Monthly Archives: October 2015

October 29, 2015 · 10:18 pm

THE HAIRY APE Old Vic SE1

FROM THE FIRES BELOW,  O”NEILL’S  ACCUSING VOICE 
From the opening moments of Richard Jones’ stunning, nightmarish production of Eugene O’Neill’s early play we have both the shock of expressionist newness – it can still disconcert, a century on – and a powerful sense of period. Both are profoundly right. The ships’ stokers, black with smoke and filth, are figures frozen in the angular energy of 1920’s socialist realism, lurching in robotic concord as if hit by the ship’s roll in their yellow steel barred cage. They come to life to quarrel and brawl and sing and stamp, or listen to Irish Paddy (Steffan Rhodri) declaiming O’Neill’s passionate threnody for the real days of seafaring. Days when “there was clippers with tall masts touching the sky, the clean skins and clear eyes of the men, free men…work, but work under the sky with skill and daring in it..”. All the baffked anguish of industrialisation rolls through it.
Only Bertie Carvel’s Yank, alone and moody at the end or suddenly erupting in caged, stamping energy, is inwardly struggling to make sense of life. It is to be his journey and his doom, this proud aloneness: his story could not be more stark and simple. On the great deck above the spoiled young heiress of the Douglas Steel empire bickers with a stiff aunt , the face of her father the tycoon adorning the shining bulkhead. Young Mildred has persuaded the Engineer to let her see the stokehold and “how the other half live”. When they descend to the fires and men who keep the liner moving smoothly, she sees Yank looming diabolic and dark against the flames . “Oh, the filthy beast!” she cries, and faints in her pristine white frock.

Yank does not get over it. His pride is shattered. In dock, he roams Manhattan half-coherent with revenge . Nightmare, puppetlike masked figures of the wealthy swirl around him; he lashes out and ends in another cage, a prison cell. Carvel’s angry Bronx is sometimes only half-coherent in the dodgy Old Vic acoustic (it’s back in proscenium mode now) but it doesn’t matter. The anguished reiteration of words and themesgrows in power: steel becomes his preoccupation, the bright metal which brings weary captivity to some and wealth to others. Prison shouts echo from every corner of the theatre. An innocent radicalized, he finds the IWW, the Workers’ Union derogated by the newspapers as “a dagger to the heart of America”. But Yank’s enthusiasm for dynamite over leafleting has him thrown out as a suspected spy.

His weary dusk is spent slumped alone against the barley-sugar of the proscenium edge (an almost accidental poignancy, so rich does the Old Vic paintwork look against his shabbiness) . A great balloon moon whose face is the Douglas Steel logo hangs smug above; finally comes the zoo scene where he envies the gorilla because it does not have to think. It is not, like him, trapped in a reflective, feeling, remembering human brain within a world which ignores it and makes him a commodity. All he can do is force open the cage.
The gorilla itself, his merciful executioner , is remarkable. All the physical ensemble work is: expressionistic without pretension, deft, frightening. Stewart Laing designs, Aletta Collins choreographs, sound and light draw its ninety minutes tightly together. A time to remember.

box office 0844 8717628 to 21 Nov
rating five   5 Meece Rating

Principal sponsoring partner: Royal Bank of Canada

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October 28, 2015 · 11:11 pm

PIG FARM St James’ Theatre SW1

OINK! SWIPE! SNOG! STAB!

“Ohhh Tim, you beautiful filthy boy!” cries Tina the pig-farmer’s discontented wife, succumbing drunkenly to some pan-banging draining-board sex. Filthy he is indeed, though not in the sanitized Fifty-Shades manner: the 17-year-old “work-release” farmhand from the local penitentiary is head to foot in pig-slurry.
Soon her nightie is, too. In fact, at numerous points in Greg Kotis’ play all four characters are liberally besmeared with “faecal sludge” from the fifteen-thousand pigs on a grim rural unit which can’t quite cope. Tom, the husband (Dan Fredenburgh) is living on the edge, beleaguered by torrential rain and Federal government paperwork. Speaking as a former farmer’s wife, I can vouch for that realism. He devotes his evenings, though, to illicit sludge-dumping in the Potomac River while the thwarted Tina thinks he should be home making babies. Worse still, the Environmental Protection Agency inspector is coming tomorrow and requires an accurate audit of their pigs. There are too many for comfort, but as Tom repeatedly mourns, when America wants bacon, and pork prices keep dropping, numbers have to go up for a small, panicking farmer to survive.
Kotis last hit this stage with the unpromising but successful and West-End-transferred URINETOWN, a dystopian water-shortage dictatorship fantasy musical. Clearly he’s by no means through with excretory themes and sustainability worries. Or with violence: this story of country folk generously deploys a rolling-pin, a slaughtering-knife , a handgun, several offstage truck-crashes and an acoustically spectacular though invisible “pig run” when young Tim proves his manliness by crashing the West Pen open during the inspection and allowing Ole’ Bess the herd mother to lead thousands in a charge for freedom.
That this is black comedy rather than Chekhovian rural tragedy is signalled by the alliterative casting: Tom and Tina, Tim the farmhand, Teddy the EPA official preparing a report for DC, and offstage there’s neighbour Tony, Toby the feed-meal man, and Teddy’s colleagues Trevor, Tyler, Theo… well, you get the idea. This is, surprisingly, funny at the time. So is most of the violence, and the repetitive revivals of the two bloodstained corpses near the end is pure Python. You expect them to break out in Spamalot’s “Not Dead Yet” chorus.
Tom’s desperation and nostalgia for a simpler time in their life is both laughable and, at moments, immensely sad: Fredenburgh does it beautifully, and there is real depth of confusion and affection in Charlotte Parry’s Tina. Chuck in some nice Pinterish menace from Teddy (a brilliantly odd Stephen Tompkinson) and a remarkable turn from American Erik Odom as Tim, all adolescent longing and spurting violence. So the two hours, briskly directed by Katharine Farmer, are certainly watchable. As to the author’s political point about unmanageable, wasteful oversupply , disgusting industrial farming and resentment of Federal regulatory jobsworths, they are discernible, but not really central. Top marks for Carla Goodman’s credibly rundown kitchen set, though, and sound designer John Leonard’s spectacular thunder, porcine stampedes and pop radio.
box office 0844 264 2140 to 21 Nov

rating:   three   3 Meece Rating

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October 27, 2015 · 11:46 pm

HUSBANDS AND SONS NT Dorfman, SE1

THE PEOPLE OF THE PITS
Tender, fierce, intelligent and humane, this superb production reminds us that D.H.Lawrence was at his best a great interpreter of 20th century change. Years before the showy hysteria of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (heaven knows why the BBC chose the worst of his works to dramatize) he wrote plays about his Nottinghamshire pit village, vivid with understanding humanity, humble observation and pity. Here are themes of marriage and pride, trapped lives and rich communities, possessive fearful mothers and feckless endangered sons. Here is class and money and the yearning for art and the painful the rift between generations when education takes the young out of manual work. Here too, noted with generosity, is the increasing independence of women.
Three separate plays are superbly sewn together by Ben Power and presented in the round, village households lying before us schematic but detailed in another fine Bunny Christie design complete with fires and candlelight and washtubs and kitchen tables. The families’ lives weave through lanes and kitchens a pattern of light and shade. The oldest play, the 1909 “A Collier’s Friday Night” is more of a sketch, with Lloyd Hutchinson as an ageing curmudgeon supping tea from a saucer in his pit-dirt and berating his wife (Julia Ford). Her eye is on their son , home from college talking of Rimbaud but forgetting to take the bread out of the oven; at one point he interrupts the father’s snorting wash-down with the announcement “Fancy! Swinburne’s dead!”.
A still more possessive mother is up at the Gascoignes: Susan Brown magnificent as the contemptusous mother-in-law of prim Minnie (a finely tuned Louise Brealey) who is annoyed at the infantile helplessness of her handsome new husband Luther, not to mention the fact that he’s got the neighbour’s daughter up the duff. Finally, up the road is Anne-Marie Duff electric in the most troubled role as Lizzie Holroyd, victim of a drunken husband she cannot stop loving and hating.

With unobtrusive skill, Power and director Marianne Elliott weave it together, occasionally letting the families meet or refer to one another without diluting the individual stories (Hutchinson’s grumpy patriarch brings home the drunken Holroyd, who stays asleep on their outside lavatory during the other family’s latest row). The intercutting and counterpoint of emotional tides and themes is reminiscent , in a very good way, of the best soap opera direction (Excavation Street, perhaps) . But pure theatre are the moments when all the emotions gather silently against a scratchy plaintive record they all might hear, or a Lawrentian poem from lonely clever Ernest in the dusk.

Flashing rattling indications remind us of the mine that dominates their lives; the accents, thee’s and tha’s and nays and nivers, are pitch-perfect (my Mum was from thereabouts, and did it sometimes). A lost world rises before us, every voice in it ringing true with the sad, sweet music of humanity.
box office 0207 452 3000 to 10 Feb
co-production with The Royal Exchange Theatre

rating four

4 Meece Rating

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October 27, 2015 · 10:32 pm

ROOSEVELVIS Royal Court, SW1

THE PRESIDENT OR THE POP STAR? CHOOSE YOUR ROLE MODEL, GIRL!

It’s a portmanteau of Theodore Roosevelt and Elvis Presley. And, one must sorrowfully surmise, was lit upon by The Team, a collaborative group, mainly for the sake of using that gamesome centaur of a title. Not too bad an idea, though, to have the spirits of two national heroes competing to hearten a shy, depressed citizen of today on a road trip. As if we were to portray a struggle between Churchill and John Lennon to offer life-coaching on the A 14 .

The heroine here is Ann (Libby King), meat-packing factory worker in South Dakota, who holds imaginary conversations with her alternative persona as Elvis, longs for lesbian love, and welcomes to her apartment the more adventurous ourdoorsy Brenda (Kristen Sieh) who she has met online and who is a bit Roosevelt. There’s an introduction in which they run us through a few details of their alter egos’ lives , in full drag including Brenda in sidewhiskers and bucksins. Then we find them on a middling-unsuccessful romantic campervan weekend to Mount Rushmore.

Brenda finally reproves Ann for being “unbrave”. In this sequence, and others, they spend a lot of time passive, watching bits of pre-created location film of their own activities on screens around the stage: theatre for the selfie generation. It does at least give them time to hop in and out of the costumes of their personae: Elvis’ is simple enough given Ann’s macho outfits and “dude underwear”, but Sieh has some sharp quick-changes into buckskins and sidewhiskers.
For most of the 95 minutes Ann is alone, going crosscountry to Graceland to show she is not unbrave; we gradually work out that the sidewhiskered Brenda now exists only in Ann’s head, ever at her side leaping around punching video-screen buffalo or delivering inspiring Roosevelt quotes. Conveniently, the real Elvis did love the President’s line about “great and generous emotion, high pride, stern belief, lofty enthusiasm”. Finally they fall out, Roosevelt calling Elvis “degenerate” and lazy, Elvis snarling “Rich kid!” and whining that he couldn’t have done any better with his life after coming from a family of “dirt farmers”. The message, unsubtly and repeatedly hammered home, is that there are two kinds of America, and that each of us as Whitman says “contains multitudes”.
Oh, and part of Ann’s problem is that she’s ashamed of being gay. The real Brenda, reappearing on the phone at Ann’s lowest moment, turns out to be a chilly cow anyway, telling her she’s “depressed” and that no, she never gave her much of a thought after that camping weekend. One finale inevitably references them as Thelma and Louise going over the Grand Canyon, the other has Ann glumly reaching Graceland.
The laborious whimsy wears thin, and there’s a a skill deficit. Ann’s voice and body language simply do not change enough between being herself and being Elvis, though the script needs her to do it moment to moment. Sieh as Roosevelt has created an accent so bafflingly odd (an idea of late-19c American Toff) that it grates into irrelevance. . She is, though, at least physically adept, spurting with energy and a good comic mover in the imaginary Roosevelt’s odd dance sequences. King, though more real, offers only a sweet one-note melancholy with underpowered Elvis moments. In the end, she has a speech of proper strength. But only the one.

box office 020 7565 5000 to 14 Nov
rating two   2 meece rating

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October 26, 2015 · 1:24 am

ROOSEVELVIS Royal Court, SW1

PRESIDENT OR POP KING?  WHO HOLDS THE SECRET OFLIFE?

It’s a portmanteau of Theodore Roosevelt and Elvis Presley. And, one must sorrowfully surmise, was lit upon by The Team, a collaborative group, mainly for the sake of using that gamesome centaur of a title. Not too bad an idea, though, to have the spirits of two national heroes competing to hearten a shy, depressed citizen of today on a road trip. As if we were to portray a struggle between Churchill and John Lennon to offer life-coaching on the A 14 .

ThE heroine here is Ann (Libby King),  a shy gay meat-packing factory worker in South Dakota, who holds imaginary conversations with her alternative persona as Elvis, longs for  love, and welcomes to her apartment the more adventurous ourdoorsy Brenda (Kristen Sieh) who she has met online and who is a bit Roosevelt. There’s an introduction in which they run us through a few details of their alter egos’ lives , in full drag including Brenda in sidewhiskers and bucksins. Then we find them on a middling-unsuccessful romantic campervan weekend to Mount Rushmore.

Brenda finally reproves Ann for being “unbrave”. In this sequence, and others, they spend a lot of time passive, watching bits of pre-created location film of their own activities on screens around the stage: theatre for the selfie generation. It does at least give them time to hop in and out of the costumes of their personae: Elvis’ is simple enough given Ann’s macho outfits and “dude underwear”, but Sieh has some sharp quick-changes into buckskins and sidewhiskers.
For most of the 95 minutes Ann is alone, going crosscountry to Graceland to show she is not unbrave; we gradually work out that the sidewhiskered Brenda now exists only in Ann’s head, ever at her side leaping around punching video-screen buffalo or delivering inspiring Roosevelt quotes. Conveniently, the real Elvis did love the President’s line about “great and generous emotion, high pride, stern belief, lofty enthusiasm”. Finally they fall out, Roosevelt calling Elvis “degenerate” and lazy, Elvis snarling “Rich kid!” and whining that he couldn’t have done any better with his life after coming from a family of “dirt farmers”. The message, unsubtly and repeatedly hammered home, is that there are two kinds of America, and that each of us as Whitman says “contains multitudes”.
Oh, and part of Ann’s problem is that she’s ashamed of being gay. The real Brenda, reappearing on the phone at Ann’s lowest moment, turns out to be a chilly cow anyway, telling her she’s “depressed” and that no, she never gave her much of a thought after that camping weekend. One finale inevitably references them as Thelma and Louise going over the Grand Canyon, the other has Ann glumly reaching Graceland.
The laborious whimsy wears thin, and there’s a a skill deficit. Ann’s voice and body language simply do not change enough between being herself and being Elvis, though the script needs her to do it moment to moment. Sieh as Roosevelt has created an accent so bafflingly odd (an idea of late-19c American Toff) that it grates into irrelevance. . She is, though, at least physically adept, spurting with energy and a good comic mover in the imaginary Roosevelt’s odd dance sequences. King, though more real, offers only a sweet one-note melancholy with underpowered Elvis moments. In the end, she has a speech of proper strength. But only the one.

box office 020 7565 5000 to 14 Nov
rating two

2 meece rating

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October 23, 2015 · 11:27 am

GASLIGHT Royal, Northampton

‘I MUST CLING TO MY HUSBAND!”  OH NO YOU MUSTN’T…  HE’S IN THE ATTIC…
James Dacre’s leadership of this twin theatre is certainly lively: a dark Oklahoma, King John in Magna Carta year, Arthur Miller’s forgotten The Hook (cheekily, since then Radio 4 has been claiming the “first” production). Add a powerful Brave New World, and now to ring the changes, a preposterously melodramatic , delightfully nasty neo-Victorian melodrama by Patrick Hamilton. Who is better known for bleak 30’s and 40’s novels like Hangover Square and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

GASLIGHT itself is famous for the 1940 adn 1944 films, with Anton Walbrook and then Charles Boyer as the husband who convinces his fragile wife she is going mad, by hiding her things and fiddling with the gas pressure in a secret attic when he’s supposed to be out. It gave the psychiatric profession the term “gaslighting” for manipulative creating of self-doubt in another. The film crept so deep into the national psyche that a memorable pastiche in Round The Horne had Kenneth Williams in Armpit Theatre as the villain.
But this is the original play, realized with gleeful relish by director Lucy Bailey, and a quite brilliant set by William Dudley . It’s a gloomy drawing-room with uneasily slanted doors, intermittently transparent walls, and a ceiling which flares upwards at an angle to reveal horrid stairs and attics whenever necessary. The story is markedly different from the film: not least because the hapless Bella knows from the very start, that her husband is upstairs, and it’s him fiddling with the gas pressure. His emotional manipulation over her “madness” is more overt and harshly verbal; from the opening moments poor Bella (beautifully played straight and poignantly wounded by Tara Fitzgerald) is clearly a tormented victim of a Jonathan Firth who as Jack feels more like something out of Orton or Pinter in their nastier moods. It’s chillingly realistic, and very true to Hamilton’s novelistic vision in its uncompromising portrait of emotional bullying.
Rather less realistic is the arrival of a curiously stilted old police inspector (Paul Hunter) who reveals the husband’s brutal back-story and fiddles about forcing desk drawers: one could wonder by Bailey didn’t cut a bit of his repetitive and dated character-act wittering, and if it gets a transfer (which it 75% deserves) I hope she does.
For a time Bella nobly says “I must cling to my husband!” like a proper old-style missus, and refuses to co-operate; but once assured that he is not only a murderer but “has an interest in unemployed actresses” she goes right off the clinging idea. A very Patrick Hamilton woman: murder fine, adultery not so much. By the end of Act 1 the jocose old copper has informed her that she is married to a “tolerably dangerous” man; thereafter expect no modernistic volte-face to change that judgement.
Yet for all the clunkiness, and some slow passages, Bailey’s production has proper grip and power, rising to a final twisted revenge from Bella , superbly done by Fitzgerald, which had the matinee audience giggling with relief. And then a design moment which made us gulp. Hokum, yes: but Reader, I swallowed it…

BOX OFFICE 01604 624811 http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk to 31 Oct

RATING three  3 Meece Rating

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October 20, 2015 · 10:41 pm

DARK TOURISM Park Theatre, N4

CELEBRITY CULTURE DECODED – FURIOUSLY

I’m a bit late on the curve catching this, but it runs all week with two more matinees, so Roll up! Shudder as you savour the freakish world of celebrity PR agents, tup’n tell journalism, fake reality-shows, slut-shaming, and career dieting . Meet some of the most topically revolting of contemporary male characters: all but one equipped with seriously wrong beards, from the Mark Thompson Bristle to the Russell Brand Silkie. Applaud the author’s creation of four cracking female parts, alongside and agin these monsters.
Daniel Dingsdale, in his first and furiously eloquent full-length play, is a bit too discursive in the characters’ rants against (and for!) the cult of vapid fame, the cynical construction of narratives fed to media, and the general decline of culture, taste, kindness and modesty. But they’re very fine rants. He says in his notes that these people are heightened and bastardized amalgamations of reality, but it’s my world too, and some are credible verging on libellous…
It begins on air with two comedy DJs  – Milton a loghorreic druggy sex addict  smartarse with long hair (Huw Parmenter) , the other, Rob (Tom Maller)  a thuggy oaf. Decode that if you will. Parmenter and Maller are so accurate in tone that I actually started hating them (a few in the matinee audience booed the curtain call, which is a tribute). They riff an ooh-arent we-naughty revelation about Milton’s night with childrens TV presenter Becky, who as a result gets headlined BECKY BUMLOVE in the tabloids, is suspended and humiliated. Milton’s PR agent is Rick (Damien Lyne),  whose wolfish devotion to the dark arts is allowed, interestingly, to waver and develop into self-disgust as the disaster rolls on. His assistant Max, however, is pure, venomous manic evil, and the author plays the part himself with a sinister Brylcreemed hairstyle I devoutly hope is for stage-use only.
They set up a meeting in which, with a tabloid vixen at hand, Milton is to apologize and Becky forgive. It goes violently wrong (Dingsdale likes a showdown every ten minutes. – tiring but usually exciting) . Wronger still when some sex tapes emerge and the second act twists begin.

What I like is the author’s skill and intelligence in presenting four distinct types of young female fame, each falling foul of prurient misogyny.  Becky (a sweet Josie Dunn) is clean girl-next-door CBBC type, not looking for tabloid fame, but expected to be sexless: she loses her job and more.  Jenny is a serious actress, stalling in her career, fearing invisibility and using Rick as helpmeet: Carol is a fearful Fleet Street cynic who despises the other women and Gemma, a pout-perfect, brainlessly cunning X- for-Essex autotunie, is beautifully played, down to the last toothy smile and skip, by Tamaryn Payne: a born comedienne of whom we shall hear more.
Not a perfect play, it could do with a trim and less glee in its own eloquence, but I hope it finds bigger stages.  The author certainly will: not least because his willingness to work up narrative twists is refreshingly rare in a play so furious in its message.
box office 0207 870 6876 to 24 oct
rating three     3 Meece Rating

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October 18, 2015 · 5:53 pm

JANE WENHAM, THE WITCH OF WALKERN Touring

Touring Mouse wide

TOURING NEAR YOU;  RICH DARK OOZING EVIL AND FEMINIST DEFIANCE

A fierce bleak play, this. Set in 1712 but, taking the wider world as it is, not un-topical: hangings, tortures, religion turned into a sour power-trip. Here are superstitious dreads and demonization of anyone different, whether homosexual, eccentric or just female. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’ reimagining of one of the last witch-trials in England gives us a stimulatingly nasty picture of a village suffering from an oppressive, sly, sadistic hysteria, whipped up by bad sexual secrets and the neurotic, unhinged virginal zealotry of the vicar. The devil hangs over it, and not only in the imagination of hunched crones fantasising over a fire-pit about demonic carnality: rather like the book-group from hell which can’t move on from Fifty Shades of Grey.

It’s strong stuff, and Ria Parry’s stark direction serves it well (though some scenes go on a shade too long, and the opening could be clearer. We need to know what has just happened: the hanging of a “witch” whose young daughter Ann (a touching, troubling performance by Hannah Hutch) is grieving her, while the locals chunter prurient satisfaction and blame the dead woman for all the local evils, notably a wife’s repeated miscarriages.
Cut to a strong scene with an elderly Bishop (David Acton), an educated man who dismisses necromancy as “tricks of the light” and nonsense, versus the worryingly stiff young vicar (Tim Delap) who prates“thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. He has his eye on Jane Wenham, a reclusive elderly herbalist he thinks is next up for the witch-pricker and the gallows , because she has a pet cockerel which might be Satan. The Bishop wearily tries to dissuade him. But lest we canonize him too soon, it appears that he himself is taking advantage of Kemi Martha (Cat Simmons) a freed slave-woman who is his housekeeper and bedmate.
Meanwhile in the village the husband of the miscarrying woman is having a fling with the tavern-keeper, and poor lonely Ann has been giving herself unjoyfully to all comers in the barn. But she confides in the seemingly kindly Jane Wenham that her sexual desire is actually for women, and is furiously shooed away as “misshapen”. So when a child drowns, and the sly old demon-fantasisers (Judith Coke brilliantly sinister as Priddy) help the vicar to close the net round Jane, Ann vengefully joins the accusers. The final scenes with Amanda Bellamy as the tormented but defiant Wenham are fast, powerful and important.

It’s a rich dark mix : I can see why Lenkiewicz threw in the lesbianism, not to mention the vicar’s sudden burst of lust and the bishop’s ex-slave. It does paint a complete picture of sexually driven hysteria and exploitation, but these elements make it veer off-piste for a while. As for the references to child abuse and Blind Priddy’s robust description of the devil’s “kingo like a broom handle” in either a dream or a memory, it pulls no punches. As a result of which, I am sorry to say, one of its rural tour dates, the private Ipswich High School for Girls, was panickily cancelled on the pretext of bad language and “safeguarding”.
But you know what? If ever there was a show that GCSE and sixth-form girls needed to see – this being both the Twilight fiction generation and one bombarded with both online porn fantasy and news footage of Iranian hangings – here it is. Yes, you’d need decent thoughtful teachers to run serious discussions and analyses straight afterwards. But to ban it altogether feels worryingly early-60s. Even then, I hope and believe my convent school would (with a gulp) have let it through.

bookings and tour dates http://www.outofjoint.co.uk
rating four  4 Meece Rating

Co- production by Out of Joint, Watford Palace Theatre and Arcola, touring in association with Eastern Angles. I saw it at Woodbridge: next up, West Yorkshire Playhouse, 21-24 Oct, then Liverpool Everyman, Bristol Tobacco Factory, Salisbury, and Arcola from 5 Jan.

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October 15, 2015 · 11:40 am

A WOLF IN SNAKESKIN SHOES Tricycle, NW6

SINS OF A PREACHER-MAN 

Admit it, ladies. Within the most modestly-clothed and lipstickless of us pale white matrons, there lurks a sneaky wish to be – just for an hour or two – poured into a tight snakeskin dress, rechristened “Peaches”, and able to snarl “When God made me She broke the mould – put an earthquake in the sway of my hips, a hurricane in the curve of my stride and a tornado in the whip of my hair…Even when I’m a disaster, I’m a natural disaster,! This body is a gift and I will unwrap it as much as I see fit. I am a prize! Uh-huh!”. So thank you, Adjoa Andoh, for the brief fantasy. You did it for all of us.
And thanks to Sharon D.Clarke for the other female role model, the majestic pastor’s wife, first drumming up support in a rich gospel contralto for her venal fraudulent husband (“The preacher who can reach ya and teach ya..”) and then defying him. Oh yes, the women win all right in Marcus Gardley’s poetically eloquent, often peculiar, farcical-satirical echo of Moliere’s Tartuffe tale of a hypocritical cleric exploiting a bourgeois family whose head is dying and fears hell .
A problem is that this burst of manic female energy – and the full enslavement and rebellion of the family against Apostle Tardimus Toof – doesn’t happen until the far more interesting second act. There is some pleasure earlier on, not least because Toof is the magnificent Lucian Msamati – the RSC’s black Iago, no less. He does the villain proud in pointy shoes, hellfire sermons, weasel charm and correct terror of his majestic wife. He inveigles himself into the household : there’s Wil Johnson as the ailing Organdy, a gay son, the mistress Peaches, and a tribal-hip daughter, born Britney but self-styled “Africa Adewunme Wakajawaka X’tine. It means she who laughs like the hyena, bathes like the hippo, hunts like the lioness and walks like the dodo bird in the nighttime”. Good black-on-black mockery, though it doesn’t contribute much to the actual story.
The problem with that first act is that many such terrific lines and jokes are – despite the director being the normally savvy Indhu Rubasingham – half-buried under far too much shouting. And, once the Mexican maid joins in , under an overly intense outbreak of comedy accents at full volume. The seduction plot gets buried , as do the financial issues (which Moliere so cherished). Msamati gives his lines plenty of light and shade, but Wil Johnson needs to take the volume down six notches, as do several others in that section. I kept wanting to love the show for its exuberance, and just failing.

Until the second act. The duel and reconciliation of Peaches and the pastor’s wife is splendid, and there is an unmissable, satirically ferocious attempt by Toof to exorcise the son’s gayness with an exorcism banishing “ponytails and painted nails, muscle tees, and Elton John CDs. Except the LIon King. I dispatch angels” – he cries “ to uncross your legs, make you sit through Saving Private Ryan and break things for no apparent reason..”
See? I’m off again, quoting, because Gardley writes like a good angel. And the second act really is a treat. Not least because – no spoilers – there is not only a full-on farcical eavesdrop sequence, but a climax: a genuinely shocking, perilously cynical, ferociously political and dismaying Arturo Ui moment. Which nobody expected. And which works.
box office 0207 328 1000 to 14 November
rating three

3 Meece Rating

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October 12, 2015 · 10:50 pm

THE FIRST MAN Jermyn St Theatre, SW1

EUGENE O’NEILL,  EARLY AND IMPASSIONED…

Well, God bless the little Jermyn. Director and AD Antony Biggs, an unwearying ferret of lost drama, has dug up another barnstorming early 20c number: a UK premiere, no less, from lEugene O’Neill. The author, it seems, didn’t much rate it in 1922, and went on to success with more famous The Hairy Ape (about to run at the Old Vic). But on this smaller stage, with an impressive cast of 12 , the forgotten work flares into savage, passionate life.

Opening with a familial “unfortunate tea” in a Connecticut front room, it hurtles rapidly into scenes so emotionally violent, visceral and verbally shocking that you hang onto the arms of your seat. After a brief interval, a looming firelit tension punctuated by eerie wolf-howls of anguish fractures in turn into jagged fury, before a final funeral scene puts the lid on it with the hero repeatedly seeming to charge like a maddened bull at an unnerved group of relatives wincing in unison. Unsayably shocking things are said, enormous dependencies and betrayals hurled around as a smalltown earthquake rips up family decorum.

It may be this intensity, growing too fiercely and fast, which made O’Neill shove it back in the drawer after early outings. Or it may have been that Curtis’ worst remarks had too much echo in his own family life. But it’s a pity, because it has all the furious vigour of its decade: a postwar loosening of gender expectations and a hysterical pursuit of science. Against a clever impressionistic set of curtains daubed with Lascaux cave drawings Adam Jackson-Smith is Curtis, a Post-Darwinian anthropologist off to search the Gobi desert for the Missing Link between ape and man. His wife Martha, played with dignified, humorous authority by Charlotte Asprey, usually travels with him as “a chum, a comrade…more efficient than a whole staff of assistants and secretaries”.
After losing two small children years before, they have agreed to seek what he calls “a more difficult beautiful happiness” than mere family life, which is suspiciously convenient to his ambitions . But his friend Bigelow (Alan Turkington) is a widower with children, and Martha at 38 now longs for a baby. The scene where she tells Curtis she is pregnant – after the awful tea-party with his stifling family who hate her for being a “Westerner” – has him rivetingly losing all decent control and shouting “I cannot understand! I depend on you! Treachery! Ruining our life!” “YOUR life” she says reasonably, and he goes wilder still with “There are doctors….”. Asprey and Jackson-Smith strike violent sparks off one another in furious, incompatible mutual need: it’s electrifying.

Then we meet the family again (a very fine ensemble, with flares of salty character for every one of the eight) lurking by a dim fire hearing the keening howls of a proper Victorian-style obstetric horror-labour, brilliantly sound-designed by David Gregory to be not quite human. There’s even the looming presence of an old Aunt Elizabeth in black bombazine in the corner ( Lynette Edwards. and she gets her moment too).
The smalltown muttonheads have decided that Curtis’ weird attitude to the baby is not just because it sabotaged his work, but because it’s not his. He is unaware that they think this, and it feeds a fearful melodramatic showdown after the ultimate disaster. The gulf between Curtis’ enormous – and creditably believable – agonies and desire for a “fine free life” and their smalltown worries is something nobody feels more strongly than him: “Your rabbit-hearted emotions! bread and butter passions!” he shouts.

And it is to the credit of this vigorous production – and the beautifully directed panic of the family – that pig as he is, you rather side with Curtis. Though if there’s an actual hero, it is definitely Martha. A name , I’d suspect, artfully chosen to echo Martyr. Epic stuff. A nugget of theatre history in two sharp, unflagging hours.

Box office 0207 287 2875 to 31 October

RATING   FOUR   4 Meece Rating
rating four

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October 8, 2015 · 10:43 pm

MEASURE FOR MEASURE Young Vic SE1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FEELS THE NEED FOR A SCRUB

Sex is at this play’s core. But it’s not sexy in the slightest. It’s a means of leverage, abuse, it’s a crime, a threat. Each of the 50 or so plastic sex dolls strewn across the stage make you want to stew in hot bleach. You can taste the immorality of this Vienna.

So potent, the Duke withdraws and leaves his pious deputy in charge. In his ruthless clampdown – and via an acrobatic twist of logic – he attempts to rape a nun,   a young woman desperate to spare her brother from execution.

Like the best of Shakespeare, though, this is a feat achieved through fierce dialogue, and deft delivery. For the seasoned actors in this production, its disturbing sexuality and combative dialogue are its greatest asset. Not the ludicrous, childish, unoriginal and baffling production.  The sight of Isabella (the outstanding Romola Garai) r fending off of the maddening holy gropes of the puritanical Angelo (terrifyingly meek and quietly vicious Paul Ready) is a great gun-battle of Shakespearean acting. Every ludicrous train of perverted thought beautifully conveyed. Likewise Tom Edden (off of One Man Two Guvnor’s, here as Pompey) revives even the stalest of Jacobean gags and Zubin Varla (Duke Vincentio) nicely marries the camp and the dramatic (perhaps largely due to having a voice like Kenneth Williams doing a Larry Olivier impression?)

This play’s woeful undoing, however, is its director.  Joe Hill-Gibbins appears bored by the wicked story, the handful of thrilling performances and black humour. Just has he did in Edward II at the National.  Key moments of the play are delivered backstage, or just ever so slightly out of view. Our saving grace is a member of the cast with a camera hooked up to a baffling projection system.   For large tracts of the play, nothing happens on stage, and the entire auditorium is just watching a basic projection. A screaming, furious performance from Romola Garai is essentially skyped* to us from backstage for absolutely no good reason whatsoever. If you’ve never seen a camera or a video, this might tickle you nicely. Otherwise it proves to be an absolute shafting of the theatrical experience.

The staging is at its best when simple. Two actors, in dialogue, with nothing but the quiet stage. Brilliance is conjured. The flinging of sex dolls, flickering video streams and messy direction are nothing compared to the unobstructed power of the central performances.   It’s a dark and murky play – a success, despite the best intentions of its director.
*I’ve also, incidentally, seen better camerawork from a 4 year old.

4 mice (just)   4 Meece Rating

Until 14th November
Box Office 020 7922 2922

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October 7, 2015 · 11:50 pm

TEDDY FERRARA Donmar, WC1

QUEER ON CAMPUS,  THE 21c BLUES

Welcome to our college! Meet the students, America’s future. Or, as depicted in Christopher Shinn’s new play, a selection of the most sexually rampant, morally confused, smartphone-addicted and emotionally immature, so that as Matthew Marsh’s fed-up college President observes, “These kids are f—ing infants!”.
They also variously tend to suffer from a touching belief that the answer is tequila shots, random blow-jobs in the car park, opting for 20c literature because “the books are shorter so there’s more time to look at porn” and outbreaks of intense student politics by committee, campus journalism or loudhailer. Ah, college days! It’s Catcher in the Rye for Generation Porn.
But although Shinn’s characterization veers towards caricature at times, none of these poor kids deserves to be made more miserable than they naturally make themselves, and the inspiration of the play was serious: several suicides in US colleges, notably that of Tyler Clementi whose gay encounter in his college dorm was secretly filmed on a webcam and put online by his nasty git of a roommate.
Here, the victim of a parallel intrusion is Teddy Ferrara, played with inspired runty, weirdo geekiness by Ryan McParland. He spends a lot of time – before the real filmed encounter – assuaging his frustration by unzipping his flies and going for it on exhibitionist chatrooms. Meanwhile, ambitious Gabe (Luke Newberry) is running the LGBTQ group to |”create a community outside of partying”, and is touchingly in love with Drew ( a dark, intense Oliver Johnstone) who runs the news-sheet and is doing a splash claiming that last year’s suicide was secretly gay, so it’s not just a youthful tragedy but a political issue about the college being “deadly” to the diverse.
This is the belief of the ferocious lecturer Ellen (Pamela Nomvete, a sort of Diane Abbott on speed) and campaigners like transgender Jaq and disabled Jay. The campus, to them is rife with “heteronormative micro-aggressions”, which in English means that gay, lesbian, transgender or gender-fluid students – even when not actually bullied – are repeatedly upset by indications that they are in a minority. The body renames itself the Social Justice Committee because the word diversity is “too ocular”, and demands a “safe” syllabus free of anything which might upset anyone ever (some universities are getting to this point in Britain, so stop giggling). They want an extra set of gender-neutral lavatories throughout campus because transgender or variant students feel “unsafe in binary spaces”.

There’s a lot about that word “safe”: it adds to the general sense that decent, reasonable tolerance can shade into voluntary infantilism and victimhood. ln the funniest scene of an earnest evening, the College President tries to lead a meeting about it and digs himself helplessly into a hole. Marsh does it superbly: but while in the US the character was seen as satirical, the awful thing is that the middle-aged UK heart rather warms to the poor devil.
The plot is driven by emotion ,sexual energy and constant texting. Gabe is friendly with the big, straight, handsome Tim – Nathan Wiley, gleaming with dumbo-jock health. So Drew is jealous. He is desired by Nicky, his chief reporter (Kadiff Kirwan) who when the real lovers break up, chases Gabe, while Drew gets straight Tim to unbutton. There’s a demo in memory of Teddy, who dramatically bows out at the end of Act 1 (Dominic Cooke’s direction melds in Donmar-classy style with Hildegarde Bechtler’s bleak EveryCollege set).

The cast skilfully balance touching pained youthfulness and infuriating daftness, with Newberry in particular growing through the play. And the closing moments, with a disingenuous canonization of Teddy, throw a bracing gloss of cynicism over the whole farrago. But there are limits to how much time you can spend with self-absorbed nitwits, and Mr Cooke is wise to keep it half an hour brisker than it ran in Chicago.
box office 0844 871 7624 to 5 December
Supported by the John Browne Charitable Trust, I & C Sellars and Kathleen J Yoh, with Principal Sponsor Barclays.
Rating three    3 Meece Rating

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October 6, 2015 · 12:12 am

THE SMALLEST SHOW ON EARTH Mercury, Colchester & Touring

A FROLIC…

This is an artful wheeze. Take the story from the sunniest of films, a 1957 cheer-up British Lion starring Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford and Bernard Miles. Bolt on some classic Irving Berlin songs, and you’ve jukeboxed a stage musical. Director-writer Thom Sutherland has done this – fresh from a London success with Grand Hotel – for a cheerful touring show with a six-piece band. I saw it at the Mercury, which produces it, before it squares its shoulders and toots off round the country. A thin Monday house was hard to stir, but the frolicking energy of the cast and the sheer good-humoured Ealingness of the story got us going. Hard not to, with so much help from the Berlin tunes and lyrics.
The story sees a struggling screenwriter and his wife – Haydn Oakley and Laura Pitt-Pulford (so glorious lately in Seven Brides) – unexpectedly inheriting from disreputable Uncle Simon a fleapit cinema in Sloughborough (“the Venice of England, if Venice had fewer canals and more lino factories”). It has an ageing ticket-lady Mrs Fazackalee, her nerdy son Tom, and the drunken projectionist Percy. The blustering owner of the big rival cinema wants to buy it as a car park, together with his scheming wife Ethel (Ricky Butt, a born show-stealer). Their daughter Marlene rebels and joins the Bijou lot, who restore the cinema’s fortunes and honour its past as a music-hall by doing burlesque in the interval.

The scope for tap breaks and leaping ensemble choreography (by Lee Proud) is obvious, and done with ferocious verve from the very first scene in the Railway Arms, with Mrs F. on the piano and Uncle Simon drinking himself to death on a yard of ale while the rest of the cast leap on tables. There are explosions of energy all through, notably a fabulous cleaning-up scene (the set by David Woodhead is a gorgeous thing of barley-sugar-pillars, red velvet, portable townscapes and a neatly revolving staircase). A charming romantic tap shows off Tom and Marlene : Christina Bennington and Sam O”Rourke, the latter endearingly singing about stepping out in top hat and tails while actually wearing a duffle-coat with his woolly gloves on strings through the sleeves. And there’s much carolling of “Always” from the leads: Pitt-Pulford’s voice is pure honey.

As for the interval performances Matthew Crowe, having somewhat overdone the overemphasis as the dopey trainee solicitor, suddenly comes into his own as a full-on drag artiste in a bustle. And Bennington turns shy Marlene into a high-octane belter leading a spirited fan-dance with fans made, naturally, of celluloid film strips.

But as in the days of Rutherford and Miles it’s the oldies who walk off with it: Liza Goddard turns the ticket-seller into a middle-aged but game blonde mourning her boozy husband and doting on a pampered cat (“He can’t chase the rats, he’s allergic to animal hair”). Her “How deep is the Ocean” is genuinely affecting, properly cracked in character. And Brian Capron – completely unrecognizable as my all-time favourite Coronation Street villain – is a grand Percy Quill.
Regarding musical form, it can’t make the top table: Southerland and musical director Mark Aspinall use the old songs skilfully, with well-crafted dialogue breaks and attention to character, but in the first half songs tend to stop the action dead rather than move it on. The second half moves far better: and as the show moves on and grows, the first half will sharpen. And you can certainly go home whistling it. It’s Irving Berlin. You have to.
box office 01206 573948 to 10 Oct

then touring http://www.thesmallestshowonearth.co.uk/    Touring Mouse wide

rating three    3 Meece Rating

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October 2, 2015 · 11:57 am

EVENTIDE Arcola, E8

THE GREATNESS OF SMALL LIVES

We are in a pub garden in rural Hampshire, where landlord John is gathering logs for the fire (in high summer, “it’s part of what people come for”), and telling a joke about a ferret and a blow-job to cheer up Mark, a lanky, sad youth. Along comes Liz the bravely prattling church organist. They talk. A year later, they meet again. That’s all. But it is immense.
Sometimes a new playwright emerges bringing not only skill, but a determination to offer a perspective and preoccupation outside the mainstream of dramatic, and indeed national, discourse.  Barney Norris’ theme is unregarded lives in rural communities: villages hollowed out by alien money, agribusiness and a hypermobile world.   But his concern is neither agitprop nor nostalgia, simply an exploraion of how people inwardly navigate the rolling waves of life.
Norris first full play, Visitors, was a quietly, beautifully, tragic reflection on loss and memory, with an old farm couple at its heart. This time the three protagonists are on the face of it less vulnerable  as they  confront the universal problem of how life plods or races past you, unstoppable, unseizable except in fragments. It is also about the consolation of mere human interaction: chats in a drab pub garden with a semi-stranger.   But by pretending to no grandiosity Norris reaches out further and deeper – as Jez Butterworth did in the more swashbuckling JERUSALEM – into tradition, belief, identity, love, and the immense question of how anyone finds a place on a fast-turning uncaring globe. All this through jokey boozing John, young Mark the road-mender and odd-job labourer, and nervy Liz, who drives two hours to play the moribund church organ because it’s the only gig she can get.
The trio are variously likeable, and wholly believable (I find it hard to think of them as actors cven now, but they are James Doherty, Hasan Dixon and Ellie Piercy, perfect casting by director Alice Hamilton). They talk in the pub garden – first over a morning and evening, then a year later. At one point, two of them remember a verse from “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” and tears rise; but Norris turns the mood in seconds to a shock laugh and a crassness and breach. It is not without outside incident : it’s the landlord’s last day, he having sold to a chain after his wife left: the same morning sees the funeral of young Mark’s old schoolfriend, which he is missing because he needs the council work of repairing the war memorial she crashed into. “It’s for the centenary” he says; and skinny in his work boots, fresh from sleeping alongside motorways in the van he seems an modern heir of those WW1 recruits. In the second act Mark has sorted out his life, John returns just for a day, still lost, and Liz is giving up organ playing.

None of them are yokels: John’s conversation, when not ferret-based, is sharp, literate, poetic and aware, and Mark has a restless wish to know more of the world and “fill up his bookcase from down at the Sue Ryder”. Both have travelled: indeed a sidelong delight of the play is Norris’ beautiful debunking of the great modern god Travel. John went to Nepal but “there’s only so many hours a day you can spend being fascinated by how foreign everything is”. Mark – now humbly learning FIlipino words off his work colleagues – came home from India after only a week having given his money to beggars. He was repelled in a proper, decent spirit by the filthy poverty. “I just thought, you cunt – coming over here like it’s an adventure, when it’s these people’s lives..Disrespectful, to be there staring at everything’. Superb.

box office 0207 503 1646 to 17 OCT then tour: Bury St Edmunds, Oxford, Salisbury, Bristol.
http://www.upinarms. org.uk
rating five

5 Meece Rating

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October 1, 2015 · 11:53 pm

MEDEA, Almeida, N1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS ANCIENT TRUTH IN A GLORIOUSLY DARK DIVORCE

“I can unmake you the same way I made you. I write the story, remember?” Rachel Cusk’s brilliant vision of Euripides’ Medea for the Almeida transforms the barbarian witch into a modern-day writer: but, just as the ancient Medea’s spells had immortal force, so the new Medea’s power with words, particularly her fearless refusal to compromise on the truth, alienates and terrifies all those around her, and endows her with the ability to change her own destiny – at the terrible price of her sons’ lives. However, in Cusk’s profoundly contemporary version, Medea doesn’t actually shed blood: after all, “There are more ways of killing a child than just stabbing it to death like some wild animal.” She commits an equally unthinkable act: she abandons them. And sure enough, her children die, just as surely as if she had butchered them with her bare hands as Euripides decreed. From an elegantly restrained (Pinteresque) opening scene, Cusk sets and maintains an atmosphere of brutal tension which lashes out regularly into loud, snarling rows, placing the family on the psychological torture-rack of a messy divorce to reap a whirlwind harvest: gender battles, marriage myths, bitter recriminations about mid-life crises, all delineated with savage realism. Elizabeth Barrett Browning may have lovingly termed Euripides “the human”, but in Medea he shows us all the sides of being human we are ashamed to acknowledge, the play’s finger placed unerringly on our darkest secrets, nastiest failings, and most vulnerable weaknesses.

One of this Medea’s surprise strengths is how closely it can follow Euripides despite its modern setting, with many vital details (the cursed necklace, Glauce’s burning by poison, Aegeus’s childlessness and Medea’s clever bargain for safety in return for a cure, even her final vindication by the power of the sun) lovingly and cleverly transposed by Cusk, despite the introduction of an entire new character (a Brazilian cleaner, acting as a more sympathetic Chorus) and plenty of new ideas. Even Cusk’s text, which bristles and glowers with four-letter-words of all hues, will suddenly chime intimately with the original when you least expect it. Above all, Jason (a debonair Justin Salinger) is as suave, self-serving and loathsome as always; a man keen to have his way, and not interested in being made to feel bad about it. It says much for the failure of modern feminism that Cusk didn’t need to update Jason whatsoever to make his opinions, and his position, absolutely believable for a modern audience.

Kate Fleetwood is mesmerising as Medea, a taut, sinous pillar of vengeful contempt, turning her fury directly on the audience, as well as Jason: “It gives you a thrill to watch me suffer. The less I pretend, the more of a kick you get.” Our society piles just as much pressure on an abandoned wife to accept her husband’s decision as the ancient Greeks did; a Chorus of yummy mummies swap school-gate gossip and condemn: “How could she not have known?” A sudden switch from prose to rhyming couplets from a divine hermaphrodite Messenger strikes an odd note at first, but listen closely: the big finale is as horrifying, and disturbing, as ever.

~ CHARLOTTE VALORI

Rating: five 5 Meece Rating

Until 14 November at the Almeida Theatre, Islington, as part of their GREEKS season. Box office: 020 7359 4404

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October 1, 2015 · 11:19 pm

ROARING TRADE Park Theatre , N4

MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO SOUR 

The setting is excellent . Terrible flashing screens of numbers, alerts, currencies; sometimes becoming a glass window onto a London scene made of banknotes and FT headlines, or at one memorable moment a park where a £ 20 butterfly floats past. As you sit down there is an equally horrible barking, jabbering unease of voices. This is a bond trading room, evoked in design by Grant Hicks, Alex Marshall, Chris Drohan and Douglas O”Connell’s video.

And – as we all now know rather too well, from Capital City on ‘90s telly to Enron to The Power of Yes and William Nicholson’s Crash! – they’re pretty horrible. Aggressive, ambitious, neurotically bound up in their fantasy world of real money, crazy bonuses and cruel or sexual banter fuelling the dark human sacrifice demanded by high-tech capitalism.

So this play – first aired a few years ago and now directed by Alan Cohen – always risked being a “Meh, so what’s new?”. Even though Steve Thompson , who wrote Damages, researched it and its people with a kind of compassionate horror, and introduces enough up-to-date references (Syria, Volkswagen) to make it modern. But in the event it is gripping because of the quality and depth in the performances. Nick Moran is Donny the working-class sharp lad trader, unforgivably jeered at as “scullery boy” by Olly, known as “Spoon” for his silver-spoon posh-Cambridge background, though not until Donny has treated him pretty horribly for most of the play. The cockney confidence of the one and the entitled, nervy arrogance of the other are beautifully done. Lesley Harcourt is the tough glamorous Jess, who will use both her steel-trap mind and her top button to win clients and make millions; there is perhaps not quite enough to see beneath her surface glitter and nastiness, or not until the final minutes. Michael McKelly is interesting as the battered, discontented older trader PJ who is leaving to have a life, and alone in the trading-room tries to start conversations about the outside world – global warming, spreadable butter, Tony Hancock, anything but deals.
Family lives are used to underline the arid horribleness of their long working days. PJ has a wife (Melanie Gutteridge) who is furious at the idea of his leaving, being wedded to the lifestyle: he protests that they have had three new lounge suites since they moved to the 7-bed house and he’s never sat on any of them, too tired; “trouble with being flash – she gets used to the stash and you’re stuck”. Donny has a teenage son Sean, and their interaction is one of the most poignantly depressing bits of the play.
So you’re with them all, all the way, and indeed pretty depressed, and there is an unfolding dramatic plot moment in the last half-hour (it’s 1 hr 45 including interval, which is about right). But the only conclusion is that it’s an awful way to live, and that you’re stuffed even if you try to leave. But they’re real, such people, and out there looking after everyone’s money. It would have been good to have more sense of that.
box office 0207 870 6876 to 24 oct
rating three

3 Meece Rating

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October 1, 2015 · 5:40 pm

CRUSH Richmond Theatre

JOLLY HOCKEYSTICKS!  

“Put on your navy knicks, pick up your hockey sticks – and bully-up, bully-up..”  Jeepers. I had completely forgotten that ritual “bully” of stick-bashing at the start of a vicious hockey encounter. But a friend of my youth persuaded me to sneak in to this peculiar, and not unengaging, new musical on the last leg of its short tour.  And there was much to see:  the crazed hockeystick tap routine, the sapphic  love duet in the locker room, and a barnstorming finale when the demise of the unrepentant demon headmistress  caused my friend sagely to think of Don Giovanni. – ” I like it when the goodies win but the villain goes down defiant. And the bit with the ghost of the dead headmistress – it’s the Commendatore”.

Not quite operatic, though. Taking the musical style , dances and barmy plot together, Maureen Chadwick and Kath Gotts’ show – directed by Anna Linstrum – is best described a schoolgirl-story Salad Days for the same-sex love generation.  A traditionally feminist ‘50s boarding school has been taken over by an unaccountably (till the end) fascist-retro headmistress (a vigorously strident Rosemary Ashe) who demands well drilled wives and mothers . She opens with the best number of the lot: girls to her are “The future mothers of the future Sons of England…breeders of our leaders, strong and hearty, never arty”.   She also gets a magnificent line about the dignified charity pupil Daimler (Brianna Ogunbawa) – “named no doubt after the stolen car in which her unfit mother conceived her!”.
Good Miss Austin (Sara Crowe) in grey plats and brogues resists her; two mysterious interlopers , played by Kirsty Malpass and James Meunier, the only man, turn out to be the dei ex machina of the rebellion , all the way to a truly bonkers denouement with writs plucked from bosoms , mistaken identity, and Brenda the Sneak being reformed, and doing a cartwheel to prove it.
There’s some larky dance (choreography by Richard Roe) , and odd sharp lines (“Schools without rules breed savages and socialists!”).  But a less Ealing-comedy , more 21c aspect is that our heroine Susan (Stephanie Clift) is in love, beyond mere crush, with lisping Camilla, and heartbreakingly betrayed when her paramour goes straight. Via a stonkingly insane dream sequence in a an imaginary London lesbian night club, with Meunier reappearing as a baritone Marlene Dietrich, she finds another girl to love. In full-on modern, non-crush style love such as Malory Towers never (at least openly) permitted. There’s a point being made here.
box office 0844 871 7651 to Saturday
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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