Category: Theatre

The Writer at the Almeida Theatre review *****

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The Writer

Almeida Theatre, 9th May 2018

The Writer is …. an absolutely staggering piece of …. writing. No other way to say it. I’d wager there were a few punters in the audience that disagree with me but I think Ella Hickson, along with director Blanche McIntyre and the rest of the creative team, and an outstanding cast, have conjured up a masterpiece. In the same breath it provokes, educates and entertains. It deserves a much wider audience that the well-heeled punters like the Tourist who make up the Almeida throng. Whilst the Almeida may not immediately struck you as part of the solution to the problem of access for telling stories from women on stage, it was heartening to see this project realised there.

It starts with an impellent Lara Rossi, (who is more than a match for Romola Garai, superb as the eponymous Writer), playing a young actor/writer who, post performance, eloquently demolishes the lazy, sexist premises on which a complacent Samuel West’s direction is constructed. As she says theatre is “famous people, doing boring things badly”! Men are judged on what they produce, women on how fuckable they are. They have inevitably met before. We discover though that they are acting out the Writer’s text and sharply shift to a staged Q&A in which the nervous, tongue-tied Writer’s work is undermined by the “real” Director imperiously played by Michael Gould who praises its “promise” but inveigles against it lack of “structure”. Just who is going to watch this sort of stuff?

Scene two switches to the home of the Writer and partner, also Samuel West, who bullies and cajoles the Writer into agreeing to adapting her work into a film. It is all about him. She yearns for, and needs, more. The “biological clock” is invoked. The next, I think deliberately disorientating and galling, scene sees the Writer in a safe, supportive female only space, a jungle-y retreat of sorts, invoking Semele and other Origin mythological mumbo-jumbo (with some fantastic realisation from Richard Howell’s lighting, Emma Laxton’s sound and Zakk Hein’s video). Scene four sees the now confident Writer arguing with Michael Gould’s director about the play to date. He is viciously pulling the prior scene apart, whilst patronisingly banging on about the “rawness” of the opening. The final scene sees the writer with another partner, this time played by Lara Rossi. The compromises and imbalances of scene two are revisited.

From this structure Ella Hickson is able to explore fundamental arguments about how power, the patriarchy and contemporary capitalism, (as Lara Rossi’s character explains early on), affects, and infects, the creative process, art and the theatre and our relationships. It is a polemic of sorts, but Ms Hickson dissects her material, with fearless, supple and sceptical self-awareness. It confronts and confounds the audience, for sure, is intellectually reflexive, but avoids aggressive predictable dialectic. It revels in, and reveals, the artifice of theatre. Which in some ways makes Romola Garai’s performance, remember she has to convincingly “act” this all out, even more remarkable.

If thats sounds like a recipe for a dry evening, think again. The “drama” is delivered with real passion, even anger, with wit, and with a formal inventiveness, that left the Tourist with bum glued to his seat, ears straining, mouth open. Anna Fleischle’s design, (and the on-stage managers), intelligently accommodate the play’s inversions with repeated construction and de-construction. Ultimately though it is the control that Ella Hickson exerts over her themes, assisted by Blanche McIntyre, that makes this brilliant. It twists and turns but it knows exactly what it is doing and saying.

I learnt a lot. I recognise the behaviours exhibited by the men on stage here, especially Samuel West in the second scene. I don’t know how to avoid them. I do know I had to think very hard about what I would say about the play. It will make you want to argue. Ideally not while it is going on although maybe we should.

At one point, forgive me I forget when, the point is made that the Writer will move on to more established theatrical storytelling forms. Presumably this will be so for Ms Hickson thought I doubt she will write anything as powerful as this story about the struggle to tell women’s stories. Mind you Oil was a work of near genius in my book and also shows she isn’t going to fuck about with little subjects. I think she might just be the best and most challenging writer for the British stage right now. Ignore those who will say this is just irritating, indulgent self-therapy. They are wrong. Leave them to watch nonsense like that revival of Absolute Hell or Rattigan knock-offs. This is what theatre is all about.

 

Not Talking at the Arcola Theatre review ****

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Not Talking

Arcola Theatre, 5th May 2018

Not Talking is, in his own words, Mike Bartlett’s first “proper” play. It won prizes when first aired on BBC Radio, (with Richard Briers and June Whitfield no less), but it was written for the stage and, here. courtesy of production company Defibrillator, it has it first theatrical outing.

You may well know Mr Bartlett from his TV outings, Doctor Foster, Trauma or maybe the TV adaptation of his play King Charles III. (It always tickles me that the TV critic of the execrable rag the Daily Mail gave this a 0* review whereas the sharp-witted theatre critic gave it 5*). Or maybe you have seen one of his other plays, Albion (Albion at the Almeida Theatre review ****), Wild, Game, An Intervention, Bull, 13, Earthquakes in London, Cock, the adaptation of Chariots of Fire or his brilliant version of Medea with Headlong. His writing is innovative and fearless, and full of colour. If a big dramatic concept or twist is required he will jump in with both feet, and the quality of his writing is so good that he always gets away with it.

All this is visible in Not Talking. We have four characters, James, Amanda, Lucy and Mark. James and Lucy have been married for many years but have drifted apart. They don’t talk to each other. Mark and Amanda are soldiers at the same barracks who fall for each other. Something happens that neither one of them can really share. It turns out that there is a connection between the couples.

I’ll stop there. The plot is too absorbing to reveal and there are still plenty of tickets up for grabs through to 2nd June. You would be a mug not to see this.

David Horovitch who plays James is a top drawer stage actor, last seen by me in All My Sons at the Rose Kingston alongside Penny Downie. Kika Markham who plays Lucy is similarly theatrical royalty. She played Lena in Caryl Churchill’s magnificent Escaped Alone and her mate, Tony Kushner no less, wrote a one hour monologue for her in his play Homebody/Kabul. You would be hard pressed to see two finer actors on the London stage and here they are at the Arcola for 20 quid. Gemma Lawrence and Lawrence Walker who make up the quartet are less experienced but equally as good as they renowned colleagues. This is the first time I have seen any of James Hiller’s work, the AD of Defibrillator. Nothing he does gets in the way of Mr Bartlett’s riveting plot, which is equally well served by Amy Jane Cook’s simple set.

Now you might argue that Mr Bartlett is a little too ready to pump up the dramatic volume, or that his message, don’t bury secrets, is a little too patent. Who cares when it is this involving and this well presented.

Take a friend. You’ll have someone to talk to afterwards.

Our Country’s Good at Theatre Royal Stratford review ****

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Our Country’s Good

Theatre Royal Stratford East, 28th April 2018

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good is one of my favourite plays. As it is for many theatre-goers. The context, the “First Fleet” of British convicts sent to Australia with their Royal Marine guards in the 1780s, and the setting, Sydney Cove in New South Wales, are intriguing; the characters, which cover a broad spectrum of society at the time, are many, but go beyond mere sketches; the plot, incorporating a play within a play (sort of) as the convicts set out to stage a version of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer guided by the well-meaning Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark, is perspicacious; and the messages many and critical. Above all it is accessible but not simplistic.

The play is based on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, which I haven’t, shamefully read, and the novel and these historical events, (without the Farquhar play), were loosely dramatised by Jimmy McGovern a couple of years ago in the BBC series Banished. It is also no great surprise that the play is used as a text for various English Language examinations.

Can art, and specifically the theatre, play a part in “reforming” and rehabilitating criminals? Is “criminality” innate or born out of desperation? How is justice dispensed? What is a fair punishment for petty crimes? Why is society ashamed of taking retribution? How do the class system,  and gender relationships, respond to, and evolve in, a new, and hostile, environment? How damaging is the force of colonisation?

These are some of the more obvious themes which the play contends with but there is also a pointed examination of the way in which we communicate, most obviously through the character of John Wisehammer, an outsider as a Jew, but who is educated and can read and write, in the relationship between Midshipman Harry Brewer and Duckling Smith, and in the lines from the Recruiting Officer itself. It also, through the play, shows what people are capable of if they are given an opportunity.

This production, the third from the seven theatre consortium that makes up Ramps on the Moon, underscores these dimensions. Ramps on the Moon is made up of a company of D/deaf, disabled, hearing and non-disabled cast and creatives who seek a similarly diverse audience and, outside of the productions, aim to ensure D/deaf and disabled people see the theatre as a realistic option on both sides of the curtain.

From my perspective, as non-disabled, the opportunity to see and hear the various solutions employed to present the drama and connect to the audience, was most welcome. The use of BSL and interpretation in particular added a whole new dimension to the play’s central message about the power of theatre and about who can make it. Jon Nicholls’s sound design and composition was first class, even between scenes. The production uses less doubling than the text allows, which sharpens the divide between captive and captor and lends clarity at the expense of the intended ambiguity. As it happened at the performance I attended Colin Connor ended up playing Harry Brewer as well as the prize shit Major Robbie Ross, a man beyond redemption. Serendipity indeed as he is a fine actor, though his eventual mental and physical collapse was a little restrained.

Caroline Parker, both in her role as “Shitty” Meg Long, as the voiceover and as BSL interpreter for Emily Rose Salter’s Duckling amongst others was excellent. Ms Salter, in this her debut performance, gives a master class in communication without words, poignant and aggressive as the action demanded. I was also drawn to Tom Dawze’s enigmatic Wisehammer, Gbemisola Ikumelo’s truculent Liz Morden, who remember eventually speaks out to save her life and secure justice, and Alex Nowak’s preposterous Sideway and priggish Reverend Johnson.

Fiona Buffini did a superb job in bringing all these elements together, including that part of the technology that was visible to me, and ensured that the plot was clear and ideas were foregrounded. She couldn’t quite avoid the signalling and exposition that characterises a handful of Ms Wertenbaker’s scenes, but that is true of every version I have seen, and there were a few moments where pacing was a little off-beam. Overall though this is a fine production that deserves to be seen by as wider audience as possible (it still has to go to Sheffield and Birmingham), and which sheds new light on this remarkable play.

 

 

 

Nine Night at the National Theatre review *****

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Nine Night

National Theatre Dorfman, 3rd May 2018

You never quite know what you are going to get at the National Theatre. Mind you the Dorfman has turned into a pretty safe bet. After a painful 90 minutes, (it seemed much longer), sitting through the first half of Absolute Hell in the Lyttleton, I was praying for theatrical Heaven. And I’m an atheist. No review of Absolute Hell because we left at the interval. The SO might have been more forgiving but I can’t recall seeing a worse play. Not a worse production. Design, direction and cast did what they could but I just think there are some “classic” plays, which Absolute Hell purports to be, that are nothing of the sort. A few drunks and sexual libertines careering round a stage, with no plot or message to speak of, might do it for some plummy critics, but it doesn’t cut it in today’s world. We weren’t the only ones to feel that way. The NT has come in for a few knocks in the last couple of years, undeservedly in my view, but why this was revived, and why Joe Hill-Gibbins as director wanted to get involved, is a mystery to me.

And then there was Nine Night. Which is an absolute crackerjack of a play. OK so there are maybe a few too many plot strands spinning around and left unfinished at the end but it doesn’t really matter as there is so much to enjoy from what is wrapped up in just 100 minutes. It never ever drags. In fact I wanted more. Maybe someone could even prevail upon writer Natasha Gordon to create further plays drawn from this milieu and these characters. There is more than enough here to justify it.

It leaves me speechless that this is Ms Gordon’s debut play. I see that she is of Jamaican descent. Which was pretty handy when it came to writing Nine Night. The title refers to the ninth night after a death in Jamaican culture, a celebration involving food, drink, talking, stories, music, dancing (here Kumina rituals from eastern Jamaica) to support the bereaved, pay respects to the deceased and to properly bid them farewell. I understand that many of the traditions have been altered through time and when transposed, as here, into another place, today’s London, but the connections back to the belief systems of an Africa before monotheistic religions can be tracked. These customs are what lie behind the shattering conclusion to the play.

Single Mum Lorraine is caring for her Mum, Gloria. Her brother Robert is an entrepreneurial type married to Sophie, who is white. They are childless. Lorraine’s daughter Anita in turn has a baby daughter with partner Nathan (neither of whom we see). Lorraine and Robert have a half-sister, Trudy, who remained in Jamaica when Gloria, whose husband Alvin left her with the kids, came over to seek work as part of the Windrush generation. When Gloria subsequently passes we also get to see a lot of her cousin Aunt Maggie, and husband Vince. So we have three generations of Britons of Jamaican heritage, and Trudy herself when she comes over, all under the same roof. Celebration and, it probably won’t surprise you to know, recrimination, ensues.

By the way it is a hell of a roof. Or, to be exact. room under a roof in Rajha Shakiry’s beautifully detailed set. George Dennis’s sound design, crammed with off-stage dancehall rhythms is also a delight.

Families coming together after a death, and processing their grief, is theatrical meat and drink. This is different though because of the push and pull between two cultures in the past and in the present, the quality of the writing and the immediacy of the characters. Lorraine’s frustrations at being a single parent and then  having to give up her career to be the carer, and at having to organise all the celebrations, are universal as are Robert’s thwarted financial ambitions and his sense of male entitlement. Sophie is unconditionally accepted by her relations but still, however well intentioned, manages to say the wrong things. Trudy’s brash exterior barely conceals real pain at being left behind. Anita’s struggles to reconcile her heritage with her home also seemed well crafted to me (though I would have happily heard more from her).

Which brings me to Aunt Maggie. Now it may turn out, when this play is revived, as I am sure it will be, that it transpires that only Cecilia Noble could do justice to the part, though so juicy is the role that I doubt it. Certainly she turns in a performance that, on the face of it, steals not just this show, but every show now on across London. Aunt Maggie is a force of comedic nature who turns out a string of belly-aching laughs. The proper reviews have identified the best of these though you have to be there to really savour the delivery. If you ask me though it is Cecilia Noble’s facial expressions, (even from where I was up in the balcony), her movements and the tonal shift at the end that turn this into a shoe-in for an award if there is any justice. For just a few moments I may just have believed in a a world of spirits thanks to Cecilia. Silly me.

For my money though she is not the best actor on the stage. That accolade belongs to Franc Ashman as the careworn coper who cannot allow herself to grieve. Not to say that Oliver Alvin-Wilson as Robert, Ricky Fearon as Uncle Vince, Michelle Greenridge as Trudy, Hattie Ledbury as Sophie and Rebekah Murrell as Anita don’t deliver, they do, just that Franc Ashman lends a real depth to Lorraine. And she, rather than the prior generation, articulates the shame of a country that, even now, will appropriate a community’s labour, whether freely give or not, but will not fully accept its culture, or even, as we now see, grant it legal equivalence in belonging.

I haven’t seen any of the productions where Roy Alexander Weise was in the director’s chair though I see that he was an Assistant on some masterpieces of the last few years at the Royal Court; X, Escaped Alone, Hangmen and Liberian Girl. He is destined for great things. I cannot know what Natasha Gordon would have hoped for when she finished her draft but if it looked and worked any better than this I’d be surprised. The plot and action work like clockwork. The performances are great and in some cases, as I say, outstanding. By putting the weight on the right lines in each of the scenes Mr Weise turns the slight hurdle of over-plotting in Ms Gordon’s text into a desire for us the audience to know more about these people, their back-stories, and their futures.

Nine Night definitely ticks the National box in the National Theatre moniker. It also, unequivocally, ticks the Theatre box. So now it needs to be seen by a bigger audience. A tour maybe? A transfer? That would count as progress.

The Phlebotomist at Hampstead Theatre review *****

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The Phlebotomist

Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 2nd May 2018

The Phlebotomist is sold out for the rest of its runs. So you had better hope that it pitches up elsewhere, ideally with the current cast and creatives, for it really is an excellent play. There are three almighty talents on show here. Writer Ella Road in this her debut play, actor Jude Anouka who just keeps on getting better and better and director Sam Yates who proved his mettle with Glengarry Glen Ross recently, but here extracts the maximum amount of tension and drama out of what is already a smartly plotted story.

It is another one of these near future dystopian dramas, which playwrights are currently obsessed with. No real surprise there. Us liberal, luvvie types are never happier than when warning ourselves, (for we are the audience), about the impending disasters that beset us, ideally disasters precipitated by the very technologies which we benefit from most. Ella Road’s story starts with a slightly different, and I think more chilling and realistic premise, that blood samples will be used to provide a detailed genetic profile, an early prognosis of what medical conditions will impact you through your life and even your behavioural characteristics. You can avoid the test but this will impact your educational, employment, credit and relationship prospects and looks shifty. Of course taking the test, and finding out the details all wrapped up in a rating out of 10, will also impact those prospects.

Bea (Jade Anouka) is the phlebotomist, (no I didn’t know either), who administers the test. She, quite literally, bumps into Aaron, (a fine performance from Rory Fleck Byrne, a new name to me), who turns out to be a descendant of the poet Lord Tennyson. They fall in love (and look like they do such is the chemistry between them). Turns out they both have high scores. Char, Bea’s friend, (a spirited Cherrelle Skeete, also new to me), does not and she abandons her career to campaign against the system, after an attempt at deception. The only other character is David (Vincent Ebrahim) a softly spoken, sagacious porter at the hospital Bea works in.

I won’t elaborate. Suffice to say that Ella Road provides enough disclosures to keep the plot moving along but not too many to raise eyebrows. The world she conjures up cleverly eschews compulsion, there is no evil state organ here, implying benign, market driven compliance, (as with so many informational threats to our privacy). Avoidance and manipulation of the test results are, rightly, key elements of the plot. It all feels very real. It asks some big questions, even tackling the stain of eugenics, but never, ever, appears didactic. How much should we know about our genetic make-up? Should this ever be made public? How “perfect” do we want to be? Ms Road has an unmistakeable view but ensures all three main characters elicit our sympathy.

The dialogue between those characters is believable, the monologues perfectly placed, there is humour and there is even a memorable tomato based metaphor (you’ll see). It is something that Charlie Brooker and the Black Mirror team would have been proud to come up with, but this is achieved without their giant budget, and, I think, has far more emotional clout. Rosanna Vize offers a simple, grey transverse set at the HT Downstairs, a few chairs and other props. Zoe Spurr’s lighting and Alex Twiselton’s sound are similarly economic but very effective. Costume changes are effected on-stage. The production is helped enormously by Duncan McLean’s snappy video work which offers social and political context so that the play, which at its heart, is a story about the relationships between Bea and Aaron, and Bea and Char, is never overwhelmed by its central conceit.

Jade Anouka was mesmerising in the Phyllida Lloyd Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare trilogy, as Ariel, as Mark Antony and as Hotspur. She was the only saving grace in the otherwise execrable Jamie Lloyd Faustus. You may have seen her in the recent ITV production of the Trauma, by Mike Bartlett. She was the daughter of Adrian Lester’s high-flying surgeon. When John Simm, who plays the embittered father of one of Mr Lester’s patients, invades the family home, her fear jumps through the screen into your living room. (How Mike Bartlett keeps getting away with these electrically charged finales verging on the melodramatic beats me, but he does).

Up close as here, she is bloody marvellous to watch. A completely natural performer. Not to decry her three colleagues but it is difficult to take your eyes off her. Sam Yates does seem to have a knack of ensuring that great stage actors, (and I am putting Ms Anouka in that category), are great on stage. Not as easy as it sounds. I offer the evidence of, especially, Christian Slater, but also Robert Glenister, Stanley Townsend and Don Warrington in Glengarry Glen Ross at the Playhouse (Glengarry Glen Ross at the Playhouse Theatre review ****), Emily Barber in The Globe Cymbeline, Jane Horrocks in East is East, his collaboration with Ruth Wilson. Why he hasn’t been offered a big gig at the National is a mystery to me.

 

 

Pressure at the Park Theatre review ***

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Pressure

Park Theatre, 26th April 2018

I had high hopes for Pressure. I have said before that the Park Theatre has a knack of mounting a wide array of productions, which, on paper at least, sound interesting, though execution can be variable. If I am honest Pressure, initially, wasn’t one of them. But the reviews from previous performances in Edinburgh and Chichester and the presence as writer, and performer, of David Haig, and the Park’s always jolly atmosphere, reeled me in. When it transpired that the production was transferring to the West End, (the Ambassador’s Theatre from, in a nod to its content, the 6th June), I confess to feeling inwardly smug that I had got in early, along with the full houses which the Park has secured.

Talking of smug, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, there is a faint air of the self-satisfied about Mr Haig’s performances. Most recently I have seen him play the arrogant, borderline racist Dr Robert Smith in the Young Vic’s revival of Joe Penhall’s marvellous play Blue/Orange alongside some blokes called Daniel Kaluuya and Luke Norris who you might know. Let us hope Mr Penhall’s latest offering, Mood Music, at the Old Vic matches this. He also played the enigmatic Player in the said Old Vic’s recent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In both cases, and in some of his telly roles, he nails down the patronising pomposity of a certain type of middle-aged Brit expert, whilst revealing any vulnerability or desperation that might lie behind the surface.

I am sure that, outside work, he could not be more different, though his writing, the text of Pressure is intimidatingly exact in terms of directions, suggests otherwise. Regardless, what I can say is that when he gets his teeth into a character there are few more stirring sights than Mr Haig in full flow. So if I tell you that he has written a dramatic account of the real life contribution of meteorologist, Group Captain James Stagg, to the D Day invasion on June 6th 1944, it will likely not come as too much of a surprise. GC Stagg, on this account, was a dour, uncompromising Scot, who staked his reputation on convincing the Supreme Allied Commander General Eisenhower, here played by Malcolm Sinclair, to first hold off, and then go ahead with the invasion plans, despite apparently overwhelming evidence to the contrary and the opinion of his breezy American counterpart Colonel Irving P Krick (Philip Cairns).

It would have made a gripping black and white film in the 1950s or even a one off TV drama today. And that, in part, is something of its problem. It is a powerful story, but, once the die is cast, it is theatrically predictable and Mr Haig presents it that way. The pressure on GC Stagg is, compounded by his wife’s troubled pregnancy. The isobars on the charts measure pressure. We see the pressure mount on Eisenhower as he makes his fateful decisions. There are no real surprises in what the characters do or say and there are times when they verge on cliche.

On the other hand Mr Haig has wisely introduced a major female role in the form of Kay Summersby, the aide-de-camp to Eisenhower. She is played with clip-vowelled exactitude by Laura Rodgers, who I admired in Rules for Living at the Rose Kingston and Winter Solstice at the Orange Tree, (a play that continues to linger long in the mind). Malcolm Sinclair as Eisenhower is also impressive though I have no idea what the man himself was like, and the rest of the cast lend solid support. Director John Dove has collaborated with Mr Haig before on his most famous play (and film) My Boy Jack, based on the relationship between Rudyard Kipling and his son, so doesn’t mess about with Mr Haig’s story.

I appreciate that I am sounding a bit sniffy about Pressure. I don’t mean to be. It is, in its own conventional way, very effective and David Haig turns in an exemplary performance. If this sounds like your sort of thing then don’t hesitate to get down to the Ambassador’s.

 

Instructions For Correct Assembly at the Royal Court Theatre review ****

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Instructions For Correct Assembly

Royal Court Theatre, 23rd April 2018

I was much taken with Thomas Eccleshare’s previous outing, Heather, on a recent outing at the Bush Theatre (Heather at the Bush Theatre review *****). Instructions for Correct Assembly looked similarly intriguing and, much to my surprise, I manage to rope in both the SO and the Blonde Bombshells to hold my hand. Well I can report that satire IFCA is well worth a viewing even if Mr Eccleshare doesn’t seem to fully explore the ramifications of the imaginative scenario he conjures. Mind you what do I know. I am so dull I couldn’t even come up with an idea one tenth as good and then wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.

Hari, played by Mark Bonnar, who I guarantee you will know from the telly, and Max, Jane Horrocks, who needs no introduction, are keen to have a second shot at parenthood. Only this time they are taking no chances and opt for a technological solution. An off the shelf AI robot in kit form, think IKEA, which they are trying to put together in the opening scene, whose behaviour, emotions and attitudes can be altered by remote control. The result, Jan, as we soon find out, is the spitting image of their human son, Nick, who, let’s say, didn’t quite meet their expectations. I’ll say no more but the set up provides plenty of opportunity for wicked humour, particularly when Nick’s failings are set against the achievements of Amy (Shaniqua Okwok), daughter of next door neighbours bragging Laurie (Michele Austin) and condescending Paul (Jason Barnett). It also examines the relationship between parents and their children as they turn into adults and specifically what happens when someone “throws their life away” as Nick does on drugs. Would we really want, need or trust technology to help us make perfect kids and what should we do when the real thing fails to live up to our hopes and dreams?

What really makes the play come to life, as it were, is Brian Vernel’s performance as Jan/Nick. I was much impressed by young Mr Vernel’s performance as Konstantin in Sean Holmes’s erratic Seagull at the Lyric (The Seagull at the Lyric Hammersmith review ***), a production which I think in retrospect was better than I gave it credit for. He also stood out in the otherwise disappointing Future Conditional at the Old Vic as well as on the telly (David Hare’s Collateral and in the Last Kingdom, which I was addicted to). He has a slightly other-worldly quality, which, unsurprisingly, fits the bill here, but can turn convincingly nasty when required. Here, as he shifted between a desperate Nick and the machine Jan he was tremendous.

The set design of Cai Dyfan is the other star of the show, as a narrow window into Hari’s and Max’s suburban home, complete with conveyor belt of parts as they put Jan together, opens up in subsequent scenes before metaphorically collapsing again into the finale. This is an enterprising solution to Mr Eccleshare’s text which calls for a lot of different rooms and fairly rapid switches between them. The visual trickery courtesy of illusionist Paul Kieve is similarly eye-catching. Hamish Pirie’s direction is geared to making the most of the clever set pieces even if he can’t quite work out a way to fully realise the emotional torments that the plot should realise. We can only assume that Nick turned into the person he was in part because of Max and Hari’s influence and that their doomed attempt at redemption reflects their guilt. There is not enough in the play though to make this connection. The whole may be somewhat less than the sum of the parts, as it were.

Even so it gets its points across, is often wryly amusing, the dinner party scene in particular, and doesn’t outstay its welcome as some “dystopian satire'” plays are prone to do. The SO and the Blonde Bombshells were more than satisfied with their outing and I await Thomas Eccleshare’s next writing move (he is also a founder of visual theatre company Dancing Brick with his partner Valentina Ceschi) with interest. Meanwhile I humbly recommend you pop along to this

Much Ado About Nothing at the Rose Kingston review ****

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Much Ado About Nothing

Rose Theatre Kingston, 20th April 2018

Come on fellow residents of the Royal Borough of Kingston and London Borough of Richmond – both upon Thames. Get your collective arses over to the Rose Theatre to see this new version of Much Ado About Nothing, celebrating the 10th anniversary of your local theatre. There are plenty of tickets left for the last handful of performances. It is not perfect but when it is funny, it is very funny, the setting is intriguing, there are a handful of strong performances, including the star turn Mel Giedroyc, and, in John Hopkins’s Benedick, there is Shakespearean comic acting to rival the very best.

Now I will admit that the main draw for BD, LD, myself, and latterly MS, was Ms Giedroyc herself. Obviously she is a national treasure and we have collectively seen her memorably translate her inimitable style, arch covers it, to the reading of Agatha Christie. Play, proximity and support for the local theatre was enough justification for me, but LD especially needed the hook of her off the telly. LD is probably a bellwether teen, suspicious of Shakespeare, unless forced to consume at school, and then normally pleasantly surprised when Dad mugs her into coming along, usually through vague subterfuge. And she thoroughly enjoyed this. It doesn’t mean a trip to an uncut Lear is just round the corner. Just saying that if it is good enough to entertain her it is good enough to entertain anyone who might be dubious about the Bard.

Moreover, this production, jointly staged with Granville and Parnham and Antic Face, rattles through the action so that we are all done and dusted in under 150 minutes inc. interval. That’s including a several minute intro as we are, just so we know, introduced to the resort hotel in a set shrewdly realised by Naomi Dawson. This is modern day Sicily and Leonato’s estate is now a luxury spa to which Peter Guinness’s suitably intimidating mafioso Don Pedro and crew have retired for a bit of rest, relaxation and intimidation. Suffice to say it looked nothing like the bucolic MAAN in the drawing above.

Director Simon Dormandy’s ideas do, fitfully, generate some insight, notably in the way that Kate Lamb’s Hero and Calam Lynch’s Claudio are so precipitously thrust together, in the fancy dress party which permits the romantic plotting, in the wedding scenes and, especially, in Hero’s fake funeral. Here the juxtaposition of modern sophistication with older, deeper, paternalistic traditions is most striking. We love Sicily, (well I do especially), but Sicilians are a wary bunch, unsurprising given colonisations by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Muslims, Vikings, Normans, Germans, French, Spanish, Italians, Mafia and Tourists. Mind you that is what is makes it endlessly fascinating to the outsider.

On the other hand there are times when the hotel set is a limitation, most notably for the Watch, though frankly that never works, even with Stewart Wright doing his very best as Dogberry. And, let’s face it, most people see MAAN for the comedy, specifically Beatrice and Benedick sparring. Mel, as customer services manager for the hotel and Mr Hopkins, as an unlikely consigliere to Don Pedro, deliver. Ms Giedroyc, is funny, we know that, and exactly the right sort of funny, and doesn’t hold back from mugging to the audience. When she needs to show Beatrice’s independence, and specifically her revulsion at the patriarchal conceits around her, she also shows she can seriously act. John Hopkins however is a cut above, the physical humour matches his brilliant delivery of the text. Their early disdain for each other is done snappily enough, with some evidence of their back story, but it is when they get serious about each other that they hit the heights. Mel’s immediate retort of “kill him” when asked by Mr Hopkins what Benedick could do for Beatrice to right the wrong Claudio has inflicted on Hero, got the laugh, but the audience was palpably nervous. It is their respective eavesdropping scenes which still the show: pure farce, but why not if it makes us happy.

We were taken with young Calum Lynch as Claudio on his professional debut, especially LD, and especially when his top came off. There was a harsh streak in him, where required, to balance the skittish wooing. Kate Lamb presented an initially diffident Hero but bristled wth anger as her reputation was impugned. Peter Bray, rather disconcertingly played Don John as a somewhat dim East London thug; in contrast his Clerk was more Home Counties solicitor. David Rintoul as Leonato, now hotel manager, was alternately brutal and oleaginous. Fine support elsewhere includes Nicholas Prassad as Borachio and Victoria Hamnett as Margaret conjuring up a saucy scene involving Hero’s wedding dress that provides a not unreasonable explanation for the mistaken identity window scene which leads to Hero’s “disgrace”.

There have been, and will be, sharper, richer versions of MAAN, Christopher Luscombe’s recent RSC production for example, but if you want some straightforward easy on the ear and eye Shakespeare comedy, Kingston, for the rest of this week, is the place to be.

 

 

 

Pericles, Prince de Tyr at Silk Street Theatre review *****

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Pericles, Prince de Tyr

Barbican Silk Street Theatre, 19th April 2018

Trust me. You can trust experts. Parading your own ignorance against all the evidence of those who know more than you, just to satisfy your own prejudice, is an ugly human foible. In the very small commercial world of which I was once a part I like to think I knew what I was talking about. When it comes to theatre though I am no expert and you should always seek out the opinions of professional reviewers who do know their onions, as I do. If they think it is very good, it is normally very good, if best avoided, ditto.

In the case of this Cheek by Jowl production though, at their usual London home on Silk Street, it seems that the experts didn’t quite know what to make of it and certainly couldn’t agree. You can safely ignore me, and I recognise I am a pretty easy date theatrically, but I though it was tremendous.

This is the French company affiliate of Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s Cheek by Jowl empire. There is also a Russian branch. If you want theatre classics, reinterpreted with intelligence, wit and invention, there is no better port of call, (an early Pericles reference for you dear reader), than Cheek by Jowl. But “Shakespeare, in French, in London, what’s that all about Dad, isn’t that too much of a pose even by your standards” to paraphrase LD? Well, it is certainly a different experience, and Shakespeare is about so much more than the words, though I’m not an idiot, I know how important those words are. So a crack ensemble of Gallic thespians, whose previous productions of Ubu Roi and Andromaque did the business, according to them experts, wasn’t to be missed.

Now Pericles the play, if not the man himself shown above sporting a beard any denizen of Haggerston would be proud of, is a tricky customer. The first couple of acts were written by another bloke, George Wilkins, you can see the join before Will Shakespeare’s acuity becomes apparent, and it really is a rum old plot, written to excite the punters, rather than to make sense. It is a kind of road trip, by sea, of a bloke and his family who keep finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, before it all turns out, improbably, alright in the end. And, as if it wasn’t confusing enough, Messrs Donellan and Ormerod have come up with the cunning idea of locating it all in a hospital ward and, therefore, largely in the mind of patient Pericles.

Apparently they are not the first to come up with this wheeze, but, for me, it was a triumph. They have taken a scalpel to the play’s wilder linguistic excesses, which, with the French translation, sur-titled for bumpkins like me, means it gallops through the story in an unbroken 100 minutes. It can take over three hours normally. It will be interesting to see what the NT comes up with in its forthcoming musical production of the play mixing up an amateur and professional cast.

Now with a story this silly you need your wits about you, especially since the seven strong cast each play at least 3 parts, and the helpful narrator, Gower, in the standard text has been cast adrift. This production, more than ever, supports the Tourist’s contention that it is always worth boning up on the synopsis ahead of any Shakespeare viewing, however many times you have seen the play. No need to treat it like GCSE revision, just a quick reminder of the story will suffice. Then you can focus on performance, spectacle, language, emotion, big Will’s uncanny insight into the human condition, or whatever else takes your fancy. Here, because of the lingo, I could savour the non-verbal communication of all the cast, and the way, they shifted character, and the ingenuity of the production as we shifted between the hospital room and the delusions inside our Prince’s head.

The floor and walls of Nick Ormerod’s set are a vivid, turquoise blue, enhanced by Pascal Noel’s understated lighting design. It was similar to the effect conjured up at the Gate in last year’s intriguing The Unknown Island, that too signalling all things oceanic and marine. The room is filled with hospital details, right the way down to the anti-bacterial hand-wash that the actors take advantage of on entry and exit. Always nice to see a production that cares about hygiene. This hospital room is unlike anything you might see in the creaking NHS though, or even a private hospital, being big enough to accommodate all of Pericles’s family as well as the action from all the exotic Mediterranean locations, Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus and Mytilene.

(Having said that my one experience of the French healthcare system suggests such luxury might be possible. LD broke her arm pony-riding when she was little, the denouement in a holiday from hell. Very disappointing gite, terrible weather, mother in law crocked her back, dead rat in the swimming pool. The SO stayed with our brave little soldier in hospital, but, carless, a taxi was provisioned for me, by said hospital, so that I could visit prior to her being discharged. Unfortunately my idiocy, and criminal lack of French conversation, saw me dropped down in the wrong wing of the well-appointed hospital. Correct room number though. You can imagine the surprise, nay horror, of the poor French woman, in the early stages of labour, when I popped my head round the door. Mortified I make a rapid exit, mumbling my “pardons”. before I eventually found the right wife and patient. In all the confusion though I do remember the generous size of the room my petrified mon nouveau amie occupied).

Back to Pericles. Our hero, played magnificently by Christophe Gregoire, is asleep in his bed with talk radio humming in the background. He has the gaunt and fevered look of a man prone to psychotic episodes, probably enhanced by powerful medication. The doctor, played by Cecile Leterme, similarly impressive, is doing her rounds. Wife, daughter and friend are watching over him. Cue the first dream/delusion as we kick off with Antiochus (Xavier Boffier) and his rubbish riddle confessing to incest. Like I say you can check out the rest of your story but given that M. Gregoire doubles up as the duplicitous Cleon, Governor of Tarsus, who with wife Dionysa, plot to kill Pericles’s daughter Marina, after he has entrusted her to their care, you need to be on your mettle. He also ends up as the Master of the brothel that Marina escapes to. Meanwhile Mme Leterme, goes one role further, playing the physician, obviously, Cerimon, who revives the half-dead Thaisa, Pericles’s wife, who, he has agreed, should be chucked overboard during shipwreck number two (you read that right). She also plays Simonide, King of Pentapolis and Dad to Thaisa, whose hand Pericles wins through martial derring-do. Oh and goddess Diana, whose temple Thaisa retreats to when she thinks hubby is dead and daughter was never born.

All up to speed. Well Xavier Boffett, also plays Lysimaque, the Governor of Mytilene, brothel town remember, (of which he is a regular patron until swerved by Marina’s saintly virtue), and who brings father and daughter back together at the end. As well as the servant to the Master of the brothel and to bad Dionysa. Who in turn is played by Camille Cayol, in addition to wife, Thaisa, and the Mistress of the brothel. Valentine Catzeflis, thankfully just plays daughter Marina, and, briefly, Antiiochus’s abused daughter. To round things off Guillaume Pottier and Martin Nikonoff step up as various gentlemen, fishermen and knights, without whom the plot wouldn’t make sense (!!!).

In between the Pericleian adventure scenes, even in their truncated form, we have periods of silence when we are back in the (hospital) room, magic suspended, as well as scenes, where Pericles’s delusions are happening in “reality” as opposed to just in his head. Making all of this hang together is an act of imagination on the part of Declan Donellan which rivals that of George Wilkins and William Shakespeare in the first place.

And, for me, it really works. Obviously you lose the Tempest style fantasy from such an interpretation and location. But remember when this was written (1607/08 is the generally accepted date) the audience’s demand for special effects could be accomplished with a few bits of wood, a bit of glue, some pulleys, candles and distraction. If you are going to take a modern, hard-bitten audience, used to films, games and even funny helmets, where technology can conjure up any universe you like, on a believable stage version of Pericles’s journey, you’ll have your work cut out. Look at the technological lengths the RSC went to last year with its holographic Ariel in the Tempest to drag in the kids.

Even if this production eschewed such a journey there was still buckets of theatre-craft, and magic, on show, but it came from the ingenuity of matching the “action” in the play to the setting. The first storm kicks off with Pericles pouring a bed-pan over his head for example, not the only laugh here. The tournament where Pericles wins the hand of Thaisa is conveyed in the corridor behind the room as the orderlies try to pin down Pericles who has gone properly bat-shit. Thaisa’s revival sees her emerging from a body bag on a hospital trolley having been rushed off stage previously in childbirth.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense which ever way you look at it, so why not, literally, make it a dream play, or more exactly a succession of dream plays. And then wait for this supremely talented cast rise to the challenge of condensing character and plot into the transitions the concept afforded. The most powerful scene, and the one all this misadventure builds up to, is the reunion of father, daughter and wife, and I thought it was terrifically moving. If our patient Pericles thinks he is going to die, as it seems here, and therefore lose his family, then the parallels with our Prince Pericles, similarly imperilled, do, sort of, make sense.

Like I say, this may not be for everyone, and is a long way from what you might call, classic Pericles. Then again it is seldom performed probably because, a bit like Cymbeline, it is pretty daft and tricky to swallow. Hidden within, actually not really hidden, the byzantine, travelogue, plot, the stock scenes, the potential coups des theatre, and despite the mangling of Mr Wilkins at the outset, who is more concerned with soapy plot turns that character development, there is some balls out Shakespeare which properly entertains and moves. With a play this highly stylised why not overlay with one more layer of stylisation in an attempt to create a consistent narrative thread.

There is at least one person who cannot wait for next visit from Cheek by Jowl, in whatever language.

 

 

The Country Wife at Southwark Playhouse review ***

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The Country Wife

Southwark Playhouse, 17th April 2018

I haven’t seen that many Restoration comedies. In fact if I take the list of notable examples of the genre offered up by Wiki I see it is a grand total of one, in the form of the NT’s Beaux Stratagem from 2015, directed by the versatile Simon Godwin. It was OK but I can’t say I was bowled over. Still anyone with the Tourist’s theatrical pretensions needs to master the form so he leapt at the chance to see this production of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife courtesy of Morphic Graffiti. Especially at the bargain basement price of a tenner. There is no cheaper, or often, better way to see theatre in London than through Southwark Playhouse’s Pay As You Go offer. All Londoners should be compulsorily enrolled for their own cultural good.

Luke Fredericks and Stewart Charlesworth are the brains behind Morphic Graffiti which they set up in 2012. I see that the majority of their well received work to date has been musicals, including a version of the problematic Rodgers and Hammerstein work Carousel at the Arcola. That would explain why this Country Wife has some absolutely marvellous song and dance routines between scenes. The entire cast dances its way through the intricate set changes to a backdrop of abridged jazz-swing versions of pop “classics”. The choreography is in keeping with the 1920s “Bright Young Things” setting, for that is the period Messrs Fredericks and Charlesworth have alighted on to shed new light on Wycherley’s original written in 1675. The idea is that the privileged Bohemians of 1920s London, with their drink and drug excesses, their music and fancy dress parties and their sexual licentiousness, had a lot in common with their, probably, frock and wig wearing ancestors in Charles II’s time. Apparently Charly 2 was notoriously potty-mouthed.

The Restoration saw  a reaction against the puritanism of the Protectorate. The theatre was restored, and frou-frou, baroque-y, Frenchiness was all the rage. Moliere, albeit hyped up, was the inspiration for the Restoration playwrights who satirised, albeit lovingly, etiquette, manners, class and sex. The Country Wife was at the more explicit end of the spectrum with its knob and fanny double entendres and it was banned from performance from 1753, as those miserable Georgians and Tories gained ascendance, until 1924.

Which circles back to the backdrop here. I can see that some of the characters here, the foppish dandy Sparkish, the roue Harry Horner, the horny cougar Lady Fidget and the eponymous country wife looking to widen her horizons as it were, Margery Pinchwife, might fit the Bright Young Things template. In contrast the cuckolds, Pinchwife and Sir Jasper Fidget are the older generation against which the young’uns rebel. But surely the Restoration, and these comedies which prick it, was a time a time of deception and hypocrisy. The look may have been flamboyant but there were presumably social mores which governed public behaviour, even if, in private, anything was up for grabs. In contrast those BYT’s revelled in their visible outrageousness and were flagrant self publicists, Made in Chelsea types but obviously not so dumb as fat Spence, toddler Jamie and Bonky. In short if Harry got horny in the 1920’s in this company, surely he would need no elaborate ruse to get his leg over.

I fear I maybe overthinking this but my point is I am not entirely sure the concept stacked up even if the look, especially Stewart Charlesworth’s set and costumes, movement, Heather Douglas, and sound, Neil Rigg, was appealing. Apparently Luke Fredericks took a few liberties with the text and cut his dramatis personae, I wouldn’t know, but it didn’t do any damage to the plot as far as I could make out. Mind you, even with plays I know well, I will always get familiar with the outline of the plot in advance. The SO thinks this is mad but I reckon if you have a rough idea of what is going on there is more joy to be had from performances, characters, insights, messages, spectacle and the like. And I am notoriously slow on the uptake.

In essence The Country Wife is a bunch of people looking for a shag, with randy Harry Horner, played rather too straight by Eddie Eyre, pretending he is impotent so he can get close to the ladies without arousing suspicion, Pinchwife’s young and “inexperienced” new, yokel wife Margery (a winning Nancy Sullivan) embracing all the City has to offer, and Harry’s droll chum Frank Harcourt (Leo Starr) nabbing the lovely Alithea (Siubhan Harrison) from under the nose of the camp chump Sparkish (Daniel Cane who sets out to, and succeeds, rather too obviously, in stealing the show). Mabel Clements caught the eye doubling up as knowing servant Lucy and vivacious Dainty Fidget, sister in law of Lady F, played by Sarah Lam who seemed to me to most embrace the tenor of the text. Richard Clews as the preposterously misogynistic Pinchwife, Sam Graham as Sir Jasper F and Joshua Hill as Harry’s other wing-man, Dorilant, completed the cast.

Now these plays are famous in part for offering the first proper meaty parts for women (no filth intended0, not dressed up boys, and for making stars of the actors and actresses who starred in them. You’ll have to pick you own way through the sexual politics, guided by the director, to decide if the women here have real agency, and how sympathetic Wycherley is to his three male archetypes, Horner’s libertine lad, Pinchwife’s brutal possessive or Harcourt’s upstanding hunk, but it does seem amenable to various interpretations. Most of all though it has to be funny I guess and this is where, maybe, this production, came a little unstuck. I can’t fault the pace, but what with so much to think about, including lighting from Sam Waddington which highlighted every aside to the audience, I didn’t think the lines were delivered with perhaps as much relish as they deserved.

The regular reader of this blog (hello!) will know that I claim not to like musicals. Based on the music and choreography, if not maybe the play itself, I will certainly look at for Morphic Graffiti’s forays into that genre. Especially if they reel out the proverbial row of tents. They look like they are good a that.