Monthly Archives: March 2015

March 31, 2015 · 6:01 pm

OUR AMERICAN COUSIN Finborough, SW10

A SNORTER? OR  A SMOKED POSSUM?
It was in 1865, on the stage line “You sockdolagizing old mantrap!” that John Wilkes Booth took advantage of a guaranteed laugh to shoot dead President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s theatre, Washington DC.  At moments in the first half of Tom Taylor’s 1858 play (the first revival in London for a century) one did slightly yearn for a pistol-shot. But not too often, and mainly during some of the painful puns, malapropisms and prolonged jokes about sneezing from the silly-ass character Lord Dundreary . Yes, he has Dundreary whiskers: this is the actual character in the actual play which gave those exaggerated sideburns their name. And yes, the overlong jokes were put in by the original actor because his part was too short. Don’t blame playwrights for everything.
Timothy Allsop does his gallant best with this now deeply unpromising comic creation, but is stuck with the sort of jokes which last amused Punch readers well before World War I (Taylor as well as being a West End hit merchant, edited that magazine). And as the dangblastit, hornswoggling, bison-baiting, Grandma’s-slapjacks yee-ha American who horns in on the British toffs and solves their problems, Solomon Mousley is almost enragingly cheeky-charming.
Fine: the Finborough audience likes a bit of living history, and director Lydia Parker clearly made a brave decision not to rescue this hoary lump of Victoriana  by cutting ferociously and playing it double-speed. Rather we learn how it used to be: especially how mutual amusement and suspicion flowed between US and UK in popular culture, before Henry James began laboriously explaining us to one another in the 1880s and, British grandees took to livening up the gene pool by marrying Boston heiresses.

The result finally becomes oddly fascinating in retro charm: a cast of 13 in a stately home deploy a thicket of asides and back-stories, a drunk scene, a couple of songs, a superbly pompous comic butler (Julian Moore-Cook), time-wasting crosstalk and annoying riddles, a missing document, a changed-at-birth story which seems to go away, a problematic will, love at first sight, a scheming mother, a spirited proto-feminist heroine (Kelly Burke) weary of being excluded from the business incompetence of her dim squire Dad. There’s an Irish alcoholic who comes good, and even an adorable milkmaid (Olivia Onyehara).

They all give it admirable wellie, though the one I really fell for is Hannah Britland as the scheming mother’s “delicate” daughter being sold to the tedious old captain: she secretly wants to give up the fashionable invalid role and scoff a plateful of “corned beef and pickles!”. Britland looks uncannily like a young Rebecca Front and has much of that great comedienne’s dry brilliance. Watch this space, she’ll go far. Daniel York is nicely evil as the former charity-boy steward who like a good middle-class schemer has got a mortgage on the estate. And Erika Gundesen, a pale beauty at the piano, plays before, during and after the show original galops and waltzes unearthed from the British Library, with very considerable musical wit.

3 Meece Rating

box office 0844 847 1652 ; Sun-Mon-Tue to 14 April, with matinees.
rating three

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March 27, 2015 · 10:33 am

THE JEW OF MALTA Swan, Stratford upon Avon

THE BOUQUET! IT WAS POISONED!
We are supposed to be thinking about the history of European antisemitism, tracking back to the 16th century when Christopher Marlowe wrote this play ,and the 15th, where he set it. And it’s all here – the ‘blood libel’, the accusations of physical dirtiness combined with greedy wealth, the spitting contempt and – not least – the undercurrent of awareness (Marlowe was no fool) that the thing which most annoyed Christians was that Jews were so damn clever, and that the fear of them was fuelled in a vicious circle by guilt at the violence meted out to them. We all fear the people we maltreat.

Thus our anti-hero Barabas – after the governor of Malta seizes all his property to pay off invading Turks – vows vengeance and runs rings round the ruling élite. He uses his daughter as bait to make suitors kill each other, then when she gets angry and converts he poisons her entire convent with rice-porridge, thus enabling the deathlessly plonking line “All the nuns are dead. Let’s bury them”. Moving on, he murders one friar and frames the other, and poisons his blackmailing servant, a courtesan and a pimp by disguising himself as a pantalooned “French musician” banging incompetently on a lute and giving them a poisoned (albeit fascinatingly slow-acting) posy of flowers to smell. Oh, and he fakes his death, admits the invading Turks through a sewer, gets made governor but burns all their soldiers to death. Which, accidentally, enables the Christian governor to turn the tables and drop him through his own secret trapdoor.

A clever Jew, see? And, as performed by Jasper Britton under the gamesome direction of Justin Audibert (a riproaring RSC directorial debut), disgracefully likeable in a confiding, Richard-III way. When he brags “”I walk abroad a-nights and kill sick people groaning under walls; sometimes I go about and poison wells…” we get a strong sense Barabas is parodying the prejudice he meets, and probably couldn’t be bothered to do any of it. And anything which could be uncomfortable about this cheerily brutal evening – pitched somewhere between farce and mumming-play – is that Christopher Marlowe is disgusted with the Christians too. They’re stupid, cruel, lecherous and as keen on money as anyone. The two friars are greedy, venal and competitive and deserve their fate. Only Abigail, used as a pawn by her father and converting when she grieves her dead lover, is at all decent (Catrin Stewart gives her great dignity and the only depth of feeling in the play). As she expires with “I died a Christian” the friar can only gropingly regret that she died a virgin too.
Audibert is not afraid of incidental comedy : even the bearers removing a corpse do “stone paper scissors” to decide who takes the messy end, and the poisoned nuns, to a background of yearning plainsong, actually foam at the mouth. Lanre Malaolu’s Ithamore , bought in the slave-market by Barabas’, escapes his early degradation to be caperingly wild and deliciously depraved. And there’s even a line prefiguring a centuries-later satire on human behaviour when Barabas says “I am my own best friend”.

Yessir! Marlowe got there before CHICAGO…
box office http://www.rsc.org 0844 800 1110 to 8 sept
RATING four     4 Meece Rating

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March 26, 2015 · 11:19 pm

THREE LIONS St James Theatre SW1

THREE MEN IN A (PROBABLY RIGGED) VOTE…

In 2010, three men came to a Zurich hotel to present (to a scandal-ridden FIFA) Britain’s case for hosting the 2018 World Cup. David Cameron the chirpy new PM was backed by two icons from different strata of British society: David Beckham and Prince William. William Gaminara, alone among playwrights (very slow, TV commissioners..!) saw that this was a gift. In 2013 I loved the result in Edinburgh; now it’s back, in from a pre-London tour (I caught it in Ipswich) just as FIFA stumbles through the fallout of its next bad decision, Qatar.

From my recce in Ipswich I can report that it is still a blissful farce: sly, sharp, its impersonations just the right side of caricature. A sycophantic Indian hotelier pops in and out of the bedroom where the men deliberate; offstage Boris is in the hotel bar and becomes involved in a reported trouser incident. Each of the men repeatedly has his leash jerked as he fields phone calls from home: Beckham being told to hang his clothes up and blag a seat at the coming Royal Wedding, William fending off Kate’s fear that if invited Posh might sing, and Cameron at one point offstage in the hotel bathroom fending off Nick Clegg while the Prince and the footballer earnestly discuss haircare.

The beauty of Gaminara’s approach is that none of them is cast as villain or gratuitously mocked in tedious leftie news-quiz style. This is more P.G.Wodehouse than The Thick Of It, as he plays not unaffectionately with the interaction of three very different Englishmen united in a quixotic, patriotic attempt which we know will fail. Cameron (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) and Beckham (Séan Browne) are not close lookalikes, but rapidly become credible. The PM is jerkily, selfconsciously masterful as he was in his early days in the job, matily trying to get his kids a playdate with Beckham’s (he is caught secretly practising keepy-uppy before the others arrive). Beckham exudes friendly decency and slow-thinking literalness. Tom Davey however is uncannily like Prince William, with beautiful deep rounded royal vowels: his earnest well-bred goodwill leavened with schoolboy practical jokes (the best capped with “it was Dads idea, I promised I’d give it a go” when he pretends to think the meeting is about cricket, and enjoys the polite panic of the others)..

In the first half relationships ebb and flow, sometimes the two Etonians bonding in reminiscence and pedantry, sometimes William and Beckham affronted by the PM’s arrogance. As they return from ‘pre-meetings’ with FIFA grandees each has his weakness revealed, not least a lovable British incompetence at bribery. Ashok the butler does, at times, become a little tedious with his learned verbosity and rather dated Empire-loyalist caricature, but it transpires there’s a reason for that.   The second act becomes nicely farcical, as Cameron imposes the old Tony Blair / Enoch Powell trick of making them all fill their bladders to add urgency to their big presentation. Which, without crudeness, leads up to the classic trouser moments.

So once again I enjoyed it no end. And there’s a joke I didn’t remember from Edinburgh. The daffy intern gushes that Boris Johnson is “cute”. To which the PM replies “Cute is not the word I”d have chosen. Almost, but not quite…”

Yes, think about it. The Ipswich matinee audience got it immediately, the dirty beasts…

box office http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk to 2 May

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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March 24, 2015 · 11:05 pm

RULES FOR LIVING NT Dorfman, SE1

SITCOM DOESN’T QUITE STAND UP

First the good news. If there is an award for best-choreographed food-fight, it’s just been won (take a bow, fight director Kate Waters).  Stephen Mangan leaps on tables with the agility (and the hairdo) of Erroll Flynn, Miles Jupp looks terrific with gravy on his head, John Rogan delivers from a largely wordless wheelchair role some of the best reaction faces this year. Maggie Service has all the fearless absurdity which marks the rising generation of female stand-ups, and Deborah Findlay is, as ever, heroic in suggesting layers of painful character with little to work on.
But that’s it. Out of ten the cast score 8, the play about 3. Sam Holcroft’s blackish comedy of a dysfunctional family Christmas never makes the jump into reality, even with Marianne Elliott as director and a kitchen-diner set so huge and smart that it makes David Cameron’s look poky. The theme is built on an idea behind Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, that people set themselves unachievable “rules” which make them unhappy. Offstage until the end is Emma, 14-year-old suffering from fatigue syndrome and what her fussed, unhappy mother Sheena (Claudie Blakley) calls “negative core beliefs”. She is deemed too poorly to come down to the family meal.
Her father Adam – failed cricketer turned junior solicitor – despises psychobabble and won’t go to couples counselling (Sheena is currently unhappy for the footling reason that he didn’t book a hotel for their anniversary). Brother Matthew is a more successful lawyer, who fancies Sheena but has brought a horribly extrovert actress girlfriend (Service on galumphing form). Mother Edith is under stress, attempting to do a perfect Christmas as her husband Francis is wheeled home with a post-operative stroke. Matthew is trying to diet, Sheena to stop drinking, Adam to give up smoking. None succeed.

Mangan and Jupp almost become credible characters, but Holcroft gives the women no subtleties at all to work on; indeed there’s a formulaic, cardboard case-history quality in all the characterisation. This is not helped by the gimmick of a lighted scoreboard overhead, detailing the “rules” for each character. Once or twice this is funny – Matthew always has to sit down in order to lie, and Carrie can’t stop dancing around telling jokes until someone laughs. But it woefully prevents the actors developing any fluid honest realism.

Just as well one doesn’t care much for any of the characters, because before the big row kicks off (over a complex card game, a clunky metaphor) the second act opens with an uneasily sadistic scene, modishly “dark”, as the younger generation confront the speechless wheelchair father and revert to childhood rivalries. If the best laugh for fifteen minutes is a stroke victim shouting “Fuck off” and groping a breast, you’re in trouble.

Indeed the trouble with the whole play is that until the final food fight it’s not as funny as it needs to be. You can see the jokes coming a mile away, and the one about a clumsy showoff visitor breaking an ornament and being tearfully told “It was my father’s” deserves a geriatric wheelchair of its own.
box office 020 7452 3000 to 8 July
Dorfman Partner – Neptune Investment Management
rating three3 Meece Rating

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March 20, 2015 · 12:03 am

BUYER AND CELLAR Menier, SE1

SUBTERRANEAN STREISAND: SILLY AND SUBLIME
It’s a heady cocktail, the Hollywood Heartbreaker: tartness and syrup,  firewater and froth ,l served in the campest crystal with diamond sparklers.  Heady delusion meets hard dollars, and schmaltzy folksiness erects steel gates against the overpressing adoration of the faithful.  Rarely has this L.A. la-la land been skewered with such loving laughter as in Jonathan Tolins’ one-man play, a fantasy about Barbra Streisand.

That is, about her basement. He read, in her extraordinary vanity coffee table book “My passion for Design”, that as an avid hoarder of costumes, toys, antiques and curios the megastar actually built, in her Malibu basement, a row of old fashioned folksy stores .  He began to wonder how it would be if she employed a floorwalker to play shops with her, down there under the pink (flattering) light whenever she cared to wander down the spiral staircase.
Hence this 100 minute virtuoso piece, hedged carefully around with insistence that – with “a person so famous, talented and litigous” it is definitely all made up. Although apparently acquaintances of the real Streisand have cautiously admitted a certain truthfulness in the characterisation. Who knows? There are strong gates, and she is an actress born…Anyway, its too good a fantasy to spoil, and comes to the glorious Menier (directed by Stephen Brackett) garlanded with off-Broadway awards.

The performer is Michael Urie – known from Ugly Betty – as Alex, an actor sacked from Disneyland (“Mouseschwitz”as embittered ex-employees refer to it ). who takes the weird subterranean job. Urie is ,from the opening moments, an elfin delight: entrancingly entertaining word by word,  and controlledly camp. That control enables him to drop in and out another character, his boyfriend Barry who is thirty degrees queenier and has a typically schizophrenic and terrifyingly well-informed love-hate relationship with the Streisand legend .
Urie also gives us the cynical no-nonsense PA, and Barbra herself . She visits her deranged mini mall, playing improv shopping games with Alex: at this point it gets so funny you can hardly breathe. When he pretends to haggle there is “an almost erotic pleasure in denying this woman something she wants”. Then she begins to seem to show friendship: if it is ever friendship when the deal is so one-sided. Once , she demands that he stay on all evening in case she wants frozen yoghurt from her street’s candy store. Poor as a church-mouse, Alex mentions overtime and the diva cries : “It’s always about dollars and cents..why can’t people CARE as much as I care?” . Ouch.
The trajectory takes the story beyond mere sketch: Alex’s involvement torpedoes his real life by degrees, and ends in a lovely bit of disillusion.  And froth-light as it is, the play gently, affectionately teases out serious themes. It’s about fame, fortune and unbridled acquisition: the terrible glamour of the famous boss who seems for a moment to care, and the gap between rueful strugglers at the base of the showbiz pyramid and lonely deluded billionaires at the top, clinging with absurd pride to the hard-luck legend of their youth. It is about aspiration and perfectionism and the way, as Alex admits, that we are all “struggling to create our own perfect little world” and watching the stars’ lives for “the comfort of the totally impossible”.
But I would hate you to think it’s in any way a sober evening. Never stopped grinning all the way through…
box office 0207 378 1713 to 2 May
rating: four4 Meece Rating

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March 18, 2015 · 11:14 pm

PLAYING FOR TIME Crucible, Sheffield

A GRAVE GRANDEUR, AN UNFORGOTTEN HORROR

Hard to overstate the impact, the sense of event, commemoration and bleak grandeur in this extraordinary evening. There is, in this 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, obvious solemnity in staging Arthur Miller’s “memory play” from the testament of Fania Fénélon. The Parisian chanteuse survived by forced membership of a rag-bag orchestra recruited for the entertainment of the SS officers and, horribly, to march fellow-victims to the gas chambers and pander to Dr Mengele’s experiments on music and insanity.

But add to that a central performance as Fania from Sian Phillips: eighty-one now, a war-baby with early memories of being taken outside at night to watch Swansea burning. We use some words too lightly in the arts, but Phillips’ wholly committed gently controlled performance is a marvel of fearlessness, sorrow and sincerity. It is one of those rare memorable nights when you come to believe you are not watching acting at all, but remembered experience: a necessary ritual.

It is a huge cast: fourteen women and three men, amplified with extras from Sheffield People’s Theatre. So shaven-headed women in rags are herded and surged around the big open theatre, edges of violence being glimpsed – as they were by the appalled, conflicted Fenelon – around a central area where for much of the play the hungry, fearful musicians struggle with ill-assorted instruments under the nervy, disciplinarian Alma Rosé. She was Gustav Mahler’s niece: the Jewess virtuosa violinist who with Fenelon’s orchestrating skills and grainy, Weimar cabaret voice somehow held them together.

Richard Beecham’s direction is supported by extraordinary lighting and design by Richard Howell and Ti Green, creating a darkness visible, a grey despair around the vivid individuals . It is further served by unobtrusively sinister sound design by Melanie Wilson – whistles, thuds, shouts, guard dogs barking, at last the distant artillery . And even more by the musical direction and some lyrics by Sam Kenyon, creating shattering moments. Here are the Commandant and Dr Mengele sitting splay-legged with imperial power, sentimental over the desperate gentleness of the scratch orchestra playing von Suppé, and saying approvingly “it strengthens us for this difficult work of ours” – that is, murdering twelve thousand a day.
At another moment, after playing marches as the prisoners head for the ovens and the smoke rises, Fania must sing Madam Butterfly’s hopeful song about “a thread of smoke rising on the horizon” from the ship bringing back her lover. Congratulated by the Commandant, she bravely denies her stage persona with “My name is not Fenelon. I am Fanny Goldstein”. A terrible silence.
But nothing is milked, nothing is sentimental, and Miller allows rein to the tensions between Jew and Gentile, Pole and French, the Zionist and the racially indifferent, the despairing and the defiant. Nor does he flinch from the brutalities that brutalized people pass on: the Polish women guards shoutingly bully the “Jew shit”. Marianne asks early on: “Why are they doing this? What do they get from it?” Unanswerable.

Sian Phillips is the powerful centre, but around her other performances rise too. Melanie Heslop is Marianne, moving from naive fear to greedy dissolution, whoring herself to the very executioner on the day her friend’s beaten body is left hanging dead in the rain until dark. Amanda Hadingue is stiffly Austrian as Alma, Kate Lynn-Evans is Mandel the officer whose half-humanity becomes, to Fenelon, the “problem”. A problem horribly reflected in her own honest conflict about using her art in collaboration, struggling to hold something back yet survive to testify .
And always the Beethoven and Puccini, the cabaret songs and accordion, remind us that this was Europe, this was recent. That savagery is not something alien and far away, for humanity can go downhill very fast and very far, without losing the superficial trappings of efficiency and aesthetic culture. As Fania says, “The aim is to remember. Everything”.

Box Office 0114 249 6000 http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk to 4 April
Rating five5 Meece Rating

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March 18, 2015 · 11:33 am

REBECCA – a study in Jealousy Richmond Theatre & touring

MANDERLEY AGAIN,  AND VERY WELCOME TOO 

“Last night, I dreamed I went to Manderley again…” The famous opening is spoken from the sea-bed: a dim otherworld where a jointed lifeless body descends from far above, crushed beneath a wrecked boat. Which – as a vast chandelier descends in turn – becomes sometimes a table, sometimes floor, beneath the leprous plaster and high broken banisters of a grand ruined house above. So the set itself is the ghost of Manderley and of the rockbound Cornish bay where the first wife Rebecca met her end. Within this frame, between a dark past and a smouldering end, the story will play out. Fishermen intone the first shanty “Go down, you blood red roses”. Brilliant.
Kneehigh, and Emma Rice’s direction elsewhere, are generally original, quirky, larky, musical, a touch camp, prone to outbreaks of puppetry, but focused on storytelling and above all theatrically atmospheric. This touring production, I am happy to say, is their finest since Brief Encounter . It’s a glorious evening: both faithful to the spirit and shape of Daphne du Maurier’s chronicle of second-wife paranoia and Bluebeard dread, and mischievously subversive of it.

Perhaps the Cornish setting inspired the Truro company even more than usual. In folkish Kneehigh tradition it is interwoven with shanties (and that lovely Wilburn brothers ballad Give Them The Roses Now, sung by Frith the butler to cheer up poor Mrs de Winter after the ball débacle). Cast members casually pick up instruments – bass, banjo, fiddle, accordion – and deftly create interiors with props, often singing in hair-raising harmony. There are tweaks: Rice has made Maxim de Winter’s sister Bea and her husband a pair of rip-roaring, huntin-shootin’-shaggin’-drinkin’ County party-animals, at one point executing a spirited sand-dance routine in Arabic costumes and leading a vo-de-o-do outbreak as an Act 2 opener. Lizzie Winkler and Andy Williams give it their all, to general glee, Winkler seeming to channel a hypermanic Edwina Currie in her prime.

The footman Robert (Katy Owen) becomes an elfin, broadly Welsh lad, tearing cheekily around and, in opening scenes, startlingly discussing his mother’s menopause symptoms over the phone to the lodge-keeper (“bit of a dryness in ‘er tuppence”). She’s very funny too. Danvers – Emily Raymond – is perhaps not quite as terrifying as one would hope, possibly due to modern sympathies towards her plainly lesbian passion: but having her entrances heralded by a flapping puppet cormorant is grand. So is the puppet dog, especially when he greets the terrified new bride with a nose up the crotch.

Not that she is terrified by the end. Imogen Sage is a real find, as tremulous and cotton-frocked and virginal as you could wish, but hardening and sexing-up convincingly when she discovers the truth. It’s a genuinely striking transition. So, in its way, is the decline of Maxim – glorious Tristan Sturrock, who was the original lover in Brief Encounter. He has just the casual, haughty, scornful affability and moody hawkish demeanour of a romantic hero in the 1930’s mould. As they say, you would, wouldn’t you? Even though you’d definitely regret it in the end.

His bride doesn’t: even in the genuinely dark,shivery moment when the corpse is raised and laid to rest amid shifting suspicions. The school parties around us shuddered with pleasure. So did I.
Box office 0844 871 7651 to 21 March

then TOURING    Touring Mouse widenationwide to 19 Sept – Kneehigh tour dates on http://tinyurl.com/lqvo5jo

Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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March 17, 2015 · 10:48 am

THE HEART OF THINGS Jermyn St Theatre SW1

POST COALITION TRISTIS…
The best line in this rather overstuffed play comes from Keith Parry as Bob, a magnificently slow-thinking lummox. In the corner of a scruffy Norfolk kitchen Bob is the blinking, half-aware witness of an emotional scene in which a drunk, despairing middle-aged English teacher relates a failed proposal, underage sexual blackmail, personal confusion, schoolyard violence and a crashed career . The teacher’s sister and nephew stand transfixed with horror, and in a brief silence bearded Bob surfaces in his corner with: “Ah. All goes on down London, don’ it? Fancy a bit o’toast?”. It’s a beautiful bit of bathos, an unkind reminder of what certain impatient GPs put on patients’ notes – NFN. Normal for Norfolk….

Which is, of course, unfair. But such flippant thoughts do tend to surface during in Giles Cole’s play. His last one here, The Art of Concealment , was an excellent and well-researched biographical imagining of Terence Rattigan (same director, Knight Mantell). But maybe the freedom of pure fiction was a bit too heady this time. For in its two-hours space, and in the trajectory of Peter the teacher (Nick Waring) over his sister Ros’ birthday celebrations, Cole hurls in questions of sexual identity, paternal post-traumatic guilt and contempt (Ralph Watson is a splendidly curmudgeonly old bastard father in a wheelchair), plus potential incest, thwarted ambition, self-publishing, rape, and the question of whether dim Bob will ever finish his model ship after twenty years (it’s a truly terrible prop: the mast is all wrong). Oh, and there’s an advance condemnation of Michael Gove’s education reforms, because the action is set in 2010, during the discussions which formed the present Coalition, and Peter has brought along a fierce Tory PR lady called Jacqui, who he now wants to marry because he’s tired of being gay. But he is really, deep down, longing for his big sister. Frankly, if Peter is on Facebook he’ll need something more comprehensive to post up than “It’s Complicated”.
This overstuffing is a pity; and so is the character of Jacqui, played with a rather retro, overarticulated 1930’s brittleness by Amy Rockson and never allowed to develop into anything beyond a clumsy plot device. On the other hand there are some wonderful performances, especially from Patience Tomlinson as Ros, the countrified sister whose life has been a trap between curmudgeonly father and dim pointless Bob, by whom she has a nice son William . Tomlinson conveys without fuss multiple layers of sadness and warmth and hurt and daily decency, and your heart goes out to her. Ollo Clark too, as William, nicely evokes a generation – one I know well – of citified educated youth emerging, laughing slightly shamefacedly, from dull rural homes and returning with a gentle patronizing kindness. As for Waring as Peter, he does everything possible with his melodramatic unhappiness, confusion, and back-story. But the cast are streets better, and more authentically credible, than the material. It’s always dangerous for a playwright to quote four lines of WH Auden in a scene: reminds you that the rest of the lines are not nearly so good. Except that one of Bob’s. That I treasure.

box office 0207 287 2875 to 4 April

rating three  3 Meece Rating

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March 16, 2015 · 12:01 pm

DIFFERENT BUTTONS Avenue, Ipswich

MEMORIES OF A MADHOUSE

Hard on the heels of her admirable PROGRESS, Joanna Carrick of Red Rose Chain revives (in this elegant new studio theatre) an earlier piece devised as site-specific three years ago for the closing of the old Victorian asylum in Ipswich: St Clements. The sound design, indeed, by Laura Norman, has used recordings made inside that haunting space, in corridors and abandoned wards: the stories threaded through small scenes and monologues reflect reality. And, of course, the history of the great Victorian change, approaching the ‘lunatic paupers of the borough” in a way more humane than the old imprisoning madhouses . Though still, to our modern eye, wincingly difficult to watch.
In a bare but convincing space – old radios, old magazines, hospital chairs – the five cast switch roles . Tom McCarron is sometimes a foul-mouthed inmate but often a doctor, or a Victorian journalist giving his account of the place’s foundation; Herbert Brett and Daniel Abbott as other male inmates, the former rantingly aggressive, the latter curled, terrified, foetal and trembling; Rachael McCormick as an older, longterm female inmate, working as a maid, put in by her father as an uncontrollable “moral imbecile” in 1924. There is – when one has just walked to the Avenue across it – a particular jolt when she remembers being brought across the stone bridge by the station on the day it was opened, amid free and happy crowds: it reminds you of the resonance of this kind of powerfully local theatre.

But at its centre is Lucy Telleck as a modern young woman, seemingly hard-faced , resentful and unhappy, waiting for her appointment and haunted by these ghosts of earlier time. Carrick makes good dramatic use both of contemporary writings on madness, with old obsessions like measuring people’s heads (“Cranium – narrow”) and also of the sad tickbox forms modern depressives are asked to fill in “I am feeling useful / Hopeful / confident – Most of the time / some of the time/ none of the time…” etc: Telleck develops into a powerful emotional presence, both in her modern defiant indignation and in the moments when she regresses into an overwhelmed Victorian mother interned against her will.
The piece does provoke thought: about changing ideas, and the perennial struggle of the “sane “to help or contain “mad”. It pulls no punches about irrationality, persecution mania, violence, the difficulty of comforting the unreachable, and the simple frustration of dealing with the silent, trembling youths played by Abbott (another strong presence). Dramatically, sound and light are strong, and it is a short piece, ninety minutes including interval.

But it is not easy to watch: sometimes you feel like a rubbernecking onlooker in an older Bedlam, and correspondingly uncomfortable. Which, of course, is a tribute to the actors. The interwoven stories do become clearer as time goes on and there is another real emotional jolt at the end when the ghosts bid farewell to the troubled, modern Ruth: “Live without fear, no need for endless grieving.”

Box office http://www.redrosechain.com to 28 march
RATING three 3 Meece Rating

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March 14, 2015 · 10:14 pm

THE CUTTING OF THE CLOTH Southwark Playhouse, SE1

A BESPOKE PREMIERE, TRIBUTE TO A TRADE

1953, a tailors’ basement workshop under Dover Street. Five people work eighty hours a week or longer. Out front, unseen, the smooth cutters and measurers greet bespoke clients; down here the “makers” work. In a set of breathtaking immediacy tools, clutter, and casual expertise come alive. Old Spijak the Pole works cross-legged on his bench as his forefathers did, sewing by hand and despising Eric – faster, earning more – for his sewing machine. Each maker has a “kipper”, a female assistant for cuffs and lowlier “ kipper-work”; Spijak’s is his daughter Sydie, Eric’s is Iris. Maurice, Spijak’s tyrannized new apprentice, spends his lunch-hour in the bare washroom writing a play…

For Michael Hastings – who died only in 2011 – was such a teenage apprentice to his father’s trade, though he became a distinguished Royal Court playwright (famous or TOM AND VIV). This slice-of-life play, never before performed, emerges from that youth. But Two’s Company and director Tricia Thorns love forgotten, truthful testimonies of the past, notably with workplace themes: LONDON WALL brought a 1931 law office alive, WHAT THE WOMEN DID gave us WW1 munitions-girls.

So it seems a period piece, larded with snatches of ‘50s pop and references to clients like Macmillan, Charles Clore and the impresario Henry Sherek, who was so large that at one point Sydie and Maurice stand side-by-side as Eric drapes the basted (tacked) jacket over both. But it bites because then, it was social realism: a portrait of a transitional moment. Spijak , powerfully played in an (at first) improbable accent by Andy de la Tour, is devoted to hand-stitching, persecuting his apprentice (James el-Sharawy) for not sitting cross-legged enough, being left-handed and insufficiently Jewish. His craft has, through disappointments we gradually glimpse, become his obsessive sole pride.

Eric (Paul Rider) is light-footed and brisk (all the cast are uncannily convincing as lifelong craftsmen, trained up by a modern bespoke tailor). He gets his joys rather in the unseen toffs he dresses: at one point, glorilusly, puts on Harold Macmillan’s new jacket and demonstrates how he allowed for the sloping shoulders of the Housing Minister , and how it would work when he was on the grouse-moor, with proudly double-lined pockets to put dead birds in. He dreams of Ascot and the Mirabelle and (with a Hancock echo) is never happier than with a Racing Gazette and “the old Puccini knocking the lid off me gramophone”. The two “kippers” are Alexis Caley as the quietly sceptical Sydie – Spijak’s daughter, taken from school at 14 to replace a mother dead from overwork – and Abigail Thaw, a marvellous drop-dead comedienne as Iris who feeds the pigeons and dreams of the seaside. And, it turns out, of Eric.

At first the wealth of detail – facings, inlays, gorges – and the noisy altercations threaten to lag or mystify; but it becomes absorbing, they become your own workmates in the L-shaped intimate room. Brown parcels of work thud down, chucked from the front office, goose-irons and blocks and half-jackets are nimbly manipulated so that the never-still movement of continuing work beneath every line and silence is masterful. We see regrets and griefs, the decline of Spijak, the progress of Maurice from victim to acolyte and beyond. A theme – unexpected in Hastings’ Angry-Young-Man, Osborne-and-Wesker generation – is how sweated labour in a time of change can be perpetuated by the exploited craftsmen’s own deep pride in expertise, and condemn those who could have escaped or embraced new technology to crippling lives. Spijaks’ father “died on a bench in Warsaw, happy doing what he could do best”.

Neither a sentimental threnody for dying craft or a shout of socialist rage , it is idiosyncratic, human, funny, sad. Near the end switchbacks of comedy surround a private tragedy and twist back to a lesser one. Thorns’ direction and the cast handle this brilliantly.

Box Office 020 7407 0234     http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk    to 4 APril

RATING   four  4 Meece Rating

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March 12, 2015 · 11:01 am

RADIANT VERMIN, Soho Theatre W1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI IS CHARMED TWICE OVER

Miss Dee arrives. She’s from the newly-created DSRCDH: “Department for Social Regeneration through the Creation of Dream Homes.” She makes Ollie and Jill an offer which is surely too good to be true: Miss Dee explains it’s a government project inspired by the Amazon jungle plant, “The Shimmering Glimmering Tree”, which looks drab until you polish one berry, at which point, all the berries begin to shine until “the whole tree sparkled like treasure.” To have a free house, all the Swifts have to do is do it up: Jill has excellent taste, Miss Dee notes, and Ollie is a dab hand at DIY.

The dream home in question is a shell: it needs rewiring, has no hot water, and is in a deserted suburban development mainly inhabited by wandering tramps. But Jill and Ollie, with a baby on the way, take the chance. They do renovate the property, to their own astonishment, in a macabre and surreal method in which Ridley’s dark humour begins to wax lyrical. And, sure enough, Gilead Close begins to sparkle as predicted, with aspirational neighbours moving in to take advantage of the property boom, culminating in a shiny new shopping centre round the corner, offering “The Never Enough Shopping Experience: because enough is never enough.”

Radiant Vermin has two strengths. One is its macabre twist, which I won’t spoil for you: but just watch Ridley’s twist grow, strengthen and become ever more prominent, with the characters’ actions becoming ever more hysterical and desperate. While maintaining a tone of cheerful surrealism, Ridley slides in questions about religious hypocrisy, our attitude to the homeless, consumerist greed and neighbourly one-upmanship. You are swept up into the joke: but afterwards, walking away through the streets of Soho with beggars on every side, I felt a kind of horror at the hilarity which only applies to the very best of black humour. You almost can’t believe you laughed at it, but you did.

The second strength is the sheer talent on stage, directed by David Mercatali. Sean Michael Verey begins Ollie as a quiet, ordinary bloke, but steadily builds him into an extraordinarily brilliant character performance, including two hilarious one-man fight scenes, in which he fights his invisible assailant while commentating on and explaining each punch in real time, causing the audience to collapse with laughter. The speed of Ridley’s writing, and Verey’s natural comic instincts, seem made for each other. Gemma Whelan is wonderful as his socially-upward wife Jill, a nice girl who likes to get her own way, cheerfully sacrificing her morals until guilt begins to eat away at her. The play builds to an insane crescendo in the fabulous “Party from hell” scene, which has Whelan and Verey playing no fewer than eight different characters, all with scrupulously distinctive accents, body language and gestures, in bewilderingly rapid exchanges, reducing the audience to helpless, uproarious laughter. Amanda Daniels is bewitching and unsettling as Miss Dee, the devilish Fairy Godmother figure, and heartbreaking as the shattered vagrant Kay.

– Charlotte Valori

Box office: http://sohotheatre.com/whats-on/radiant-vermin/, 020 7478 0100, until 12 April

Rating: five 5 Meece Rating

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March 6, 2015 · 10:21 pm

ANTIGONE Barbican, WC2

ANCIENT GRIEF, A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

There are some trademarks here: shaven heads, bare feet, bleak staging, immense and timeless dooms and subtle, insistent soundscape. Ivo van Hove, the Belgian director from Toneelgroep Amsterdam, stunned us lately with Arthur Miller’s A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, and there is a family resemblance to that “perverse purity” in this Sophoclean tragedy , with Juliette Binoche at its heart striding stark with grief .

It is that quality which van Hove’s production most expresses: the grief of Oedipus’ orphaned daughter, desperate for her dead warring brothers and defiantly burying Polyneikes, the reflected sorrow of her sister, Ismene, at her headlong rush towards death; the grief too of King Kreon, blinded by stubborn realpolitic – “the sacrilege that I called public policy” when his own son and wife sink beneath the same dust. The production is spare, slow-paced, mesmerizing, almost incantatory with Anne Carson’s text and Daniel Freitag’s echoing insistent score: Binoche moves with beautiful, unsettling sorrow: at one point her ritual tending and burying of the brother’s dead body is beyond moving.

Yet it is a difficult tone to sustain for a hundred minutes, especially in the Barbican theatre, a space which somehow always manages to feel both cavernous and claustrophobic. Van Hove’s great View from the Bridge was born in the breathing, warm, organic, almost makeshift atmosphere of the Young Vic: the starkness there was a contrast, not so overpowering. And some may find this re-telling slow, underpowered, perhaps less engaging than Polly Findlay’s recent, more detailed production of Sophocles’ tragedy at the Olivier.

For me, though, it struck home: the way the grief crackled through it, the unemphatic message of the courtiers being in modern business-dress, the casual vernacular chorus acting as advisers and as quietly horrorstruck onlookers, the gentle angry power of Binoche. And, not least, Patrick O’Kane’s strong Kreon and a wonderful Queen Eurydike from Kathryn Pogson. There is a moment when suddenly the dead Antigone strolls to the stage’s edge and delivers lines belonging to the messenger, her accent suddenly a little French for the first time: “Citizens…” she calls us, and the moment feels thrillingly direct. A message from the deep long past, a dead hand reaching out in warning and resignation. “Fortunate, unfortunate..no seer can see what’s ahead”.

box office: barbican.org.uk to 28 March
Then touring Europe; BBC filming it for BBC4 later in the year
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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March 6, 2015 · 10:50 am

THE ARMOUR Langham Hotel, W1

ONE HOTEL, 150 YEARS, THREE PLAYS

Plays in hotel rooms are in vogue: there’s a voyeuristic intimacy and a pleasing sense of dislocation about them. And a grand hotel – the Langham was Europe’s first – is theatre in itself, a marbled set with a large cast. A couple of years ago the Carinthia down by the river offered Mimi Poskitt’s immersive, rather brilliant experience in which every (lone) viewer became a new staff member, hustled about and falling into decades-long time-warps from kitchens to rooftop as the guests’ stories interwove. This is a different approach: less immersive and personal, in which each group of fifteen or so remains an audience not a participator, and moves through three hotel rooms in three eras, tracking moments in its presumed history.

This company, Defibrillator, had a success with Tennessee Williams’ HOTEL PLAYS here, and now the hotel’s Writer in Residence Ben Ellis presents three short two-handed playlets – basement, third floor and seventh floor, directed by James Hillier. The matter of moving us around is untheatrically done (would have been good to have a solemn flunkey with an atmospheric script, perhaps) but the plays are sharply written and – by the end – thoughtful.

At first we are in the basement nightclub, where Hannah Spearritt is a spoilt, self-destructive pop legend tinkling at a keyboard, waiting for the helicopter to take her to the o2 and refusing to go, despite her exasperated manager’s pleas. The clue which links it to the last of the three plays is a historic coat she has stolen from a glass case, and which finally gives her courage. It is the least engaging of the three; but then, 21c arena pop meltdowns are wearily familiar as a theme.

The next play, set in 1973, chimes with my own Langham memories: it was a BBC building in the ‘70s, when its grand-hotel days seemed to be over. I trained there as a studio manager on aged Bakelite desks and loudspeakers the size of wardrobes; as a Today producer we were sometimes – like the continuity announcers – allocated a few hours there overnight, in spartan scruffy rooms with lugubrious lavatories down the corridor. Ellis has had fun trying to reproduce this in room 353 (probably to the present, ultra-glitzy management’s mild horror) where we find Ryvita soundproofing, an old microphone and some polystyrene cups. An American couple are waiting to be interviewed about his docklands containerization plans: we gradually learn that he is a Vietnam veteran, furious at the world, wanting to “rip out the rotten teeth” of the old world with its small cosy lives and found “a new nation coming – the Republic of Capital”. Which has, of course, come to pass. The actual BBC people are represented only by keeping these two waiting while they work out their angsty relationship. This one does catch fire.

Then up to the seventh floor: and Emperor Napoleon III, in exile in 1871 (he did indeed stay here) . He is lit only by candlelight as his Eugenie, in flowing nightdress (a splendid Finty Williams, all loving wifely exasperation), tries to coax him out of his suicidal, end-of-empire gloom. This one is genuinely spooky, full of sadness and an old man’s yearning for the great world of expansion and innovation which is crumbling . There’s a nice digression into the invention of margarine, which indeed Napoleon III did foster, with a prize for anyone creating a butter-substitute). This was the best of the three. So the 90-minute evening is – metaphorically as well as literally – a journey upwards… And then down to the bar again with a 15% food and drink discount for audiences. Because it’s the Langham’s 150th birthday….

  

http://www.defibrillatortheatre.com/
box office seetickets.com to 4 April
RATING three 3 Meece Rating

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March 4, 2015 · 11:03 pm

GAME Almeida, N1

GAMES WE NEARLY PLAY

It’s the Almeida, Jim, but not as we know it. Hunched on benches in four uneasily intimate soundproofed zones padded with camouflage-print, summoned by a robotic voice and issued with headphones, we watch screens . Then blinds lift and we peer into a real flat where a young couple are exclaiming over the induction hob, the hot tub, the longed-for private space.

Except that it isn’t. The screens show in grainy monochrome a crowded observation space in the flat\s walls, where a Warden admits punters and issues rifles . In detailed CCTV we too see the flat from various angles, always with each sniper’s crosshairs. The residents have got the flat in exchange for being shot repeatedly with tranquillizer darts as they go about daily life. As the horrible boss (Daniel Cerquiera) says to the warden in charge (played with skilful low-key decency by Kevin Harvey) “they’re adults, they’re no’ stupid, they knew what this was”.

And we on our benches, darting our eyes from screen to reality, are complicit. Hard to know whether it is worse to find yourself watching the lovemaking (for it is love, for the young couple, even if just barea-rse ludicrous sex to the voyeurs) or spying on domestic life: hoovering, eating, coming home from another failed job interview…

You can’t fault Mike Bartlett for diversity: fresh from his caricaturish King Charles III he’s back at the Almeida with this hour-long, intense and angrily dystopian show whose themes – picked up artfully in the programme collage – are many. The desperation of young couples for homes and work, the Big Brother culture, pornified sex, TV’s rubberneck interest in poverty, violent screen games, the tendency of showbiz to go a bit further every year, the and the way the ghastly Hollywood glamour of the sniper is irresistible to a soft-living discontented society. Too much? Not really. This deft, brief, unnerving show brings them all together in a “Game” which – at least in the moment – feels real and imminent.

Jodie McNee and Mike Noble play the workless couple, trying for a decent life and a baby. The first time we see them shot we are not yet aware that they will recover. Horribly, the wearying repetition of their collapses continues until it begins to bore the punters and they want more: the extra frisson of shooting their seven-year-old child. He at first is scared, then withdrawn, ironically immersing himself in a violent video game and hiding in cardboard boxes, alienated and ruined. The boss on the screen, his business model fading under pressure of imitators, snarls that it would be better to “make them actually suffer – if this was Holland we could do euthanasia!”.

As the young pair suffer the humiliating price of a home, we see and hear the punters above. The strength of the piece is that it is not cheap agitprop – posh rich people shooting the homeless poor. It’s modern everyman; lads tittering as they aim at the naked girl in the bath, a shrieky hen-party, a bickering middle-aged well-spoken couple, and best (well, worst) of all, a primary schoolteacher relishing the chance to shoot little Liam. So we’re all complicit: even if we don’t yet shoot at the vulnerable, we stare at them through the one-way mirror of the telly and the tabloids. And it corrupts. The last moments of the Warden make that clear, as does the child’s blank-eyed obedience. Nothing physically gruesome: just morally. It’s shock treatment, but Bartlett’s j’accuse says necessary things.

box office 0207 359 4404 to 4 April Partner: Aspen
rating: four
4 Meece Rating

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March 1, 2015 · 1:33 pm

MY MOTHER SAYS I NEVER SHOULD Chipping Norton Theatre

MOTHERHOOD, SECRETS AND LIES

Neatly in time for International Women’s Day and the celebratory WOW-ings on the South Bank, John Terry has had Chipping Norton’s gorgeous galleried interior temporarily reconfigured in the round for a 30th anniversary revival of Charlotte Keatley’s modern classic. Tracking four generations of 20c women from the 1930’s to the late 1980’s, it’s a lovely intimate staging: birdsong and washing-lines and moody piano, and deft unfussy costume-changes as the four actresses dodge around the decades, backwards and forwards. And, occasionally, step out of time to become their child selves – as if they were contemporaries, little girls playing in a ‘waste ground’.

A device which, for a good while, I couldn’t quite bond with: it felt too self-consciously theatrical, and the actual narrative is so strong that at times the brief interruptions can irritate. But looking back, the device has its reasons; not least because the little girls are not sugar and spice but realistically crude and credible, well into mutual blackmail, play-violent fantasies and amateur witchcraft. Maybe it’s a necessary grit to keep the tale from soapiness.

Sue McCormick is a splendid, majestic big Doris as the grandmother, in brisk middle-age as a wartime mother and formidably amiable when in later years she reflects on as ixty-year marriage in which “we never liked each other much” and on the way that “When you’re old and you’re rude they think you’re losing their mind. They never know it’s anger!”. Zara Ramm is her daughter Margaret, growing up proudly postwar to expect to work, but finding only secretarial obedience and compromise. Her own daughter Jackie (Jessica Guise) is a sixties kid demanding more and getting it, but still unable to handle single motherhood and reluctantly handing over her baby to Margaret, with the hateful convention of the day which made her a pretend “big sister”.

Both are delicate, touching, subtle performances, treating the difference of age and era adeptly. The hardest job perhaps goes to Charlotte Croft as Rosie, because we see her only between the ages of ten and sixteen, largely bratty and eventually unforgiving of her real mother. Despite the older women’s vast obvious affection she has a hard time being likeable. But it’s a lively performance, and maybe the obnoxiousness is necessary for credibility. Anyway, altogether this absorbing evening captures perfectly many things most women will recognize; the half-needy, half-resentful maternal bond, the preciousness of objects and ideas handed down, the bafflement of each generation at the next one’s freedoms. And the moment of the rabbit-decorated baby dress is electric: a dangerous secret hovering behind a domestic banality. Wonderfully played.

box office 01609 642350 to 11 March
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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