely, breaking away from the template altogether in the later stages of the play; Morrison refers to it as a “shadow text”, one that inspires rather than dictates.

Though the timeline is condensed, Morrison’s play takes place at the most pivotal point in the sisters’ lives, when their books had finally found publishers and Charlotte in particular was starting to experience the first glow of literary success. This was to prove exposing and disconcerting to Emily who was content to shelter behind her pseudonym and pointedly did not join her sisters on their first tentative journey to London. Though London is a place the sisters ache for, it is a subtler form of longing than Chekhov’s sisters feel for Moscow, and Emily in particular makes her ambivalence felt.

Natasha’s ill-advised green sash in Chekhov’s play has become a dress the colour of limes, a retina-searing garment which stands out a mile next to the palette of matt browns and greys of the Brontës. The dress may as well have been Jezebel red, such is its effect; its wearer, Mrs Lydia Robinson, is Branwell’s older, married lover, here depicted as a cruel and manipulative woman with few redeeming traits (we know she is no good because she’s nasty to Tabby, the Brontës’ frail and ageing housekeeper).

Morrison has his Mrs Robinson paying a fictional visit to the sisters, much to their shock and displeasure. The other interlopers into their guarded world are all men – and all found wanting. John Branwell plays the local doctor, poignantly sporting a soft spot for Anne because she reminds him of her dead mother, whom he once loved. Marc Parry plays a rather feeble curate and director Barrie Rutter plays a self-promoting teacher to generally humorous effect. Fittingly it’s those playing the sisters who stand out. Rebecca Hutchinson’s Anne gets to escape her elder sisters’ shadows and speak of her own hopes; Catherine Kinsella’s Charlotte is the most grounded and subtly ambitious of the three and Sophia di Martino captures Emily’s volatility but also conveys a touch of knowing wit.

The play is less strong at providing social context and the references to events outside the parsonage walls, the Chartist riots for example, often feel heavy-handed; the same can be said of the handling of some of the background biographical detail. Branwell’s rapid decline into a stumbling drunk with a penchant for dipping into the family funds is also rather forced. The play is far better at sketching the tensions between the siblings, as that famous family portrait, with Branwell’s face blotted out by his own hand, watches over them from the far wall.

Rutter’s production can feel a little slow-paced and stiff; it sometimes lumbers rather than glides, and it lacks the energy and physicality of Shared Experience’s exploration of the same narrative ground. But it never feels like mere intellectual exercise; the play has an elegance of expression and an – eventual – emotional power as the three sisters, already coughing ominously, look ahead to their shared future.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Next Time I'll Sing To You at the Orange Tree Theatre

2011-11-16T05:45:00.000-08:00

The stage is naked except for a small raised platform and a deflated air mattress. The ceiling glitters with fibre optic stars. Beneath these, a group of characters debate the nature of existence and reality, using theatre and the nature of performance as a broader metaphor for life (and death). Their conversation, which is studded with intentionally bad jokes and poetic digressions, swings back and forth but never settles.

First performed in 1962, James Saunders’ play was inspired by the story of the hermit of Great Canfield, a man who spent over three decades living in almost total isolation in a tiny hut. Was he some kind of contemporary saint or was he just a lonely old man prompted to reject the world after the young girl with whom he was fixated rejected him?

The play was the first ever directed by the Orange Tree’s Artistic Director, Sam Walters, and Saunders went on to have a strong association with the theatre throughout his life. Saunders’ next big project, according to the programme, was a stage adaptation of Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Italian Girl, which seems apt as there is a lot of thematic overlap – but Murdoch usually embedded her philosophical exploring within a stronger structure than Saunders uses here.

The piece constantly comments on itself, picking itself apart. The performers remark on how they are going through the same motions, night after night, and on how nothing much has actually happened yet. “Yes, we get the metaphor,” is the weary reply. The director takes on the mantel of creator, the ultimate auteur, while the performers are deemed to be somnambulistic figures, neither fully awake nor asleep, with the exception of one man who eventually starts to merge with the figure of the hermit. There’s plenty of Pirandello here; Beckett and Ionesco too. You can almost see the spines lining Saunders’ library. Though frequently witty and undeniably smart, the play at times feels like a collection of his interests and obsessions, a primer in existential thinking, rather than anything more cohesive and relatable.

The cast cope well with the particular tone and rhythm of the play. Brendan Patricks is elegantly arrogant as Dust while Aiden Gillet succeeds in bringing out the spiritual quality of his director figure, Rudge. Roger Parkins’ character Meff, there primarily to provide relatively light relief, has dated far less well though he does his best with what he’s been given, and Holly Elmes, as Lizzie (one half of a pair of interchangeable identical twins), is required to do little beyond look almost permanently bewildered.

Unfortunately along with all this 1960s intellectual enquiry, the play comes with a hefty dose of 1960s chauvinism, complete with jokes about rape. Anthony Clark’s production attempts to counteract this by turning it into a period piece, complete with corduroy trousers and snug black turtlenecks, an ashtray quickly filling with the remnants of skinny cigarettes. But by rooting it so firmly in time, the light that shines around the edges of the text is dulled. The play becomes a fixed, rigid thing rather than something questing and illuminating. It’s easy to see what excited people about this play and how it came to influence other writers. At times it is still possible to feel the electricity of ideas at work, but in framing this as a heritage piece Clark has neutralised the play in more ways than one.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Changeling at Southwark Playhouse

2011-11-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

Snip, snip. Snip, snip. Michael Oakley’s production of Middleton and Rowley’s Jacobean tragedy has taken the secateurs to the text. Gone is the madhouse subplot, leaving only the story of the duplicitous Beatrice-Joanna and her murky sexual entanglement with the bitter, volatile De Flores. But this secondary narrative strand does more than provide a comic counterweight to the central story, it feeds into it, shadowing it, paralleling it. Insanity takes many shapes, many forms in this play.

Oakley’s second conceptual experiment is to take the play’s many asides and turn them into pre-recorded voice over. Oakley, a past JMK Award-winner, admits in his programme notes that this is a risk, and the resulting disconnect between the internal and external is problematic. In theory the idea does chime nicely with the play’s use of doubling, but the recorded sequences seem flattened out and the production never quite solves the problem of how the cast should interact with them – they occasional resort to brow furrowing and other ‘thinking’ signifiers.

The production has been given a contemporary setting complete with seemingly obligatory CCTV monitors. There’s something vaguely 1980s about the aesthetic with its grubby filing cabinets and Beatrice-Joanna’s skin-tight black lace dress; a collision of Basic Instinct and Sliver. But the surveillance theme isn’t really picked up on, the monitors are only really brought into play during one scene, and the production suffers from a lack of claustrophobia, from a sense of these two people being unable to escape each other’s hold.

David Caves simmers as De Flores, a born gentleman forced to serve others; resentment permeates his every gesture and when he gets a chance to right what he sees as a slight, an insult, he leaps at it, relishes it. He seems to compensate for both his reduced circumstances and his marked face, his perceived ‘ugliness’, through hyper-masculine behaviour. He is not a hunched Caliban figure, muscles bulge beneath his short-sleeved white shirt; he even (just about) pulls off De Flores’ penchant for glove-sniffing.

Fiona Hampton is not quite as convincing as the fickle Beatrice-Joanna, a woman happy to manipulate De Flores into getting what she wants (having the unfortunate Alonzo iced so she can marry the dashing Alsemero), but who fails to anticipate the repercussions of her actions. While she is stronger in the early scenes, clearly enjoying the power she has over him, and she succeeds in showing how Beatrice-Joanna’s initial distaste for the man evolves into something more complex and interesting, as the situation escalates her performance seems to lose power.

Again, claustrophobia – or the lack of it – is an issue. Shorn of context, Beatrice-Joanna no longer seems backed into a corner by circumstance and her choices make even less sense. By ditching the madhouse subplot, the more blackly comic elements of the play, particularly the delicious absurdity of the virginity test, feel adrift and more than a little silly. There’s a strong case to be made for updating The Changeling; with its themes of social hierarchy – Beatrice Joanna’s sense of entitlement pitched against De Flores’ resentment – it has a particular contemporary resonance; but Oakley’s production is neither as sexually or as emotionally charged as it might be and while his approach to sound design is intriguing it also doesn’t quite make a case for itself.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Memoirs of a Biscuit Tin at Jackson's Lane Theatre

2011-11-07T08:52:00.000-08:00

This house is a lost house; cobwebbed, dilapidated and dusty, it has been forgotten. The old woman who once lived here has disappeared but no one has come looking for her; she is remembered only by the house itself. The chimney, the wall and the floor are given physical form. Clad in Miss Havisham rags, simpering and mugging like Playschool presenters they pine for their lost owner. Slowly, using objects scattered around the abandoned house they piece together the life of the missing woman: they give her a name, a past, a story.

Maison Foo’s poignant if rather broad-brush production was inspired by the performers’ experiences of working with the elderly. There’s something very touching in the way the fragments of a person who has been diminished and eroded by dementia are pieced back together, making them whole, even if the company have saddled both the piece and themselves with an awkward and overly elaborate narrative framework. The performers spend a very long time establishing that it is the house itself that is telling the story: so we see the floor getting overexcited at the memory of the hoover, while the chimney alternates between soot-clogged coughing and minor flirtations with the front row.

The stagecraft is impressive, blending elements of clowning and physical theatre with puppetry, and there is something particularly satisfying in the way they utilise every prop to create a recognisable world: a balloon and a piece of fabric become a small child, a coat-stand becomes a dashing young suitor, a picnic blanket and a straw hat create a fleeting yet idyllic afternoon in the sun. But while these shards of memory, these glimpses into the past, are often genuinely moving, in the favouring of the archetypal over the specific, the production is self-limiting. Mrs Benjamin, the woman who is both the absence and the presence at the centre of the piece, is not so much an individual as a portrait of every aging person whose sun-flecked past has faded to grey.

While it’s well-intentioned (the company are touring the work in partnership with Dementia UK) and well-executed, there is something a little twee in its presentation. It’s at its strongest when exploring the cruelty of dementia, conveying a strong sense of bewilderment, decay and increasing distress, but the depiction of life leading up to this moment is more formulaic, the milestones obvious and the storytelling simple: courtship, marriage, bereavement. The method of telling is visually appealing but dramatically the piece is rather narrow, and while the concept of the house as narrator is a resonant one, it feels too blunt, too literal.

The strongest sequences are also the darkest and most jarring, scenes that elegantly evoke loneliness and decline in old age, social isolation and its consequences, but elsewhere the company rather hammer their point home in a way that teeters on the edge of being patronising. It’s when they unshackle themselves from this tendency and trust their material and their audience more, that the production’s considerable charms become clear.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Revenge of the Grand Guignol at the Courtyard Theatre

2011-11-06T12:37:00.001-08:00

The centrepiece of the London Horror Festival is Revenge of the Grand Guignol, a series of four vignettes inspired by the plays of the infamous Parisian Theatre and, in particular, by the work of the Grand Guignol playwright André de Lord.

The first piece, The Laboratory of Hallucinations, is the most explicitly linked to the French original. In an isolated clinic, a scientist is conducting brain experiments on terminal patients, tapping their frontal lobes, tinkering with their internal machinery. His wife decides she can no longer stand to stay with him, to be menaced and threatened, to listen to the screams emanating from the basement, so along with her somewhat unreliable lover she plots her escape. It takes a while – perhaps too long – for the premise to be established, but the piece eventually comes together, combining a campy Hammer quality with a lick of David Cronenberg-esque unpleasantness, but while this was the most faithful adaptation it was also the weakest; it did, however, serve as an interesting counterpoint to the pieces that followed.

By contrast, the second play, Stewart Pringle’s As Ye Sow, is the most successful of the four. An elderly man (a well-pitched performance by Jeffrey Mayhew) is visited by his daughter in the care home where he now resides, having been in decline since his wife’s disappearance eight years ago. His daughter has a scheme to remedy their financial worries, but when she explains it to her father he becomes increasingly fretful and upset. Elegantly blending elements of J-Horror – technology offers no solace here, the television and the radio are not your friends – with domestic drama, the piece contains some proper jolts but it’s the small details, the things half-glimpsed and half-heard, which really unnerve.

The third piece, Hero, sees de Lorde’s 1902 play Au Téléphone updated to the age of Skype. A medical student conducts a web-cam conversation with his girlfriend who is halfway across the world, working as a teacher in Russia. The student (nicely played by James Utechin), we eventually learn, is concealing another woman in his room, and what begins as the most light-hearted play of the night, soon begins to wrong-foot its audience; the initial jokiness falls away in favour of a drawn out, stark conclusion. Though Tom Richards’ update introduces a visual component and thereby opens up what was originally one-sided and left to the imagination, it doesn’t diminish its effectiveness – in fact it feels very much in keeping with the original’s suggestion that the devices designed to connect people can end up emphasising the distance between them.

The Blind Women, the final part of the varied quartet, has an air of Ballardian disconnect. It’s ostensibly set during the Blitz, but could easily be set during some future conflict; it has a floating, unsteady quality which is only enhanced by the harsh, jarring industrial sound effects. A young woman comes to work at a wartime munitions factory staffed predominantly by blind women where she immediately triggers the resentment of Greta (a menacing Scarlet Sweeney), a woman hardened, scarred, and more than a little unhinged. It’s the most overtly horrific of the four plays but interestingly, despite the escalating tension created by the proliferation of sharp things, it’s not as effective as the previous two pieces.

The production as a whole has a pleasing tonal variety, though possibly more could have been done to compensate for the lengthy set changes. And, in lieu of a David Warner or a Robert Powell figure to knit everything together, some form of title card might have better helped to shape things, to mark out the lines between each separate play. But, these small concerns aside, what impresses most of all about the production is its avoidance of cheap laughs and easy scares in favour of a focus on the psychology of horror, and the way in which the most successful of the plays here manage to tap into contemporary fears while still honouring their Grand Guignol origins.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Ché Walker

2011-11-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

My interview with actor, playwright and director, Ché Walker, about directing John Patrick Shanley's two-hander, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, is now up on Exeunt. We talked about his being a 'rehearsal room baby' and the challenges and pleasures of directing in a space like The Vault at Southwark Playhouse. You can read the full interview here.

Earthquakes in London at Richmond Theatre

2011-10-31T09:54:00.000-07:00

As Mike Bartlett’s 13 opens at the National Theatre, this earlier foray into the apocalyptic and multi-stranded is currently on a UK tour. Earthquakes in London is a huge, sprawling play, both in time and scope, a cocktail of stylistic devices and narrative possibilities.

The snaking staging and immersive nature of Rupert Goold’s original production has been flat-packed for a proscenium stage by tour director Caroline Steinbeis, but it still throbs with energy. Music permeates the piece; there is a burlesque sequence, a chorus line of cloned Sloanes in black sunglasses and some spirited drunken dancing to Arcade Fire.

Bartlett’s play has a kaleidoscopic quality and the story only gradually comes into focus; the connections between the characters are revealed gradually, scene by scene. At the centre of the play are three sisters: Sarah, the eldest, is a Liberal Democrat minister; Freya is lonely, heavily pregnant, and grappling with her fears about brining another life into a broken world; while the youngest, Jasmine, is unanchored in every sense – she has recently been kicked out of university and feels increasingly estranged from her family and surroundings, swigging Ouzo from the bottle in an effort to blot things out. The sisters’ climatologist father abandoned them years ago after their mother’s death leaving Sarah to raise Freya and Jasmine alone; he now lives an equally isolated life in a remote part of Scotland, convinced the world is on the brink of imminent environmental collapse.

Occasionally the characterisation veers close to formula. This is particularly true of the character of Tom, a student protestor whose family in Eritrea are dealing with the tangible effects of climate change. He is the polar opposite of Jasmine, whose half-baked piece of protest performance art seems like a childish attempt to get her older sister’s attention rather than anything more reasoned. Tom’s anger seems justified but it walks hand in hand with a rather sniffy sense of self-righteousness; his fury sings out yet his methods are underhand. As characters they seem too carefully fixed at different ends of the apathy/engagement scale.

The character of Lib Dem Minister Sarah is more intriguing. A woman in a senior role in government with a slightly rocky home life, her principles being slowly eroded, she could so easily have been a caricature but in Bartlett’s hands she is a shaded creation, confident and capable in the political arena yet not devoid of warmth or humour, qualities only enhanced by Tracy-Ann Oberman’s well-judged performance.

Having established this complex and engaging web of characters and stories, the play becomes even more ambitious in its aims, sending out feelers into the future, dabbling in dream sequence and origin myth, a quasi-Biblical reboot of a broken world. For all its audacity it doesn’t quite come off. The play works better as a pluralised portrait of contemporary unease, the growing tide of anxiety, the groping for a solution. This is echoed in the choreography, which is often jagged and robotic. From the identikit Hampstead housewives to the department stores sales assistant who matches her make up to the store’s lighting scheme, the play is stuffed with automatons, consumers, cogs in a machine on the verge of crashing, fussing over their Fair Trade ‘good coffee’ as the world collapses around them.

One suspects that some of the production’s visual originality is reduced by being forced into a more conventional space: seven people frugging in neon wigs does not a wild party make, particularly when framed by a proscenium, and the revolve is decidedly arthritic, audibly wheezing and creaking as it turns. And while the thrust and ambition of Bartlett’s writing is undimmed, little can disguise the fact that the play starts to unravel well before the end.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Terror 2011 at Soho Theatre

2011-10-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

Terror isn’t quite the word. Disquieting? Yes, perhaps. Creepy? In places. This collection of short plays doesn't really come close to creating genuine terror in its audience, but then nor does it seem to be trying to: it seems to prize the nervous, slightly grossed out chuckle more highly than the scream of real dread and distress.

This peripatetic annual celebration of the macabre and unsettling, last seen at Southwark Playhouse, has been rehomed in Soho Theatre’s basement cabaret space and this relocation seems to have informed the production as a whole because the musical interludes are given almost as much time and room as the plays themselves. The songs, co-written by Desmond O’Connor and Cabaret Whore, Sarah-Louise Young, are spectacularly off-colour: a country and western ditty about abortion, a ballad about anorexics in love. The resulting laughter is often halting and awkward, slow to flow, arriving in guilty little bursts. But by addressing and involving the audience, the songs knit together a production that might otherwise have felt too tonally choppy, too disparate in approach and execution.

Of all the playwrights on the bill, Lucy Kirkwood has taken this merging of music and theatre furthest. Her contribution to the evening is a piece of burlesque, conceived with performer Eleanor Buchan, in which a be-tasselled dancer falls under her own dark spell. It juxtaposes a jokey, nod-wink style with something distinctly icky but doesn’t really leave itself anywhere to go once the premise has been established.

The opening piece, Dave Florez’s The Waiting Mortuary, is similarly stuck. Two nineteenth century doctors debate whether the body laid out on the slab before them has actually expired. The tone of the play – more of a sketch really – is weirdly pitched, a pastiche that seems unsure quite how seriously it wants the audience to take it. Carl Grose’s comic verse monologue, Wormy Close, performed by Amanda Lawrence achieves a far better balance between the horrible and the comic. It’s a silly but endearing piece, a kind of goryJackanory that benefits from Lawrence’s strong sense of timing and delivery. Tom Holloway’s play, If I Stay I Would Only Be in Your Way, is a two-hander that owes a debt to Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters. It’s more genuinely unsettling but it over-plays its hand. There’s something to be said for taking something beyond what appears to be its natural end point and stretching it further than good sense or taste might dictate, but it’s not a gamble that quite pays off, and the resulting laughter is fitful and diminishing.

The most unnerving piece of the night, and also the most successful, is Jack Thorne’s The Gong. Thorne is a writer who knows how to create tension, who understands how to feed information to his audience in the most potent way possible before confirming their worst fears. A torch-lit Ciaran Kellgren stalks around the room, smoking intensely as he recounts his experience of being working class at Cambridge University, and the lengths he will go to fit in, to prove he belongs. It’s a jarring and unpleasant piece, and one that achieves in words what the other plays never quite manage even with all their splatter and seepage and shrieking.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Royal & Derngate, Northampton

2011-10-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

The Duke of Milan strides round the stage in a pair of be-ribboned PVC knee boots, his hands sheathed in fingerless black leather gloves. This is a Milan of flashbulbs and high fashion overseen by a Karl Lagerfeld-esque colossus, the kind a man who tweezes sushi into his mouth while barking at hapless underlings. Music pounds and bodies writhe and somewhere beneath the din and the flicker there is a trace of Shakespeare.

There’s a sense of disconnect to Matthew Dunster’s new production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a piece made in collaboration with RashDash. Dunster is clearly enamoured with the company – after seeing their work at the Edinburgh Fringe, he was determined to create something with them – but while many of their most appealing traits, their energy, their physicality, have made their way into this broad reworking of Shakespeare’s early comedy, so have some of the company’s limitations, the messiness of intention, and, chiefly, the way in which they knit together – or rather frequently fail to – the text with the choreography.

There were similar issues with RashDash’s previous pieces, Another Someone and Scary Gorgeous. The imaginative physical sequences always seemed to sit above and apart from the narrative – and the same is true here; only when working with an established text, rather than a piece of their own devising, it feels all the more marked.

The production is lively and bright, musical and colourful, but there’s often a sense that the words are secondary to the visuals. RashDash’s Abbi Greenland and Helen Goalen play, respectively, Julia, Proteus’ homely Veronese sweetheart, and Sylvia, the glamorous daughter of the Milanese Duke; while Julia flutters over her lover’s every letter, Sylvia is the pouting, strutting object of much male attention and fascination, a woman on a – literal – pedestal, with her near-naked image splashed across banners.

In comparison to the throb and debauchery of Milan, Verona is depicted as suburban and small fry, a town populated by beaming kids in well-pressed khakis; in the over-stretched opening scene, the titular two gentlemen brandish guitars and sing a peppy song about seeking fortune and freedom elsewhere. There’s wit and invention in such devices, but a lack of subtlety, the point is forced home, the comparisons are laboured. There are long periods given over to music and movement where no one speaks a word of verse, and there’s an adolescent quality to some of the humour, a seeming belief that all this cussing and snorting and stripping is more daring than it is.

Clemmie Sveaas plays Proteus’ inept servant, Launce, as an escapee from Ugly Betty toting a plastic lapdog in a designer handbag, but her scenes soon start to grate and this is before she ends up relieving herself in a plastic cup. By making this clownish secondary character female and by focusing the audience’s attentions firmly on Julia and Sylvia over the various gentlemen, the production seems to be tugging in an interesting direction, but this is neither a fully feminised or feminist account of the text and some of the choices seem to have been made for visual appeal rather than to make a particular point.

In fact there seems to be two conflicting desires at work here. On one hand it feels like an attempt to stage a frothy homage to the play, in the vein of Ten Things I Hate About You or Clueless, and in these moments the text feels like an obstacle. This is frustrating, as some of the more successful episodes come when the background noise subsides and the words are given room. This is most evident in the morally knotty final scenes when Sylvia is threatened with rape and then seemingly bartered; Dunster’s production plays up the sinister implications of this transaction, but then undoes the power of these closing moments by ending on a song and giving the women back their voices.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Tena Štivičić.

2011-10-14T07:56:00.000-07:00

My interview with Croatian playwright, Tena Štivičić, about her latest play Invisible, a co-production with the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich, is now up on Exeunt. We discussed the idea of migration as theme and as context and she talked about her work for the Ulysses Theatre on the Croatian Island of Brijuni. You can read the full interview here.

The Playboy of the Western World at the Old Vic

2011-10-06T06:37:00.000-07:00

When J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World was first performed in Dublin in 1907, the audience exploded over its moral murkiness and its perceived ridicule of Irish village life, with particular ire reserved for the very notion of Mayo woman parading in their shifts, something which is referenced in the text but not actually shown.

The play is now considered Synge’s masterpiece and fully cemented in the canon of 20thcentury Irish drama, a thing to be revered and handled with due care. So it’s difficult to make that leap back in time, to fully grasp what so inflamed its original audience, causing them to riot in the stalls; John Crowley’s production for the Old Vic does little to help bridge that gap for, though undeniably lively, it’s distinctly polished in tone, overly polite.

Former Misfit Robert Sheehan, here making his stage debut, plays the young interloper, Christy Mahon, who arrives breathless and footsore at a Mayo shebeen late at night and immediately starts to sweet-talk the locals. When he first arrives, he’s a hunched and diminished figure, ‘destroyed by walking’ but the minute he lets slip that he’s killed his bully of a ‘da’, delivering a fatal blow that near enough split the man down the middle, then the community starts to look at him differently. Sheehan’s physicality reflects this change; gradually he uncurls and unfurls, like a flower turning to face the sun. When he moves, he’s like a gangly marionette, oddly jointed and long of limb; though Sheehan is probably too pretty for the role, his awkward way of holding himself, his crab-like, wary stance, goes some way to overcome this.

Christy suddenly goes from being a nonentity to a man anointed with the sparkle of scandal. Instead of condemning him for his actions, the local folk seem excited by his story. He is a like a star in their midst, white knight and rock god rolled into one, and the source of much female adulation. The publican’s daughter Pegeen Mike takes an instant shine to him, but she has to compete for his affections with the predatory Widow Quinn. Christy can’t quite believe his luck; he talks with increasing rapidity and energy, as if he’s worried the spell will be broken if he ever shuts up.

Sheehan is somewhat cowed by the force of the two female leads. As the volatile Pegeen, Ruth Negga almost visibly glitters; there is heat in her gaze but also metal, and she is not a woman you would want to cross. The same can be said of Niamh Cusack, as the Widow Quinn; she fixes her sights on Christy and is adept at steering the situation in an attempt to get her way. Compared to the sodden, quaking Mayo menfolk, these two make a formidable pair.

Scott Pask’s detailed set consists of a rotating two-room shack, a stone walled collage of greys and browns with a string of laundry slung to its side – grinding rural poverty lavishly and expensively recreated. A clutch of villagers with fiddles and accordions set off each scene and provide bridging music as the house slowly twists and slides into place.

The way the play blends the comic with slivers of the macabre, its tectonic shift from the light-hearted to the unsettling, now seems almost too commonplace to be worthy of comment, but Synge was particularly revolutionary in this regard and his influence can be seen everywhere, in the work of Martin McDonagh, and in the gentle (and not so gentle) mockery of Father Ted. This revolutionary quality – and the lyrical brilliance of the language, its glorious musicality – is evoked by Crowley’s production without ever being completely convincing. Everything about it is very nice, both to look at and to listen to, but there’s something missing from its middle, the vital thump of a heart.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Me, Myself and Miss Gibbs at Camden People's Theatre

2011-09-26T07:06:00.000-07:00

Francesca Millican-Slater is an inadvertent detective. The discovery in a Totnes junk shop of a postcard bearing an enigmatic message which was sent in 1910 to a Miss L Gibbs of Southwark kick-started a process of investigation that was to last a number of years. During this time Millican-Slater combed through census data and various archives until she gradually narrowed the gap between herself and Miss Gibbs.

The resulting show is as much, if not more, concerned with the directions in which her research takes her than with the mystery of the postcard itself. Millican-Slater attacks her project in a manner that borders on the obsessive, interspersing her telling of the story with video recordings of her younger self responding to each small new discovery. She starts to think of Miss Gibbs as, in some ways, her own, forming an emotional connection between herself and this young woman who lived a century ago, a bond which becomes increasingly evident in her voice as she describes the process of historical digging, particularly in the tender, caring way she talks about Miss Gibbs and her family.

The stage is scattered with the debris of Millican-Slater’s investigation – a quilting of train tickets, maps, and photographs – and, as she speaks, she lays each newly unearthed document and certificate in a line on the floor at her feet, a visual representation of the trail of discovery, the piecing together of the past. She has a chatty, open and engaging performance style, which is reflected in the way the audience’s discussions about her discoveries continue long after the piece has come to an end.

Though Millican-Slater was only able to discover the bare bones of Miss Gibbs’ existence – the births, marriages and deaths – this is enough for a loose-lined portrait of the person, and the world in which she lived, to start to take shape. The obvious point of reference for an exercise like this is the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? and the resultant mania for genealogy, though what makes the piece all the more interesting is Millican-Slater’s decision not to delve around in her own family’s past. There is a sense of serendipity in the way the postcard first spoke to her and demanded that its story be told, but she’s also careful to interrogate her own motivations in making this show; she remains both aware and wary of turning Miss Gibbs’ life into “her own personal soap opera.”

There’s also a thread of nostalgia running through the show about the way our relationship with the past is changing; the internet is making raw data more accessible but it is also making the process of research less personal, less hands-on, and dulling the joy of the chance discovery, the beautiful coincidence.

In the end Miss Gibbs and her postcard are just the seeds in a piece about what it is to be remembered and to be missed, about the need to leave our own particular print on this world and on the people in it while we are able. By this reckoning, though long dead, Miss Gibbs still exists in the context of Millican-Slater’s show and her story will now be spread further still, contained in the memories of those who have seen it.

Reviewed for Exeunt

When Did You Last See My Mother? at Trafalgar Studios

2011-09-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

Ian is eighteen years old but conducts himself with the air of one who’s lived longer and experienced more of the world. He’s all talk, an adolescent raconteur, a verbal volcano in a herringbone tank top and National Health spectacles. But beneath the precocity, the intellectual self-confidence, he’s manipulative and emotionally frozen, incapable of gauging the consequences of his behaviour on others.

Christopher Hampton’s debut play was written in 1964 when he was also just eighteen. The play was picked up by the agent Peggy Ramsey and ended up being staged by the Royal Court when Hampton was still only twenty. Hampton’s writing is very astute about what it is to be young and arrogant and confident of your own charisma but also utterly wrapped up in your own wants. Yet, for all its assurance, the play also shares some of the characteristics of its young lead: it has a tendency to show off and displays a taste for melodrama.

The character of Ian, the public school educated orphan lusting after his flatmate Jimmy, is a particularly difficult one to pull off. His behaviour at times is vile and brattish; he becomes particularly waspish when faced with the girl Jimmy has a bit of a thing for, his attitude tipping towards the misogynistic, and he seems to really relish pushing people’s buttons until they lose their tempers. But Harry Melling nails it. While he’s convincingly obnoxious and hateful, he’s also something of a charmer, a man of calculated attack. He’s always ‘on’, always playing to an audience, and even when a frustrated Jimmy leaves him to his own devices, he can’t help but provide a running commentary as he pootles round his empty bedsit. At times you want to slap his face, hard and repeatedly, at times you marvel at his chutzpah; he’s like a teenage version of Butley (a play it predates), Simon Gray’s self-sabotaging academic who takes great pains to push away the people foolish enough to care about him. Melling can be over-mannered as an actor – he was the shrillest thing on stage in Deborah Warner’s production of The School for Scandal, no easy task – but under Blanche McIntyre’s direction this is not the case. As Ian, he is, as McIntyre admits, an “utter fucker” at times, but he’s also completely compelling.

McIntyre nimbly negotiates the play’s line between humour and pathos. Her production is rooted very much in a particular time with Nicky Bunch’s detailed set recreating the boys’ 1960s bedsit, complete with Formica foldaway table, a buckled mustard-coloured sofa and a floral curtain concealing the kitchenette. While Ian’s rather too rapid seduction of Jimmy’s elegant mother isn’t entirely convincing, the openness of his feelings for Jimmy and the seeming easiness of his sexuality still feels exciting, especially given the era in which it’s set.

The final scene doesn’t quite deliver the emotional kick for which it seems designed; it feels far too neat and predictable a way to tie things up, the result of a young writer looking for a convenient escape route. But this doesn’t overshadow the production’s many strengths and the pleasing complexity of the central character, a role to which Melling brings the intensity it deserves. Sam Swainsbury, as Jimmy, the object of Ian’s attentions, provides a cool, easy-going and necessary counterpoint to Melling’s energy. And, as Jimmy’s mother, Mrs Evans, Abigail Cruttendan gracefully conveys a deep reservoir of suburban sadness and longing under her smartly-tailored coat and white gloves.

Reviewed for Exeunt

A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson at the Arts Theatre

2011-09-10T03:18:00.000-07:00

The last time this Out of Joint production was performed in London it was in Dr Johnson’s house in Gough Square, in the garret where he worked on his dictionary propped in his three-legged chair. In terms of intimacy and atmosphere it was always going to be difficult venue to equal, and it’s certainly not matched by the bland, boxy basement space of the Arts Theatre, which has a stale, sap-sucking quality all of its own.

Cribbed from Boswell’s Life of Johnson with a smattering from his London journals as well as from A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, this is potted Johnson, hopping between the key events in the life of the Lichfield-born lexicographer, essayist, clubman and failed dramatist. Johnson describes how he was taken to be touched by Queen Anne as a child to cure his scrofula; he talks about his curious marriage to Tetty, some twenty years his senior and the object of ridicule of many of Johnson’s friends, including his one-time student David Garrick; he dances around the various controversies surrounding his pension and bemoans the lack of trees in Scotland.

A familiar picture comes together of a man who was both hugely sociable, who found company and human connection absolutely fundamental to his life, but was also prone to melancholy, perennially black-dogged; a man of appetite, tics and habits, he could show great restraint but could not be moderate (he was known to drink 14 cups of tea in one sitting); he was also, of course, a man of great wit and learning, and Johnson’s aphorisms and definitions provide the largest laughs, with critics “a species of dung beetle” and the Scottish coming in for a particular kicking, and all the best known lines duly trotted out.

Boswell does his (inevitable) bit, acting as friend, antagonist, interrogator, as well as taking some predictable pleasure in recounting his amorous activities “in armour” on Westminster Bridge and his resultant bouts of venereal disease. The role of Boswell, along with the majority of the minor characters – King George III, a preening Sir Joshua Reynolds – were originally played by co-adaptor Russell Barr, but illness has forced him to pull out of the London run and so these parts are played – ably despite having to step in at such short notice – by Luke Griffin. Barr’s Jack Russell, Katie, who represented Johnson’s ageing, finicky cat, Hodge, in the original run is also no longer present.

The piece consists mainly of the two men either bickering or each relating their own strand of the story, speaking in turns. As Johnson, Ian Redford both looks and sounds the part; in his fizzy white wig, he closely resembles portraits of the man and he injects a measure of pathos into his recollections, a sense of emotional isolation, without over-egging things. A puzzling decision has been made to cast Trudie Styler as Hester Thrale, brewer’s wife, society hostess and the object of Johnson’s affections. Her eventual marriage to an Italian music master is presented as one of the major upsets of his life, but while Styler’s performance is fine, her appearance in the last twenty minutes does rather disrupt the dynamic of what has up until then been an engaging, if overly talky and rather flatly staged, two-hander.

Reviewed for Exeunt

TeZuKa at Sadler's Wells

2011-09-09T07:47:00.000-07:00

There are moments of astonishing intricacy and beauty sunk within this cluttered homage to the work of manga master Osamu Tezuka. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s multi-disciplinary piece is at times gloriously inventive but it also feels over-seasoned and tangled, squid-limbed.

Cherkaoui’s choreography merges animated sequences and live performance in a manner that brings to mind 1927′s The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, his dancers interacting with images created by Japanese video artist Taiki Ueda projected on the screen behind them. Scrolls spill from the ceiling and kanji are formed and then dissolve into rivers of ink. A group of musicians sit on a platform on one side performing Nitin Sawhney’s atmospheric score while a table sits at the very front of the stage on which artists materials are strewn.

The dancers adopt the personas of Tezuka’s characters: one jitters, shimmies and fizzes like Astro Boy in his tiny shorts and bright red boots, another dons the flowing jacket and silver mane of Black Jack, the mercenary surgeon. A semi-naked man grapples in a pseudo-sexual way with a priest, in an overt reminder that Tezuka’s work was not just cutesy stuff for kids, far from it; he was willing to engage with taboo subjects, like sexuality, in ways that are decidedly more Robert Crumb than Walt Disney.

There are echoes of Cherkaoui’s earlier work, Sutra, in the piece too, both in the figure of the fanboy, the cultural outsider looking in, and in the figure of director – or the artist in this case – actively controlling the performers’ movements from the side-lines: at one point a piece of paper becomes like a voodoo doll, with a dancer flapping and folding as the paper is wafted in the air beside him. Two of the Shaolin Monks from Sutra also reappear and engage in a striking martial arts sequence as a series of cartoon ‘pows’ fly across the screen behind them, eventually merging like microbes to form a placid, floating Buddha.

The piece at times gets mired in the need to explain itself; there are long spoken sequences in French with the surtitles awkwardly placed on monitors at the sides of the room. The audience ends up being tugged three ways – in the act of reading, listening and watching – and this proves frustrating after a while. Some of what we’re told, about bacterial communication, ‘quorom sensing’ and Japan’s capacity for renewal after nuclear and natural disaster, is fascinating, but there’s too much of it. Even if the piece eventually archly acknowledges this excess of exposition, it still doesn’t quite excuse it.

There is also a sense of the material being over-stretched; the majority of the memorable images come in the tauter first half. The pictographic roots of Japanese kanji and their natural evolution into manga are fluidly evoked: lines, becoming words becoming whole worlds. Calligraphy is a recurring theme, ink on white paper, the elegance and precision each brush stroke; yet by the end. the performers’ limbs are smeared with ink and the delicate scrolls have become roads on which to walk. The philosophy of Buddhism which permeated Tezuka’s work – the connectedness of all living things - is also explored through Cherkaoui’s choreography.

It’s the interlacing of animation with live performance that leaves the deepest impression. Witty, playful and impeccably timed, these sequences are the things the audience are most likely to remember. But as it stretches onwards the piece loses this playful quality and becomes more sombre in tone as columns of ink are shown collapsing in the wake of a great wave.

Reviewed for Exeunt

truth and reconciliation at the royal court

2011-09-06T08:24:00.000-07:00

The floor is blanketed in black. This fine covering, like volcanic sand, scorched earth, becomes increasingly mottled as it is disturbed by pacing feet, the white wood underneath shows through as the earth is churned.

The new play by debbie tucker green interlaces stories from some of the most brutal conflicts of recent years. These stories are set not during the conflicts themselves but in the aftermath, years blurred by uncertainty and unanswered questions. The play explores the search for resolution and the agony of not knowing what happened to your wife, your husband, your child: the absence of an ending, any ending.

Designer Lisa Marie Hall has laid out the space like a courtroom, with the audience circled around the edges on hard, wooden seats onto which names have been scratched, marks made. Dates and locations have also been etched in the wood of the walls, like make-shift tombstones. The play begins with a scene from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A family are made to wait – more waiting to add to all the years they’ve already waited. The mother refuses to sit; she will remain standing until she is acknowledged, until she is given something tangible.

The South African strand bookends the play but green also visits Zimbabwe Rwanda, Northern Ireland and Bosnia; the characters are, for the most part, nameless while the language is economical, elliptical, to the point of being repetitious. A recurring motif sees people discussing where to sit, when to sit, picking over the little details as their loss floods into the spaces between, in acknowledgement of the fact that there is only so much words can achieve.

The stories echo one another, emotional tension co-existing with the mundane. This repetition, this constant circling, is – by necessity – at times frustrating: the play is constantly shifting, pulling back, holding back, disinclined to settle. Yet occasionally it sharpens its focus, and everything becomes tauter, clearer. The South African mother, powerfully played by Pamela Nomvete, articulates the pain of waiting for so many long years to end up here, facing an empty chair. A volatile Northern Irish woman bristles at having to defend the actions of her son. A dead Rwandan man confronts the man who killed him, left his wife a widow, forces him to remember.

The images that persist are those of doggedness and determination in the face of silence, the need to keep going even if to find the truth – or a version of it – will mean encountering fresh pain. Two Serbian men appear to barter over who will admit to a war crime, as if the thing that matters most is that someone – anyone – accepts blame, someone holds up their hands (which felt particularly pertinent with Mladic and Hadzic now awaiting trial in The Hague).

Some of the threads are more developed than others, but this helps establish the universal nature of the situation in which these characters find themselves: one story blends into the next, and while some come close to resolution, others are left hanging, incomplete. Throughout the play, the spare language pulses and flutters, with a kind of insectile delicacy, but when it hits, it hits hard.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley at the Pleasance Courtyard

2011-08-31T06:32:00.000-07:00

Chris Goode’s solo show takes a familiar shape. It’s a comforting, coming-of-age narrative in which a young boy meets an outsider who helps him find his way in the world; it’s Stig of the Dump with jokes about Radiohead; it’s just lovely on very many levels.

Fourteen year old Shirley carries around a lot of baggage. For one thing, his parents’ have seen fit to give him a girl’s name – that doesn’t help; he’s besotted with the captain of his school’s cross-country running team, the stick-on plastic stars on his bedroom ceiling have never deigned to glow in the dark, and then there’s the case he keeps under his bed: a boxed promise, dwindling despite his best efforts to look after it, to keep it safe.

Things begin to look up for Shirley when he meets Wound Man, a ‘freelance social interventionist’ or, to put it more succinctly, a super hero. Wound Man is a walking version of one of those medical illustrations from the Middle Ages showing the various damages a body can receive in battle. Weaponry of all forms sprouts from his limbs: spears, maces, arrowheads, clubs; one hand dangles by a sinewy thread and he has a tendency to clank when he walks. He’s a human Swiss army knife in snazzy silver pants. His pain is external, overt, and people find they start to feel better merely by being in his presence.

Wound Man shows Shirley how to be brave, to grow, to cope with his grief and his sexuality but also to be open to the possibility of happiness and love in his life. It is an incredibly warm piece of storytelling, gentle in delivery, and surprisingly funny in places.

This is a smaller scale version of a show originally commissioned for the 2009 Queer Up North festival. The animation sequences described in previous outings are absent but the simple set still evokes the world of an adolescent boy via an apt fanning of X-Men comics, a Rubik’s cube, a handful of Asimov novels and some discarded socks.

Goode delivers the piece in true Jackanory fashion. He deepens his voice slightly when delivering Wound Man’s lines, but otherwise he tells his audience who said what rather than acting out the narrative. He’s an affable and engaging performer who manages to convey the story’s emotional shifts in an elegant, economical way, so that when he does let loose, when his delivery quickens, the audience are picked up and swept along with him. A central fantasy sequence which tells of a vast menagerie spilling through suburban streets is a prime an example of this. Goode becomes more excitable as the music picks up and the descriptions of the animals become sillier and surreal.

The piece, as a whole, is incredibly disarming and the manner of delivery is at times deceptive. Goode doesn’t appear to be doing all that much and yet the story exerts a considerable emotional hold: as a piece of writing it’s full of subtlety and unforced pathos, never straying into overt sentiment; as a piece of theatre, it’s also very effective, the kind of thing that makes people who don’t know each other exchange little smiles of wet-eyed delight as they collect their bags and jackets at the end.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: Opposition at Zoo Southside

2011-08-28T00:57:00.000-07:00

“Are you happy being Ed Milliband?” This is not a question with which I ever anticipated having to grapple; fortunately the process of ‘being Ed Milliband’, for the purposes of this show by the spoken word artist Hannah Silva, involved nothing more traumatic than the wearing of a name badge and the reading of a slogan at a chosen moment.

Silva’s ‘Little Political Speech Opera’ takes the form of a collage, a collection of slogans, stock phrases and spin. Through a process of cutting and splicing, looping and repetition, any residual meaning these words may have held soon seeps away, creating a semantic vacuum where everything is better, bigger, and bolder.

Silva, grey-suited and neck-tied, is already spouting words as we sit, a steady drip-drip of sound delivered with a forced smile: “spend, borrow, spend, borrow, tax, tax.” This act of deconstruction and morpheme-extraction ends up creating a Dadaist stream of banalities and absurdities – something akin to verbal bird-song – which Silva then takes one step further via the use of a loop pedal. Through a process of sonic layering, this lexical minestrone forms a backdrop over which she then recites poetry or plays the flute.

The piece fuses the words of Thatcher, Obama, Reagan, Churchill and Cameron with a dash of the BBC weather report. Any distinction between them, any dividing line, is soon blotted and lost. At one point she leads her audience in an extended episode of call-and-response. We bat slogans back and forth, again and again, until they are just noise, a vapida cappella chorus.

It’s all part of an increasingly dense thicket of words in which it seems that the more people speak, the less they have to say: the chirp and babble of Twitter, with its constant prompt of: ‘what’s happening?; the streaming of status updates; the stern remonstrations of the Sat-Nav: “U-turn, you-turn”. Silva’s not the first to pick and chip at political speechifying, the hollowness of spin, but rarely has it been done with such vigour. Her performance is also physically intricate: she jerks and twitches, grins and grimaces; at times it’s like watching a kind of Tourettian body-popper at work.

Though there’s a – perhaps inevitable, given the nature of the piece – slack patch in the middle of things, Silva succeeds in both creating an inventive and arresting piece of performance and in making the audience actively think about language, its uses and misuses, the potency of words.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: Watch Me Fall at Summerhall

2011-08-24T14:54:00.000-07:00

Chuck Yeager, the test pilot and American aviation legend who first broke the sound barrier, is encapsulated in the final pages of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff as a flaming figure dropping from the sky, a human comet with a tail of silk, suckered by gravity. Ejected from a jet travelling at twice the speed of sound, his parachute became entangled in his ejector seat and his face started to melt as he fell. Wolfe’s ‘master of the sky’ had been brought down to earth, but he survived to fly again and one of the book’s abiding images is of this molten man striding across the sand, unvanquished.

Men like Yeager, and daredevil stuntman Evel Knieval, provide the inspiration behind Action Hero’s Watch Me Fall. The company are interested in what it is to strive, to rise, to fail, to fall; to launch oneself into the unknown, come through the other side, broken, bloody, scarred, and then do it all over again. A black track has been etched in the floor of the Summerhall Dissecting Room and on this track James Stenhouse and Gemma Paintin prepare to recreate Knievel’s Caesar Palace fountain jump with just a child’s bike, a crash helmet and a plentiful supply of Coca-Cola. The stunt itself is almost an afterthought; the piece exists in the hype, the build, the whoop and roar of the crowd. She wears a star-spangled dress, he’s clad in a red T-shirt and jeans; together they work the audience, charging them up, stoking the sense of anticipation, that we are about to witness An Event.

A number of audience members have already been given disposable cameras by this point, with which to record proceedings and the room is filled with the intermittent click and flare of their bulbs, paparazzi starbursts, pin-pricks of white light. Stenhouse begins by setting his helmet on fire before batting the air with his hands to whip up the crowd. He holds aloft two bottles of Coca-Cola, like plastic trophies, or a pair of liquid dumbbells, his arm muscles taught in a show of strength. He then proceeds to pour the contents down Paintin’s throat, the wet stuff spilling down her front, staining her dress, gagging her, stinging her eyes. It rapidly ceases to be funny, becomes sickly and unsettling, a reminder that where there is an almost foolhardy level of courage and bravado there is also often a corresponding selfishness and disregard; in this way the piece chimes with that other memorable scene from Wolfe’s book, the opening tableau of waiting wives, flinching at every phone-call, every knock at the door; these are the women left to lip-bite on the sidelines as their husbands hurl themselves into the sky, again and again and again.

It’s this impulse, this compulsion, to keep taking leaps that Action Hero is exploring. That and the messy edges of spectacle, the hollow echo beneath the buzz of the crowd; if the whole thing fizzles slightly before its 50 minutes is up, it’s kind of apt.

Finally Stenhouse takes up his tiny bike and rides, hits the ramp, tips, tumbles, sprawls. It’s abrupt, clumsy: over. And while he doesn’t soar, nor does he melt.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: Skittles at the Pleasance Courtyard

2011-08-24T03:34:00.000-07:00

Richard Marsh’s solo show is a very funny falling-in-and-out-of-love-story that’s more sweet than it is bitter, though it’s a fair bit of both. Marsh tells the story of ‘Richard’, a man who looks a lot like him, and who falls hopelessly in love and want and need with a girl called Siobhan, who has the two vital attributes he looks for in a woman, being someone who is both beautiful and who also finds him funny.

The piece charts the path of their relationship; they begin by sharing first Silk Cuts then Skittles on the chilly steps outside the office where they both work. Eventually he builds up the confidence to make a move and very soon they are moving in together, camping out on the floor of a cramped unfurnished flat. They dash towards marriage with almost unseemly haste and all too quickly find themselves in the midst of a cinematic American honeymoon, facing the open road together with a second-hand car rainbow-armoured with the titular sweet. But as they light out for the Grand Canyon, Thelma-and-Louising across vast American plains, reality intrudes on their Hollywood moment.

It turns out the US is a pretty big place and that long hours in a hot car will test any relationship, especially one where the couple have yet to fully discover each other’s faults and kinks and tickles. No vibrating roadside motel bed can halt the fall. The way Marsh evokes the gradual erosion of their bliss is deftly handled, the subtle shifts, the slow hardening. The piece becomes a break up story, a verbal essay in the unfolding of hope. Love does not find a way, it ebbs away, evaporates into the hot desert night.

Marsh’s story is told in a poetic stream, his rhymes are rapid and punchy though often economical; he doesn’t luxuriate in lexical possibility, rather the rhythm is the thing, the zing of the delivery, the ding-ding-ding that drives the piece along. The writing is witty – you find yourself laughing both at and with ‘Richard’ – but it’s also often touching and raw, increasingly so as the piece progresses and the Skittles start to moulder and rot.

The ending is an exercise in understated poignancy, a gentle act of looking forward and an acknowledgement that most hurt fades with time. Marsh is a genial performer, comfortable with an audience and confident in his delivery, but the writing is at times lacking in textural variety, the quick, snippy rhythm could stand to be broken up. But his grasp of narrative compensates for this, the story holds tightly onto its audience at the end. And there are free sweets. Free sweets salve all.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

2011-08-23T16:42:00.000-07:00

In Haruki Murikami’s fiction a sense of menace often pervades the mundane and the most familiar things have the capacity to disturb and unsettle, to scratch like a cat. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Toru Okada is searching. Both his wife and his moggy have vanished from his life; his days are spent hazily, folding laundry in his flat, waiting.

Many of Murikami’s novels contain a detective element, a puzzle to be solved. But just as in the work of Raymond Chandler, the thing being searched for is often secondary, and the process of investigation and exploration takes precedence. Toru is a reluctant protagonist in the classic Chandleresque tradition, stumbling through his own story, encountering sinister figures and truanting schoolgirls, malevolent dream police, half-seen shadows, and a trace of the woman he thought his wife was.

Film producer Stephen Earnhart’s adaptation has taken seven years to bring to the stage; he even spent time living in Japan, but still it struggles – perhaps unavoidably – to condense this hefty, 600+ page novel, to evoke its many layers. The production is foggy and tangled with an episodic choppiness, and it feels too obviously like a thing abridged, reduced. That is not to say it is without beauty or power but the piece is permeated by a sense of disconnect. In some ways this is fitting – syncing with the often dream-like, distant quality of the novel – but it’s too pervasive; the constant shifting in tone becomes tiring and the technical elements of the production never seem entirely integrated.

Performed both in English and Japanese, with surtitles on screens at the side of the stage, this should be the very essence of this year’s EIF, an exercise in cross-cultural conversation and exploration, and yet it contrives to strand itself in between two worlds. The production at times feels like a grab-bag of Japanese cultural markers – bunraku puppetry, butoh-inspired modes of movement, shrill, garish television shows in which people are humiliated, an unsubtle nod to the Ringu films – everything heaped in together.

The tentative friendship between Toru and May Kasahara, the smart schoolgirl with a sly, witty tongue, suffers most. In Earnhart’s version she is brattish and stroppy and it’s hard to fathom why James Yaegashi’s amiable Toru puts up with her. There’s no obligation for a stage adaptation to be slavish to its source, but this curtailed version of the text doesn’t fully satisfy on theatrical terms either. There are individual moments that dazzle, flashes of Lynchian nightmare and unexpected sparks of comedy, but they stand apart from one another. Despite the stacking of scenes, signs, silhouettes, the piece as a whole is often lacking in atmosphere; all the technical elements are in place, but everything remains rather flat and I was left wondering what you’d make of it if you had no prior knowledge of the novel.

The one aspect of the production that does penetrate, that does pierce, is the music, performed live by Bora Yoon in a striking black-feathered headdress. She creates a hypnotic soundscape, all lapping waves and metallic clangs, the filigree drip of water being poured into a bowl, and it is this music that provides the pulse that rest of the production so often sadly lacks.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: Whistle at Zoo

2011-08-22T05:23:00.000-07:00

This solo show by poet Martin Figura is astonishing. It’s astonishing not because of its staging, which is very still and simple, but by virtue of the story Figura tells – when he was just nine years old, his father killed his mother – and the way he chooses to tell it.

Whistle is a collection of poems, performed in a matter-of-fact style, about Figura’s family and childhood. This awful shadow of his mother’s death is the heart of the piece and yet at the same time it is part of a broader story. Figura’s father came from Silesia to the UK following the Second World War, having served for a short time in the German army. In this country he met and married Figura’s mother, young and besotted, always immaculately dresses, a wearer of white gloves. They were happy for some time but his father became increasingly ill and paranoid, suspicious of everything and everyone.

The piece is full of details, picked out by a poet’s eye: the marble-barrelled pens bought to fill school pencil-cases, the Cliff Richard quiffs of his boyhood, the smell of pickled cabbage and Polish sausage, the women in black who flocked round him like birds on a visit to his father’s homeland. The writing also marks itself out by the things omitted. Figura steers purposefully away from extremes of emotion; he shares his story but leaves things unsaid, untold. The poems are left to do their work, a boy’s world vanishes. We glimpse Figura and his sister floating ‘equidistant, not just from the walls, but the floor and ceiling too’, orbited by relatives and the inevitable priest. We glimpse a car pulling, peeling away from the pavement, a childhood being left behind.

An old Box Brownie camera sits on a table one side of the stage and a series of still images are projected on the other: toothy, gleaming family photographs, a Man from UNCLE membership card and, of course, the newspaper headlines, his father’s face stark in black and white. All that is left of the smiling time is celluloid, sepia, coiled in a film canister: the fireplace his father built, the easy chair, a gloved hand on a shoulder.

Figura would later be abandoned once more by relatives and brought up within the care system. But this is not a piece about blame, nor is it one conceived in anger – though there are inevitable traces of pain. It’s an elegant account of a family’s history, the stories behind the snapshots, the shadows that shape a life, painted in words and frozen images, memory given voice.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: Translunar Paradise at the Pleasance Dome

2011-08-16T17:18:00.000-07:00

Theatre Ad Infinitum’s incredibly touching piece of mime theatre is an exercise in delicacy. It wordlessly journeys through the lives of two people, through all the stages of their marriage, from young love to loss in old age.

The piece is beautifully executed, full of precise and well-judged visual detail. There’s elegance in the piece’s economy, in the way it uses gesture and repeated motifs to convey the story of a whole life lived. The performers hold masks to their faces when playing the older versions of their characters; they waltz with these masks, putting them on and removing them again, as if in a tangle of memories, the past bleeding into the present – the poignancy of one man looking back.

The wordless nature of the piece means that only extremes of emotion are easily conveyed, the highs and the lows, while the muddy middle ground of marriage tends to get ignored. Instead they present a collage of moments of great joy mixed with moments of anguish and trauma: the loss of a child, the departure of the husband to war. The performances are wonderful to watch, full of subtly and warmth. George Mann (who also directs) and Deborah Pugh are both superb, both in the precise, slightly stylised nature of their movements and in the way they convey real affection and connection between the couple. The look of the piece, with the masks and the minimal colour palette, is one of European animation – it has a stop motion quality. Kim Heron’s music, making uses of both vocals and accordion, give the play its pulse, a drifting, time shifting grace.

The production is at times a little too obvious, tugging on the heart-strings with more force than is perhaps necessary, but it’s also full of genuinely moving moments: the old man frozen in mourning, facing life alone after all these years. The production has an elegant, dream-like quality that is almost hypnotic; the repetitions of the piece, the recurring steps, become soothing, familiar – it’s as if you are entering a half-way world where this couple are forever engaged in the act of parting. Needless to say there was quite a lot of quiet sobbing in the audience by the time the piece came to an end.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: 2401 Objects at the Pleasance Courtyard

2011-08-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

Analogue’s latest production invites its audience to think about memory, about how and what we remember, the complex process of sifting and retrieval that takes places, and what happens when the brain fails to function as it should. 2401 Objects tells the story of Patient HM, one of the most famous case studies in neurology. HM’s brain has been sliced ad preserved for research purposes; it survives as a series of slices and has furthered the understanding of the relationship between the physical structure of the brain and the way we store memories.

Just as Rebecca Skloot’s recent book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, told the human story behind the HeLa cell line, Analogue tell the story of Henry Molaison, a young American man whose epilepsy led him to undergo experimental brain surgery. The production begins with the recorded voice of Dr Jacopo Annese, a neuroscientist at the Brain Observatory. Following this brief introduction, we are introduced to two Molaisons. Firstly we see him as an old man, institutionalised, capable of completing crosswords, but completely unable to recall a conversation he had five minutes earlier; later we see him as a younger man, shyly engaging in conversation with his neighbour’s daughter.

The young Molaison suffered from several severe seizures a day and his debilitating epilepsy prevented him from holding down a job or moving out of the family home. In 1953 he underwent radical brain surgery, with an ambitious surgeon removing his hippocampi (which are strikingly described as resembling two sea horses). While the surgery did succeed in ridding him of his epilepsy, it also prevented him from forming new memories – and though it didn’t affect his procedural memory, it meant he was essentially trapped in the past. The reality of his situation is poignantly evoked through scenes in which the elderly Molaison, engagingly played by Pieter Lawman, interacts with his patient young nurse. He repeatedly recalls an event from his youth and she listens, each time responding as if hearing it afresh. Molaison does not think of himself as old, and is baffled by his reflection; he also has no recollection of his mother’s death and each time he realises his loss, he is distressed.

Analogue’s use of multimedia techniques, merging video and live performance, is more successful here than in their previous show, Beachy Head. Images are projected on a raised transparent screen and the cast are able to stand both behind and in front of these projections; there is also a fabric strip at the bottom of this screen, under which the performers frequently duck and tumble, vanishing into the black. The piece is nicely played, particularly by Lawman but also by Sebastien Lawson as both Dr Annese and the young Henry, and Melody Grove as both Molaison’s nurse and mother. While it ends a little abruptly, the production succeeds in making its audience pause to consider their internal workings, the mechanics of memory, and to appreciate Molaison’s unique contribution to medical research.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: Kalagora at Zoo Roxy

2011-08-08T12:53:00.000-07:00

Kalagora is a hymn to cities, to their richness, their colour, their noise, sprawl and energy, and to the process of cultural merging, mixing and melting that categorises the urban experience.

Poet Siddhartha Bose has lived in three of the biggest, most distinctive cities in the world. Born in Mumbai, he spent several years in New York before moving to London. His show is a jazz-inflected poetic monologue exploring this journey, his words fused with music and images. In the city of that size you can lose yourself, find yourself, be someone else if you so wish. Bose’s show captures that heady urban experience, the taxi drivers and the rough sleepers, the shifting skies and the glitter of glass.

Kalagora is a Hindi word meaning black man/white man and Bose (or, at least, his onstage persona) explores how his urban existence has shaped him, how his identity is defined as much by the places in which he’s lived as by his race or religion. His story takes in charged encounters with airport officials, a boisterous millennium eve party in Manhattan, and what it means to be an illegal immigrant, paperless and under suspicion.

The audio-visual elements of the production enrich what could otherwise be a static experience. Pankaj Awasthi’s music is paired with filmed images of all three metropolises, a striking string of faces and places, the cinema of the city life, the traffic, the neon, the hum. Nor is Bose a stiff, still performer, a reciter, instead he makes the words come alive. His voice is resonant and versatile, switching between accents with ease; he’s also an engaging performer, confident and capable of conveying subtle shifts in emotion.

He has also published a book of poems on the same theme under the same title but this is not a straight-forward reading of those lines. Thought has been given to bringing out the theatrical aspect of the material, to make it work in a performance context: as Bose describes the chaos and clamour of Bombay, he draws a circle in vermilion sand on the floor; later, having landed in Manhattan, he inks a similar circle around his eye. Striking as the language often is there is a sense that still more could be done with this material, to lift and link these words, to sync the visual with the verbal, to condense the modern megapolis into a black box.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh: Mission Drift at the Traverse

2011-08-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

This is the fourth time that TEAM (the Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) have appeared on the Fringe. Their last show, Architecting, was a gloriously layered piece of theatre which stretched in many directions; ostensibly about the process of social repair following Hurricane Katrina, it used Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind as a window through which to explore American identity in the south, post-Civil War reconstruction and the emotional significance people attached to the built world.

This new piece sees them switch their gaze to the American west. Inspired by the story of Catalina and Joris Rapalje, a pair of Dutch teenage newly-weds who travelled on one of the first ship to take workers to what was then New Netherland. The real Joris became a successful Brooklyn magistrate and the father of eleven children; their descendants are now estimated at around a million and they have been labelled the Dutch American Adam and Eve – which is apt as here they become characters in a myth of origins, the parents of American capitalism. In TEAM’s version of their story the couple head out west, occasionally changing their names, but never aging, remaining eternal teenagers. Finally they end up in the desert, in the arid outlands of America, where they help raise a city from the sand.

The epic sweep of the piece is counter-balanced with a more intimate narrative. Joan is a cocktail waitress whose family have lived in Vegas for three generations. She loves the city; she is tied to it materially and emotionally and volunteers at the Neon Boneyard, the place where old Vegas signs are taken when they are no longer needed, a three acre collection of dead bulbs: ten-foot lettering, garish wedding chapel signage and a Cinderella slipper the size of a small house. But things are changing. The city, this “desert experiment” was, until recently, the fastest growing in the US, but this growth has tailed off in the current economic climate and Joan has just been laid off. She needs to get to grips with this new Vegas, toxic city, a place she wants to “kill in the face”; she needs to confront Catalina and Joris and make them face up to what they have made.

Music forms a huge part of the piece. Heather Christian’s Miss Atomic acts, as compere and narrator; she has an astonishingly rich voice, sometimes throaty and Joplin-esque, sometimes honey-coated and heavenly. Her songs drive the production; they stud it like mushroom clouds: “We’ll make millions here,” she drawls. Nick Vaughan’s scrappy set is a Douglas Coupland-esque landscape of lawn chairs, cocktails, fairy lights, tinsel-fringed trees and atomic glare – all that’s missing is the drained swimming pool. The band sits at the back of the stage besides Christian’s white baby grand.

The TEAM did on-the-ground research in Las Vegas and their collaborative process involved “bartering and argument”. The resulting production is tangled and thick with Vegas lore: Elvis, Frank, Sammy and The Sands (though there are some odd omissions; the Mafia don’t rate a mention). It’s more than a little chaotic in places, hyperactive and fidgety, but always compelling. At two hours without a break this is a long ride, but it’s one worth taking.

Reviewed for Exeunt

A Woman Killed With Kindness at the National Theatre

2011-07-27T09:34:00.000-07:00

Two households. Two women. Katie Mitchell’s new production of Thomas Heywood’s 1603 play splits the stage down the middle: on one side, there is an ancient family manor house and, on the other, an elegant early twentieth century home. This division allows for a process of mirroring, for moments of both harmony and discordance between the play’s two plot strands.

Heywood’s play begins on a joyous note, on the day of the wedding of John Frankford. But the celebratory spirit of these opening moments is soon diluted when his wife Anne embarks on an affair with Wendoll, a friend of her husband who has been invited to stay at their home and treat it - and its contents - as his own. The idea of women as property is made explicit in the secondary but more potent account of Sir Charles, the wealthy landowner imprisoned for his shooting a servant, who in order to free himself from mounting debts, offers up his sister, Susan, to a man she can’t abide.

Mitchell’s production continually contrasts these two women and their predicaments. The events have been transplanted from the early seventeenth century to 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when social structures were shifting. The Representation of the People Act had recently granted women over 30 the right to vote, but both of these women remain trapped by entrenched social codes, the need for female purity most pressing among them. Whiteness. The wedding gown takes on a toxic symbolism as Susan stands shrouded in lace awaiting the man Charles would have her give herself to and, on the night of her wedding, Anne’s white nightdress is tainted by her own blood, so it seems apt that, later, when her husband interrupts her in bed with Wendoll, she emerges from the room clad in turquoise silk. Heywood’s play offers little in the way of insight into why Anne gives herself so quickly to Wendoll but the walls of the Frankford home are pointedly hung with butterflies under glass. On the other side of the divide, the walls of the Mountford home are methodically stripped of their finery, of the oil paintings and the chandeliers, as their once grand family seat becomes little more than a decaying, chilly prison.

The stage space is actually split into four rather than two since both sides of Lizzie Clachan and Vicki Mortimer’s set are spread across two levels, each connected by a staircase, while Mitchell’s production plays with the vertical as much as the horizontal. Servants are forever flurrying up and down the stairs or gently ascending to the bedrooms above; in one striking moment, Susan, amid a blizzard of activity, walks slowly backwards up the stairs as if tugged by a cord. Visual paralleling also occurs between the upstairs and downstairs worlds: when Anne is in labour both Frankford and Wendoll rattle back and forth across the stage like fingers being impatiently run up and down the keys of a piano.

For all this visual intricacy, Mitchell sometimes seems to be sparring with Heywood’s play rather than dancing with it; a constant process of negotiation with the text seems to be at work. There’s wit here - when Frankford faces his wife over card table and they debate whether to play Hearts and Cheat – but the play is often merely functional, shoving its characters from point A to point B without giving much thought to the journey. It’s full of emotional lurches and leaps in plausibility and neither play nor production ever fully gets under Anne’s skin as a character, neither makes the audience grasp quite why this woman is so quick to hop into bed with Wendoll (Mitchell suggests that sex with Frankford is a brusque, abrupt affair but this feels like a tacked on explanation).

The production is better at painting the fall-out of Anne’s adultery, the pain Frankford inflicts through his stoic determination to drive his wife from her home and her children and the awful punishment she inflicts on them both as a result. There’s a continuing resonance to Anne’s decision to starve herself; a woman of appetite remains a suspect figure and self-denial is a kind of power, a means of taking control. Yet at times the production seems to be pushing too hard to make its point: the final hospital scene – which finally unites the two women’s stories – is as clinical as the space in which it is set, and an earlier scene in which Susan clutches a noose and contemplates escape, are blunt in execution and out of step with the production’s particular rhythms.

Of the performances, Paul Ready’s decent, bemused and ultimately shattered Frankford stands out, as does Sandy McDade, a still, drifting presence as Susan. But this is very much an ensemble piece, elegantly and intricately choreographed. Mitchell seems particularly interested in the relationship between servant and master, the bonds of dependence and affection, and there are always large numbers of bodies on stage, clearing dishes, serving drinks. Gawn Grainger’s turn as Frankford’s paternal, no-nonsense butler, Nicholas, provides a necessary note of warmth.

Amid the near-constant motion and the dramatic use of the domestic interior it’s the moments of connection that mark themselves out. The most memorable image, the one you are left with long after, is of these two women on either side of the wall picking out notes on the piano, briefly connecting with one another, before life spirals away from them.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Rattigan's Nijinsky at Chichester Festival Theatre

2011-07-27T05:25:00.001-07:00

There’s a process of weaving at work here. Nicholas Wright’s new play is inspired by a never-produced Terence Rattigan screenplay about the life – and loves – of Vaslav Nijinsky. Wright takes this unfilmed script – written in 1974 for the BBC but withdrawn by the playwright – and threads it with scenes from the Rattigan’s own life.

As the ageing playwright self-medicates in his suite at Claridge’s and considers his creative legacy, episodes from the Njinsky script invade his room. At one point the suite becomes a ballet class, flooded by young boys in white, while later on performers from the Ballet Russes glide and leap behind him. Reclining on his sofa while elegantly clutching a Sobranie, Rattigan also has a number of earnest, soul-searching conversations with Diaghilev in which the Russian impresario advises him on matters of the heart.

Rattigan’s screenplay explores the intense relationship between Diaghilev and Nijinsky without tiptoeing around their sexuality. But he seems most concerned with what prompts the enigmatic young dancer’s sudden marriage to Romola, a determined admirer with whom he didn’t even share a common langue, and the impact this has both on his relationship with Diaghilev and eventually on his own sanity. Though it’s not always clear how much of the play has come from Wright and how much from Rattigan, it’s not always easy to see where that line falls, the screenplay seems more caught up in Romola’s evolution as a woman than with Nijinsky himself, who remains an unknowable, tortured figure throughout.

Fittingly it is Romola, now old, who halts the production of the film by threatening to expose Rattigan’s ‘bestial’ urges. Perturbed by the rise of a new wave of playwrights who “couldn’t write bum on a wall”, Rattigan is already concerned with the way in which his work will be remembered, and he worries about being tagged as queer, of his work being labelled and boxed, its impact narrowed.

This encounter is one of the more gripping in what is a rather bitty production. Wright’s dialogue is too often weighted with exposition and some of the lines he puts in the playwright’s mouth feel cribbed from research notes, such as when Rattigan argues that he could and did write women as women, not just men masquerading as women.

Malcolm Sinclair gives a warm and understated performance as Rattigan. The production often requires him to be a passive figure, to silently watch on as things unfold in front of him, but he always gives the impression he is contemplating his situation. He is active in his stillness. This is in marked contrast to some of the other performances; there is little shading in Jonathan Hyde’s flamboyant Diaghilev, with his Pepé Le Pew hair-do; Hyde is however much more convincing in his brief turn as a big-shot television producer.

This use of doubling enhances the dreamlike quality of the production. Rattigan, already stricken with the cancer that would kill him, frequently swigs from a medicine bottle or tops up his glass with J&B. The play seems intended to have the texture of memory and Philip Franks’ production is able to evoke the sense of a man nearing the end of his life and still wrestling with who he is and how he wants to be remembered.

But some unhappy compromises seem to have been reached in translating material intended for the screen to the stage; the play has a choppy quality and the dialogue is often functional. While the curiosity value of the piece is clear and one can see what excited Wright about it, he never really makes it feel like a great loss that the screenplay was shelved. Franks’ production also seems to neglect the visual potential of the script; Nijinsky’s creative daring is discussed without being shown and the play’s relationship with dance is somewhat half-hearted throughout. There’s a leap here, a turn here but no one really moves like a dancer

The exception to this is the scene where Romola and Nijinsky first glimpse each other. She is wearing a tuxedo, as she has been informed that this will appeal to him (It does, but not in the obvious way; he believes that art has no gender). With no common tongue, they attempt to speak, first in Russian, then Hungarian and then in halting French, before doing away with words altogether and allowing their bodies to move together, to connect through dance.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Frisky and Mannish

2011-07-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

Last week, after their last performance at the Udderbelly - the big purple cow on the South Bank - I had the pleasure of speaking to Laura Corcoran and Matthew Jones about intimate venues vs. larger spaces, the shortcomings of Edinburgh dressing room facilities and the demands of staging their biggest show to date on this year's Fringe.You can read the full interview on Exeunt

Eden End at Richmond Theatre

2011-07-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

It may be less structurally playful than some of his other plays but J.B Priestley’s Eden End is still very much concerned with time, its passing and the things it wrings from people over the years.

When prodigal daughter Stella Kirby returns to the family home after an absence of eight years, she finds that may things have altered since she left: her mother has passed away, her father’s health is failing, her sister has hardened with the strain while her younger brother, still a boy when she set out, has simply grown up. Stella left the nest to pursue a career on the stage but the world of the Edwardian theatre has not been kind to her; despite travelling widely, she has never achieved fame, just drifted from one draughty dressing room to the next.

Perhaps because it is more straightforwardly constructed than some of his other work, Eden End has been comparatively neglected. Written in 1934, in the turbulent period between the wars, the play is set in 1912 and duly loaded with ironic foreshadowing. There are recurring conversations about their hopes for the future; more than once characters pass comment on how four years down the line life will surely be looking up for everyone.

Stella does not anticipate how disruptive her return will be for her family, particularly for her sister, Lilian who feels angry that she has been obliged to stay behind and take care of things while Stella has been out in the world. This idea, of roads not taken, runs through the play; the girls’ softly spoken father, a rural GP, speaks of his regret at not having taken his chances in London when a younger man and Lillian’s conception of herself is shaped by the things she hasn’t done, even if there’s a sense that she has come to cling to the role of the devoted, stay-at-home daughter, that she alone has held herself back. In places the tone, it has been pointed out, is decidedly Chekhovian: this family in their rain-lashed out-of-the-way abode dreaming of what might have been.

Lilian’s bitterness becomes increasingly venomous when the dashing local farmer - for whom she has held a candle for years - finds his dormant feelings for Stella reignited by her return. Lilian retaliates by looking up Stella’s estranged husband Charles and inviting him to stay. Priestley’s characterisation of this caddish interloper, however, is surprisingly affectionate; in fact the playwright’s sympathies seem very much skewed towards the two actors and their itinerant tempest-tossed existence, with the result that Lilian comes off as chilly and malicious in comparison.

Charlotte Emmerson’s delicate yet worldly performance as Stella is the highlight of Laurie Sansom’s slow-burner of a production though Nick Hendrix makes an endearing stage debut as baby brother, Wilfred; home on leave from his job in Nigeria, he seems to have regressed to adolescence, pouting sulkily at the maid and dashing around the stage with boyish energy before getting spectacularly squiffy with Charles in a somewhat over-extended scene of drunkenness.

While Sansom successfully conjures an air of poignancy and wistfulness, a world and a way of life about to be obliterated, he seems to wish the play were a little more formally experimental than it actually is. Some of the directorial choices are jarring: a music hall interlude feels like too aggressive an insert, puncturing the atmosphere of the piece, and the decision to place the set on a raised stage upon the stage itself seems only to constrict the performers’ negotiation of the space. Other aspects of Sara Perks’s design are more successful and her backdrop of light bulbs and glistening strings is appropriately reminiscent of both a theatre curtain and the trickle of raindrops on a window pane.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Lou Ramsden

2011-06-28T07:45:00.000-07:00

"I like going to the theatre and feeling my heart beat."

Last week I spoke to Lou Ramsden about her new play Hundreds and Thousands which opened yesterday at Soho Theatre. You can read the full interview on Exeunt

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Theatre Royal Haymarket

2011-06-24T03:13:00.000-07:00

The lights rise on two men huddled by a gnarled and leafless tree. But despite this momentary illumination Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remain in the dark for much of Tom Stoppard’s 1966 collision of Shakespeare and Beckett.

Transferring to London after a brief run at Chichester Festival Theatre, Trevor Nunn’s production seems a bit too keen to impress upon the audience its GSOH. The wit and wordplay, the verbal waltzing, are ramped up, pushed to the fore, while the play’s more philosophical musings on free will and the quest for meaning can at times feel secondary.

Former History Boys Samuel Barnett and Jamie Parker are reunited as Hamlet’s hangers-on; Nunn’s production relies heavily on their chemistry and charisma and they both duly deliver. They have an engaging rapport, playing off and against each other’s strengths; it’s like watching a kind of dance, though each takes turns to lead. Barnett is a little shrill and given to panic, restlessly darting from one side of the stage to the other, but he’s also rather puppyish and endearing, while Parker is marvellously pragmatic, greeting each new upset with the same straight-faced resignation.

They regard Hamlet’s various outbursts and breakdowns with bemusement, and seem both puzzled and intrigued by the young prince’s frequent soliloquising which, in Nunn’s production, is mostly delivered with his back to the audience – apt, as the happenings at Elsinore remain backdrop, to be entertainingly picked over and apart yet only ever viewed from a distance. The only supporting character who interacts with the title pair in any meaningful way is the First Player. Originally intended to be played by Tim Curry, who had to pull out of the production due to ill health, the role is now played by Chris Andrew Mellon, both seedy and camp in his crimson codpiece. With eyebrows permanently arched, there’s a showy pantomime quality to his performance that seems quite fitting though his frequent bursts of villainous cackling are perhaps pushing things too far down this track.

The arrival of the travelling players provides some necessary textural disruption to the, at times wearying, verbal back-and-forth. Their second act dumb-show is the visual highpoint of the production and there’s something particularly potent – and in keeping with the overarching concerns of the play – in their despondency to find they have been performing without an audience.

Simon Higlett’s effective set with its ceiling of wooden slats, shafts of white light spilling through the gaps, manages to evoke the sense of being below deck on a ship – which becomes relevant in the play’s second half – and, more generally, to create a the feeling of the characters being caught in some strange, half-way place, a world between and beneath.

What’s missing is a sense of connection. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (curiously attired in ill-fitting jeans and furry jerkins) are fated to orbit Hamlet’s star forever, to be continually summoned and dispatched. But while their need to glean meaning from their predicament is vocalised repeatedly, it is never really felt. The play too often feels like an exercise in linguistic agility and Nunn seems keen that the audience grasp what a smart, witty thing it is. The laughs come – eventually – and the word play often excites, but there’s little sense of despair, little chance of emotional entanglement with their plight.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Mr Happiness and The Water Engine at the Old Vic Tunnels

2011-06-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

A red on-air light glows in the corner of the stage. This is apt, as both the David Mamet plays in Theatre 6’s double-bill were originally written for radio; what you hear matters as much as what you see in director Kate McGregor’s inventive production, to the point where the method of staging is in some ways more compelling than the plays themselves.

The first, far shorter piece, Mr Happiness is a monologue delivered by a radio agony uncle. He reads out a number of letters – a boy with a limp worries about asking a girl to the prom, a woman asks how best to handle her burdensome mother - and then doles out suitably homespun advice. It’s an incredibly slight thing, made diverting by David Burt’s rich delivery. Behind him silhouetted figures enact scenes from the letters in an attempt to inject movement into an essentially static piece, but this is a somewhat unnecessary addition as Burt’s voice is textured enough on its own.

McGregor’s production acknowledges the play’s thinness; it’s used as a taster, the newsreel before the man feature. The switch between plays is elegantly handled, a smooth transition. Instead of shoe-horning in an interval, the back wall of the set is wheeled away to reveal the industrial setting of the second play.

The Water Engine is set in 1930s Chicago in the year of the World Fair. Inventor Charles Lang has created an engine that runs on water. Aware of its potential to revolutionise the world, he attempts to get it patented, but immediately becomes the target for a pair of ruthless lawyers willing to stop at nothing to get their hands on his plans. If it sounds formulaic, it is – this is not Mamet’s strongest work - though his characteristically taut dialogue gives it a real sense of urgency.

The two pieces are stylistically linked, with radio advertisements and smooth wireless voices running though the second play. Foley sound effects and live music had to this effect; this is particularly effective when Lang’s invisible engine is fired up, the clunks and clanks, the grinding of gears, the generator hum, all come together to create a sense of the mechanical: the whole set seems to shudder. The venue itself add to this; the plays are performed in The Screening Room, a new space within the warrens of the Old Vic Tunnels and the sound of trains rumbling into Waterloo Station overhead is echoed by the clatter of footsteps on the raised stage. In several places water drips from the ceiling which is thematically apt if probably not intentional. Though evocative as this all is, the music occasionally starts to become repetitious, with the lone saxophone motif particularly coming to feel overused.

The cast give solid performances, with Jamie Treacher displaying an engaging everyman quality as Lang; at first he bucks against the situation in which he finds himself, desperately seeking a way out, but eventually he seems to resign himself to the way things must end. David Burt, in a neat juxtaposition to his avuncular radio host, returns as the more threatening of the two lawyers, a mobster figure, menacing and icy. There’s something very neat about the way the second play eventually picks up the themes of the first, and their pairing comes to make more sense as the idea of human connection and communication offers Lang a way out, providing a sense of continuation, a light at the end of the Tunnels as it were.

Edinburgh, in short

2011-06-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

There are 2543 shows in the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe programme, each with their own potted synopsis. Study them for long enough and the words start to swim...

A wide-eyed orphan on the run. A woman’s husband disappears. An ageing militant with a dark secret. A drunken barber. A vengeful psychotic doll. A foreign country on the brink of civil war. An affair under the influence. A thought provoking vulgar pantomime. An unforgettable filmic journey for one. A darkly seductive aesthetic. A haunting memory play. A brilliant cocktail of songs. An adult fairy tale. A vibrant young cast. A witty and radical reworking. A dance of glances. A 21st century Coen-esque farce. An overnight experience with live DJ. A visionary devised performance. An immersive love story set in the belly of a whale. A night of secrets and seduction in NYC. A lovingly disrespectful homage. A pressure pot of a piece. A genuine Swedish classic. A pudding of prostitution. A dark, dirty chuckle.

What if hell were a reality show? How many times would you dismiss being cursed? Having survived the explosion can they survive each other? Will they give in to the overwhelming deluge? Between the dusk and the dark, what terrors lie? What would you do for a million dollars? Can monkeys give evidence? Ever wanted to howl like a wolf? Ever lost an argument you felt you could have won? Does your curtain flutter on a still night? Why would a mother become a suicide bomber? What happens when she starts tracing a history that isn’t hers? Where does love cross the line?

The shadow of my porn star dad. The global wanderer collides. The world ended two years ago. Interactive zombie entertainment. Bursts of pumping adrenaline. Spectacular puppets that glow in the dark. Rumbustious sari-wearing eunuchs. Gorging pity like a leech. Invisible cabbages. In love with a bear. The wreckage of the financial crisis. The art of the clown. The monstrous course of defeat. The hotel of the future. The wrong sized elephant. Ten years of close encounters. Tainted by a dark secret. Obsession reaches beyond the grave. Where saying sorry is just the start.

Oblivious to her impending fall. Giving in to her schizophrenia. She prefers to be called Venus. Meanwhile society, haunted by inflation, reels towards fascism.

Direct from San Francisco. Based on the popular video game. Inspired by true events. Created intoxicated. Made up on the spot. Show includes partial nudity. Show includes live guitar music. For grown-ups only. Free coffee and croissants.

Innovative object manipulation. Solo live action. Pedal-powered anarchic theatre. Mesmerizingly dark animation. Airborne physicality. Explosive choreography. Amazing street dance. Side-splitting wit. Iranian history. Celtic lyricism. Teenage effervescence. Trouserless bankers. Dangerous closeness. The most pressing issues of our age. True life sex stories from real women. Told entirely through a Facebook wall-to-wall.

Fine art and codpieces. Karaoke and bad science. Alienation and filicide. Homespun contraptions and cabaret songs. Richly blended with percussion. Viewed through a veil of lace.

Descend with us.

Originally posted on Exeunt

American Trade at Hampstead Theatre

2011-06-10T02:18:00.000-07:00

This ‘contemporary Restoration comedy’, a commission for the RSC by Tarell Alvin McCraney, is a play full of colour and noise and excess and yet for much of the time it is an oddly flat experience. At its best it has the sass and playfulness of McCraney’s earlier play,Wig Out!, at its worst it’s like a particularly lacklustre episode of Ugly Betty.

Pharus, a New York hustler, first glimpsed sporting hot pink Calvins, has just escaped the attentions of hip-hop mogul Jules when he receives an out of the blue call from his, before now unbeknownst to him, great aunt Marian who, while knocking back a 7am gin, invites him to London come and work for her PR company, Move.

That’s all the excuse Pharus needs to hop on a plane and high-tail it to the UK, but he can’t shake off his old habits, and even manages to mile-high a diplomat’s wife en route to Heathrow. Once installed at Move, he’s charged with recruiting models for the agency but ends up attracting a multicultural assortment of fellow hustlers and hookers, his presence triggering suspicion and jealousy in his jump-suited cousin, Valentina.

McCraney clearly has much affection for London’s multiplicity, for the sexual and cultural collision of the city. There are natty Haitian immigrants, volatile cabbies, towering ‘Prussian’ sex workers and closeted airport jobsworths, not to mention a generous scattering of turquoise posing pouches, PVC shorts and men in killer stilettos. The fondness and amusement elicited by a particular brand of English officiousness is also evident, with Debbie Korley’s Girl Wonder assuming the role of various uptight uniformed types: flight attendant, London Underground announcer and hotel receptionist. (“Do you work everywhere?” Pharus eventually asks her).

Though it apes the wit and artifice of Restoration comedy, it lacks bite and is somewhat one-note in its gaudy excess. The lyricism of the Brother/Sister plays is only occasionally glimpsed and even when it is in evidence the performers don’t always rise to the challenge of mining the most from the rhythms and rapidity of the writing. Tunji Kasim, as Pharus, is the only one who really nails it; he seems comfortable with the language and manages to convey a sense of a man well accustomed to living off his wits beneath a varnish of surface charm. But then as the protagonist, he’s required to play it cool, while everyone else in Jamie Lloyd’s production dials their performance up to eye-rolling levels. This works better in some cases than others; Sheila Reid plays aunt Miriam like a cross between Anna Wintour and Mindy Sterling’s villainous sidekick from the Austin Powers movies but elsewhere people just resort to yelling and mugging.

Soutra Gilmour’s neon night club of a set looks a bit like some someone has set about the stage with a collection of highlighter pens, but this visual insistence – the hot pinks and acid yellows, the glitterball shimmer – seems to be intended to underline something that isn’t actually there in the text. The plot is slender as a stiletto heel, but the narrative arc is tried and tested; bracketed by McCraney as one of his Identity Plays, it seems to be saying that a man can move cities, move countries, but he can’t escape himself. The bitter circularity, that the city will get you in the end – no matter which city it happens to be – is delivered almost as an aside.

As a whole, the production looks like it should be a lot of fun, like it wants to be a lot of fun, but while it intermittently raises a smile, the not inconsiderable energy of the thing quickly dissipates; it’s a lipstick kiss, easily wiped away.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Three Farces at the Orange Tree Theatre

2011-06-09T05:38:00.000-07:00

Though both popular and prolific in his day, the work of Victorian playwright John Maddison Morton is now rarely performed; in fact the taste for theatre of the kind he specialised in had already started to decline well within his lifetime. On one level it’s easy to see why: these short plays, often written to bookend other work, are slight things individually but they have a certain charm when grouped together. In many ways they resemble comic sketches more than anything else and Henry Bell’s production makes a good case for Morton as an early precursor of Monty Python.

The three one-act farces in the Orange Tree Theatre’s triple bill have evidently been selected to demonstrate the different facets of Morton’s writing. Each one is introduced by master of ceremonies, Daniel Cheyne; magnificently bewhiskered and armed with a ukulele, he introduces the performers by name at the start of the evening, indulges in gentle banter with the audience throughout and provides a scene-setting musical prologue for each piece.

The first of three plays, Slasher and Clasher, written in 1848, is – by some way – the funniest. A raucous and energetic play, it concerns an inveterate coward who is driven to fight a duel in order to appease his paramour’s uncle, a stern individual, dogged in his insistence that a man who refuses to stand up for himself isn’t a man worth marrying. Clive Francis plays the fearsome Mr Blowhard, while Edward Bennett is hugely endearing as the decent but dim Lt Brown but the piece belongs to David Oakes, as the timorous Slasher, who spends much of the play trying to squirm away from danger but is eventually pushed too far. It all ends with some entertaining swordplay, made all the more impressive by the relative intimacy of the space.

The second play, A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion, is a very different creature, a two-hander with a distinctly absurdist edge. Mr Snoozle, Clive Francis again, is contemplating a lazy day alone without wife or family to bother him, when a loquacious stranger talks his way into his home and refuses to leave. Bennett plays the uninvited guest and is quite unnerving in his persistence, his disinclination to be reasoned with and the casual way in which he helps himself to Snoozle’s possessions; here the sparring between Francis and Bennett is verbal rather than physical and the whole thing ends in an almost postmodern fashion when the performers break off to explain the role of improvisation in plays of this nature.

The last of the three, Grimshaw, Bagshaw and Bradshaw, is the most overtly farcical, full of mistaken identity and multiple exits and entrances, but paradoxically it is the least frantic in pace. Stuart Fox plays a chemist’s shopman, a mid-Victorian everyman (as were many of Morton’s characters), whose lodgings are invaded by a stream of people: neighbours, bailiffs and other assorted undesirables.

Though Morton’s plays are structurally indebted to French farce they are very English in sensibility. There is (in the plays presented here at least) far less of an emphasis on bedroom antics and more of a focus on subjects which the audience could have related to, like the terror of trespass and the invasion of one’s home, the social anxiety about the need to live up to a particular standard of manliness and the fear of creditors (which is apt as Morton himself ended up a Charterhouse pensioner at the end of his life). The plays draw the majority of their humour from a sense of the absurd and there’s a pleasing playfulness with language, slapstick is used sparingly and the audience are frequently acknowledged and involved (though in a warm, inclusive way, not in an alarming One Man, Two Guvnors way).

While it’s arguable that Bell shows his hand too early, staging the most uproarious of the plays first, his production works both as an exercise in theatrical archaeology and as pure entertainment, showing just how much and how little English comedy has changed since Morton’s day.

Reviewed for Exeunt

One Man, Two Guvnors at the National

2011-06-03T06:54:00.000-07:00

The woman in the row in front of me appears to be gripped by some kind of near-orgasmic spasm. “Oh my God,” she keeps saying, while fanning her face with her hand. The man sitting to my side is less overtly amused, but I notice his mouth, set so firm at first, has curled itself into a smile and that his shoulders are twitching despite himself. This is a production where the chief currency is laughter and judging by all this barking and hooting, the multifarious music of mirth, it’s hit paydirt.

Richard Bean has transplanted Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters to 1960s Brighton, a bawdy, gaudy world of cardboard cut-out sets and a particularly English strain of smut. Nicholas Hytner’s production is a riotous collage of panto and music hall, the scenes interspersed with musical interludes by sharp-suited skiffle band, The Craze. The cast members occasionally join the band to do a turn on the xylophone or a stint at the microphone; there’s the obligatory bit of cross-dressing and a comedy chase sequence in which the performers ricochet from one side of the set to the other. This is a production at ease with the inherent comedy value of the chest wig; at one point someone even sports a fez.

James Corden plays Francis Henshall, the none-too-bright Harlequin figure who ends up working two jobs. His first master is Jemima Rooper’s Rachel Crabbe, who spends the majority of her time on stage disguised as her dead twin brother Roscoe, the other is Rachel’s lover – and Roscoe’s killer – lanky posh boy Stanley. Unbeknownst to the other, both are trying to extort money from the tight-fisted Charlie the Duck so they can do a bunk to Australia together (Australia comes in for a lot of digs in Bean’s deliciously spiky script) while Francis, caught between them, ties himself in knots as he attempts to run errands for them both while keeping them apart.

Hytner orchestrates the pacing meticulously, balancing moments of (comparative) restraint with those of full-bodied physical comedy. His production works as a bell curve, building to a magnificent middle sequence in which a starving Francis (he has already chewed through an important letter in an effort to ward off his hunger) is forced to serve dinner to both his bosses. To this end he is assisted by Tom Edden’s spectacularly palsied and decrepit waiter, Alfie (think Julie Walters in that skit with the soup, only add a few decades) who is forever being pitched down the stairs.

Bean’s update retains many elements of commedia dell’arte, replete with set social types that are recognisable to a modern audience: the miserly dad, the pompous Latin-spewing lawyer, the swaggering actor. There is also much audience interaction, with Francis nimbly riffing with the front row and occasionally inviting people to join him onstage.

Though the selfish and whining Francis – his character is in fact led by the two masters of groin and belly – is never exactly endearing, Corden’s performance provides a reminder of what a capable comic performer he can be when well directed; he’s quick-witted and responsive as well as energetic, tumbling from armchairs and taking a swing at his own head with a dustbin lid. Hytner meanwhile makes as much use of Corden’s bulk as he does with Oliver Chris’s long-limbed agility as blazer-clad ninny, Stanley. No gesture, however small, is wasted: he strides and thrusts and towers over Jemima Rooper, so that even their embraces have a comic quality; there are times when he appears to be channelling Hugh Laurie in his delivery.

This level of attention to the physical is evident in every performance. Daniel Rigby seems to be forever angling his body towards the audience, as Alan, an actor who speaks only in sonorous declarations with his arms windmilling and his chest permanently puffed, while Edden’s Alfie continues to jitter even when taking his bow. Pleasingly the female characters are also allowed to indulge in the slapstick, with Rooper shuffling around the stage hobbled by her trousers and Susie Toase, as Francis’s Babs Windsor-bosomed would be paramour, Dolly, writhing on the floor in mockery of his earlier tantrum.

After the comedic high-water mark of the middle section, Hytner lets things tail off gradually, tying up all the various plot strands and throwing a few last minute hurdles for Francis’s character before wrapping it all up – naturally – with a song.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Many Moons at Theatre 503

2011-05-23T10:28:00.000-07:00

There are many things to admire about Alice Birch’s startling debut. It’s an assured piece of writing, a gripping exercise in the control and release of information in which she demonstrates a superb understanding of just what to give away, when to give it away, and what to hold back.

Set over a hot July day in Stoke Newington, it tells the story of four people via four interlinking monologues. These characters are initially familiar types. Ollie has just dropped out of his PhD, he highly intelligent, obsessed with the cosmos, but exceptionally socially uneasy to the point where you suspect he might be on the lower end of the autistic spectrum. Meg is pregnant and suffering from an unspecified malaise, she knows the price of every expensive kitchen gadget but has never felt real love. Juniper is incessantly perky, an eternal optimistic; she’s ‘actively’ looking for love, but hints at an inner sadness. Robert is by some way the oldest of the four, a dignified soft-spoken man caring for a wife who is slowly being lost to Parkinson’s.

Birch switches between these characters and their voices, their stories. From the beginning she sets up particular expectation which she gradually and subtly undercuts and plays with. Meg’s anaesthetised life of jam-making and Debussy is shadowed by something black; she spends her time online, clicking on hate-filled sites – she has four separate Facebook profiles. Juniper, who wears butterfly pins in her hair and describes her personality as ‘cartwheely’ has no-one to celebrate her birthday with. The nurse who looks after Robert’s wife refuses to speak to him, which sets one wondering about the particular nature of the support circle he talks about, while Ollie’s endearing nerviness around women and matters of a sexual nature hides the darkest truth of all.

Birch’s writing is poetic and rich with imagery so when she slides in an unsettling detail, which she does often, it’s doubly shocking. The performances are all of a comparable standard, relishing the power of the writing. Esther Hall captures Meg’s emotional flatness; she convinces as a comfortably off thirty-something mother-to-be yet there’s an overwhelming sense of absence to her performance – she’s both there and not there. Edward Franklin is sweet and open as Ollie which makes Birch’s revelations about his character all the more troubling. Jonathan Newth deftly captures the ambiguity of his character; he gains the audience’s sympathy and never entirely loses it even when his past comes into focus. Esther Smith, as Juniper, has the most winning role and she is quite heart-breaking in it: hopeful, kind, a little ditzy, yet conveying kind of delicate desperation underneath.

Director Derek Bond moves the characters around the stage from time to time, but otherwise the piece is quite static; he trusts the writing to do the work and it does. Where he excels is in the building of tension; this is superbly handled. The play grabs hold of you and doesn’t let go until the end and the audience’s final awkward expelling of breath. James Perkins set is stylised and elegant with two chairs and a sculptural metal sphere at its centre, the curve of the stage floor suitably askew.

Once Birch plays her hand and it becomes clearer who her characters are and what they have done, the piece is a little diminished – but only a little. There is a sense of having been here before (in this same space in fact with Stephen Brown’s Future Me) and the internet is depicted as a place, not of community but of contamination, in a way that while persuasive is ultimately overstated. The play works best as a portrait of social disconnect and of the loneliness one can feel in a city full of people; it’s a confident and exciting piece of writing, and as a debut, as a marker of things to come, it’s one to remember.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The School for Scandal at the Barbican

2011-05-22T02:42:00.000-07:00

Deborah Warner’s production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s delicious comedy is a shouter. As the audience make their way into the auditorium the soundtrack is already pounding while a number of cast members strut across the stage as if on a catwalk wearing blue steel stares, Hoxton specs and man-bags along with their knee breeches and crinolines; occasionally someone in a technician’s headset and a Barbican BITE T-shirt throws a few shapes.

If you saw Warner’s production of Mother Courage at the National, you’ll recognise this stylistic landscape. Scene titles unfurl on banners or are held up on cards, the flats are intentionally flimsy and rough drawn, and there is no attempt to disguise the rumble and clank of props being assembled. The whole thing is thick with anachronism, the 18thcentury violently colliding with the 21st: there are Vivienne Westwood shopping bags, bottles of Bombay Sapphire and a whiff of urban decay. There’s something very modern in libertine Charles Surface’s debauchery; he glugs from a jug of Burgundy while sporting fashionably ratty jeans and an Indian headdress, his associates and hangers on slumped and sozzled around him.

Some of these anachronistic flourishes are inspired – particularly when Charles slakes a hangover with a can of full fat Coca Cola and something greasy and possibly from Greggs or when a vital piece of gossip is confirmed via iPhone – but sometimes it feels like Warner has taken one of those banners of hers, scrawled This Is The Concept on it in fat marker pen letters and is waving it in your face.

All that said, the exuberance of the production is seductive, compelling even, and the rapidity of Sheridan’s wit is only occasionally dampened by the racket. The principle joys come from the performances. Amid all the noise Alan Howard gives an elegant and understated performance as Sir Peter Teazle, grumbling, dogged, with an air of being permanently put upon: “was ever a man so crossed as I am?” He is well paired with Katherine Parkinson – whose delivery, as ever, is superbly measured – as his wayward and (much) younger wife. Though her character has succumbed to all the trappings of life as a lady of fashion, she is not without a heart and somewhere beneath all the snapping and sparring of the couple’s “daily jangle” they manage to suggest a degree of real affection.

Leo Bill is suitably nervy and spaced as the rakish wastrel Charles, yet beneath his array of twitches he suggests the existence of some small nugget of inner decency, however eroded. Aidan McArdle, as Joseph, the other Surface brother, a noted man of sentiment, conveys a strong sense of superficial moral solidity whilst suggesting a lack of any real resolve; at one point he is even seen enjoying some 18th century porn. This is a production particularly interested in the things underneath, the padding and girdles – and, in one case, a pair of Superman underpants – beneath the mile wide dresses and towering wigs.

The broader ensemble seems to have been differently instructed; here are performances dialled up to eleven, all snivelling and screeching, pratfalls and harsh caricature. This results in some over the top mugging but also, with the character of Moses the Jewish moneylender (played with an extravagant lisp by Adam Gillen), it presents something more testing as Warner looks the play’s anti-Semitism in the face and doesn’t attempt to pull back or soften it any way.

Sheridan’s play, with its strong distaste for hypocrisy and the pedlars of slander, remains a joyous thing to behold and Warner is faithful to its spirit; despite the 21st century visual vocabulary, she lets the play speak for itself. This is theatre as event – over three hours long and big, big, big – and it’s nothing if not memorable in its own bludgeoning way.

Reviewed for Exeunt

And I and Silence at the Finborough Theatre

2011-05-16T07:14:00.000-07:00

Confinement comes in many forms. The windows don’t have to have bars; lack of opportunity, lack of money and food, lack of hope: these will do the job just fine.

Naomi Wallace’s new play, And I and Silence, hops back and forth over a period of nine years in 1950s America. Dee and Jamie, two young women, one white and one black, meet in prison and become close. Together they make plans for their future. They don’t hope for much: a job they can hold onto, a room they can share, the chance to walk through the city arm in arm and drink ice-cold soda. Their dreams are small but even so they are to prove incompatible with the realities of the segregated world outside their cell.

The women rehearse together for the roles they will need to play to get by: the good servant, dedicated, capable, graceful and uncomplaining. They practice polishing invisible silver, dusting invisible shelves. They remind each other there is a line that must never be crossed, there are things they must never succumb to and there are times when the only choice left to them will be to run, though even then they must always take care never to forget their bucket and brush.

By having different performers play the characters’ older and younger selves, Caitlin McLeod’s production highlights how much the hard passing of time has shaped and changed them: the optimism of old has been dulled and something vital and bright has been drained away. While both women knew well the taste of hardship – it brought them to prison in the first place – it had not broken them; it takes a constant pattern of let downs and disappointments, an ever empty stomach, and the knowledge that even on the outside they can never really be free, to tip them over.

Produced in association with Clean Break, a company whose work explores the experiences of women in the criminal justice system, Wallace’s play has a transcendent quality; its reach stretches beyond its setting. In some ways the play has parallels in Chloe Moss’ This Wide Night (also written for Clean Break), a contemporary account of two women trying to reshape their lives on the outside and doing what they must in order to survive.

Wallace’s approach is more lyrical; her language has heat and rhythm and occasionally the dialogue is rhymed, something which is initially jarring but quickly becomes part of the play’s particular texture. It has an elegance of structure, alternating scenes of the past and present, and uniting the two threads only at the end in a moment of potent circularity. There’s a more general resonance in the way the characters rehearse their actions and behaviour, learning their lines by rote, perfecting each scene.

The performances are strong on all sides, managing to convey both a sense of unity as well as the crucial one of difference, a wearing down and wearing out. Cat Simmons and Cherrelle Skeete play the two faces of Jamie, the former a little less buoyant than the latter, her spirit slowly sapped. There’s a more overt gulf between Lauren Crace’s bright-eyed and impulsive young Dee, a woman who’ll exact gleeful revenge on a cruel prison guard even it means weeks in the hole, and Sally Oliver as the same character nine years on, still given to impulse but with some central spark starting to fade.

McLeod’s production – set in one room that, appropriately, doubles as both their cell and the sparse, cell-like place the characters end up in – has some issues with the tonal differentiation of scenes, particularly at the beginning, but as the split between what the women hope for and the harsh reality that overtakes them becomes ever wider, the piece becomes stronger, building to a bleakly inevitable – if slightly overwrought - but still moving conclusion.

Reviewed for Exeunt

I am a Camera at the Rosemary Branch Theatre

2011-05-10T05:08:00.000-07:00

According to Christopher Isherwood’s entertainingly candid memoir Christopher and his Kind, written in the 1970s and recently filmed in all its sweaty bedroom detail by the BBC, the character of Sally Bowles was based, in part at least, on his friend Jean Ross (the surname he appropriated from a pre-literary fame Paul Bowles). But by the time Isherwood got around to this further act of ‘fixing’ there were already numerous versions of Sally out there, both on film and on stage.

John van Druten’s 1951 play, I Am a Camera, which would in turn inspire the Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret, is based on Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, particularly the Sally Bowles section (which had been originally published as a stand-alone volume by the Hogarth Press) though it also contains bits and pieces from The Landauers.

Fittingly the whole thing takes place in Christopher’s rented room where he agonises over his typewriter, craving distraction, “waiting for something to happen”; the social turmoil of 1930s Germany is a reality but – initially at least – a rather distant one. Christopher and Sally find numerous excuses for drinking, socialising and generally enjoying all that nocturnal Berlin has to offer; occasionally, in an effort to make some money, he gives English lessons to Natalia, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish department store owner.

Mark Jackson’s performance is nicely judged; he is wry, laconic, a trifle prim, given to hypochondria, and the perfect foil for Vicki Campbell’s Sally Bowles. She arrives in a predictable blur of peacock feathers and green nail varnish, but rapidly wraps herself in the role, making it her own – no easy thing. There’s something incredibly open about her performance; she’s voluble and physical, knocking back prairie oysters and warm champagne as if each drink might be her last, but when reality punctures this whirlwind world of theirs, she crumbles in a most dramatic fashion. Her eyes brim with tears, her mascara threatens to run in black rivers down her cheeks; she blubs and gulps like a child.

They make a well-matched pair. He is (relatively) reserved, she is all energy and display, self-involved and prone to hymning her own self-perceived quirkiness – as she tells Christopher on their first meeting, “I think I’m rather a strange and extraordinary person” – and yet she gets away with it. As Campbell so well conveys, there is also something vulnerable about her, a huggable quality that stops her from being utterly unbearable.

They’re supported by a strong and cohesive ensemble cast. Erika Poole is suitably amiable and quasi-maternal as Frau Schroeder, Herr Issyvoo’s landlady, which makes her parroting of the Nazi party line about the Jews even more jarring. Natalie Ball is composed and somewhat intense as Natalia, a woman who has the rug pulled out from under her by emotions she had not expected to feel and does not know how to process.

Though Amy Yardley’s set design, with its bold white slogans – the writing literally on the wall – leaves the audience no escape from what is occurring in the outside world, yet it takes a while for these events to infiltrate Christopher and Sally’s bubble; when they do, it’s a jolt, a cold, hard slap.

There’s more sentiment in van Druten’s play than in Isherwood’s novels and it has a circular, narrative neatness that the stories themselves lack. The Christopher of the play is also never quite as passive and disinterested as the famous line – “I am a camera with its shutter open” – implies; he expresses hurt and anger and he grapples with a growing sense of distaste at the things he hears and sees.

Despite limitations of space, Owen Calvert-Lyons’ production is a richly textured piece that impresses on many levels, as a homage to the writer in the anniversary of his death and a potent evocation of Isherwood’s Berlin world.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The End at The Junction

2011-05-04T04:09:00.000-07:00

Michael Pinchbeck’s The End takes its cue from the most famous Shakespearean stage direction of all: Exit pursued by a bear. Building on a collaborative project from 2008 entitled Beginning Middle End, the piece takes the form of a two-hander between Pinchbeck and Ollie Smith. This is Pinchbeck’s purported final piece for the theatre, his resignation letter and swansong, and it is also, we are repeatedly told, Smith’s first piece.

Endings are a necessity in narrative art – full stops, gun shots, the final fall of the curtain – and Pinchbeck’s piece is a meditation on endings and exits, on knowing when to draw a line, and on understanding when an ending is, in actuality, part of a process, a cycle, a longer story. The show is given shape and pace by stacks of index cards piled at the back of the stage. Pinchbeck seems to read from these, flinging them to the floor when he’s finished or – occasionally – throwing them into the air and creating a Nabokovian cascade. Snow-flaked on the black floor they also add a visual dimension to what is at first a fairly minimalist aesthetic and by the end of The End the stage is littered with them.

Dressing up in a budget bear suit, Pinchbeck portrays an actor backstage, waiting for his cue, his moment of glory, his chance to chase. But not before he has delighted in making Smith don the suit and dance until he is gasping for breath. A recurring motif is of death by gunfire: ready, aim, fire, and a toppling body. The piece is full of little symmetries and repetitions; it has an apt circularity: when the bear gives chase both Pinchbeck and Smith end up standing back in the original spot from which they started.

In this way The End is as much about continuity as finality, about the relationship between mentor and mentee, master and apprentice, father and son even. There’s a sense of bitterness in the knowledge that one will be overtaken but also a sense of pragmatism (or maybe just resignation) in the face of the inevitable. Gradually the dynamic between Pinchbeck and Smith begins to shift; at first the former is the superior, the elder, the one in control, but the power balance starts to falter as the baton is passed and Smith displays a certain glee in making Pinchbeck play out the same scenes over again with the roles reversed: the bear dance, the death scenes. The recurrence of certain phrases underlines this sense of progression, the awareness that in passing something on one is often nudged into the background.

While there is much humour in the interactions between Pinchbeck and Smith, the piece also has a self-interrogating quality, drawing attention to the processes of its making, its aims and its motifs. Though occasionally blunt in its methods and perhaps overshooting its natural endpoint (though this is at least thematically apt), this is an elegantly structured, thought-provoking and coolly resonant piece.

Then we came to the end.

Except we don’t. Or, rather, they don’t; as the house lights rise, Pinchbeck and Smith return to their seats among the debris of index cards. We leave the theatre before they do.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Macbeth at Clerkenwell House of Detention

2011-04-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

There has been a prison on this site in Clerkenwell since the 17th century (remembered in the main these days for an act of terrorism in 1867 by the Fenian Society that left many dead). Rebuilt a number of times over the years it was eventually torn down in the late nineteenth century and replaced with a school, which has since been palimpsested further into covetable flats: a glossy, gated space. But, beneath all that, the prison vaults remain untouched, a warren of linking rooms and tunnels and the site of Belt Up’s latest production.

Founded in 2008, the York-based company are prolific and urgent in their work, eager to experiment, to strive, to reach, even if it means making the occasional misstep, over-stretching. In 2010, during the Edinburgh Fringe, they took over a space in C Soco, named it The House Above and adapted it, filled it, staging a mini-festival of their own making.

The lure of the House of Detention as a performance space is immediately obvious. The twitch of excitement begins even as you negotiate the winding roads of Clerkenwell, still adhering to their medieval curves, and discover the small door, the narrow flight of stairs leading down. Inside, the space is part cavern, part crypt, with a damp cellar smell and the chill of old stone; the must of years. Alexander Wright’s production has not simply been parachuted in, as is sometimes the case with theatre in found spaces; it’s clear that considerable thought has gone into the choreography of the scenes and into how to best utilise the peculiar acoustics of the place. Curtains of creeping mist make it difficult to gauge the lay-out while clanks and moans drift from distant corners, grunts and drums, the scrape of a blade on the flagstone floor, voices that summon and pursue. A melancholic wailing, the chorus of the weird sisters, acts as a sickly siren song, beckoning performers and audience alike, permeating the production. These creatures, when we see them, are more like apparition than witches, timeless things, bloodied and twitching.

The space is lit by low-wattage bulbs and the flicker of candle light. The effect is visually rich, chiaroscuro, faces patterned by shadow, bodies half-buried in the murk; scenes often terminate with a snuffing out of flames.

Staged with a cast of four and hurtling through the text, Belt Up’s Macbeth is rapid and rattling. It’s also an all-male affair: Dominic Allen is quietly charismatic in the title role while company co-founder James Wilkes resists the urge to overplay as Lady Macbeth; there’s a prim quality to his performance that works particularly well and periods of relative calm are used to counterbalance the sudden bursts of violence.

The promenade nature of the production has a degree of appeal (there’s a potent sense of being led, deeper and deeper into a dark world) but it also has its pitfalls. There’s a fair amount of uncertain shuffling and neck-craning on the part of the audience. It’s all too easy to miss chunks of dialogue as one negotiates pillars and the frequent movement around the space, coupled with the repeated need to resettle, to find one’s patch of flagstone, can have a distancing effect. The ominous echoes, all those ghostly clangs and wails, at times skirt close to cliché but the final scenes (one of the few moments where the audience are penned in place, their gaze directed) have a brutal intensity, a shadowy slasher flick vibe that’s thematically apt.

The production is, ultimately, most memorable for the space itself – the adventure of it, its time-bending quality, the way in which it scratches London’s surface – but this wouldn’t be anywhere close to the case were it not for some imaginative and space-sympathetic thinking on the part of the company.

Tickets are available through the Southwark Playhouse website.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Little Eagles at Hampstead Theatre

2011-04-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

To be indispensible is to survive. Having been released from the frozen hell of the Siberian gulag, Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov rose to become Chief Designer of the Soviet space programme, its architect and aorta. He was the driving force behind both the Sputnk and Vostok projects; his vision led to the first man being sent into space, his ambition allowed mankind to – briefly – touch the stars and when he died the programme fizzled like a spent match.

Rona Munro’s new play for the RSC (the first part of a proposed trilogy) tells the story of this pivotal but little known figure (Korolyov’s centrality and significance were suppressed by the Politburo during the years of the Cold War). It successfully condenses a complicated and fascinating story – touching on the symbiosis between the Soviet space programme and their defence programme; the training of the cosmonauts, Korolyov’s ‘little eagles’; the questioning of whether the vast sums spent on the space race could have been better utilized in, say, feeding and clothing people – but as is often the case with biographical drama, it also suffers from an overly episodic quality; it’s more of a kite-string of scenes than a cohesive theatrical experience.

Roxana Silbert’s production does contain some memorable individual moments. A scene of wide-eyed and yokel-accented (the performers avoid Russian accents even when curling their tongues around polysyllabic patronyms) Soviet farm labourers confronted by a jump-suited Yuri Gagarin, elated after his orbit of the earth, is played, in part, for laughs. The sight of the cosmonauts-to-be competing to see which of them can hold his hand to a scalding samovar for longest contains an edge, if only an edge, of the testosterone crackle of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. The rivalry and camaraderie of these young me, their training, experiences and the glare of their subsequent fame, is a fascinating seam that remains only partially developed.

Silbert’s production never fully taps into the sense of wonder and vision inherent in what Korolyov achieved; it skitters on the surface but rarely digs deep. Blueprints are wafted around and a miniature Sputnik dandles on a string, but the sense of hope and magic of those early days of space exploration is only superficially evoked (at times one longs for the visual panache of something like Complicite’s A Disappearing Number, a piece which though clearly different in its objectives, succeeded in giving shape to complex theories while weaving them together with biographical information). According to one character, Korolyov “changed everything I thought and felt when I looked up at the sky”, but the audience needs to take his word for it on this. The scenes of space travel are also oddly low-key, a LED backdrop and some timid aerial work; though perhaps this serves as a decent visual metaphor for the extraordinary things that were achieved with such comparatively limited technology.

Darrel D’Silva, with frosted quiff, is gripping in the lead role, suitably bullish and driven as a man who refuses to relinquish his grip on his work even as his health began to fail him. Brian Doherty is both boorish and menacing as Khrushchev, with an amusing hint of Al Murray in his demeanour. Greg Hicks doubles as a confrontational Soviet general and the gulag ghosts that haunt Korolyov. Noma Dumazweni provides a good foil for D’Silva as a doctor carrying with her the carapace that comes from spending twenty years in the gulag. She’s the only real mirror to his character’s sometimes alienating drive and allows the audience to better understand how his instinct for self-preservation became so tangled up with the Soviet push for the stars (certainly his personal life, what we learn of it, takes a back seat to the world of his work). This is echoed in Ti Green’s set, a cold, factory-like space with grime-fogged windows and a blade of riveted steel – evoking both wing and debris – jagging down from above.

Munro’s play works best as a piece of storytelling, accomplished if a little over-long, elegantly plaiting a number of narrative strands, but as an act of theatrical trepanning it doesn’t quite come off.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Precious Little Talent at Trafalgar Studios

2011-04-13T07:57:00.000-07:00

Ella Hickson’s second play has been considerably reworked since it first appeared at the Bedlam Theatre at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe. The premise remains the same but certain scenes have been strengthened and lengthened since that first showing, certain points clarified.

Hickson’s three-hander begins on a New York rooftop on Christmas Eve. This is where Sam, nineteen and bursting with adolescent chutzpah, first meets Joey, the English girl in New York, flight-frazzled and fidgety in a new city. One thing leads to another and they end up dashing through the New York night, wrapped in each other’s arms beneath the chandeliers of Grand Central Station. These opening moments, with their faintly unreal, US indie movie quality - Linklater-lite - are revisited later in the play and amusingly undermined.

Joey, it transpires, is in New York to visit the father she hasn’t seen in more than two years. Having recently lost her job and feeling increasingly uncomfortable at home following her mother’s remarriage, she is trying to build bridges. George, her father, a retired academic, has allowed the ties between them to slacken because he wants to shield her from his own mental and physical unravelling.

Joey is yet to discover this; she also initially does not realise that Sam, the boy with whom she shared her rooftop liaison, is also her father’s carer. The play turns its attention on the relationships between these three people who are so intimately connected – father and daughter; patient and carer – and yet distanced from one another, emotionally, culturally.

The character of Sam has benefited most from the reworking of the play. He retains his blithe American optimism and his certainty about how the world works, but there are greater hints at the things that drive him and these are drawn out by Anthony Walsh’s confident performance in the role. Ian Gelder also gives a measured and moving performance as George, a man all too aware of his own deterioration; his life has been one of the mind and now he is losing his hold on himself and the things he loves.

Joey is, oddly, the weakest point of the triangle. Her own struggle to gain a sense of her place in the world has lost some of its freshness; the play, on first viewing, gave a strong sense of what it meant to become an adult just as the rules about what exactly that means – in terms of career and security, in terms of the future – seem to be shifting dramatically. Yet this seems to have been diluted a little in the re-writes (or maybe it’s just that I have grown a little older, lived a little more). Sam’s kind manner and puppyish enthusiasm now seem to jar more with Joey’s capacity for child-like outbursts. Though the character of Joey as written gives a good account of what it is to be perched between adolescence and adulthood, Olivia Hallinan’s performance veers more towards the former. While her brittleness occasionally comes across as brattish, there is a measure of poignancy in her sudden need for her father’s reassurance, in her wish to recreate a proper English Christmas, just like the Christmases of her childhood. As a generational mouthpiece she’s on shaky ground but the character succeeds as a portrait of a confused, if rather self-involved, girl who suddenly feels at sea in the world and misses her dad.

With a longer running time, this reworking of the play is able to better flesh out all three relationships and allows for a more playful, plausible sense of attraction between Joey and Sam. The relationship between George and Joey, volatile but fuelled by love, is also elegantly portrayed in James Dacre’s new production and George’s monologue, in which he acknowledges all he stands to lose, is particularly moving (aided by Hickson’s sense of the poetic). That said, the culture clash humour can feel overplayed at times, an easy recourse rather than a source of real insight, and the final coda strikes a rather hollow note. The sheen of Washington D.C. on inauguration day and the way it feeds Joey’s need to belong to a moment, to be part of a movement, to just connect with something, all seems a trifle too neat a way to end a play that is otherwise brighter and sharper than that.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Brontë at the Tricycle Theatre

2011-04-09T02:34:00.000-07:00

“Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.” It was with these words that the poet laureate Robert Southey replied to Charlotte Brontë after she sent him a selection of her verse. He assumed that her burning need to spill herself onto paper would – and should – fade when she married; Charlotte however, perhaps not surprisingly, was not swayed by his argument.

Following their staging of Jane Eyre, Shared Experience shift their attention to the lives of the Brontë sisters with this reworked version of Polly Teale’s 2005 production, the third part in a trilogy that also includes After Mrs Rochester, an intertwining of Wide Sargasso Sea with the life of its author, Jean Rhys.

Living a life of isolation in rural Yorkshire, the sisters’ imaginations, their creative energy, provide a means of escape both from a life singed on all sides by death – the girls lost their mother and their two elder sisters when young and the graves of their father’s parishioners loomed through their windows – and from the weight of expectation, of how a woman should be behave, of what a woman should desire. To write, for pleasure, for release was not what decent Victorian daughters did.

As in Shared Experience’s earlier work, the girls’ creations share the stage with them, as physical manifestations of deeply internalised emotions. Through repetition, both by the company themselves and those influenced by them, this device has become an over familiar one which in turn leads to it feeling heavy-handed at times; this is particularly true of a scene in which a scarlet-clad and wild-haired Mrs Rochester writhes on the floor at Charlotte’s feet as she reads a letter from her Belgian tutor; at other times it’s done with a lighter touch, such as the moment when a sickening Emily is soothed and embraced by Cathy.

This emphasis on physicality extends into the siblings interactions with one another; people spring onto tables and bodies are flung about the stage to the point where the production threatens to lose its grip on the staid routine of their day to day lives. The production seems to need to paint the sisters as being as emotionally turbulent and passionate as the characters that sprang from them, and in a brief opening sequence, it concedes this need; featuring the three actresses in modern dress, unencumbered by stays and skirts, it subtly acknowledges how difficult it is not to frame the Brontës sisters’ lives through a contemporary lens.

Nancy Meckler’s production has an episodic, almost bitty quality, which intensifies towards the end as tragic death follows quickly after tragic death requiring frequent fades to black. There are so many scene shifts in the second half that Anne’s demise barely registers; there’s a cough and the sound of the waves at Scarborough and suddenly she’s gone. Kristin Atherton’s performance complies with Teale’s reading of Charlotte as a woman wonderfully unwilling to be meek and still, but also at times pinched and rigid and full of self-disgust; steely too and selfish, especially in her relations with Emily. (Charlotte’s brief flicker of a marriage to her father’s curate is also dealt with in a rather off-handed manner).

Elizabeth Crarer gives a remarkably controlled performance as the wilful and slippery Emily, the most unknowable of the sisters, and Flora Nicholson successfully conveys Anne’s warmth, calm and practicality, though her character is somewhat edged out, her inner life less fully explored. Mark Edel-Hunt is suitably brash and boyish as Branwell, sunk by the pressures inherent in being the only son. It’s hard to know what, if anything, Meckler is saying in casing Stephen Finegold not just as the dour Brontë patriarch, but also as Charlotte’s eventual husband and her married tutor, M. Heger, the object of her affection.

Ruth Sutcliffe’s minimal set consists of a black back wall and a single door. While this can’t fully convey the sense of isolation and the power of the surrounding moors, the blackness instead becomes a canvas for the girls’ imaginings. Yet while the performances are particularly strong and the production contains a number of resonant moments, a distance remains; the sisters remain remote figures against the black.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Quiet Volume

2011-04-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

Think for a moment about your ‘reading voice.’ That inner voice that accompanies the reading of a novel or the composition of a letter; is it related to your speaking voice, does it have a particular ‘sound’? The Quiet Volume invites its participants to do just this, to let that voice join with other voices, to become part of a larger choir.

We are in the Bishopsgate Institute Library, an attractive building near the chilly, gutted hull of Spitalfields Market, a building which since the late nineteenth century has been a place for debate, for the exchange of ideas. In the library the walls are lined with glass fronted-cases, home to their collection of books on the history of London and on the labour, co-operative and humanist movements. This is the backdrop for a piece of audio-theatre co-created by Rotozaza’s Ant Hampton and Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells, a piece designed for libraries, a “whispered, self-generated performance for two at a time” taking place as part of the London Word Festival.

Participants are paired up and given mp3 players. We sit side by side at a library table and don the headphones; a voice invites us to listen to the sounds around us, to the particular music of libraries worldwide, the muffled cough, the bags being unpacked, the turning of pages.

A stack of books sits at each person’s elbow from which we are invited to read, to run our finger under the lines of text as we once did at school. In this way the very act of reading becomes defamiliarised. We are invited to consider how we read and why we read from a position of distance; to examine the process of absorbing these words, of gleaning meaning from the lines of black ink on white.

We are made to study our own skin, to read our own stories and those of the people around us: we find ourselves watching the stylish woman sitting to our right with her shoes cast off under her table, the white-haired and grey-suited man sitting beside her and concentrating deeply on some kind of map. We are also invited to think about what it is to not have this ability; the words are made to dance, to fade to white.

The voice is at times soothing, at times unsettling. The resulting experience is both meditative and playful. The chosen passages in the chosen books echo one another, describing scenes of loss and destruction. We are invited to close our eyes and think our way into these scenes; from our table in the library we are transported to shattered cities. By placing participants in pairs, a solitary activity becomes a shared one in a manner that is again reminiscent of being at school, hunched over a single volume, suddenly rather conscious of the speed of your own reading.

The experience takes less than an hour, but it lingers in the memory. The next occasion you take up a book, in the tube on the way home say, or later that evening in bed, it is difficult not to do so with a greater degree of wakefulness, to enjoy the weight of the book in your hand, the feel of it, the strength of it, and to pay much closer attention to your reading voice.

Following its run at the Bishopsgate Institute Library, The Quiet Volume will tour a number of contrasting library spaces across London including Hackney Central Library and the University of London’s Senate House Library.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Interview: Ella Hickson

2011-04-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

A quick link to my interview with Ella Hickson for Exeunt. Her first full length play, Precious Little Talent, which I saw and loved in Edinburgh in 2009, is transferring to the Trafalgar Studios this week in a new production directed by James Dacre.

Remembrance Day at the Royal Court

2011-03-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

The 16th March marks Latvian Legion Day, a day of commemoration for the surviving veterans who fought against the Soviets on the side of the Nazis. It is a day of remembrance but also a day of protest and anger in which the country’s entrenched social divisions are brought sharply into focus. The march has become a touch-paper for a younger generation, both for young nationalist groups and for predominantly Russian anti-fascist groups.

Aleksey Scherbak’s new play, staged as part of the Royal Court’s International Playwrights Season in a translation by Rory Mullarky, is set on the eve of the march. Anya, the teenage daughter of a Russian family, is getting ready to protest; her rage is blue-flamed and youthful, her view of the world binary. Her father doesn’t condone her anger yet he is sympathetic and even helps her paint an anti-fascist banner; however the more he speaks of forgiveness and leaving the past in the past, the more he seems to upset and anger both her and other Russians who feel as she does.

Scherbak’s play is set in a run-down block of flats in Riga where Russians and Latvians live next door to one another, though this proximity does not equate to neighbourliness. If anything the divisions run deeper than they once did (Latvian Legion Day was only instituted in the 1990s when the country gained its independence); Anya’s elderly Uncle Misha, a Russian army veteran, used to play chess with his Latvian neighbour Valdis, but those days are long gone. To speak of forgiveness, as Anya’s father does, is on a par with declaring oneself a Nazi sympathiser.

In the adjacent flat, the two veterans, Valdis and his friend Paulis, knock back the vodka in remembrance of the fallen and discuss how their fight has become a symbol of Latvian independence and pride. Paulis is full of unrepentant bluster but Valdis is more contemplative, fully aware that things were not so clear cut during the war years.

Tom Scutt’s stark set, its walls and floor painted red and white, striped like the Latvian flag, is agreeably flexible, acting as both the connecting corridor and the interior of the various flats. A pile of rather functional furniture sits at one side of the stage and is pulled into use when needed and left in place so that director Michael Longhurst is able to interweave the scenes and show the neighbours - literally - living on top of one another, sharing the same sofa, eating at the same table.

Scherbak seems to be writing with a broader audience in mind – there’s a lot of contextualising and explanation – but his play paints a fascinating picture of a divided country and the harnessing of the past for political ends, which while very specific to Latvia, contains ripples that run throughout Europe and beyond. Character takes something of a backseat in this process and Anya’s journey towards radicalism, tangled as it is with sexual desire and adolescent romanticism – she speaks dreamily about the purity and beauty of martyrdom, of being willing to die for one’s beliefs – feels rather heavy-handed at times. Ruby Bentall, as Anya, manages to combine teenage petulance with something colder and more disturbing while Iwan Rheon, as her brother Lyosha, is the voice of optimism and internationalism; he pronounces himself a citizen of the world and thinks the whole situation has little relevance for his generation.

Michael Nardone gives the play a solid centre as Anya’s determinedly reasonable father, a man unwilling to dilute his principles. Sam Kelly and Ewan Hooper, as the ageing veterans, add a necessary textural layer as well as some humour - which sits uneasily with the sight of their SS jackets. Luke Norris is fittingly slick and cynical as Boris, the young man using both the veterans and Anya’s passion as a way of furthering his political career (there’s a nice, if a little too wry, moment where Boris meets his fascist counterpart in the corridor and greets him like a colleague, asking after his family before briefly discussing printing costs like any two co-workers).

Scherbak’s play, like Anya’s father, seems keen to draw a line under the past, while demonstrating that looking forward is not the same thing as forgetting or even forgiving. But it does this at the expense of fully engaging with what drives young people towards extremism and sacrifices a certain dramatic richness along the way too, yet for all it lacks, it remains a fascinating portrait of a country split by its past.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Mary Broome at the Orange Tree Theatre

2011-03-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

What’s in a name? An awful lot, a life, a past: to have a name is to exist, to be recognised. Mary Broome has worked as a housemaid for the prosperous Timbrell family for years, yet they only have cause to learn her surname when it transpires, on the eve of a family wedding, that their younger son Leonard has got her ‘in trouble.’ Suddenly they’re forced to see her as a person rather than as part of the furniture, a speck in their peripheral vision. Later the family congratulate themselves on letting another housemaid hang on to her ‘awful’ given name of Beryl rather than insisting she change it to something more palatable.

It says much about both playwright and play that Allan Monkhouse chose to use her name as his title. Monkhouse, a critic and literary editor for the Manchester Guardian as well as a socially minded playwright who had several plays staged at Manchester’s Gaiety Theatre, was clearly very interested in the interplay between the servant class and their employers. He was also interested in intergenerational relationships and this play, first staged in 1911, is as much about the gulf in attitude and understanding between young Leonard Timbrell and his father as it is about Mary.

The couple are obliged to marry and do a good job of coping with the situation until Leonard’s runaway tongue causes his father to cut off their allowance entirely. While Mary grows ever anxious over money and the health of their child, Leonard lounges around and vaguely considers pawning his pocket watch. A sub-Wildean aesthete lacking only the lily in his lapel, he was a source of torment and confusion to his rather Victorian father even before this latest indiscretion. Though he’s perceptive, expressive, and quite unlike his stuffy elder brother, he is also, as he confesses, quite ‘rotten with egoism’ and is capable of being just as blind and cruel as his father when he chooses. At times his aestheticism feels like a defence for idleness (he’s a writer, but there’s no real sense that he’s particularly gifted) and the whole situation like an amusing adventure, while Mary’s whole life and sense of herself has been uprooted.

The situation also seems to awaken something in Leonard’s cowed mother. Though she repeatedly and rather too vocally insists on her own weakness in the face of her husband’s bluster, she also confesses that she believes that there’s “something in what these suffrage people say.”

Jack Farthing manages to convey the conflicting aspects of Leonard’s personality; he is charismatic and honest yet oddly hollow and casual in his cruelty, quite astonishingly unlikeable at times. He views everything at a remove, barely acknowledges his son, but seems – briefly at least – saddened by his inability to feel anything more deeply than he does. Katie McGuinness has an apt placidity as Mary, a woman used to accepting the various hands that life has dealt her, but who is also quite unshakeable when she sets her mind to a thing. Eunice Roberts also gives an intriguingly shaded performance as Mrs Timbrell, a woman who – at times at least – seems far more questing and aware than others of her generation, but whose love for her son blinds her to his faults.

Monkhouse’s play sets its stall deftly. The situation and characters are elegantly established and while it’s not as socially probing as a play by someone like Granville-Barker, it remains a strong piece of comic writing with a conscience and would probably have been considered rather daring in its day. But the play loses steam by the second half and his portrait of Leonard and Mary’s life together is less convincing. The final scene sees everything tied up rather too quickly and neatly (when one learns that Mary has been stepping out with the Jonsonianly monikered milkman George Truefitt it’s not that hard to guess how things will end up for her) and there’s only the lightest sense that anyone has learned anything, Mary excepted, from this unfortunate episode.

Auriol Smith’s production is pleasingly pacey for a revival of an Edwardian play and this despite some lengthy scene changes. That the furniture is shifted and the cushions plumped by women in housemaids’ attire does serve as a neat reminder of how these people’s lives were oiled and their homes made comfortable by the labour of others, but these interludes also serve to slow down and break up the flow of the drama.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Theatre Uncut

2011-03-18T05:43:00.000-07:00

Theatre Uncut is a refusal to lie down and be silent. As the project’s co-ordinator, Hannah Price of Reclaim, has explained, it’s about theatre contributing to the discussion and “joining our voice with the voices that are already out there.” This is not just a response to the cuts in the arts, rather a broader response to the spending cuts in general; an attempt to spark debate and stir feelings.

The project consists of eight short plays by Mark Ravenhill, Lucy Kirkwood, David Grieg, Jack Thorne, Dennis Kelly, Laura Lomas, Anders Lustgarten and Clara Brennan. The plays have been made available rights-free to anyone who wants to stage them. On the 19th March, they will performed by an eclectic array of theatre groups – including am-dram groups and student groups – across the UK (as well as in New York, Chicago and Berlin) with the resulting productions linked together by online networking and video conferencing.

Before that the pieces are being staged in London’s Southwark Playhouse to allow all eight to be seen together. Each writers response has been different; some take a more opaque approach while others aim for the throat – or rather the heart in the case of the first play in the showcase, Laura Lomas’ Open Heart Surgery, a raw allegorical monologue delivered by a woman by a hospital bedside, trying to put a brave face on the fact that something she loves has had its heart ripped out. Dennis Kelly’s Things That Make No Sense is a spikier piece of writing, a Kafka-esque skit in which a man is punished for a crime he didn’t commit, his protests ignored by a pair of smiling police officers.

David Grieg’s piece Fragile is a two-hander in which, in a nod to austerity, the audience is required to play one of the parts, reading their lines en masse from projections on the back of the stage. It takes the form of a conversation between a young man with mental health issues and his case worker; light-hearted at first it becomes increasingly taut as Greig makes the audience think about those at the hard-edge who stand to lose the most as well as the people in between, the people whose jobs are going to become an awful lot harder (that is if they still have jobs)

Both Jack Thorne and Lucy Kirkwood, in Whiff Whaff and Housekeeping, take slightly slanted paths towards the subject at hand. Thorne’s play depicts a cheerful middle class couple who describe how they believe that providing support for the disabled or ailing is somehow defeatist: “The thing is with crutches, they’re crutches.” In Kirkwood’s piece, which has more of a poetic intensity than its premise would suggest, a woman sells off her grandmother to help clear her debts. The grandmother, played by Marlene Sidaway, eyes Zawe Ashton’s brisk, business-like accountant with recognition. She’s marched from Jarrow, debated at Putney; she’s been here before.

Anders Lustgarten’s contribution is not a character piece at all rather a polemic delivered by the playwright himself, in which he neatly explains the economics of the Greek bailout before urging the audience to get angry, to lose their rag, to wake up to the changes they can exert collectively if they try; to, as he puts it, “fuck the fat man” of capitalism.

Mark Ravenhill’s piece, A Bigger Banner, written in response to and in honour of the recent student protests, employs a time-slip set-up in which a student at a university sit-in encounters her 1950s counterpart and ends up reassuring her that the future she’s fighting for so passionately will indeed come to pass. Interestingly it is Ravenhill and Lustgarten’s pieces that have proved most popular with younger groups, perhaps because of their clarity of message, their undiluted call to activism.

The evening concludes with Clara Brennan’s moving monologue Hi Vis, featuring Lisa Palfrey as a mother of a severely disabled daughter, describing her child with love and humour. Each play has its own particularly potency, and though some are blunter instruments than others, together they succeed in their intention to stir, to connect, to create an engagement that spills beyond the theatre walls.

Reviewed for Exeunt I'd also recommend reading Aliki Chapple's account of staging the plays in Lancaster, here.

For further information about the project, visit Theatre Uncut

Woman Bomb at the Tristan Bates Theatre

2011-03-11T04:19:00.000-08:00

Woman Bomb, by the Croatian playwright Ivana Sajko, is as much about one woman’s journey towards becoming a suicide bomber as it is about the creative process involved in imagining such a journey.

Though subtitled ‘a monologue for a woman-bomb, a name-less politician, his bodyguards and mistress, God, a choir of angels, a worm, the Mona Lisa, twenty friends of mine, my mother and me,’ and previously performed as a solo piece, under the direction of Maja Milatović-Ovadia and Vanda Butković, the play is voiced by three women. This has the effect of giving shape to the playwright’s internal conversations as well as form to the woman-bomb herself (played with suitable intensity by Laura Harling).

Sajko’s play is a layered to the point of being messy, flicking back and forth between the self-interrogatory and the exploratory, merging dreams and digressions in what often comes across as a relentless stream of consciousness splurge (or, possibly, a purge). She has said that the author is always hidden somewhere in every playwright’s work so she chooses not to hide herself nor her role as the writer. Having embarked on the project Sajko emails twenty of her friends to ask how they would behave if they had only twelve minutes and thirty-six seconds to live, and weaves their responses into the text. She feeds her audience the fruits of her research. Most female suicide bombers are young; 22, we are told, is the average age. For some it’s the only way of restoring honour to their family after perceived sexual transgression, for others the reasons are murkier and less easy to grasp. A section of the play is devoted to a discussion of Dhanu, the woman who assassinated Rhajiv Ghandi, and to descriptions of the photographs taken both before and after she detonated the explosives strapped to her middle.

Sajko equates this terminal act with pregnancy; she describes the intimacy between bomber and bomb, metal against skin, and blurs the line between destruction and creation. The woman-bomb is forced on her back and has her belly pawed and fondled by the other two women, pages of script are stuffed beneath her clothes to give her stomach the false curve of pregnancy. The woman-bomb speaks through a mouthful of apple (what else?) and the final act of detonation is described in near-sexual terms, a sticky embrace, while fear and the bomber’s desire to self-betray take the form of a literal ear-worm, a squirmy nervous creature on her shoulder. Footage of the rotting body of a dog is projected on a screen in one corner of the stage. Any discussion of political motivation is, for the most part, pushed to one side; it’s the psychological that fixates Sajko, the contents of the bomber’s mind in those last fraught minutes.

The riper passages of Sajko’s play hover, at times uneasily, between abstraction and incoherence. There are puns – a‘Prada Meinhoff bra’- but also many other instances where the adverb-heavy language jars. Perhaps this is an issue of translation or perhaps the result of more intrinsic linguistic differences between Croatian and English; the writing is sometimes poetic, but sometimes blunt, jagged, cluttered (full of sentences like this: “aeroplanes fly over my desk, scanning my manuscripts, my skull, ribs, spine and limb-bones, noting my body postures, the composition of liquid in my cup and the burned misery of a war-torn scenery.”).

Butković’s set design consists of a writer’s desk and a collection of floor tiles set in sand that crack and slide (rather noisily) under the performers’ feet, until, with papers strewn everywhere and furniture upended, the room looks not unlike a bombsite.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Cleansing of Constance Brown, A.E. Harris Building, Birmingham

2011-03-06T07:29:00.000-08:00

A corridor is not a destination. It’s a place of transition, of passage; a place people move through, not to.

First staged in 2007, Stan’s Café's mesmeric production takes place in a chilly warehouse in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. The stage takes the form of a stretch of corridor two metres wide and fourteen metres deep; facing the audience end-on, the space is spot-lit from above and has doorways on either side, doorways through which it’s impossible to see. It’s a space through which people are constantly moving, darting from one entrance to another in various guises; moments of stillness are rare and all the more potent for that.

This corridor becomes an ‘anywhere’ space; it is a prison, a hotel, the hallway in an apartment building, an office complex. It slip-slides through time, from the Elizabethan era to the recognisable present, a collage of narrative fragments that often overlap and intersect. Sometimes it is lit with torch beams like some early episode of The X Files, at other times by the lamp of a Florence Nightingale figure who peers with concern into the various rooms.

The act of looking in and on is a recurring trope. In a production performed with minimal dialogue and a cranium-pounding soundtrack, the audience are left to guess at what’s going on behind the doors. At one point police officers force their way through one doorway while a Jewish man and his wife emerge from another pushing a pram laden with their possession. In this way the responses and reactions of the ‘characters’ become the main event. This is an incredibly powerful device, tapping into everything from way that key incidents are reported in Greek drama to the modern obsession with conspiracy, with shadowy goings-on behind closed doors, decisions being made and plots being hatched. This is emphasised by the vaguely sinister black-suited men with earpieces who pop up at various points in the proceedings to stand guard, arms folded and vigilant.

Only on a couple of occasions does the production break this pattern of observing from the outside, most notably when the aftermath of a raucous office party circa 1985 segues into a scene of soldiers tormenting prisoners in Abu Ghraib. A gaggle of quivering men, cuffed and hung-over, become meat for manipulation, to be posed and humiliated. It takes a moment for the click to come, for this transition to sink in.

Constance Brown is steeped in cinematic reference, sometimes overt, sometimes less so. Various genre markers are employed, sci-fi, horror, a semiotic smorgasbord. In one of the more blatant moments a priest armed with holy water pursues a twitching, wild-eyed girl in a nightgown. There are nods to The Shining and at one point a 1950s B-movie blob engulfs the whole space. It is also frequently witty, with a number of neat visual gags: a woman in a burka walks past a woman whited out with terry cloth and cold cream and they both register curiosity and amusement.

The act of cleaning is a recurring theme: people mop and sweep and polish the walls. At one point the buzz of a vacuum cleaner adds another layer to an already pulsating soundscape. There are echoes of Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things: these are the people who clean up the mess of the world once the lights have been switched off. It’s also difficult not to think of Rupert Goold’s staging of Enron when documents, shredded in panic, rain down like so much wedding confetti. And who is Constance? It’s not always clear. She’s the woman on the edges, in the background, peering through doorways, inquisitive, bemused, aghast.

The piece is performed by seven cast members, though one feels the need to double-check that number as there are so many costume changes (there are 68 distinct characters in all), so many shifts, that it often feels like the work of far more. The production has a relentless quality and teeters on the brink of becoming wearying as it tips over the hour mark, but director James Yarker ensures there’s enough textural variety to stop it becoming too oppressive. At the end the audience are invited to inspect the spaces behind and between for themselves, to get a glimpse of the workings behind the seemingly seamless. This just adds another layer of appreciation to what is already – in so very many ways – an exciting piece of theatre.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Moment at the Bush Theatre

2011-03-03T05:50:00.000-08:00

The ritual of tea-making plays a large part in Irish playwright Deirdre Kinhan’s tense drama. In moments of familial crisis, people reach for the kettle. The tea doesn’t always get drunk, the stuff in the cup is almost secondary, but it’s the act of making it that matters, the sense of purpose provided, the long wait for the kettle to sing.

Kinahan’s play illustrates how one awful act, one unreclaimable moment of violence, can shatter a family, can have consequences that bleed through the years. Around fifteen years ago, while still a teenager, Nial Lynch committed a crime, he killed someone. He’s paid for it; he’s served his time, and after his release he was able to go and live in London where he became a successful artist. His sisters, however, Niamh and Ciara, stayed behind, left with the mess, with a father who would die young from the stress and a mother who pops pills like sweets in an effort to shut out the past. They were left to face the reproachful stares of the neighbours and to tend to their damaged parents.

Now Nial is coming home for a visit. Recently married, his English bride Ruth wants to meet her new family. She’s been told about Nial’s background but it’s clear she doesn’t fully understand the consequences, not completely, and over the course of one exquisitely tense meal, the full impact of Nial’s act comes flooding up.

Kinahan roots their story in the everyday, in the domestic and familiar, in cups of tea and plates of quiche, in shop-bought potato salad. Though an evident tension between mother and daughters is there from the beginning, she takes her time in exploring it, exposing it. The mother’s weakness and dependence, and the way she uses it to subtly control them, only gradually becomes apparent.

Maybe because of its size the Bush does gripping kitchen scenes very well. There are echoes of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Apologia, also staged in this space, in this pivotal meal, in the way the kitchen table becomes a site of familial dissection, with all their old wounds opened up. The second half of David Horan’s production never quite matches the momentum of the first and the play too becomes a blunter instrument, dabbling in flashback.

Maeve Fitzgerald and Kate Nic Chonaonaigh are both compelling as the Lynch sisters. Fitzgerald is brittle and tightly wound, forever on the brink of exasperation and outburst; her face tells of the effort required in not speaking and occasionally, inevitably, she erupts. Chonaonaigh is far calmer, playing someone long accustomed to steadying the boat. Yet she too carries a weight around her neck and ultimately needs to unburden herself. Ronan Leahy is more impenetrable as Nial, There is anger there but also frustration and the sense that he still doesn’t fully grasp either why he did what he did or the full implications of his actions.

There’s something almost serene in the way Deirdre Donnelly plays their mother Teresa. She’s a passive woman, but one capable of calculation, a woman who has developed strategies to ensure her own survival in the face of all that’s happened. Kinahan makes it clear that she already played upon her fragility even before the incident and this tactic has become her crutch, a vital part of who she is.

Kinhan is not afraid to tap the situation for comedy, using the characters of the two men in the sisters’ lives, Dave and Fin, to balance the emotional see-saw and provide some necessary levity. Only Ruth, the new bride, the interloper, never really rings true as a character in her reactions and expectations, she’s a tool, a catalyst. The production is well-paced, especially in its first half, and Kinahan sculpts events with elegance, adding characters, building to a pitch, and then allowing events to fade, to dissipate, as the family scatters once more and Niamh is left alone in a dark Dublin kitchen with her memories.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Winterlong at Soho Theatre

2011-02-28T03:46:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sheridan’s brutal debut, the joint winner of the 2008 Bruntwood Prize, is a play that leaves a mark, a bruise, the imprint of fingers round a thin wrist. The writing is vivid and intense, full of bleak volleys. A mother describes the many ways she could have killed her unwanted child with an almost poetic exuberance; the fallout of a nuclear blast is described with similar verve.

Oscar is a child no-one seems capable of loving. His young mother, in a relationship with a controlling, volatile man, abandons him and his grandparents struggle to show any affection for this scrap of a boy they’ve been left to raise. He grows up lonely, friendless, but not broken; he remains oddly unbowed.

The play spans a period of roughly fifteen years, from Oscar’s birth to his teenage years. Sheridan takes a recognisable kind of English domesticity and tugs at it, distorting and exaggerating it, stretching it out like a piece of well-chewed gum. Familiar things – deck chairs, a battered child’s paddling pool, an artificial Christmas tree that has seen better days – take on a new resonance in this world. The play is stuffed with perverts and aggressors, men who loiter with intent; few scenes pass without talk of bums, cum and pus. A rare moment of brightness ends with a bird shitting on someone’s head.

Everything stinks, everything is broken down; this is a world in a process of collapse and decay, shaped by pain and the inevitability of abandonment. This unrelenting quality has its moments of absurdity, there is humour in it, of a kind, and Sheridan acknowledges this and, plays upon it: scabs are picked, Mars bars are popped down pants for ‘softening.’ There is humanity as well as humour, a small buoy bobbing on a grey wave of despair, a note of hope. There needs to be.

Sarah Frankcom’s direction and the performances she draws from the cast add to this sense of balance. Harry McEntire (so memorable as Chadwick Mead in Frankcom’s production of Simon Stephens’ Punk Rock) is endearingly awkward yet resilient as Oscar and it’s hard not to feel for him when he hides his face in his jumper and tries to eat his ice cream through the wool. Paul Copley and Gabrielle Reidy play his grandparents as two people who have had the colour drained from them over their lives, slump-shouldered, accustomed to upset and loss. Laurence Mitchell plays a string of characters, all differently menacing and unsettling, while Rebecca Callard plays Oscar’s mother, hardening as the play progresses.

Amanda Stoodley’s set is fittingly non-naturalistic, a cave-like space with a fractured, cracked floor and walls made up of the acquired junk of life: suitcases, tennis rackets, and an old television set piled and packed under plastic sheeting like a cross between a suburban attic and a crime scene. At the end of each scene, the props are piled in a growing heap in the corner, like rubbish on a tip.

While the influences of the writing are at times all too obvious, Sheridan’s play feels like a work in a particular tradition rather than a pastiche. It has its own rhythms and cadences, its own drive, though the pacing sometimes wavers and there are slumps as well as highs. The final scene, a bit too cyclical and neat perhaps, has a power of its own and the play as a whole has the capacity to leave the audience dazed and gaping. There is a moment of hesitancy before the applause begins.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Biting Point at Theatre 503

2011-02-25T10:04:00.000-08:00

In a time of protest and unrest, Sharon Clark’s new play, The Biting Point, looks back to the early 1980s, to a time when riots scorched the streets of Southall and Brixton.

The play tells the stories of three characters, a police officer, an angry young man and an ANL supporter, in the days running up to a big march. Clark takes time and care in fleshing out their back-stories and in showing their motivations to be complex, messy and human. Yet even though there’s something slightly too forced and obvious about this desire to show that things are never clear cut as you think and that everyone has their reasons for behaving as they do, Clark goes about it in an intriguing way.
The march itself acts as a catalyst for the out-spilling of suppressed emotions. In many ways this is not a play about the riots at all, they’re simply a means of – violently – bringing these people together.

Malcolm is a hardworking young man who spends much of his spare time looking after his sister who has learning difficulties. He’s kind and patient, a dedicated carer, but it takes all his energy to remain so. He wants more and is beginning to grasp quite how much his sister is holding him back. Things come to a head when he invites a girl he’s attracted to back to their house.

Dennis is a teacher who’s involved in a relationship with one of his students, Anna. He despises himself but he’s weak and she knows it; Anna takes pleasure in exploiting the evident power she has over him. Ruth completes this narrative triangle. She speaks in a succession of oddly charged monologues, ever wary, her body tensing when a hand knocks at the door.

Charlie Holloway gives a an admirably slow-burning performance as Malcolm, a man accustomed to ignoring his own needs and wants, and swallowing his rage until it threatens to choke him. (It is more than fitting that his sister has an obsession with volcanoes and earthquakes). He’s been abandoned by his parents, left to fend for himself, and Clark paints a convincing picture of someone who might find solace and support in an extremist group. Gyuri Sarossy‘s Dennis is revealed to be quite reprehensible in some ways but he retains a degree of charisma throughout. Lizzie Roper’s Ruth stands apart from the other characters. Hers is an intense performance but the character’s instability never quite convinces.

Dan Coleman’s production is measured and restrained and benefits from Mark Friend’s aptly jagged, Futurist set. It’s testament to Coleman’s skill that the production’s most gripping moment is when Malcolm calmly destroys something very precious of his sister’s. Interestingly, when the three stories finally collide, in a suburban back garden with the roar of the crowd and the angry crunch of boots on tarmac growing louder around them, the tension dissipates somewhat. The conclusion lacks the punch of what has gone before.

Clark is rather too deliberate in the way she plays with audience expectations. She holds off assigning ‘sides’ to her characters until near the end – when they all don their various ‘uniforms’ before heading into the fray – but there’s something cautious about her approach, her careful muddying of the moral waters, that means her play is not as hard hitting as it might have been.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Our Private Life at the Royal Court

2011-02-23T05:04:00.000-08:00

Pedro Miguel Rozo’s self-labelled family parable is set in a Columbian village on the cusp of becoming a town. Despite the opening of a shiny new shopping mall with its promise of material pleasures and a veneer of urban sophistication, the community still operates like a village; rumours can still spread like a spark through dry grass and the currents of gossip can still pull a man down.

Nothing is truly private in such a place and Rozo emphasises this by muddying the line between interior and exterior. The characters thoughts are often spoken out loud so that not only the audience but also the other characters, can hear them. It is not uncommon for one character to admonish another for not thinking more quietly.

Our Private Life is the first of two plays presented by the Royal Court along with readings and seminars and a second play, Aleksey Scherbak’s Remembrance Day, as part of what they’re terming an International Playwrights Season.

A rumour is doing the rounds that Carlos’s father molested his twelve year old farmhand and this makes Carlos, a “bi-polar compulsive fantasist”, worry that his father may have done the same thing to him when he was a boy. He turns first to Sergio, his older brother (or half-brother, as it turns out), whose marriage and success as a businessman have failed to endear him to their father, and then to his psychiatrist, whose willingness to help Carlos excavate his childhood memories owes much to his desire to own a nicer car.

Rozo’s play, presented in a translation by Simon Scardifield, has a sensational quality and the characters make constant reference to the way unfolding events resemble something out of a daytime soap or a movie. In this light, the performances are pitched at an appropriate level of artifice, encompassing extremes of emotion, with Colin Morgan’s pipe cleaner-limbed Carlos exploding into tears like a hysterical toddler before trying to do away with himself with a butter knife, or the whole family perkily embarking on a doomed Christmas dinner before this too breaks down around them.

Morgan came to prominence in the Young Vic’s adaption of Vernon God Little and indeed Lyndsey Turner’s production shares something of that novel’s Technicolor excess as well as certain parallels of plot; there are also definite echoes of the films of Almodovar in the play’s manner of exaggeration, its relationship with the absurd, and in scenes in which Ishia Bennison’s volatile matriarch flings her prosthetic breast across the kitchen table.

Morgan is springy and boyish, his eyes suggesting both damage and a degree of glee at the chaos wrought. Bennison, as his mother, hits on an intriguing balance as a woman trying to protect her husband from the waves of accusation and ultimately shielding only herself; she maintains a shell that only occasional breaks. Adrian Schiller has the requisite air of tainted professional dignity as the psychiatrist whose wardrobe and whiskey of choice improve in quality as paranoia becomes increasingly rampant in town and his services are more frequently called upon.

Shunt’s Lizzie Clachlan’s set consists of a versatile green sliding panel that resembles a Japanese shōji door in the way it suggests that nothing is ever fully concealed; seen in silhouette it also brings to mind the screen in a confessional.

The pay-off, when it comes – in the form of a downbeat coda- lacks the chill of revelation; the use of sexual abuse as metaphor seems an overplayed device and after the near-cartoonish tone of all that’s gone before, the ugliness that finally comes to light strikes an uneasy note – possibly not in the way intended.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Ordinary Days at the Trafalgar Studios

2011-02-15T06:51:00.000-08:00

As one of the characters in Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days points out, her Manhattan is not a Gershwin Manhattan. And yet the soundtrack of her city is not entirely unfamiliar either; it’s literate and witty and inward-looking, full of lyrics about Virginia Woolf, the pairing of red wine with fish and the labyrinthine floor-plan of the Met Museum. It’s well-read and tinged with angst, full of echoes of Jason Robert Brown, Jonathan Larson and Michael John LaChiusa. But while there’s a strong sense of having visited this place before, its characters are recognisable in a good way and it contains a decided emotional charge, balancing out cynicism with sentiment - though at times veering too much towards the latter.

Ordinary Days is a song cycle made up of two New York stories that touch each other without intersecting. Claire and Jason (played by Julia Atherton and Daniel Boys ) are a young couple who finally decide to take the plunge and move in together, but instead of drawing them closer together, this only accentuates the distance between them. Deb is a grad student who’s been so busy running away from the cul-de-sac she grew up on that she’s lost sight of what’s she’s running towards. When her lost thesis notes find their way into the hands of artist’s assistant, Warren, he views the event as kismet, a fated moment, while she just wants the damn things back so she can appease her professor.

The closer Jason tries to get to Claire the more she withdraws. Atherton and Boys have a crabby chemistry which they milk on their duets, particularly during the snippy passive-aggressive back and forth of ‘Fine’. And Atherton demonstrates just how skilled a performer she is when tackling the show’s big emotional number, I’ll Be Here; this is a song that could so easily have come across as mawkish, as manipulative, and yet in her hands it’s delicate and devastating, a genuinely moving moment.

Alexia Khadime, as Deb, and Lee William-Davis, as Warren have slightly less to play with. Khadime’s sweetly soaring voice stands in marked contrast with her character’s fractious personality and she’s gifted with – and revels in – the funniest lines; William-Davis is also endearing though he doesn’t quite nail the needy geekiness of Warren.

Sometimes the writing becomes bogged down with cliché –there’s a riff about overly complicated coffee ordering which feels tired out before it's finished – but director Adam Lenson keeps things light. He knows how to play up the musical’s qualities, having staged it at the Finborough Theatre in 2008 prior to this re-staging in the similarly sized, Trafalgar Studio 2. Indeed space is something of an issue here. While the studio allows for a superb degree of intimacy (with both the performers and with the audience - you could hear each teary sniffle as the show hit its emotional crescendo), it’s also constrictive. With the musicians on stage, the limited floor space is limited further and the performers have little room for manoeuvre, especially when entering and exiting. The final visual flourish, the moment that unites the two stories, also loses some of its power as a result – if ever a scene needed a higher ceiling, it’s this one.

Alistair Turner’s set is a collection of slightly scuffed white cubes, a basic reproduction of the New York skyline which also double as a set of shelves onto which objects can be placed; this twinning is particularly apt as this is a musical much concerned with our personal debris, the things we hold on to and the things we choose to let go.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Beachy Head at Jackson's Lane Theatre

2011-02-11T08:29:00.000-08:00

Beachy Head, the dramatic white headland of the South Downs, is one of the UK’s most notorious suicide spots. Every year a small number of people will choose to end their life there and it’s this, an attempt to explore this drive towards self-obliteration, which forms the subject matter of Analogue’s production, recast and revised since its appearance at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe (where I first saw it).

Two filmmakers, Joe and Matt, in the process of gathering footage for a project on lighthouses, inadvertently capture the last moments of a young man’s life. He takes off his boots, throws them aside, and steps off the cliff edge.

As their shock gives way to fascination and curiosity, the two men find themselves becoming increasingly interested in this man’s story. They track down his widow, Amy, and with her permission they begin to make a film about his, Stephen’s, life, something she initially finds useful as a tool for helping her work through – and work out – her emotions.

The production hinges on the moral implications of their actions, or rather their inaction, as they fail to tell Amy about the existence of the footage of her husband’s death, something that becomes increasingly difficult to do as Joe in particular grows closer to the young woman.

The reasons for Stephen’s suicide remain opaque. He is glimpsed in flashback as an introverted and contemplative man, a writer of children’s stories, but he remains a flickering figure, half-hidden, a memory. The company never present a clear-cut reason for his actions, acknowledging in the process the difficulty of doing so, that certain things will always be unknowable.

Instead they turn the production in on itself, examining the very idea of making art about suicide and interrogating the film-maker’s (and indeed the theatre-maker’s) motivations in creating such a piece. The obvious reference point is Eric Steel’s documentary film The Bridge and this is cited by the company as such. It’s interesting to note that (according to Wikipedia that is) a film on Beachy Head suicides was commissioned by Channel 4 but never broadcast.

The production, a devised collaborative piece created by Dan Rebellato, Emma Jowett, Hannah Barker, Liam Jarvis and Lewis Hetherington, makes considerable use of video, live and pre-recorded. A screen at the back of the set is used for the projection of images – of the beckoning sky, of the cool tile of a mortuary; on the reverse of the screen is a mirror, which is used to shift the audience’s perspective and amplify the sense of aloneness as Amy lies in the bed she once shared with her husband. These multimedia elements are never jarring and are, for the most part, well integrated with the fabric of the production and the moment when the filmmakers’ desk, complete with editing equipment, is transformed into the cliff itself is a unifying and potent one.

The narrative is interspersed with scenes in which a pathologist (played by Sarah Belcher) describes her work, the autopsy process, the statistics surrounding suicide, with the necessary professional detachment. This sense of detachment seeps into the piece itself and Joe and Matt never really emerge as characters. Katie Lightfoot, as Amy, however, manages to convey a plausible mixture of shock and a dazed kind of calm at her character’s sudden bereavement while Dan Ford’s Stephen remains – perhaps inevitably – an enigma.

Reviewed for, small drum roll, Exeunt

Water at the Tricycle Theatre

2011-02-05T08:56:00.000-08:00

Though Water, a devised piece by physical theatre company Filter and the director David Farr, was first seen on stage in 2007, it feels just as relevant today in the wake of a number of climate change plays, including the National’s recent multi-authored Greeland. Not that Water is a climate change play in the conventional sense. The subject is dealt with, but on a human and intimate level; the company tells two stories that intertwine and echo one another while remaining separate. In the first, Graham, unsociable by nature, awkward and somewhat Eeyore-ish, travels to Canada for his estranged father’s funeral; there he meets his younger half-brother and discovers some unexpected truths about the man his father really was. In the second thread, Claudia, a hard-working political adviser, strives to create some kind of global accord on climate change while in the process jeopardising her relationship with her boyfriend, Joe, a cave diver with his eyes set on the world record. Claudia and Graham both end up in Vancouver, in a glossy waterfront hotel, but they never meet. Sound plays an integral part in the production and Filter’s co-founder, the composer Tim Philips, creates an atmospheric sonic collage of sound effects and music, punctuated by the thud-thud of a heart-beat, the thwack of a squash ball, and cumulating in the unnerving roar of water as a lone man descends into uncharted darkness. Though the spectre of global warming and the threat of rising sea levels background the narrative, they are only one aspect of a production in which the human drama is pushed to the fore. The focus remains fully on these two individuals, both at crisis points in their lives. Filter’s Oliver Dimsdale, Ferdy Roberts and Victoria Moseley share all the roles between themselves, switching nimbly between characters; the backstage crew are also occasionally roped in when a scene requires it and Philips is always visible at the side of the stage, so that the technical process of creating the sound effects is incorporated into the fabric of the production. This perception of transparency is a trait that runs through much of Filter’s work – the cast saunter on stage before the show officially ‘starts’ and are introduced by name – but it’s complementary rather than intrusive, a balance is always maintained. Enough room has been left for characters to evolve. Roberts has perhaps the hardest task in this regard, playing both the dour, unsettled Graham and his more ebullient father, a successful marine biologist and an early cautionary voice about the consequences of global warming; he manages to differentiate between the two men while subtly underlining the paternal connection. Moseley elegantly sidesteps cliché as Claudia, a woman who lives for her work, who is driven and determined to a point that borders on self-sabotage. Dimsdale’s two characters, Graham’s younger brother and Claudia’s boyfriend, are less shaded in comparison though this is more to do with the shape the play takes than his capabilities. It’s true that if one were to strip away the sound effects, the numerous inventive touches and the inflatable fish, then the story might feel anaemic in places; one could also justifiably argue that the techniques used here have been used more dynamically elsewhere, but both observations would be churlish. Substance and surface walk hand in hand in this production, they perform an intricate dance, they form a mutually rewarding partnership.
Reviewed for musicOMH

Greenland at the National Theatre

2011-02-04T05:25:00.000-08:00

The polar bear is something of a lumbering paradox; it could kill a man with ease and yet it seems so vulnerable in its whiteness, a vulnerability that has only intensified as its Arctic habitat has come under threat. For this reason the bear, an animal both threatened and threatening, has come to serve as a easy symbol for the damage climate change seems likely to wreak on the planet, for all the things we stand to lose. So the presence of a polar bear in the National Theatre’s attempt to tackle the suject is not exactly surprising, is in fact pretty predictable, and yet this ursine cameo is handled so delightfully that its predictability is eclipsed.
The appearance of the bear, the work of Blind Summit’s puppet-master Mark Down, creates a moment of awe and wonder amid an otherwise noisy and tangled production. Greenland is issue theatre, or perhaps more correctly, Issue Theatre. It takes the subject of climate change and attempts to graft narrative onto it, to inject dramatic life into it. To do this the National has drafted in four writers: Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne. The production has a jumbled quality, a franticness, though it eventually becomes possible to tease out a number of distinct narrative strands: a young boy with a passion for geography grows up to lead an isolated life studying sea birds in the Arctic Circle; a young girl, much to her parents’ bafflement and dismay, drops out of college to become an activist; the most developed strand, set in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, involves an ambitious political adviser and her burgeoning relationship with a scientist whose projected climate models present a bleak picture for the future of the human race. These stories are interspersed with other characters, other voices, the most interesting being a pair of delegates from Mali. Together they present a less familiar picture, that of a country already feeling the real effects of climate change, encroaching deserts and disrupted rain patterns. But no sooner have they said their piece than they are ushered to one side in a way which could, optimistically, be read as a comment on the general media coverage of the issues at hand. Bijan Sheibani’s production is certainly slick. That’s not intended as a dig; the staging is always visually striking and there are moments of real invention and magic: the polar bear, the silhouettes of swooping circling guillemots. At other times there is a sense of excess and repetition: first plastic bottles fall from the ceiling, then paper, and finally both rain and wind machines get a work-out. Music is used throughout; there’s a brief burst of It’s Raining Men and a rather heavy-handed dance sequence to the strains of Come Fly With Me, presumably intended to illustrate the irony of all the air travel that an event like Copenhagen entails. The obvious parallel is with Rupert Goold’s Enron - and the production’s dramaturg is Goold’s regular collaborator Ben Power. Yet while the markers of the musical, the air of showiness, felt like a bombastic but logical choice for a play about banking and commerce, they feel somewhat shoe-horned in here. There are some strong individual performances, particularly from the ever-watchable Lyndsey Marshal, and there are also a number of moments of genuine humour, yet the overriding tone is didactic and clichéd - the strand with the young activist is particularly limp - and the whole thing has a stitched-together quality This is one of a growing wave of plays about climate change. Richard Bean’s The Heretic (chosen promotional image: the polar bear) at the Royal Court looks set to cover similar ground while Steve Waters’ potent double-bill, The Contingency Plan, has already shown that’s it’s possible to merge gripping and plausible writing with the idea of a threatened world. Here, while it’s possible to glean the thinking behind the exercise, the weight of all the voices serves to sink things. Reviewed for musicOMH

Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales at the Lyric

2011-01-27T07:09:00.000-08:00

This staging of Roald Dahl’s often macabre short stories for adults has a fitting adapter in Jeremy Dyson, the non-performing member of the League of Gentleman and more latterly the writer of the sinister Funland for the BBC as well as Ghost Stories which premiered at the Lyric before transferring to the West End. Many of these stories, written in the 1950s before Dahl turned his hand to children’s fiction, were memorably filmed as Tales of the Unexpected. Among the five selected by Dyson are ‘William and Mary’, where a dying man’s brain is preserved in a jar, and ‘The Man from the South’, in which a sinister white-suited foreigner offers a young American a grotesque bet, one in which he gains a brand new Cadillac if he wins but forfeits a small part of his anatomy if he loses.
The latter is probably the most successfully executed with director Polly Findlay really piling on the tension (there’s some superb use of sound, a revelling in the scrape of a blade against wood). This stands in marked contrast to another of the stories in which an adulterous woman attempts to make some money by pawning an expensive mink. This section contains very little in the way of menace and suspense and the pay-off also lacks bite; this has the combined effect of making an 80 minute production feel suddenly sluggish. While its inclusion dose illustrate that not all Dahl’s tales were steeped in the grotesque and that some were about relatively normal betrayals, it seems an odd one to pick and rather sabotages the pacing of the piece. Dyson makes an attempt to contextualise all this ugliness and cruelty by concluding with 'Galloping Foxley', a story based on Dahl’s experiences of the humiliating fagging system at Repton and containing a toilet seat-warming episode that he would also recall in vivid detail in his memoir Boy . During his schooldays, small boys were regularly and vicioulsy beaten for the most minor offences, such as failing to toast bread correctly, and this clearly had a lasting effect on Dahl. This story is dragged from a different place to the others, coloured with memory and pain, something Findlay’s production is able to convey. These individual tales are linked togther in portmanteau fashion by a series of short scenes set on a train in which a voluble camel-coated commuter bombards his fellow travellers with the bizarre stories he’s heard. This device gives the production something of the feel of one of the Amicus anthology films that Dyson’s League collaborator Mark Gattiss recalled with evident affection in his recent BBC History of Horror. These linking scenes are not quite as taut as they might be and though they do serve to tie all these disparate stories together, it feels rather forced at times like roping animals together regardless of species. Naomi Wilkinson's design does however give the whole production a suitably noir-ish and cohesive feel The cast take on a number of roles apiece and Selina Griffiths stands out in this capacity, switching nimbly from sinister and bedraggled landlady to frosty 1950s wife. She is gifted with one of the production’s best executed scenes as the widowed Mary, her harsh and domineering husband now just a brain in a jar, a brain and a single staring eye. Mary’s steely smile as she relishes the potential of the situation is one of the most memorable moments in an otherwise slightly underwhelming and disjointed production. Reviewed for musicOMH

Less Than Kind at Jermyn Street Theatre

2011-01-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

Terence Rattigan takes no less a play than Hamlet as his cue for this work of 1944, originally intended as a vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence. Commercial pressure led to it being hijacked by Broadway stars of the day, the Lunts - amusingly namechecked in the text - and it eventually emerged, in substantially altered form, as Love in Idleness. The original play, which has never before been staged as written, has been resurrected by Jermyn Street Theatre as part of the Rattigan centenary celebrations and in doing so the theatre has gained the jump on the Old Vic and the Theatre Royal Haymarket with their forthcoming productions of Cause Celebre and Flare Path.
In Less Than Kind Rattigan lifts the central premise from Shakespeare’s play and transplants it to wartime London. Society hostess Olivia Brown has neglected to tell her absent teenage son, Michael, that she is in a relationship with the government minister and noted industrialist Sir John Fletcher. In his years overseas, Michael has become an ardent socialist with an adolescent disinclination to compromise and when he returns home he is appalled to discover the truth of the situation – his mother has neglected to mention the matter in her letters – and immediately takes against Sir John. He can’t abide the man, both the fact that he’s still married and the couple are living quite contentedly in sin, and that, as a wealthy industrialist, he’s emblematic of all Michael claims to despise. He has no qualms about forcing his mother into an impossible choice between her son and her lover. At times the play seems overly pleased with itself as a literary exercise; Rattigan heavily underlines the Hamlet parallels, explicitly pointing out Michael’s antic disposition and making a joke out of his desire that Sir John accompany him to the theatre. The play is a far stronger piece of writing when it is being less overt, when it makes a genuine attempt to explore the emotional ramifications of the situation. The performances help to give necessary weight to Adrian Brown's production. Sara Crowe, as Olivia, is the heart of the piece, a woman who, having found not only a man whom she loves, but a social role at which she excels, is obliged to give it all up for a dingy flat in Baron’s Court. She accepts her situation with dignity and quiet resignation, and gives a sense of someone who is keen to make the best of things no matter what hand life deals her – even when it involves making one’s own powdered egg omelettes and learning to type. There is no sense of resentment towards her son, her love for him is undimmed, and there’s only the – perhaps too faint – trace of anger at her predicament. Facing up to Sir John’s younger, more effortlessly glamorous wife, Crowe combines a kind of scatty nobility with a fragile, faded quality. Michael Simkins is suitably charming as Sir John, a sheen that is maintained even when Rattigan allows Olivia to glimpse the lengths he’ll to which he’ll go to get what he wants. His love for her seems sincere and complete but there’s a slight edge of steel to him which is entirely appropriate to the character. There’s something more unnerving about David Osmond’s Michael with his righteousness and utter lack of concern for his mother’s happiness. There’s a chill to him, a subtle undercurrent of menace to his manipulation, qualities which Osmond’s performance draws out. While the play contains plenty of Rattigan's characteristic warmth and wit, it probably benefits greatly from the intimacy of a space like Jermyn Street Theatre. Exposed on a larger stage, the artifice and the occasional heavy-handedness of tone would be more glaring. This tiny venue is altogether kinder, allowing the play to be appreciated for what it is, not an unearthed masterwork but a piece of considerable interest nonetheless. Reviewed for musicOMH

Poetry Links

2011-01-24T05:47:00.000-08:00

I have a piece in the new issue of Mslexia about the growing popularity of performance poetry and spoken word for which I had the pleasure of speaking to poets Kate Fox, Molly Naylor (both of whom had solo shows at last year's Edinburgh Fringe), Sabrina Mahfouz and Indigo Williams, about writing for the stage. It isn't online yet but it's there in the magazine in shiny black and white. On a not unrelated note my review of Luke Wright's latest (and possibly most ambitious) show, Cynical Ballads, is now up on musicOMH too.

Tiger Country at Hampstead Theatre

2011-01-20T06:25:00.000-08:00

Perhaps more so than any other profession, the working lives of doctors and nurses (or, at least, a dramatically palatable version of them) have come to seem intimately familiar through long running television shows; the hospital politics, the medical language, even the expected emotional journeys - of the idealistic junior doctor, of the tough female surgeon – all have a ring of the habitual. Nina Raine attempts to defamiliarize these narratives by transferring them from screen to stage, but she only succeeds in part.
Of her large cast of characters only two really stand out. Ruth Everett, as Emily the young doctor whose hide has yet to toughen, and Thusitha Jayasundera as Vashti, the ball-breaking genitourinary surgeon, an Asian woman playing in a game still dominated by English men. The other characters remain sketches in comparison: the tough but not unkind SHO, the experienced doctor given a glimpse of his own mortality. Raine’s production, traverse staged across a sea of institutional blue linoleum, concentrates its energies on recreating the bustle of the hospital, from the fever of the incoming emergency and the precious lulls in between to the tightrope between levity and tension in the operating theatre and the sting of having to deliver bad news. As with her previous play for the Royal Court, Tribes, Raine’s research has clearly been considerable but the play doesn’t wear it too heavily. Even so, it’s evident in the surgical-medical rivalry and sniping, the carping about the poor CD selection in the operating theatre (“oh no, not All Woman again”) and, more generally, in the interplay between the characters’ sense of resignation and weariness with the thrill and passion that drove them to study medicine in the first place. At its best the writing is reminiscent of the television work of Jed Mercurio - doctor turned novelists and screenwriter - though in a more dilute form. Where the play truly lifts off is in the moments it hints at the things beyond the physical - the autonomic, the hunch in one’s guts, the hovering ghosts – and their necessary presence in the rational, medical world. In other places the drama is hamstrung by sheer overfamiliarity, never quite managing to reinvigorate situations that have been played out nightly on the BBC. Raine is in no way blind to this and even milks the ironies, showing a doctor unwinding after a night shift by flopping, beer in hand, in front of Doctors, (a show that must by now outrank The Bill on most actors CVs, including many of the cast). Everett and Jayasundera strike the right notes with their respective roles and the ensemble playing is strong throughout. When Raine uses the potential of the stage to fracture the action, to make the audience look between and beyond the things they think they know (a stroke patient, dazed and dysphasic, is puzzled by the uncanny congregation around her, the sea of staring faces) then the production has real power, but this happens only intermittently and the lack of strongly defined characters does begin to become an issue as the play progresses. Emily, confronted with the reality that she can’t save everyone as well as the growing understanding that if she becomes emotionally overinvested in every single case she will eventually burn herself out, duly toughens up while Vashti, her aunt ill following surgical incompetence, questions both herself and her priorities; none of the other characters is given much room to evolve and the result, in terms of narrative focus, is something like a photograph of a fast-moving object. Reviewed for musicOMH

The Painter at the Arcola

2011-01-17T05:39:00.000-08:00

For JMW Turner light was all. His paintings are luminous; they shimmer with the glory of the sunlit sea, they emanate heat. In Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play about his life, his genius is the solid thing at the centre of the text, while Turner the man is far more opaque.

Having been obliged to leave their former home, the Arcola has moved to new premises in a converted paint factory on Ashwin Street. This raw, unfinished space doubles well as Turner’s studio and the atmosphere of the place counts for much in a production that sometimes seems to walk on tiptoe, its tread uncertain.

In choosing Turner as her subject, Lenkiewicz has to grapple with a familiar dilemma. How does one go about showing creative genius on stage? Take away the work and what remains? Though the son of a barber, Turner is utterly assured of his own abilities and seems to relish his role as an outsider. He speaks with mild disdain of the Royal Academy ("English painting is dead") and the ‘fashionables’ but certainly does not suffer from self-doubt; he seems quite certain that his work will live on after him yet Lenkiewicz shows him to be far less capable in his relations with other people, particularly women.

His companion, closest friend and studio assistant is his father; his mother, having lost a daughter in infancy, is gradually unravelling. She resents Turner for having survived to adulthood and though her venom seems a symptom of greater ailment, it is clear her comments cut him.

As Turner, Toby Jones gives a strong, subtle performance, but an essentially reactive one. As played, Turner is a man who gives little away. He accepts things as they come to him and the drive he shows as an artist does not seem to translate into his personal life. He seems genuinely fond of Jenny, the prostitute who becomes the model for a series of anatomical studies, but he even terminates this relationship at the behest of his widowed neighbour, Sarah, with whom he is having a child. He builds a bond with Jenny’s young son but casts him aside too. There seems no malice in his actions; he just does as he is bidden. Denise Gough is superb as this brittle young Jenny; her love for her young son is palpable and she gives a sense that she grasps Turner’s emotional limitations far better than the other women in his life.

Amanda Boxer impresses as his distressed and volatile mother, terrified of the asylum, while Jim Bywater and Jones have an understated rapport as father and son – there is a strong sense of men familiar with each other’s habits, able to communicate without words. Niamh Cusack (who recently played another emotionally ostracised woman, Catherine Dickens, in Out of Joint’s otherwise patchy Andersen’s English) is a mix of calculation and resignation as the widow who desires Turner but knows he will not love her in return.

The play is episodic in structure and takes the form of a collection of short scenes, nicely handled individually but lacking in bite. Lenkiewucz mingles snippets of Turner’s home life with speeches drawn from his lectures to the Royal Academy and, in its fragmentary way, the play gives the audience a sense of Turner. However, having picked as a subject a man so distant, Lenkiewicz has penned herself in. He is both a presence and absence at the centre of the play and, though her writing contains - as ever - moments of lyricism, Turner's remoteness inevitably has an impact on the play’s power.

The Potting Shed at the Finborough Theatre

2011-01-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

Like Cold Comfort Farm’s Aunt Ada Doom, Graham Greene’s infrequently performed play is preoccupied by something dark at the bottom of the garden. The play has not been seen on a London stage in forty years and, on watching it, it’s possible to grasp why this has been the case. Greene’s fixation with issues of faith and the rather ponderous way in which the play unfolds root it squarely in the past; however as a counterpoint to his work as a novelist, if only to illustrate that what works well on paper doesn’t always translate to the stage, it is an intriguing piece.

In the play Greene returns to a familiar theme: the answered prayer. The Callifer patriarch, a renowned rationalist and chum of Bertrand Russell, is on his death bed and his friends and family have been summoned to his side – with the exception of his son James who has been all but ostracised from family life following a mysterious incident in the potting shed when he was a boy. The first half of the play is concerned with the now middle-aged James’ desire to discover just what happened to him and why it has so split the family (an uncle who became a Catholic priest has also been painted out of the picture). While the play contains some pleasingly crisp lines of dialogue, the plotting is repetitive with James continually pleading with his mother to tell him what happened – for he has no memory of the event, no memory of his childhood at all – and her continually refusing to bend. Eventually, with the help of his inquisitive niece, James is able to track down his uncle and discover the cause of the family rift; the play hinges on this moment of revelation and the scene between James and his uncle is the strongest in the play. But it takes an age to get there; there’s a stiff quality to the early scenes and while Greene does appear to have tried to build a sense of tension and mystery, it doesn’t quite come off. Svetlana Dimcovic’s production for the Finborough is solidly staged and draws some strong performances from the cast. Paul Cawley, as James, slowly develops from the passive and baffled man of the opening scenes, through methedrine-fuelled desperation to dig up the truth, to a kind of contentment. Martin Wimbush, in his brief turn as the whisky-sodden Father William Callifer is also impressive, giving a sense of man who has lost some vital part of his himself, and Zoe Thorne is appealing as Anne, James’ young niece whose openness stands in marked contrast to her family’s tendency to bury the things they find disagreeable. The main hurdle, which this revival can’t quite get over, is the crux of the play itself. Greene’s depiction of faith and its loss, the literalness of it, feels heavy-handed and forced on the stage; to contemporary eyes there is even the danger of it appearing daft. Interestingly, with the exception of Anne and perhaps also of Father William, the characters simply don’t take shape in the same manner as the characters of his novels do; they seem flat in comparison, despite being stood there in front of the audience. That said, the play has an appealing oddness about it and as a thing of its time and for those who know Greene's work well, it is of real interest, particularly in the way it echoes themes from his novels. Reviewed for musicOMH

The Animals and Children Took to the Streets at BAC

2010-12-15T06:48:00.000-08:00

The Bayou is the sore on the underside of the city, a place where cockroaches congregate and children run wild; it’s cankerous and festering, riddled with petty crime and suspicious stains. This is the setting for the latest offering by 1927, the company responsible for the darkly enchanting Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, and it once again sees them blending live performance with animation to create something that resembles a living graphic novel.
This new piece feels more developed and ambitious than their earlier show; while Devil consisted of a series of amusingly macabre vignettes, this piece presents a more wholly realised world. There’s a greater clarity of voice and vision, a keener eye for the grotesque. Suzanne Andrade’s script focuses on a group of characters who live in the sticky, seedy Bayou Mansions on Red Herring Street. Agnes Eaves moves into the building with her little cartoon daughter Evie and a vague notion that she can solve some of the social problems with craft workshops and an abundance of yogurt pots filled with PVA glue. The building’s caretaker, who is diligently saving his paycheques to buy his way out of the place, takes a shine to Agnes, but his attentions go unnoticed. At the same time the marauding silhouette children start to stray into the city’s parks and, what is worse, to make demands – “we want what you have” - so the mayor decides to round them all up and pump them full of drugs that will make them docile and compliant. The fantastical elements help to sweeten what is a surprisingly bitter, if decidedly timely, pill. The faint strains of A Spoonful of Sugar can even be heard at one point as the authorities prepare to dope the children into submission. What might have floundered or appeared heavy-handed in a more conventional dramatic production is here able to sneak past the guards and wave its placards. The show is ribboned with a sense of bleak resignation; as the owner of the Bayou junk shop explains to her revolutionary-minded daughter Zelda, the leader of a pirate street gang: if you’re “born in the Bayou, you die in the Bayou.” This is a show that presents its audience with the illusion of choice between an idealist and a realist ending but inevitably comes down on the side of the real: no happy endings here, the grind continues. Paul Barritt’s animation, sepia toned and splashed with crimson, is rich with reference from the Constructivists through to Jean Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen. The meshing of live action and animation proves more versatile than before. While a certain static quality is inevitable, it only adds to the distinctive style of the piece and motion is successfully and amusingly conveyed by having streets spiral away behind the protagonists as they run on the spot. Despite the use of Cyrillic lettering and Soviet fonts, the piece is not rooted in any one place or time, which allows it a greater resonance and, while there are plenty of sight gags and teasing details, the animations also works in harmony with Andrade’s witty and pleasingly rhythmic script. The Bayou’s various characters are divvied up between Andrade and Esme Appleton, their faces greased a moon-like white, while Lillian Henley provides live musical accompaniment throughout. Among their various roles, Andrade mutely plays the shock-headed caretaker, with Jamie Adams’ perfectly-pitched voice-over supplying his thoughts, while Appleton plays Agnes with her sweetly wholehearted belief that with enough dried pasta shapes and poster paint you can successfully heal an oozing wound. Reviewed for musicOMH