Tag: Chris Bush

Faustus: That Damned Woman at the Lyric Hammersmith review ***

Faustus: That Damned Woman

Lyric Hammersmith, 5th February 2020

I bet Chris Bush was good at English at school and maybe beyond. In the precis question. For she has an unerring eye/ear/pen for taking complicated/contentious/convoluted issues and dramas and rendering them explicable, topical and entertaining. Kicking off with TONY! The Blair Musical from 2007, through a series of productions based and performed in her native Sheffield to her take on Pericles for the NT’s Public Arts project. I haven’t seen The Assassination of Katie Hopkins, the play that is, though would like to. The play that is …. Even a narcissistic cretin, who takes money for voicing offence, and who has choked and failed in her “career” on multiple occasions, deserves our sympathy, though not our attention.

Music and inclusiveness have formed central planks of CB’s work with Standing at the Sky’s Edge, co-written with Richard Hawley, set to grace the NT when normal service is reviewed. With Faustus TDW however she has chosen to contemporarise, (as she did with the mystery plays), and gender switch, the overly ambitious man about town and time, made famous by Marlowe and Goethe. With mixed results. It’s looks brilliant, there are some sound ideas beyond the gender inversion, and, for those of us new(ish) to the story, it is easy to follow, but some of the dialogue doesn’t quite match the ambition and it features a bold central performance from Jodie McNee which doesn’t help us to get beyond the cipher.

Johanna Faustus works hard alongside apothecary Dad (Barnaby Power) in plague-ridden 1660s London after Mum is executed for witchcraft. God isn’t going to dispense justice so our Johanna bites Lucifer’s (also Barnaby Power) hand off when he offers the deal. 144 years, 6x more than the male Faust, no requirement to be taken consecutively. Yet she, unlike her hubristic mythic counterpart, sets out on an altruistic path, first in her ‘hood and then, after a quick-fire Enlightenment education, a melodramatic Victorian London, through time, Cloud Atlas style, to a far future as CEO of a pharma company set on delivering eternal life to the masses. She meets various women (and some men) along the way, Elizabeth Garrett, Marie and Pierre Curie, variously played by Katherine Carlton, Alicia Charles, Tim Samuels and Emmanuella Cole, and is accompanied by her camp Mephistopheles (Danny Lee-Wynter), decked out in a natty white suit, Cuban heels and rouge, and ever quip-ready.

Ana Ines Jabares-Pita’s set design may well be the star of the show, an expansive cavern, expressively lit by Richard Howell, like the inside of a whale, though it does come to dominate. There are a few enjoyable effects, notably in the recreation of the Seven Deadly Sins, assisted by Giles Thomas’s sound and Ian William Galloway’s video. Headlong director Caroline Byrne keeps things moving along, though this comes at the expense of the questions, of faith, of female agency and oppression, of mortality, technology, free-will, redemption, which themselves are rather jumbled up. Ambition and imagination has been a feature of the UK stage over the last few years, but Faustus TDW does, like some of its predecessors, push the envelope a little too far and risks looking a bit daft.

Mind you Marlowe’s anti-hero does drone on a bit, is an annoying clever dick and uses his expensively secured special powers to mostly make practical jokes and perform crowd-pleasing tricks. Which, to be fair, is probably what this bloke would do as well. On that basis we have to applaud the two CB’s for setting out an alternative. It just might have been better to restrict the inversion to the historical starting point. Still I enjoyed it and kind of liked its can-do punky attitude. A fine foil to the rather more technologically adroit achievement of Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch’s adaptation of Orlando which Schaubuhne Berlin kindly streamed the other day. Perhaps I should have a look see at what the mainstream female time traveller in Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor Who is up to these days.

Pericles at the National Theatre review *****

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Pericles

National Theatre Olivier, 26th August 2018

So how do you like your theatre? Or more particularly how do your like your Shakespeare? Utterly faithful to the First Folio? Set in the time and place that big Will intended (however baffling)? All blokes in tights? Performed by elite, public school grandees plummily sing-songing the verse?

Of course not. He’s for all time, not just his time, so there’s a million ways to show him off. Yet it seems from some of the reaction to Emily Lim’s three night production of Pericles at the National, the first in the planned large scale, annual, Public Acts initiatives, that some misanthropic types, (who probably weren’t there), have got the right hump with this. “It’s not “proper” Shakespeare”. Well neither is the mangled, reconstructed Pericles text that has been handed down to us with half of it penned by George Wilkins. “Very little of the precious Shakespeare lines make it through the production”. Fair enough but I defy anyone to sit through the whole bonkers story of Pericles without thinking this is a cracking tale that needs fearless pruning to properly emerge. “Adding music and dance scenes cheapens the entertainment”. Who says so. Will Shakespeare was all about entertaining the punters and making money. Chris Bush’s adaptation, with music by Jim Fortune, succeeds admirably in the first aim and, if it were possible, would, I guarantee, deliver on the second. “It is all well and good having these “amateur” types making their family in the audience proud but it gets in the way of the “professionals””. Bollocks. That is not what was intended here and if you can’t grasp that then I respectfully suggest you p*ss off to wherever you think you might find a “correct” performance of this messy play.

So ditch the moaners and pay attention to most of the proper reviewers and, I humbly suggest, me. For this was one of the most uplifting nights I have spent in a theatre. It was a very. very long way from the last Pericles I saw, the Cheek by Jowl production at the Barbican, (in French, heavily chopped, with our Prince of Tyre in a hospital bed, tut, tut, what were they thinking). (Pericles, Prince de Tyr at Silk Street Theatre review *****). But it was just wonderful.

OK so, at first, realising just how far Ms Bush and Ms Lim have deviated from the “original” is a bit of a shock. But once I saw how this allows them, and everyone involved, to incorporate the community performers, whether in dance, in song, in walk-, or wheel-, ons and memorably, in named parts, I just started smiling, and then grinning, so that by the end, (after manfully holding back the tears and trying not to audibly gulp), I was overwhelmed with joy. I know how daft that sounds but I can only offer up my genuine reaction.

The professional cast, led by Ashley Zhangazha as Pericles himself  and Audrey Brisson as daughter Marina, were superb. Mr Zhangazha was as natural as you like, (insofar as you can be natural in such a daft plot), in shifting from the retained verse to the sharper rewrites. This momentum ensured the ensemble set pieces didn’t really get in the way of the story. Not that it would have mattered anyway if they had. Whether it be the marriage scene of Pericles and Thaisa, (here interrupted by a recalcitrant maypole set malfunction which, if anything, made the production even more communal), or transforming the Mytilene brothel into something a bit more family friendly thanks to the ministrations of the effervescently camp Kevin Harvey as Boult, these tableaux were marvellous. All the performances were terrific though, though, and I feel guilty for saying it, the London Bulgarian Choir simply blew me away.

Maybe some of Jm Fortune’s songs were a bit cheesy but who cares when you can clap along within seconds. Maybe the sheer amount of stuff that was thrown at the Oliver stage sometimes bewildered, as one reviewer said, like the biggest am-dram production of all time. Maybe the sheer number of bodies on stage, the cast in total is over 200, occasionally threatened to topple even Robby Graham’s masterly choreography. Yet this was what made it so much shared fun.

If this is what the Public Acts enterprise has kicked off with then I say bring on next year’s. The idea, taken from New York, is to involve an array of community and theatre partners, (here the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch who will host the next instalment), from the outset in creating a mass participation slice of theatre around the country. Time, patience and, yes all you misery-guts, money will be involved but the benefit to participants, communities and audience surely justify the investment based on this production.

Immense credit must go to NT resident director Emily Lim who has decided in specialise in community productions. To co-ordinate a work of this scale is mind-boggling. To impose a resonant vision, the idea of “finding one’s home”, upon Pericles’s journey, even more so. And to create this much love, (you soppy old git Tourist) deserves our eternal gratitude. I really hope everyone involved gets another opportunity to put this on. If they do please go.