Monthly Archives: May 2014

FRESHER THAN EVER,  AN ANCIENT LOVE UNDER THE SKY

Eve Best is an irresistible Cleopatra for today: no slinky seductive exoticism but a fresh, joyful, larky sensuality as well-expressed in warlike cloak and breeches as in a nightgown, royal robes or – at one stage – just a sheet as she searches for an Antony who has deserted her bed when – she snorts with irritation – “A Roman thought hath struck him”. A fierily physical performer, Best gives full rein to the Queen’s hysterical jealous rages (never has a messenger been so comprehensively beaten up by a woman) but defuses even her greatest griefs and rages with self-aware jokes right to the edge of death. Even when rudely silencing the rather beautifully melodious singing eunuch (Obioma Ugoala) she mocks her own mood. Touching, too, is the relationship with her handmaids Charmian and Iris: easy, affectionate, joshing. Charmian’s “Good madam, keep yourself within yourself!” evokes a habitual, unrebuked intimacy.

 
Indeed the whole of the Egyptian court, fanned with hanging carpets in the sparsely set, free-moving visual language of the Globe’s great stage, looks considerably more fun than the Roman senate. Here the rest of the triumvirate – an unhappy sober-suited coalition – discuss Pompey’s maritime threat and Mediterranean power politics. For in order for Shakespeare’s play to work well, we must believe that Antony is torn between his destiny as soldier and statesman and a mid-life love affair which made him willing to “give a kingdom for a mirth”. We have to see how a tough man’s man, whose campaigning stamina and hardships were legendary, could be caught by the “serpent of old Nile” and make disastrous military decisions. And how all the same his other nature could draw him back to embrace Roman duty and let Cleopatra down by marrying Caesar’s “holy, cold and still” sister.

 
Some Antonys fail at this, either playing too much the lover, or trying for the kind of preternatural , soaring, godlike nobility described in Cleopatra’s extraordinary late encomium in the Monument scene. Clive Wood does not fail: he creates a chunky, passionate, troubled man whose sweetness is always at war with a habit of ruthlessness. Against him is set Jolyon Coy’s Octavius Caesar: prim, puritanical, the parting of his schoolboy haircut straight, afflicted by no visible affections except for his sister. When Antony returns to Rome, his bright purple jacket contrasts nicely with Caesar’s sober-suited court.

 
So the emotional line of this broad tragedy – pretty well untrimmed at three hours – hangs finely on those three performances, and is studded with other treats. Phil Daniels’ Enobarbus – entrusted with some of the most famous poetic lines – will not be everyone’s favourite but I like the way he speaks them , without pretension, as if he had just made them up. The choreographed dancing exuberance of the Egyptians set against the stamping march of Rome underlines the difference even when both share the stage. When war breaks out in earnest a great tattered map of the Mediterranean countries falls from above and men with banners whirl aloft around one another on ropes.

The great golden-winged tragedy unfolds in the monument ,the asp strikes: silence and applause from thatch to groundlings confirm that necessary and ancient sense that we have been through something big, together.

 
box office 020 7401 9919 to 24 August

rating   four

REDEMPTION OF A HOLLYWOOD HUNK…
The tiny am-dram theatre is threatened with redevelopment: only celebrity casting can save it. Jefferson Steel – fading star of Ultimate Finality 1, 2, 3, and 4, each worse than the last – is hoodwinked by his LA agent into a UK stage debut, as King Lear. He thinks he is heading for the the RSC but finds the Suffolk mud of another Stratford. Director Dorothy Nettle welcomes the furious dupe, though a less warm reception comes from her deposed leading man, preening Nigel who reckons he’s the new Olivier. Cue an evening of raging, pathos, bathos, and fine old-fashioned farcical fun.

For theatre loves to mock itself: from The Critic to Noises Off , cluttered backstage sets, self-parodying tantrums and blissful overacting strike a happy chord in both actors and audiences. Comedy scriptwriters Ian Hislop and Nick Newman (with an idea from John Ross and Jonathan Gershfield) wrote a 2008 film with Burt Reynolds as the American and Derek Jacobi, no less, as Nigel. This, though, is its stage premiere, rewritten entirely: Hislop assures me “We were able to use more Shakespeare, and put back lots of good lines which Burt couldn’t manage”.
They have also, with oddly moving effect, used the Fool’s songs from Lear, set by Paul Herbert, to cover with rueful aptness the scene-changes. For these, in Tom Rogers’ faux home-made amdram set, the cast unfold chintzy perfect little room-sets of the local b & b in front of the central stage-within-a-stage. It supports the general sense of homely fun. Mitchell Mullen is choleric and satisfyingly bad-mannered as the Hollywood star: trapped by his own publicity, trailerless and outraged by having to walk the fifty yards from Mary’s b&b – “English breakfast? Bring me a guava juice, eggwhite frittata, and a skinny decaf latte with soya..” etc). Sarah Moyle is wonderful as the starstruck middle-aged Goneril, all girlish toothy grins and flattery, but constantly confusing him with Willis or Schwarzenegger. Another treat is Damian Myerscough as the local plumber torn between his self-appointed role as Steel’s “entourage” and his anxiety to incorporate a pickled onion in the blinding of Gloucester. Aactually, in a recent Lear in Bath, the eye was tossed into Goneril’s martini just like a cocktail onion, so he’s bang on-trend there.
There is nicely modulated tension between Nigel (Michael Hadley) with his orotundly ghastly Gielgud ac-ting, and Steel’s contemptuous Hollywoodism (“I wanna rewrite! And I don’t do crazy, cut the loonytunes on the heath”). The plot romps along briskly, with the arrival of Steel’s estranged teenage daughter and Lear-ish echoes in their relationship. There’s a standard rom-com misunderstanding and a crisis elegantly reflecting Shakespeare’s storm. Hislop and Newman are human enough to let in real emotions, not to mention sentimentalities about the redemptive power of theatre ( with which I of course concur). But they’re savvy enough to temper both with sharply funny bathos.

And just as you think aha! here comes a soft landing with “I am a very foolish fond old man”, there’s a final shock which tumbles, beautifully, into a priceless joke relating to ER. There’s a lot of love gone into this production, under Caroline Leslie’s skilled direction: whether the play will last I can’t quite predict. Except to say that if Kevin Spacey fancies a bit of self-mocking fun in his final summer next year at the Old Vic, I’d really love to see him as Jefferson Steel. Could happen.

01635 46044 to 28 June

rating four (it woz Shakespeare that won the fourth..)

WELL, SWIPE ME DOWN THE OLD KENT ROAD, ME OLD CHINA…

Would you Adam and Eve it: the Joan Littlewood centenary restores to her sacred stage not only Oh What A Lovely War but this celebration of bygone lowlife: tarts, spivs, pimps and gamblers. We’re in a club beneath the Soho pavement – William Dudley’s set is brilliant, you can almost smell the stale beer and sweat. Our characters are living in 1959 but mourning for the good old days when a man could make a dishonest living in peace and pay off the cops.

 
Now poor Fred (a suitably battered Mark Arden), has emerged from jail to find the Palais is a bowling-alley and there are “Teds in drainpipe trousers and poofs in coffee-houses” . He has lost half his club to the barman at poker and fings simply aren’t the same. Even the slumming posh-boy Horace and his spangled deb girlfriend are depressed about it – “There used to be Noel..now it’s the dole” and the bent cop (Gary Kemp) is going straight because he gets tired of never entering a room without someone running out of it it. Usually that is Christopher Ryan as Red Hot the diminutive burglar, who steals every scene he is in. Only the oldest profession soldiers on undaunted, under the pimp Tosher (a Teddy-quiffed Stefan Booth, nicely nasty). Fred’s girlfriend Lil – a lovely solid performance with a real vaudeville voice from Jessie Wallace – has given it up but admits “My old lady’s still on the game. So’s my Nan, some afternoons”. But all the girls doughtily maintain the old whoop-de-doop cartoon standards of frill, paint and corsetry now defunct in the London Road age of sad junkies in bomber-jackets and trainers.

 
Lionel Bart’s musical – from a book by ex-con Frank Norman – was a pet project of Littlewood, seeking working-class liveliness to kick at the old order: “Guys and Dolls, but with its flies undone”. Tweaked by Elliott Davis with extra Bart songs thrown in, it is a lot of fun, at times deliberately shocking. As when Rosie the modest runaway (Sarah Middleton, very sweet) comes fresh from a plaintive number about why sparrers can’t sing to join Tosher’s tarts; sent out to a known bruiser, she comes back covered in blood.

 
There are plenty of funny touches, as you’d expect with Terry Johnson directing: when Herbert the gay designer tries to make the dive look “contemporary” there is not only a Magritte and a Picasso weeping-woman but a set of Keeler chairs: nicely prefiguring the Stephen Ward scandal of three years later as the cast quite casually straddle them. And I cherish Rosie’s exit line “”Going to Stevenage. They say it’s going to be lovely when it’s finished”.

 
That sense of era is well established, though occasionally it feels weird to be in 2014, in the same row as the real Barbara Windsor who played in the original, being nostalgic about 1959 people who themselves nostalgic for 1930. Bart’s songs – as ever – require and get a lot of quite raucous belting, but Davis and Johnson have paced it well, so that only a few numbers have that dated Bartian “I feel a song coming on” sense of stopping the action. All in all, the cheerful treatment of dead-end lives makes you suspect that in 2054 there will be a lovable musical yearning back to the Olympic London of knife gangs, half-million quid flats, Boris, oligarchs, Starbucks ,Farage….

Box Office 020 8534 0310 to 8 June  www.stratfordeast.com

Rating: four 

IMBRUGLIA IN A FINE IMBROGLIO
When two old schoolfriends meet after eleven years, naturally they sing the old school song. “Girls of St Gert’s! Pure in your body, healthy in mind..” When two women are at odds over one man, it’s the dirty version you hear by the end. Gerts, Gerts, lift up your skirts!  It is a traditional love triangle that Alan Ayckbourn creates in this 1997 play; but there’s a fourth wheel on his wagon, and very beautifully it rolls along.

 
In heartless Feydeauesque farce it is important not to care much for the poor deluded puppets struggling in the machinery. In comedy drama you ache for them: when Ayckbourn is at his best, with his typical streak of pain, it can be difficult to remember why anybody ever chooses any other medium to lament the human condition.
Laurence Boswell’s shining production feels dateless : these people are ever with us. There’s Barbara the brisk chilly spinster PA and Nikki the eternal fourth-former, a cooing, little-girlish tease trailing her hunky oceanographer fiancé Hamish. Even the sweet, unpredictable oddball Gilbert in the basement flat is real: jauntiness and plumbing jargon on the surface and a boiling ferment of secret self-expression below.

 
Unusually, Ayckbourn wrote it for proscenium theatre, and part of its wit lies in the way it displays three floors of a Fulham house (Giles Cadle’s design here). Barbara’s flat, mimsily manless, is the centre, above and below mere slices. Aloft is the flat Nikki and Hamish have temporarily rented, so only feet and legs indicate the goings-on; below, we glimpse just the ceiling level of Gilbert’s basement, but it becomes a highly significant ceiling.

 
Claire Price is Barbara, with just the right combination of defiant briskness and shattered disappointment: her interplay with Edward Bennett’s Hamish, initially instinctive mutual hatred, gives the play sharp laughs from the start in those establishing scenes which often slow down such a comedy. Simon Gregor’s Gilbert is pitched to perfection, and pulls off the very Ayckbournian moment when, leg-jerkingly, assertively, comically drunk he suddenly catches pathos with the announcement that when his wife died the disco-ball stopped spinning in “a lonely ballroom where once we danced through life together”.

 
All are seasoned stage performers, but the surprising joy is Natalie Imbruglia, Neighbours star turned smash-hit popstrel. It’s her stage debut, but you’d think she had been working live on the boards for decades. Her Nikki is faultless: twining and gushing, teasingly frigid, finally a ball of tense and vengeful violence.
It romps to its conclusion beautifully, by way of a spirited, bum-biting, roller-pinning, headbangingly bruising fight (arranger, Kate Waters , take a bow). And students of the comic form will rather enjoy the fact that it seems to end twice. If Joe Orton had been in charge (at times his ghost nods approvingly) it would have ended with a certain mayhem-transvestite-disaster shock. Ayckbourn bolts on five more minutes because not all audiences like to go home on a note of disgraceful chaos. Two for the price of one.

TOURING to 21 june: next up, 13- 17 May at New Theatre, Cardiff
details: http://www.uktw.co.uk/Tour/Play/Things-We-Do-For-Love/T0337620179/
Rating: five

MINXY MURDEROUSNESS AMID THE WAVING CATS..

Polly Findlay, who gave us the National Theatre’s tough Antigone and Derren Brown’s Svengali, has great fun with RSC directorial debut: heavy snow, thick fog, pitch darkness, the more evil characters enjoying petulant asides to the audience, and a crane facilitating a memorably unsuccessful attempt at hiding a corpse. Oh, and a startling final treatment of Chinese Lucky Waving Cats. It is a play which demands no less: as Stratford’s “Roaring Girls” season rolls on in the small auditorium down the corridor from the male political solemnities of Henry IV, anything less than a full-throated 100-minute trip over the top and down the other side would be unwise.

For it’s no masterpiece. It’s an anonymous 1592 play, bits of it fairly randomly ascribed down the centuries to Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare himself, though there’s only one scene, a ferocious lovers’ tiff, which for me rises to a Shakespearian level of vigorous insult. Elsewhere there is a sense that his contemporaries, between beers, were taking the mick. Ian Bonar’s nervous manservant William has a Hamlettish soliloquy about whether to collaborate in the central murder, and Sharon Small’s flirting, wriggling, slinky finger-snapping killer-wife is awarded an improbable Lady Macbeth moment. Think of it as a prototype Ealing black comedy; it bears the same relationship to Shakespeare as The Comic Strip Presents does to a solemn BBC drama.

Not least because this is a thoroughly middle-class tale. It could come straight out of a modern tabloid, and Findlay makes Arden (Ian Redford, splendidly fat-cat) not only a 21c property man but owner of a warehouse packing up terrible gold Chinese waving-cats, presumably as a cheerfully unsubtle symbol of naff pointless globalization. Sharon Small as Alice is equally TOWIE, in Lacroix-style garish outfits and inch-high aquamarine eyeshadow which precedes her into the room.

It was based on a real murder in the mid-16c: Thomas Arden was killed by his wife Alice and her lover, who hired a hit-man. Additional interest arises from the fact that Arden is no innocent: in the few poignant moments petitioners beg for the return of land and livelihoods which he has annexed. There is a sub-plot, of which Findlay makes the most, involving rival suitors for Alice’s terrified maid (a physically hilarious though mainly silent Elspeth Brodie in Marigold gloves). The larkiness, however, stems from the glorious (Ealing!) incompetence of the plots: first Alice tries to poison Arden and he dislikes the porridge: Small hurls it around the stage with magnificent petulance. Then they persuade an idiotic painter (Christopher Middleton) to make a lethal poisoned crucifix (very Jacobean, that) protecting himself by stuffing rhubarb up his nose. But nothing comes of that.

Mainly, though, the murder is delegated to Black Will and Shakesbag – Jay Simpson and Tony Jayawardena – who when not accidentally knocking one another out or falling in ditches, can be seen in the gallery overhead fighting hopelessly over the instruction book for a laser-sighted sniper rifle. Top marks to both for not falling off the catwalk into the audience’s laps, either in the pitch dark or the thickest fog I have ever seen on stage. They get Arden in the end, of course, and justice gets them all. Macbeth it ain’t, but smartly done.

Rating: Oh all right. Four .

IT’S TRUE! A FISH DOES NEED A BICYCLE!
We’re in a cavernous Victorian swimming-pool, a dreamworld where the waterfall is made of bath-plug chains. Then we’re in a sea-green underwater of gliding bubbles, carnival fish on elaborate bicycles and a top-hatted vaudeville villain. Our yearned-for angel perches on a diving-board above, and hooded watery creatures suddenly bubble and vanish upwards in a Pepper’s Ghost illusion. As a family musical it’s pretty odd, and not just thanks to Morgan Large’s extraordinary designs.

Having had a retro childhood , I grew up with the Rev. Charles Kingsley’s sentimental yet fierce fable about Tom the poor sweep-boy, tossed into an underwater world and morally educated by the beautiful Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and the witchy, vengeful Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. This new musical is at two removes, writers Guy Jones and Ed Curtis (who also directs) and composer Chris Egan having been “inspired” by the film. So I vaguely expected the morality to be ironed out and a romantic ending bolted on.

Wrong! Instead – and this may give it ongoing succcess – they key in to the modern, vampire-loving young-adult fiction world: teenage angst at injustice, confused guilt at letting people down, and impossible unfulfilled romance. Tom – leaping down the waterfall to escape a wrongful accusation – is Thomas Milner, with a naive, emotionally truthful boy-band sweetness. Egan’s songs are often lovely and always listenable, Louise Dearman as the overseeing Mrs D. handling some fabulous power ballads and sharp lyrics – saving the boy from court she sing-snarls “I don’t like stories that end with teenage boys locked away – handed a story without hope, a story that ends at the end of a rope”. And as Ellie, the upmarket blonde teen angel perched on her diving-board, Lauren Samuels is vocally and physically gorgeous.

Tom meets three sea-creatures (on those mad bicycles) who want to help: Andy Gray is a punning Scottish lobster, Tom Davey a screamingly camp quiffed seahorse and Samuel Holmes a cowardly French swordfish. If you think someone’s channelling the Wizard of Oz, just wait till our heroes go down the terrifying tunnel at the End of Nowhere to confront the Wiz – sorry, the Kraken, who turns out to be a hologram of Richard E.Grant on a rocking chair made of old pipework. In between repeatedly dissolving into a small child, he offers temptations in the best moral tradition, luring the boy with visions of home and love to dump his water-baby friends.

Tom must make a Kingsleyesque moral choice here, since he has accidentally, betrayed the dopey dancing water-babies to the evil Electric Eel. The latter gets a great storm of cheers and boos: it’s Tom Lister – how he was wasted all those years on Emmerdale! – storming around in a top-hat and cloak, ever-changing cod accents and startling lightning effects. He electrifies the enslaved water-babies so that they constantly applaud and praise him (a sort of Kim-Jong-Eel, ho ho). Richard E.Kraken is not the answer though: look rather for the modern teen moral “Name your monster, share your fear, make the nightmares disappear” and “Be the man I know you want to be”.

Tom does the right thing, but it’s no trite ending. A spectacular one, though. And in its, way this show is as odd, sentimental, moral, tough and otherworldly as old Rev. Kingsley could wish. He was a friend and supporter of Darwin, and I think he’d rather like the evolution. Lobster-bikes and all.

box office 0)116 242 3595 to 17 May

rating: four