Tag: Paul Miller

Macbeth at the Chichester Festival Theatre review ***

Macbeth

Chichester Festival Theatre, 16th October 2019

Still waiting for that, ha ha, killer production of Macbeth. This unfortunately wasn’t it. Paul Miller, the inestimable AD of the punching-above-its-weight Orange Tree, had money to spend here. An 18 strong cast (with many actors in minor roles that had caught my eye before), so minimal doubling, led by John Simm and Dervla Kirwan as milord and lady, a beautifully designed set from Simon Daw, with lighting (Mark Doubleday), sound (Max Pappenheim) and video (Tim Reid) to match all set with the excellent sight-lines afforded by the Festival Theatre. And a full house boosted by enthusiastic GCSE’ers.

It certainly looked and sounded impressive. A circular glass floor which split open during the murders covering a pit of bodies. Some well tailored costumes in the non-specific militaristic style which defines modern Macbeths. A banqueting table straight out of Heals which would enhance the poshest Xmas lunch. Every lighting trick in the book including overhead “crown”. Atmospheric video signalling ghosts, heaths, blood, clouds, Dunsinane, Birnam Wood. Weird Sisters (Roseanna Frascona, Lauren Grace, Leah Gayer) sporting Strawberry Switchblade chic who keep popping up, again in the modern Macbeth fashion to frame the action. A proper Porter (Harry Peacock). An explicit nod to the Macbeth’s grief at the loss of their child. Dissonant strings and menacing percussion.,

But for all that it was, well, bloodless. Which for Macbeth is not a good look. John Simm especially, and Dervla Kirwan, delivered the verse faultlessly, (even up to my perch at the back which afforded a perfect view of the visual feast). Yet they both lacked a bit of passion, at least until things got going in Act V post the Macduff genocide. They were well supported by Beatriz Romilly as the gender-switching Malcolm, Stuart Laing as Banquo and Michael Balogun as Macduff. Mr Miller’s deliberate pacing, this ran for 3 hours, brought clarity to each individual scene and petty much nothing was left out. However Macbeth is a story that needs momentum. A hurtling towards the inevitable conclusion. We know the story so crack on. Then the repetition and call backs in the text have greater impact and the madness more harrowing.

I couldn’t help thinking that, with these two outstanding actors, half the cast and just the Orange Tree space to play with, Paul Miller might have actually come up with something more visceral if he had stayed at home. Being right up close as the blood flows and the minds unravel. No need for all this overthinking. Mind you I guess directors, like us all, have to follow the money.

Exquisite Sound. Designer Fury. Signifying … well not nothing but not as much as it should have done. Still there’s always tomorrow. And Tomorrow. And Tomorrow. Because the one thing you know is that Macbeth will be coming to a theatre near you soon.

Losing Venice at the Orange Tree Theatre review ***

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Losing Venice

Orange Tree Theatre, 24th September 2018

A modicum of research was all that was required to realise that this was going to be a curious, but also intriguing, entertainment. Which is near enough exactly what it was. Jo Clifford’s play was a hit at the Edinburgh fringe when it first appeared in 1985. With its story of a great Empire now in decline, and its scrutiny of strict gender roles in society, it is easy to see why the OT’s Paul Miller was drawn to revive it. The play certainly chimes with key contemporary debates on Brexit and toxic masculinity, and Jo Clifford’s own personal journey makes it more absorbing, but it is, structurally at least, something of an acquired taste.

Tim Delap plays the Pedro Tellez Geron (1574-1624) the third Duke of Osuna, a military adventurer, who, after becoming Viceroy of Sicily, and then of Naples, for Golden Age Spain, plotted to conquer Venice. The plot was uncovered and Osuna subsequently fell from favour after Philip III’s death in 1621. Jo Clifford’s play teams the Duke up with Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, (played by Christopher Logan), a poet and secretary to Queen Ana in the Spanish Court of Felipe II. He put himself about a bit, generally ruffled feathers and was one of the prime exponents of a dramatic writing style at the time known as Conceptismo, characterised by rapid rhythm, directness, simple vocabulary, witty metaphors and word-play. It prized multiple meanings and conceptual intricacies, in stark contrast to the ornateness of rival style at the time of Culteranismo. Both were obsessed with honour, reputation and chastity building on the sort of flummery that had bedevilled the world of secular culture for centuries prior.

Now knowing this, and that Jo Clifford had previously translated some of the greats from Spanish Golden Age theatre such as Calderon de la Barca, and you can begin to understand the structure of Losing Venice. For this to is a story with multiple meanings which moves rapidly across space and time and appears quite stylised. Ms Clifford sought to take a current (in the 1980s) sensibility on politics and gender and fuse it with this ostensibly “true” history with a contemporary (for 1618) dramatic style. Designer Jess Curtis in this revival has highlighted this synthesis with her costumes which mix the Golden Age with a 1980s post-punk, New Romantic look.

The adventures of the strutting Duke and affected Quevodo draw in other parties, servants Pablo (Remus Brooks), Maria (Eleanor Fanyinka), the rejected and oddly coiffed Duchess (Florence Roberts, also a Priest), Secretary (Dan Wheeler who also provides some music), the grouchy King (David Verrey) and the prosaic “Mr and Mrs Doge” (David Verrey and Eleanor Fanyinka again). A key role is that of the Sister here played by Tia Bannon and not, unfortunately given the extra dimension this would have brought, the originally cast Josh-Susan Enright. Not that Ms Bannon didn’t try to fully commit, as did her colleagues, to the play. It is just that it is so striking in tone that I wasn’t entirely clear just how “inside” the characters Paul Miller wished them to be. The knowing, and sometimes farcical, tone, the sense that the performers, indeed the whole play, was “looking into” the events as a metaphor or lesson for something else, the decline of Empire and the desire of boys to always go fighting, didn’t completely take over, such that it could just be read as a rapid, and somewhat bitty, and increasingly odd, history play, (where I would guess most of the audience didn’t know the history).

Still once you adjusted to this idiosyncratic form there was stuff to savour and it didn’t drag on, even giving us an interval to ponder what was going on. The Duke doesn’t really do consequences, is locked in the past, sees everything as a contest and takes vanity to extremes. His fading libido is conjoined with that of his country. All in all a prize dickhead not unlike a few of our current crop of deluded politicians. Quevedo’s pen may be mightier than his sword but his fine words don’t necessarily resonate with his master and there are a whole heap of unbuttered parsnips here. The women and servants look on with various degrees of exasperation. Eleanor Mayinka stands out as the sympathetic Maria but maybe just because she is the most sincere character in the play.

So this might be a play whose novelty has played out, or it might be a play that was over-praised in the first place. Or maybe it is, as my Mum would have said, “too clever for its own good”. Or maybe it is a production where the normally very reliable Paul Miller couldn’t quite make up his mind. Or rather where he couldn’t quite pin down this slippery, and odd, fish. Or maybe, for once, the OT space was a hindrance not a help. I think it might be a little bit of all of these things but offsetting this is a spark of invention and bravado that I, for one, am always happy to see. Even if it didn’t quite come off, I can safely say I haven’t ever seen anything like it. And that it itself is no small praise. A counter to the excess of lazy literalism which pollutes the body politic is surely no bad thing.

Humble Boy at the Orange Tree Theatre review ***

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Humble Boy

Orange Tree Theatre, 11th April 2018

Sometimes it can be tricky to put your finger on exactly why a play doesn’t quite work for you. Other times it is easy. This was one of the latter. For me, writer Charlotte Jones lavishes so much attention on shoehorning in all her ideas, themes and research, and emphasising the foibles of character, that she forgets to create a worthwhile story. Not a problem if the play were formally inventive but the set-up here could hardly be more unremarkable.

Felix Humble is a chubby, geeky astro-physicist man-child prone to warbling on about the theory of everything, M theory, string theory, event horizons and the like. Not by way of explanation, more like the kind of pseud who writes a blog on culture without really knowing what he is talking about. Amateur entomologist Daddy has died and Felix comes home to Mummy, Flora, who has got rid of Daddy’s bees and lacks the maternal touch. There is a gardener, (guess who that is), lurking in the flowerbeds who is prone to profundity and knows all the Latin names. Mummy has taken up with a yokel made good, George Pye, who owns a coach company, likes a drink and is the antithesis of Daddy. Mummy has a friend Mercy, to bully, and provide extra comic relief. George has a daughter, Rosie, that Felix improbably impregnated before he took off to the dreaming spires. Felix, it turns out, is a Daddy too. Mummy and Felix acidly snipe, Felix and George spar, Rosie tells Felix to man up. Mercy bites back. There is an embarrassing Ayckbournish dinner party. Mummy and Felix, sort of reconcile. Dady’s ghost exits.

What with the bees, the epigrams, the Hamlet references, the “science-y” stuff, the pithy lines, the cod-psychology, it reeks of “cleverness”. And that is probably what did for me. The performances are fine, especially Jonathan Broadbent as Felix and Belinda Lang as Flora, though Paul Bradley as George, Rebekah Hinds as Rosie, and especially Christopher Ravenscroft as Jim, have a few uncomfortable lines to hurdle over. Best of all though was Selina Cadell’s Mercy mostly I think because her comedy and pathos was more rooted in sympathy than intellect. Simon Daw’s garden design uses every available millimetre of the OT stage, and Paul Miller’s direction, is, as always, on the money in terms of pacing.

i am just not sure this is as good a play as it, and others, think it is. Nothing wrong with taking Hamlet as your starting point, it is the greatest play ever written after all, but then I would have liked some surprises. Dramatic surprises, not guess the allusion. Mummy as queen bee, Flora having a bee named after her, Felix trying to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable, the name Humble. And many, many more.

It won awards when premiered at the NT in 2001 with Simon Russell Beale and Diana Rigg in the lead roles and I can see why the luvvies loved it. There are some funny lines, even if you can see them coming, and the dialogue moves apace, even when the clunky disclosures come into play. There is a convincing prosthetic surprise and a sharp sight gag. The two main characters though eventually become irritating and the play collapses inward, black hole like, into its conceited core.

Waspish yes. Stinging no.

Poison at the Orange Tree theatre review ****

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Poison

Orange Tree Theatre, 28th November 2017

Sometimes all you want from a play is for it to do exactly what it says on the packet. No sub-plots, symbolism, pointless characters, formal invention, stilted message. Just a powerful and involving story, well told. This is exactly what renowned Dutch playwright, Lot Vekemans, does in Poison. No wonder it has been translated and performed in multiple locations. Another terrific acquisition by Paul Miller and the Orange Tree team. Here it is translated by Rina Vergano who is the go-to for Dutch and Flemish texts.

Mind you this doesn’t make this a play that will have been easy to write, create or act in, and, in some ways, it isn’t easy to watch. Its subject, the loss of a child and the impact it has on a couple, is about as painful a subject as it is possible to imagine, for a “domestic” drama. Yet Ms Vekemans, takes us through all the ramifications of this dreadful event, with such a sure and sensitive hand that every line seems to ring true. A divorced couple meet in an unremarkable chapel building in a cemetery in France. (Blue carpet tiles, the designer’s catch-all for the banal, which Simon Daw wisely embraces here, along with those other staples, water-cooler and vending machine). We never get to know there names as, even after a separation of 9 years, they have no need to employ them. They were torn apart by the death of their son, Jakob, in a road accident, which eventually led to the journalist husband walking out on the millennial New Year’s Eve. They are here ostensibly to discuss what will happy to his body given that the land it lies in is contaminated. No one else turns up though (for reasons that become clear halfway through). They talk. There is pain, humour, tenderness, recrimination, jealousy, goading, misconception. In fact there is everything you might imagine a couple in this situation would put themselves through.

Paul Miller seems to have focussed on the “rediscoveries” in the last couple of years at the OT. Here he reminds us he can do contemporary plays standing on his head as well. Not literally. Like I say at the top there is no attempt to get directorially clever with the text here. There is no need. Movement, gesture, pauses, tensions, as well as words, everything worked.

This needed a couple of top drawer performances which, with Claire Price and Zubin Varla (who I have seen a bit of recently), is exactly what we got. Claire Price showed us a woman who could not move forward. Not because she was not trying nor because she was flawed in some dramatic sense. Just because she couldn’t accept what had happened. Which makes sense I think. She could be funny, she could be scathing, she could be analytical but always brittle and nervous underneath. Zubin Varla’s stilted ex husband had tried to moved on, (a new wife, a move to France from Holland), but was struggling with guilt for doing so. I swear I could hear him thinking at times. His intention to write a book about their bereavement is met with anger and incomprehension by her. The pain of their shared past infects this present but will continue into the future unless they can find some way to make it stop. There is some slight hope of redemption to this end at the end, but it is fragile.

Even beyond the bereavement itself though what is really, really striking about the play, in just 80 minutes, is the way it conjures up the whole skein of connections that a parted couple can recreate on meeting up, both comfortable and awkward, in movement, gestures and words. I was watching two real people, intimate strangers if you will, undergoing real experiences in pretty much real time. You’d think that would be easy to dramatise. It isn’t. This really was very, very good. It is one of those plays that gets better as you remember it.

The Lottery of Love at the Orange Tree review ***

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The Lottery of Love

The Orange Tree Theatre, 13th April 2017

Apparently there is even a noun for it, “Marivaudage”. Slightly sarcastically applied, but it describes a way of writing that is precious or affected, and is derived from our friend Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (I so wish my name was as replete with syllables), whose romcom Le Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard was on show here in a translation by John Fowles.

This was my first exposure to Marivaux and all up it was OK. The action has been transposed from C18 France to Regency England. Posh daughter Sylvia is engaged to Richard but has never met him. So she asks Dad if she can swap identities with her maid Louisa and Dad says yes, as you would. But our suitor Richard has the same idea and swaps identities with his man Brass. But Dad knows this having received a letter to that effect from a mate. And brother is also pulled in to the deception to spice it up. Cue confusion, some gentle satire on the behaviour of the toffs and the servants, some will she/he, won’t she/he, fall in love, the reveal and an all live happy ever after denouement.

So I guess not the most incisive or surprising of plots (it is after all rooted in the stock characters and plots of commedia dell’arte), though there is a bit of keeping up with who knows what. In fairness, it gets to the point mercifully quickly and director (Paul Miller), cast and especially translator, in the inestimable Mr Fowles, all apply a delicate touch. Kier Charles as Brass lays it on a bit thick as vulgar cockney playing milord but that does at least ratchet up the gag count. Claire Lams as Louisa (who was very good in Kiss Me at the Hampstead Theatre as she needed to be in a play with a slightly one dimensional premise) was a little subtler.

The standout for me though was Dorothea Myer-Bennett as Sylvia. She was the best thing by far in the Philanderer at the Orange Tree as well last year. Shaw can annoy me at the best of times and in contrast to most of the audience and the reviews I really didn’t like this. Otherwise I confess I have not seen her on stage but she was perfect in this, nimble of speech and movement and well beyond caricature. Surely only a matter of time before she is on the telly as an Austen lead (Emma Woodhouse the obvious choice). I assume, with a name like that, this was her parent’s plan from the off.

So overall a pleasant enough afternoon with the pensioners who make up the OT matinee audience though I might have wished for a little more exploration of the class conflicts at the heart of the plot, as well as the love stuff. Still a decent enough entry point in Marivaux. Now I need some more Moliere revivals.

As an aside for those who don’t know the Orange Tree, it is, in my view, the best “fringe” theatre in London, closely followed to be fair by the Southwark Playhouse, Park Theatre, Arcola and Finborough. Not everything turns to gold under Paul Miller’s stewardship, especially in some of the the OT revivals, but when it gets it right it is outstanding. Recent favourites have included Jess and Joe Forever (a stunningly inventive work by Zoe Cooper), The Rolling Stone (a powerful indictment of intolerance in Uganda by Chris Urch), The Brink (another dark new play by Brad Birch), Winter Solstice (a formally inventive comic dissection of the lure of fascism by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, Blue Heart (a superb revival of Caryl Churchill’s amazing diptych) and Sheppey (Somerset Maugham’s last humanist play). So if you’re not a local it really is worth the schlep out to Richmond.  Look out for the next season – unlike some (here’s looking at you Royal Court) the blurbs give you a pretty good idea of what is on offer.