Tag: Lizzie Clachlan

Catching up (Part 1)

February 2020

Yep. You read that right. February 2020. Just before you know what kicked off and the stages went dark. You would have thought that the last 18 months would have given the Tourist plenty of time and inclination to continue reporting on his cultural journey. But no. Despite his multiple privileges which meant the pandemic had minimal impact on his day to day existence he still fell into the pit marked “intellectual lethargy” spending way to much time looking at a screen and moaning about the world.

But a repeated dose of live theatre (along with Oxford/Astra Zeneca’s elixir – thank you) has, you may or may not be pleased to hear, given him back his mojo. And he has remembered just how useful it is to record what he sees and hears to make sure he keeps on learning and stops grumbling.

So a quick catch up to complete the archives and then some recent highlights. The watchword is brevity. So a few lines only.

The Tin Drum – Coronet Theatre. 24th February 2020. *****. A separate post finally completed.

Tryst – Chiswick Playhouse. 25th February 2020. ****. Front row in this charming space. Second time around at the CP of a play first seen a couple of decades ago. Karoline Leach’s script is based on the real life story of bigamist con-man George Joseph Smith, a serial killer infamous for the Brides in the Bath Murders at the start of the 20th century. Fred Perry played George with a mixture of menace and charm. Scarlett Brookes (just seen again by the Tourist at the Orange Tree) was more successful as the bright but naive shop assistant Adelaide Pinchkin dreaming of a better life. Power shifts intriguingly though the production, directed by Phoebe Barran and mostly narrated, sometimes dragged a little and dialled down the suspense. A smart set from Jessica Staton with the two actors artfully shifted props. Overall the SO and I were entertained. Mind you this was right up our collective street.

Pass Over – Kiln Theatre. 26th February 2020. ****. Antoinette Nwandu’s 2017 play was filmed in 2018 by no less a creative genius than Spike Lee. So we are dealing with a highly regarded rendering of contemporary Black experience here. Easy to see why Kiln’s AD Indhu Rubasingham was keen to take this one for herself. Moses (Paapa Essiedu) and Kitch (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) are on an American city street corner shooting the breeze and dreaming of lives they will never have passe Vladimir and Estragon. This space though, simply staged by Robert Jones, is gradually revealed as limiting and threatening. Their swagger is matched by their fear of the police. They meet Mister (Alexander Eliot), a folksy eccentric with white suit and picnic basket, whose condescending offer of food and friendship masks racist privilege and manufactured offence. Absurdist but not tortuous, packed with allusion, to history, the Old Testament, contemporary race politics, heavy with carefully chosen dialogue but never dense. Tonal uncertainty can ruin plays of this type but not here, though it is at its best when its political message is not directly articulated as in the beginning of Act 2. Paapa Essiedu and Gershwyn Eustache Jr knock it out of the park as the nervy Moses and wistful Kitch but Alexander Eliot, as he did with Solyony in Rebecca Frecknall’s dreamy Three Sisters at the Almeida, mastered a very tough gig as both Mister and the overtly racist policeman Occifer. Can’t help thinking this needs a wider and bigger audience.

A Number – Bridge Theatre. 26th February 2020. ****. Caryl Churchill’s masterpiece from 2002 about cloning, its possibilities and its pitfalls, was given a robust workout by director Polly Findlay, with Roger Allam as the shambling father, Salter, and Colin Morgan as the sons. Once you get over the initial set up, which of the estranged sons is the “unsatisfactory real thing” and which are the clones, then there is not much in the way of CC’s usual formal experimentation or surrealist play on show here. And, in order to explore the various consequences of the subject matter, scientific, philosophical, ethical, familial, and otherwise, CC loads up with some sparkling dialogue. None of the sparse ellipses that characterise her very latest works. The setting from Lizzie Clachlan was dowdily domestic, the humour, of which there is plenty, played up, especially by the ever-droll Mr Allam. Salter didn’t really think through when he opted to “improve” on the original and the emotional effects on his son, and the copies, requested and rogue, were well played, without losing sight of the core “hard problem” of what it is to actually be human and how we “identify”. Colin Morgan offered a convincing degree of differentiation, Bernard 1 angry, Bernard 2 confused, “Michael” no 3 nonchalant, but this effort meant he, and Roger Allam, didn’t always connect or clash as much as they might/should. And some of the clues about the relationship between father and son didn’t always land. The play runs to an hour but felt a little longer with CC pauses and tics and some deliberately disorientating stage revolves between the five “acts”. Another production with, coincidentally given the above, Paapa Essiedu and Lennie James (a first on stage for me), and directed by Churchill specialist Lyndsey Turner, will appear at the Old Vic in early 2022. I can’t wait to compare, contrast and, as always on repeated viewing of CC’s work, learn and love more.

Death of England. National Theatre Dorfman. 29th February 2020. *****. Apropos of nothing, and paraphrasing for dramatic effect, someone said in my hearing recently that Rafe Spall didn’t make for a convincing Judge Brack in Ivo van Hove’s 2016 Hedda Gabler at the NT. Something along the lines of not nasty enough. My first reaction was to disagree; in a production stripped of its historical context, his was a deliberately unsubtle and brutally physical Brack. But actually they had a point. There is a whiff of little boy lost about Mr Spall which left a scintilla of doubt. In Roy William’s and Clint Dyer’s one man confessional/state of the nation play, Death of England, this vulnerability, however, literally repaid us with interest. Spall played Essex’s finest, Michael, grieving son to a dear and recently departed, but racist father, and best friend to Delroy, who is his sister’s partner. Along the way Spall also takes in his Dad, Delroy’s Mum, a restaurant owner with a vital story to tell, amongst others. He does all this at lightening speed, in both voice and movement, plucking props out of nooks and crannies from Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ’s St George’s Cross transverse stage and with occasional asides to the audience. There is much to like, and dislike, about Michael, a confident, lairy swagger fuelled by coke, convulsed by his Dad’s death, riven by contradiction about what it means to be white, male and working class in Britain today. Spall’s performance was hyper, exaggerated by Jackie Shemesh’s often glaring lighting, paralleling Michael’s own psyche, barreling towards the tour de force of his climatic drunken funeral oration. As in Roy William’s Sing Your Heart Out …. , football, nationhood and racism are intertwined though here more as metaphor, Dad dies just after the semi-final loss in 2018, than plot. Now with added Brexit. Michael knows what he is supposed to be against but what exactly is he for? OK so the script wobbles a bit on occasion and the intensity of performance and Clint Dyer’s direction makes it easier to recognise that completely understand the paradox of Michael but it was impossible not to be bowled over by its commitment.

What else that month? A couple of concerts. The Bang on a Can All Stars, champions of post-minimalism with a mixed programme including John Adams (The Chairman Dances), Julia Wolfe (Flower Power), Steve Martland (Horses of Instruction) and Philip Glass (Symphony No 2 arranged for string Orchestra), which was OK but nothing more and an energetic, spirited and ultimately convincing recital from pianist Boris Giltburg of Beethoven sonatas (Ops 26, 57, 109 and 111).

Orphee at ENO review ***

Orphee

English National Opera, 27th November 2019

The Mask of Orpheus. Extraordinary music, fine singing, showy production. Orpheus and Eurydice. Fine music, mostly, superb singing, faulty production. So how would the Tourist fair in his third encounter with the Orpheus myth in the ENO season. Well since you ask. Best production of the three by far courtesy of Netia Jones, who also oversaw costume and video, and Lizzie Clachlan’s multi-faceted set. Mind you I knew just how good Ms Jones’s ideas can be, heavy though they are on monochrome video visuals, thanks to her memorable take on Britten’s Curlew River in 2013. Singing, well singing-through, since the libretto is a pretty straight, (here closely translated into English by the versatile Ms Jones and Emma Jenkins), lift from the Cocteau 1950 film script, that was more than up to the task notably from Nicholas Lester as our eponymous hero, coloratura Jennifer France as the baddie Princess and, unsurprisingly, Nicky Spence as the ominous chauffeur Heurtebise. Music faultlessly executed by the ENO orchestra as usual under the baton of Geoffrey Paterson, though it is near two hours of Philip Glass with all the good and bad that implies.

So why wasn’t I bowled over. Well I think that comes down to the source material. Jean Cocteau was a wilful fellow, with talent to burn across media, even when off his tits on opium, but he did have his bugbears and did not see any problem with excess self-love. His film is Art with a big A, about love, death and jealously like its source, but also about how the Artist operates in a realm far beyond that occupied by us ordinary mortals. Indeed Orphee here is a misunderstood poet who seeks immortality. With the help of a lot of mirrors. Cocteau thought he was special and was determined to show us. More Narcissus and Thanatos than Orpheus maybe, though with more than a whiff of grumpy old man misogyny. Mind you Cocteau himself came in for a lot of criticism from the artistic elite, notably the Surrealists, which was often tinged with homophobia. The most obvious inspiration for his aesthetic in the film is surely Man Ray.

The film is a mix of dream and naturalism set in 1950s Paris. A drunken night out ends with younger poet rival to Orphee, Cegeste (Anthony Gregory) mown down by a couple of motor bikes after a fight. The mysterious Princess steps in to help, but instead abducts Orphee to a chateau, where she, her lackeys and the reanimated (!) Cegeste disappear. No problem as Heurtebise returns Orphee to his hone where the coppers, wife put upon Eurydice (Sarah Tynan) and feminist friend Aglaonice (Rachael Lloyd) are wondering what he has been up to. Heurtebise moves in and falls for the pregnant Eurydice. Orphee gets obsessed with the radio which may be talking to him via some ropey poetry, Eurydice is murdered by the Princess’s lackeys and Heurtebise and Orphee make a trip to the Underworld. A dodgy Court says he can take Orphee back, subject to the usual condition, when he declares he no longer fancies Death/The Princess. Eurydice fatally looks at hubby in the car mirror and so back to square one, with Orphee joining her after getting shot at the bar where all this shenanigans kicked off. Back to the Underworld to have memories wiped for O & E with Death/Princess and Heurtebise checking in for good.

Worth knowing all this and brushing up on the synopsis though even so I confess to losing the thread a few times through the 18 scenes. And to not fully appreciating the point of the many “framing” extras that Ms Jones introduces. No matter. Glass’s score contains just enough variation to demarcate the shifts in the odd narrative and in character, (this was still well before Glass drifted into auto-pilot mode), and visually the production is a treat with Netia Jones emulating Cocteau’s own mix of lo and hi (for the time) cinematographic technique to provide an equally striking impression. Cocteau made it up as he went along. Ms Jones, along with Lucy Carter (lighting) and Danielle Agami (choreography), and unlike some other directors at the ENO recently, takes a far more methodical approach, which, deliberately mirrors the film (with direct video quotes), and its “making of” successor, Le Testament d’Orphee, whilst still remembering to be an opera. As I think Glass envisaged even if he wrote for French not English and maybe with a smaller stage in mind.

Philip Glass long harboured an ambition to convert Cocteau’s vision into opera after spending 1954 in a hedonistic whirl in Paris. (He returned in the mid 1960s to study under Nadia Boulanger). It was composed in 1991 just after his wife, artist Candy Jernigan, died unexpectedly from liver cancer. He went on to compose two further operas based on Cocteau’s films, La Belle et la Bete (1994) and Les Enfants Terribles (1996).

Orpheus and Eurydice at the ENO review ***

Orpheus and Eurydice

English National Opera, 14th November 2019

The second part of my engagement with the ENO O&E odyssey. (See how easy it easy to be a librettist). Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus first, simultaneously monumental and camp, Philip Glass’s homage to Cocteau’s Orphee to come in a couple of weeks, and there was no chance of me ever signing up for Emma Rice’s take on Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld.

Going in this was probably the one on which the Tourist was most keen. Never heard or seen it before. Learned a lot in recent months about Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck (1714 to 1787) and how he, and his circle, revolutionised opera by insisting on the primacy of drama. With Orfeo et Euridice, from 1762, the first, and prime example of the reform. Less repetition, melisma and showing off in arias, similarly less ritornello in the instrumental passages, intelligible text, less recitative and more accompanied than secco, and more flow in melodies and action.

With a cast of Sarah Tynan as Eurydice, Soraya Mafi as Love and the powerful voice of Alice Coote as Orpheus, the cast was top notch, and with Wayne MacGregor in the director’s chair, the dance passages were going to receive due care and attention. And all played straight through coming in at a tidy 90 minutes.

Or so I thought. Turned out the production did feature and unnecessary interval, (in my opinion though maybe not shared by the dance ensemble), and that the choreography took precedence over the drama. The sublime combination of Alice Coote’s powerful mezzo, Sarah Tynan’s lighter, brighter, and up and coming Soraya Mafi’s sharp, accurate, coloraturas, the modernist clarity of Lizzie Clachlan’s big box set, Jon Clark’s lighting and Ben Cullen Williams’s flashy (literally at times) video designs, the vivid colours, contrasting with simple monochromes, of Louise Gray’s costumes, and Mr MacGregor’s complex choreography, all worked individually. Together, I wasn’t so sure. And the story, and occasionally the three protagonists, sometimes looked lost in all of the look and feel.

What I hadn’t anticipated was just how good the score was going to be in the hands of Harry Bickett and the ENO Orchestra. Time and again the ENO orchestra has elevated a production, true of The Mask of Orpheus, though Sir Harry’s imagination may have had something to do with it, and this for someone who is a big fan of the ENO. This was Hector Berlioz’s 4 act 1859 version of O&E, with the libretto created by Pierre Louis Moline in French 12 years after the original Italian by one Ranieri de’Calzabigi, drawn from a couple of chaps called Virgil and Ovid who you might have heard of. With English translation by Christopher Cowell.

O&E is apparently an azione teatrale, (I swear there are as many genres of opera as there are operas), mythological subject, with dancing, no chorus, few actors, short in scale, “noble simplicity” is apparently what Gluck was after. The original will have had a castrato singing Orpheus: this morphed into a haute-contre, or high tenor, but as pitch inflated, and even after the French government legislated for pitch, the diapason normale, a female alto became the norm for Orpheus. Berlioz went back to the original key scheme of the Vienna score of 1762 whilst still incorporating much of the additional Paris score of 1774, (Gluck having moved there to further his career, though he returned to Austria when fashion moved on and his final and 47th opera, Echo et Narcisse got the public thumbs down). If you want more details head over to the exhaustive Wiki page where clearly knowledgeable people in love with his work have been beavering away, (remembering to donate please), or even better the encyclopaedic programme notes. All I can tell you is that, whenever it was scored, and whoever it was scored by, this is exquisite music. I see Gluck wrote a few trio sonatas and sinfonias which barely get a look in. Shame as I am not one for listening to recordings of opera, and I like the sound of them.

Mr McGregor is apparently not the first choreographer to take on O&E. The chorus is now off stage (and therefore muffled) and the various shepherds, shepherdesses, nymphs, demons, Furies, happy spirits, heroes and heroines are replaced by the 14 dancers, with two of them, Jacob O’Connell and Rebecca Bassett-Graham, apparently representing their inner selves (you could have fooled me). Now whisper it, whilst I can admire dance, it doesn’t really do too much for me, and, though their were some striking poses, it was all a bit aimless and showy.

Not to worry, Even if the visuals and the action didn’t persuade there was always, as I said, the clean, lithe and lively music from the HIP appropriate band. And the three lovely voices. I am not informed enough to have a roster of favourite women opera singers, but Alice Coote, would join the likes of Barbara Hannigan, Sophie Bevan, Louise Alder, Lucy Crowe and Sally Matthews in leaving a mark as well as Kitty Whateley, Rowan Pierce, Nazan Fikret and Elen Wilmer. Ms Coote debuted in the role when she was just 18 on this very stage, on the night of 9/11. Sobering.

The Mask of Orpheus at the ENO review ****

The Mask of Orpheus

English National Opera, 25th October 2019

No idea where we were in the story for much of the getting on for four hours with with the two intervals. Not helped by Peter Zinovieff’s impenetrable libretto, sung and spoken, the bloated rock star gets lost in early 80’s WAG Club setting courtesy of Lizzie Clachlan’s set and frock-maker Daniel Lismore’s preposterous spangly costumes, the tripartite two singer, one acrobat/dancer, Myth/Hero/Human, casting for our hero, heroine and baddie, and the wilful directing of Daniel Kramer, where spectacle trumps sense.

Who gives a fuck though when you have a score like this. With an ENO orchestra at the top of its game lovingly conducted by Martyn Brabbins, (who has history with this work), and James Henshaw, (yep it takes two). Up to now the Tourist’s exposure to Sir Harrison Birtwhistle has been fleeting. A few chamber pieces. None of the orchestral works bar the latest Donum Simoni MMXVIII, and certainly none of the operas. And, let’s face it, you are not going to sit down and listen to recordings. Nope the full on Sir Harry experience requires a live opera in performance.

Now I get it. As a contrast I don’t know where Xenakis’s music comes from, and I am conscious that I am probably just taking on board all the cultural baggage attached to its interpretation, but it definitely isn’t of this world, (though of course it is, it still being just notes on a page) . Whereas Sir HB’s tunes, for all that “elemental”, “earthy”, “massive”, “mythic”, “ritualistic”, “visceral”, and the like, that is applied to described most definitely does come from this planet, underneath our feet for sure, as many intuit, but also from within our selves. Which made its pairing with the Orpheus myth kind of inevitable. For all the racket that the brass, wind, percussion and electronica, entirely stringless, (well bar plucked like electric guitars and mandolin), that make up the score conjure up, this still very, well, human. The brass and wind is the flow, the percussion the accent.

Right poncey pseud-ery over. I could read the excellent ENO programme over and over, plough through the learned reviews, do the rounds on Wiki, but frankly it would get me no closer to the truth of what I heard and saw. Just impossible to take it all in. You know the story. O&E get it on, marry, snakebite, death, offer to O to go underground …. but don’t whatever you do Mr music man look ba….. oh shit, you did. Various endings depending on who you believe. All four are given a work-out here. In various other permutations and combinations of the whole story . 126 different elements in total. A prologue and epilogue. Act I – 3 scenes, 2 Passing Clouds and an Allegorical Flower. Act II – 17 Arches and the Second Flower. Act III – 8 Episodes and the Final Cloud.

Unstructured time. Flash-backs, flash-forwards, flash-arounds, flash-simultaneity. Contradiction and ambiguity. The antithesis of linear story-telling. With the aforementioned O&E, and the not so blessed cheesemaker randy Aristaeus, done three ways. So if the words don’t grab you, (and they very rarely will though the repetitions and exclamations will start to bite), you can turn to the songs, or the mime, or the dance, or the bath/barbecue/dentist chair/chrysalis/sexy time/funeral parlour/bobbly skin fellas/bee video effects (you can probably work out that I may not quite have fully grasped the messages), or the aerial silks, or the OTT costumes complete with, I forget, billions of Swarovski crystals.

And the cast and creatives really work hard. Matthew Smith and Alfa Marks as the very fit, in both senses, Hero O&E dancers. Tenor Daniel Norman and mezzo Clare Barnett-Jones as the Myth Orpheus/Hades and Myth Eurydice/Persephone respectively, who had the mother of all costume changes and the sweet mezzo tone of Marta Fontanals-Simmons as Woman Eurydice. James Cleverton, Simon Bailey and Leo Hedman as respectively The Man, The Myth/Charon and The Hero Aristaeus. And Claron McFadden as the Oracle, and Hecate, who marshals the crew who make up the three way judges, priests, women and furies.

But for balls out, (well not quite), on stage all night, haring round the stage, holding everything together whilst appearing, as the part demanded, pissed, the star of the show is Peter Hoare. I don’t know if he gets paid anymore for this role compared to his more normal C20 repertoire, but he should. Mind you I see he started off as a percussionist before taking up singing. Which I guess, deep down, makes him connected to the music in a way that maybe others aren’t. Even when said percussion, which Sir Harry explores in every conceivable combination, is drowning him out despite amplification. (Oh and do remember by the time we get to Act III some of the text isn’t even in English anyway).

When all else fails though, as it often did, I just closed by eyes and drowned in the sound. Three is the magic number. Orpheus remember makes sweet music. But when the going gets tough, arch after arch, the music gets bigger and louder with a literally earth shattering 40 minute climax at the end of Act II. The sampled harp chords which create the electronic interludes composed by Barry Anderson at IRCAM. The synthesised voice of Apollo. The scraps of, I hesitate to say, melody that are repeated again and again. Orpheus’s memories. Restless rhythms. The pulses, the marches, the clunks, the shimmers, the drones. The massive, monumental structures. The raw immediacy. Never heard anything like it and when surrendered to whatever it is, ignoring all the guff on or above the stage, I swear I have never felt anything like it.

I gather the original production, on this very stage in 1986, and only now revived, went for a more mythic, indeterminate Greek vibe, with singer, mime and puppet per the score and with masks. I think I might have got on better with this but frankly I can’t blame the much maligned and now departing Daniel Kramer for chucking the camp, surreal kitchen sink at this. If, budget-wise, you’ve got it, then you might as well flaunt it. Maybe it was all clear in his head but I doubt it. David Pountney, the director of the original, had the good grace to say he had no idea what it was all about.

Once in a lifetime experience. In which case I wouldn’t mind another life. Or many lives. For that is what it would take to wrap your ears around it. In the absence of that the memory will suffice and maybe I should relent and try the benchmark (only) recording from the BBCSO under Martyn Brabbins and Andrew Davies. In fact YOLO and its Christmas so I will.

Rutherford and Son at the National Theatre review ****

Rutherford and Son

National Theatre Lyttleton, 16th May 2019

It is not difficult to see what Githa Sowerby’s photo feminist play from 1912, and brought back to life at the Royal Court by feminist theatre company Mrs Worthington’s Daughters in 1980, now has such a secure place in the repertory. Its characters and its dialogue simply have so much to say about what it was to be a woman, and indeed man, in the stifling atmosphere of Northern England at the turn of the C19. I don’t what to go all Marxist on you but the way the play examines the relationship between capital and labour, the cultural superstructure that is built atop it and patriarchal repression still looks astonishing even when compared to contemporary plays which mine the same territory.

It offers rounded characters despite, or maybe because of, the economy of dialogue and even has an absorbing plot centred on the “invention” of John Jr. However it does go on a bit, especially in the first hour set-up, and the action, contained within one room of the Rutherford house, can get, intentionally, claustrophobic. (Yet more nods to the master Ibsen).

Director Polly Findlay wisely offers us a little relief by taking a couple of intervals (prefacing each act, including the opening, with Northern folk songs from Kerry Andrew and Sarah Dacey) and jogging the pace along where possible. (I’ve just noticed the run time is down to 2 1/2 hours with interval so sounds like a bit of judicious streamlining has been administered). Lizzie Clachlan’s set however has no truck with abstraction: a perfectly realised slice of Victorian melancholia, emphasised by Charles Balfour’s gloomy lighting and (Ibsen-ian) rain. The setting is 1912 Tyneside. In real life Gita Sowerby’s father, like Rutherford, ran the family glass-making business in Gateshead, at a time when this small stretch of the Tyne dominated the global glass industry, before the family left for London in 1896 after the business went t*ts up. We are therefore treated to some full on Geordie accents, (courtesy of the voice and dialect work of Simon Money and Daniele Lydon), which, feel free to call me a patronising Southern twat, just occasionally got lost in translation from my perch at the back of the stalls.

Against this atmospheric backdrop the A list cast get properly stuck in to Githa Sowerby’s text. Now I don’t need to tell you how good an actor Roger Allam is. You are reading this so must have some interest in the theatre and the dramatic arts. Therefore you will know him from his innumerable stage roles, (a recent favourite was John Christie in The Moderate Soprano), his films, or off the telly, (the laconic Peter Mannion in The Thick Of It whose spirit he memorably exploited with a couple of the best one-liners in the whole of GoT as Illyrio Mopatis right at the beginning).

Anyway here he is magnificent. Daddy Rutherford is a cantankerous, despotic bully who is prepared to sacrifice all of life’s pleasures and his family, John Jr (Sam Troughton), Richard (Harry Hepple) and Janet (Justine Mitchell), on the altar of his business and, by implication, his legacy. Or is he? Whilst I am not defending the old sh*t I do think that showing some sign of deeply buried humanity and empathy, as Mr Allam did, yields dividends. Even Rutherford presumably loved his wife and kids once and, as his final promise to Mary (Anjana Vasan) shows, there is some feeling even in this ostensibly commercial transaction. Having to hand over control of the company he built to the bank and a Board has only served to make him work harder, grow tighter and turn his autocracy on those nearest to him. But he is doomed to lose the control he has over his family, mirroring the loss of control of his company. An alienated capitalist disfigured by profit in a society that will move away from him. Very clever.

And, dare I say, these three kids, whilst all having their reasons, are bloody annoying in their own way. Just to be clear I am not imposing some sort of privileged male revisionism on the play. Just that, by exposing the subtlety of the text, Polly Findlay got me to thinking about the play in a way that I had not after seeing Northern Broadsides version with the inimitable Barrie Rutter in the lead in 2013. Love has been squeezed out of the house, as Janet memorably observes, no doubt about that, but the idea that it might have been different once just made me admire the play even more. Githa Sowerby, even when her masterpiece first appeared, to great acclaim, was patronised, as all women were at that time, so the last thing her memory needs is some fat bloke, whose only qualification is that he has seen a few plays recently, upticking, but I was genuinely gobsmacked by just how much depth there is in these characters even beyond what I had remembered from a couple of previous viewings. Everyone thinks they can make everyone else happier in the play. Everyone spectacularly fails to do so.

Sam Troughton is also one of my favourite stage actors, most recently as everybloke Danny opposite Justine Mitchell’s Laura in David Eldridge’s whip-smart Beginning or, seizing the opportunity in what was otherwise a slightly pedestrian affair, as the various, flawed, men-children in Nina Raine’s Stories. His John Jr is desperate from the off. Desperate for Daddy’s approval even as he hates the f*cker, wasting his education, running off to that London, marrying Mary who is “beneath” him, running back to the family home, seeking to extract his birthright through his “invention”, venting his frustration on his own family. The Ibsen-ian sins of the father are listed on the weak, vacillating, quasi-hysterical, son. It was heart-breaking, (well maybe I exaggerate a bit, it’s just a play), to watch his continued self-deception even as Mary was shuffling him out the door as he set off once again to fail to seek fame and fortune.

Justine Mitchell is another brilliant actor who invariably stands out in whatever she appears in. See Beginning above but also, for me, in Anne Washburn’s opus Shipwreck, in Vivienne Franzmann’s Bodies, in the Donmar’s Arturo Ui and in the NT’s Plough and the Stars.. Hell she can even make sense of Restoration comedy. There are multiple layers of bitter, ironic resentment in her Janet because of the way she has been treated by her father and the Victorian/Edwardian patriarchy but this is still a powerful, sensual woman as we see in the scenes with Joe Armstrong’s blunt Martin, whose loyalty to Rutherford, (which itself maybe be the false consciousness of the oppressed), is put to the test. The release when Janet “confesses” to the affair, and Rutherford boots her out, following hot on the heels of Mrs Henderson’s (Sally Rodgers) p*ssed up tirade against Rutherford for the way he treated her son, is immense.

Harry Hepple as the younger son Dick, a curate, a profession old Rutherford regards with sneering disdain, who determines to escape to another parish in Southport, has less to play with but also makes the most of it. Anjana Vasan, so, so good in An Adventure at the Bush, and with smaller roles in Rebecca’s Frecknall’s lauded production of Summer and Smoke and the Young Vic Life of Galileo, represents the future as Mary, exercising her agency and opinion from the start in marked contrast to Barbara Marten’s aunt Ann, who is almost parodic as a woman whose behaviour and thinking is entirely dictated by the archaic values of the “society” around her.

Marvellous play, perfectly realised by a director who trusts the author, with a cast, to borrow the literary cliche, at the peak of its powers. OK, so much like its characters, it can’t quite escape its Edwardian roots, three acts, unity of time, place and action, painstaking exposition, which requires commitment from you the audience but once drawn in there is enough in the climaxes in the story, and especially, the detail of the context, to keep the committed theatre nut as happy as a sandboy. (A phrase from the C18 I gather which refers to the lashed up lads who were paid in drink to deliver and spread sand on the floor of pubs to soak up the various forms of sh*t. A much vivid indictment of the evils of unregulated capitalism is tricky to imagine).

So if this sounds like your sort of thing then you shouldn’t hesitate, there’s plenty of tickets left. If it doesn’t probably best not to be brave here. The Tourist though, having missed the Orange Tree revival of Githa Sowerby’s other major play, The Stepmother, is now firmly on the look-out for a chance to rectify.

The Son at the Kiln Theatre review ****

The Son

Kiln Theatre, 20th March 2019

After this, The Father, the Mother and The Height of the Storm, there is still a part of me that gets antsy at the work of Gallic wunderkind, Florian Zeller, and his English translator Christopher Hampton. There is something just too clever, too slick, too contrived about his plays. Just enough experimentation to justify the theatrical form, just enough plot jumps to keep those more accustomed to naturalistic TV drama on their toes. They are technically brilliant but for me he is just a teensy teensy bit guilt of manipulating audience emotions.

Having said that, in the superb space that is the Kiln, the right ratio of stage to audience, this is an utterly enthralling, unbroken 100 minutes of theatre. The Tourist may cavil at the concept behind these plays but, once again, the reality is undeniably affecting. We are back in a minimalist, pastel painted French apartment, grand piano at the rear, on the UK stage where the other two plays in the trilogy started, this time designed by Lizzie Clachlan. This is the home of lawyer Pierre (John Light), his new partner Sofia (Amaka Okafor) and their new baby. And troubled son Nicolas (Laurie Kynaston) after he goes to live with Dad following a spell with Mum, Anne, (Amanda Abbington) after their divorce. We know adolescent Nicolas is troubled because he has skipped his new school for 3 months, writes on the wall, self-harms, bites his nails and shrugs his shoulders under Dad’s interrogation. But just to be sure we know he is disintegrating mentally he upends the flat and a whole bunch of stuff spills out a plastic bag attached to the ceiling to litter the parquet floor of the apartment. Subtle metaphor huh?

Pierre, Anne and Sofia try to help Nicolas, pleading, cajoling, arguing, listening, but eventually have to seek help in the form of a psychiatrist Doctor (Martin Turner) assisted by Nurse (Oseloka Obi, who I say deliver a fine Gaveston in Lazarus Theatre’s Edward II, though he doesn’t say much here). This doesn’t help. The ending is, in many ways, as unsurprising in its attempt to surprise as the development. Yet the dialogue, the dilemmas with which the characters are presented, the ratcheting up of Nicolas’s condition and the inability of his parents to prevent his decline is what makes the play take hold and not let go. Florian Zeller doesn’t feel the need to offer a clear explanation of why Nicolas is in such pain, surely more than the break-up of his parents: he simply analyses the consequences. I don’t know how realistic these behaviours or events might actually be, it feels a little too pat, but there is no doubting the way it connected to the audience, whether they were grandparent, parent, twenty-something or teen.

Michael Longhurst’s direction is perfectly paced, with scenes melting into each other, supported by Isobel Waller-Bridge’s delicate under-scoring and Lee Curran’s considered lighting. This allows John Light to show Pierre’s journey from brisk, business like problem solving to utter helplessness at his son’s condition, Amanda Abbington, with minimal dialogue, to communicate a mother’s incomprehension and guilt at not being able to rescue her son, and Amaka Okafor to reveal Sofia’s ambivalence, wanting to be the sympathetic outsider but caring more about her own happiness with Pierre and the needs of her new child. Martin Turner is perfectly cast as the stern, cruel to be kind, professional. However the evening, (well in this case afternoon), really belongs to Laurie Kynaston. Nicolas, on the page, only just stays the right side of over-written. It would be pretty easy, given the torment that Mr Kynaston has to project, to go too far. He does not. Bored, petulant, despairing, endearing, frightened, threatening, begging, desolate and more. We’ll being seeing a lot more of young Laurie.

So another hit to follow the slippery study of dementia in The Father, the pain of bereavement in old age in The Height of the Storm, and the dissolution of The Mother whose children have left the nest. In the right hands, Mr Zeller’s mix of contextless, multiple perspective, “unravelling of the mind” pyschodrama, with Christopher Hampton’s lucid translation, can be utterly absorbing even if the artificiality grates. In the wrong hands, thankfully not here and not in the other plays given the acting prowess of the likes of Kenneth Cranham, Gina McKee, Jonathan Price and Eileen Atkins, I can see it going very wrong. As, judging by the reviews in has in the transfer of The Mother to the Broadway stage with the doyenne of hauteur Isabell Huppert.

Cyprus Avenue at the Royal Court Theatre review ****

Cyprus Avenue

Royal Court Theatre, 4th March 2019

From one black comedy which imagines taboo breaking violence to make a political point (here big as well as small “p”) to another. Having seen the Ladykiller from The Thelmas at the Vault Festival it was off next evening with the SO, MS and MSC to see David Ireland’s much lauded play about sectarianism on its return to the Royal Court after a run in NYC.

Now I had originally signed up to see Cyprus Avenue on its first outing at the RC in 2016 but had to can it due to a diary clash. Didn’t know anything about David Ireland at that time so was a weensy bit peeved when the uniformly excellent reviews came through, especially after seeing The End of Hope, one of Mr Ireland’s earlier plays, which is one of the sharpest and funniest hours of theatre I have seen on stage in the last few years. So to say I was looking forward to this was an understatement. In fact maybe my expectations were a little too high. Don’t get me wrong. Cyprus Avenue delivers on so many levels. Not least the opportunity to see Stephen Rea on stage. Role for role Mr Rea might just be the most principled actor on Irish, British (or any other) stage and screen. He just doesn’t seem to take dodgy parts for money. To say the role of Eric in Cyprus Avenue could have been written for him is the understatement of understatements. But this is not quite the perfect play.

Actually maybe the understatement of understatements is to say that Eric is not a nice man. The play begins with him shuffling on stage into a nondescript room where he is interviewed by a black woman psychiatrist, (the excellent Ronke Adekoluejo, who, like the rest of the cast, has played the role in Dublin and NYC). Eric’s shockingly direct sexism and racism is quickly revealed. But this is not the half of it as it we flashback to Eric’s blunt treatment of wife Bernie (Andrea Irvine) and daughter Julie (Amy Molloy). And his realisation that his baby granddaughter Mary-May is, in fact, Gerry Adams, Republican, and the leader of Sinn Fein, (until last year). Not just a resemblance. He thinks his daughter really is Gerry Adams, complete with beard and glasses. For Eric, a diehard Unionist, this is anathema. His relationship with wife and daughter disintegrates and he even recruits a hardman, albeit comically incompetent, UVF paramilitary to “resolve” his dilemma. The end is shocking as Eric is forced to assert his bigoted identity, in the face of multiple threats, in the most violent way imaginable.

This is then a black comedy through which David Ireland skewers the lunacy of sectarian politics in Northern Ireland and, by implication, elsewhere. Eric’s religious and political values are so deeply ingrained that hate of Catholics and Republicans, the “Fenians” in his words, is his only currency. His warped logic is mined for laughs but the point is deadly serious. What makes the performance of the crumpled Stephen Rea so remarkable is that, through it all, he still makes Eric recognisably human. Not sympathetic of course. Just very real, his views to him are entirely logical and reasonable. You feel that if he were ever to abandon the certainties of religion and politics his entire psych would collapse in front of us. With a preposterous bunch of “British” religious and political zealots in the form pf the Democratic Unionist Party currently trying to hold our executive, and therefore legislature, and country, to ransom, the play could hardly be more relevant.

This is David Ireland’s metier. using uncomfortable comedy, and shocking violence, to interrogate, and maybe upend, our understanding, expectations and preconceptions of key political questions: sectarianism, identity, race, sexuality and culture. In his first play, What The Animals Say, this is filtered through acting and football, in Everything Between Us the setting is a Northern Ireland Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in the End of Hope, sex and celebrity through a surreal one-night stand, (as is the similar Most Favoured), in Half a Glass of Water, male rape and abuse, (Stephen Rea playing the abuser on its original outing), loyalist paramilitaries again in Yes, So I Said Yes, an age gap relationship in Can’t Forget About You, sectarianism once again in Trouble and Shame, and abuse, religion and homophobia in Summertime.

The sharp eyed amongst you will have noticed a pattern here with the same ideas, situations, issues and characters recurring through his plays. There is I suppose a risk of repetition and self-parody in all this “offensiveness”; indeed I gather that his poorly reviewed play, I Promise You Sex and Violence, was guilty of exactly that, though the title suggests Mr Ireland is alive to the possibility. Senseless violence and the urge to provoke can induce a reaction from the easily shocked or the tiresomely worldly but also even from those, like the Tourist, more open to this sort of caper. There were indeed one or two moments in Cyprus Avenue where I did think the point had been made and it was time to move on. MS was of a similar mind, whilst the SO rightly observed a few drops in pace, and MSC was a little nonplussed by all the savagery really .

Yet for all this duplication the provocation works, the dark, ironic parody is often very funny and the dialogue, in passages, sparks. Ulster American, his latest play, is returning to the Traverse in Edinburgh after selling out last year and, once again, dividing critics with its content. I suspect, one way or another, I will end up seeing it. Mr Ireland treads a line, no doubt, with the subjects he explores and with the way he explores them, but I would contend that is, amongst many other things, the purpose of drama. Trying to work out if people are laughing for the right or wrong reasons isn’t really going to work. As ever, in all art, it is the intention of the creator that is paramount.

Cyprus Avenue just could have done with being a little tighter, less overwritten, offering a little more surprise. On the other hand, for example in the scene where Eric and Slim, (the superb Chris Corrigan), meet, the lines are just so darned good, even when they say essentially the same thing, that I can see why Mr Ireland keeps serving them up. The way their mutual indignation at the backsliding of others in their community is captured, in that odd, overly eloquent tone of florid aggression, is delicious. For me, Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, remains the definitive piss-take of sectarianism and is, line for line, funnier but it is not difficult to see why CA has proved a sell-out.

I assume Vicky Featherstone didn’t have to make too much in the way of adjustments to her sure-footed direction in moving the play from Upstairs too Downstairs at the RC and that Lizzie Clachlan’s spartan set was similarly re-used. The text calls for a muzak version of Van Morrison’s song from which the play’s title is drawn, the post part of East Belfast, but I don’t remember this. Perhaps because that might just be the most horrifying thing of all. Just joking. Anyone I have just put Astral Weeks, the album from which it is drawn on. Still as perfect as when it first came out in 1968. Doesn’t matter how grumpy he gets he is still The Man.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at the Donmar Warehouse review ****

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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Donmar Warehouse, 19th July 2018

The SO obviously is a big fan of Muriel Spark’s novel. We are both big fans of Ronald Neame’s film version, (only the other day I revisited this director’s magnificently cheesy The Poseidon Adventure), though let’s face it that is largely because Maggie Smith delivers a technicolour Maggie Smith performance. No less than David Harrower, (Knives in Hens, Dark Earth, Blackbird and some classic adaptions), was turning book into text here and Polly Findlay was directing. We have actors of the talent of Angus Wright, Sylvestra Le Touzel and Edward MacLiam and I was particularly keen to see Rona Morison again, who was so good in Orca at the Southwark Playhouse in 2016).

But, more than all of this, the big draw was Lia Williams in the title role. I believe Ms Williams is one of our finest stage actors, most recently seen in the Almeida’s Mary Stuart and Oresteia, (alongside Angus Wright as it happens), and, earlier in her career, Oleanna and Skylight. She is also a mean Pinterite, (if that is the word), and I am looking forward to her directing the opening salvo of plays in the upcoming Pinter season alongside Jamie Lloyd.

Now I had not remembered, from the film, just how ambiguously complex a character Ms Brodie is. An inspiration to the girls, (with Grace Saif, Emma Hindle, Nicola Coughlan, she who brilliantly told a twat of a critic where to get off in his insulting review, and Helena Wilson, all superb alongside Rona Morison’s Sandy), who genuinely wants to help then break free of stifling convention, but also manipulative, desperate, unfulfilled with a nasty undercurrent of fascist sympathy. David Harrower’s adaptation makes all this plain, without any need for histrionics, artfully augmented by Polly Findlay’s methodical direction and Lizzie Clachlan’s pared back design. His subtle inclusion of sub-plots involving Nicola Coughlan’s Joyce Emily, who is spurned by Sandy (and belittled by Miss JB) and goes to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and the framing device of Sandy’s book, worked for me.

Angus Wright as the long suffering, and increasingly frustrated music teacher Mr Lowther, and Edward MacLiam as the more volcanic, and damaged art teacher Teddy Lloyd, were admirable foils to Lia William’s Brodie as they vied for her complex affections. Miss Brodie affects to the aesthetic but real human connection seems to scare her. She provokes rebellion but is actually intellectually conservative. Maybe the guilt of Sandy, as the pupil who betrays Miss Brodie and enters a convent as penitence, (which we see in flash forwards through interviews with Kit Young’s journalist), was a little too forward in Mr Harrower’s adaptation, you know she is Miss Brodie’s nemesis from the off, but it does draw out the darkness in Miss JB’s psyche.

Lia Williams is up against some pretty stiff competition when it comes to theatrical Brodies even if we put Dame Maggie to one side. Vanessa Redgrave, Fiona Shaw and Patricia Hodge, as well as Geraldine McEwan on the telly, have all had a stab. I can’t comment on any of these performances but I can’t imagine they were any better at capturing Miss JB’s dichotomies than this.

With a bit of luck this will end up a run out in the West End. If so I heartily recommend you see it.

 

Gloria at the Hampstead Theatre review ****

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Gloria

Hampstead Theatre, 4th July 2017

Right. This might actually be a review of, albeit dubious, utility. There are 3 weeks or so left on the run and there are  a fair few tickets left. And this is a fine piece of theatre with an interesting premise, formal innovation, enough material to cogitate on but not so taxing as to ruin your night out, and all in the convivial and convenient location that is the Hampstead Theatre.

The proper reviews give you a realistic flavour, though I think they maybe oversell the “frustrated millenials in workplace” drama that characterises the first half, and undersell the sharpness of the satire on “ownership of stories in today’s world of commoditised fake empathy” that drives the second half.

On the face of it this is a very different play from flavour of the month Branden Jacobs-Jenkins last London outing, An Octoroon at the Orange Tree (review here An Octoroon at the Orange Tree Theatre review ****). That play was a dissertation on the notion of identity in the theatre using the guts of C19 playwright’s Dion Boucicault’s “slavery” melodrama, The Octoroon. Very clever, very entertaining. Gloria is also clever and entertaining but in a more subtle way (one coup de theatre aside). Moreover it also riffs on the ownership of narratives which for me is something theatre is uniquely able to address.

The first half is set in an NYC magazine publishing house where three put-upon late 20s assistants bemoan their lot with a mixture of anger, humour and resignation. Kae Alexander plays Kendra, an entitled Asian-American princess who is long on railing against the iniquity of the thwarted career opportunities for her generation, but short on any work ethic that might help to change this. Ellie Kendrick (last seem by me out-Oscaring all those Hollywood chumps in the brilliant film The Levelling, which cost about the same as one Oscar night table of goodie bags to make) plays Ani, whose outward show of sweetness and light likely masks a more ruthless streak. Colin Morgan (you know Merlin in a former life) plays Dean, just turned 30 and still lapdog to unseen editor Nan. They are joined by the seemingly ineffectual intern Miles (Bayo Gbadamosi), and visited by the eponymous frustrated office lifer Gloria (Sian Clifford) and stressed fact checker Lorin.

The detail of the frustrations that each of these characters face is well observed (BJJ spent a few years at Vanity Fair) and pretty funny. This first half does get close to outstaying its welcome but BJJ has a cunning and surprising trick up his sleeve to bridge us into the second half. I will leave the description there: suffice to say that the second half explores its chosen themes with the same economy and insight as the first. I see some of the criterati don’t recognise the office workplace on show here: I think that says more about them than it will about you (assuming you are not some ancient has-been like me and the other educated pensioner types who are always getting in the way of the more worthy younger punters in the quality London theatres).

In contrast to An Octoroon this play is not chock full of meta devices and playful alienating effects. It is, broadly, a naturalistic structure but the use of doubling for “new” characters in the second half, whilst hardly revolutionary, works well, at least for me. I can’t wait to see more of BJJ’s plays over here. and, given the reception afforded to this and An Octoroon, these should not be too long in coming. And best of all when asked in the programme interview who his favourite playwright is, he answered Caryl Churchill. What an astute young(ish) man.

I am dubious about filling a cast up with young names off the telly even if it does offer the prospect of better economics for producers/artistic directors. Here however it worked a treat. The entire cast was faultless but our three millenials shone. Michael Longhurst is blessed with the ability to perfectly pace any play he directs and Lizzie Clachan turned in another set which which offered an elegant solution to functional necessity. It is possible to make a vernacular theatrical settings elegant, but I bet it’s not easy.

So if I were you I would give this a whirl. Worst case you get to here a bit of JS Bach (a slightly different take on Gloria).

 

 

 

Life of Galileo at the Young Vic review ****

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Life of Galileo

Young Vic, 21st June 2017

My Brechtian education continues apace. Who would have thought that until a couple of years ago I hadn’t see any Brecht plays at all and frankly wasn’t that interested having been put off by the great man’s reputation. What a klutz I was. Turns out that our Bertolt is just the man for me.

Director Joe Wright (the go to man now for cinematic literary adaptions – and responsible for the best of Season 3’s Black Mirror) makes a number of incisive observations in the programme. Notably he was struck by just how emotionally rich this play is. So was I. You expect Brecht to load you up with ideas and get the grey matter putting a shift in, but you don’t expect to empathise with the characters. Brechtian epic drama requires a distancing between action and audience. That is still achieved, but here however I was also properly drawn in to Galileo’s struggles.

This in part reflects the committed performance of Brendan Cowell. Even before the play “opens” he is pumping up the audience along with the pounding beats of Tom Rowlands’ score (he of Chemical Brothers fame). Through the popularisation of the telescope in C17 Padua and Venice, the observation of planetary motion that supported Copernicus’s theories, the protection accorded to him in Florence, the promulgation of his ideas in vernacular Italian, his years of silence, the summoning to Rome, the torture by the Inquisition, the recantation of his theories, and the final secret dissemination of his ideas, Mr Cowell is a constant and imposing presence. He is just so physically full of belief.

This is ultimately a play about ideas, and specifically pits the rationalism of Science against the dogmatism of the Church. But this production also delivers an emotional wallop and explores Galileo’s (not historically accurate) relationship with his daughter (played by Anjana Vasan, whose advantageous marriage is sacrificed to her father’s certainties) and his pupil Andrea (played by Billy Howle, whose worship turns to disillusionment and finally to advocacy).

This being Brecht though there was still plenty of Verfremdungseffekt to keep you on your toes. A song and dance routine, some excellent puppetry from Sarah Wright to accompany each scene’s introduction, some interesting costume choices, plenty of doubling or more of roles, a “disappearing” scene, aggressive lighting and sound. Best of all though was Lizzie Clachan’s set, in the round, with a circular runway enclosing brave audience members, topped by a dome on to which the techies at 59 Productions (last seen by me working their magic in City of Glass at Lyric Hammersmith) projected cracking images of the cosmos. Our very own planetarium with punters acting as planetary bodies. This is not the first time that I have seen a set designed by Ms Clachan that has prized function as much as form.

Once again I doff my cap to the translator here, John Willett, for providing such a clear and involving rendition of the text. In particular the big speeches are perfectly rendered especially the best of the bunch in the penultimate scene. This is where, I understand, in 1947, Brecht revised the play, goes beyond technological determinism and questions the objectivity of scientific rationalism and the dangers of the Enlightenment project. This chimes with the Marxist Critical theorists in the US at the same time as Brecht (before he went back to East Germany) whose ideas had been shaped by the horrors of WWII. Most of this whizzes over my head but it is still powerful stuff. Remember people a bit of Marxist dialectics isn’t going to turn you into a raving Commie despite what some would have you believe. The nature of Truth in human discourse plainly never goes away.

Sorry veering off again. I just like this combination of drama, theatre craft and ideas. This production is nearly over but I crave the next fix of Brecht. In particular, whilst I loved this “big” production of Life of Galileo, I do hope one day to see a more stripped back version by way of contrast.