Monthly Archives: November 2015

November 28, 2015 · 2:32 pm

THE KNIGHT FROM NOWHERE Park 90, NW23

THE BELLS!  THE BELLS!  THE BOOMING!
“Where else” says an exasperated Sir Henry Irving , asked at the gates of Heaven to justify the profession which estranged him from his religious mother and cost him a wife and children, “Where else could a stuttering, sickly, bandy-legged boy from Somerset play kings and heroes?”. Fair enough. And he goes on to point out that his contribution helped to make the profession more respectable in a society still too prone to regard players as riff-raff.
Cards on the table, I nipped up the Piccadilly line to the Park theatre’s smaller studio, and Andrew Shepherd’s play partly because my own great-grandparents in family legend shared a stage with Irving once (no doubt somewhere near the back). My Granny, on her wedding night, was told by her upright spouse that it was lucky she remained “pure” in this low theatrical world and she must never speak of The Theatre again. Even after the knighted Irving, suspicion hung around it.
So what with the swagged red curtains and the fact that Shepherd, playing his hero himself, adopts a weird (though sadly accurate) prim Edwardian accent (“I will play Hemlet!”) it was one for me. It’s double-billed with an hour-long version of the melodramatic hokum which made his name – The Bells – but I saw only the 90-minute biographical piece, directed by Lucy Foster with many a flourish.
From his first entrance with a cry of “It is I!”, Irving is taken through his life’s highlights and disasters by the prim heavenly clerk (Simon Blake). His mother preaches hellfire on finding his volume of Shakespeare, he stutteringly forgets his only few lines as a “walking-gentleman” at the Sunderland Lyceum, slogs through twenty-plays-a-month rep, meets his various women, and marries one who disapproves, so he walks out on her and his unborn child when she snaps that he’s “Making a fool of himself” just after his big night emoting through The Bells.
He meets Ellen Terry, played as an appallingly actressy showoff by Angela Ferns (though she shows proper quality when she does an Ophelia scene). Most importantly, Shepherd gives us glimpses – though not enough – of what real novelties of quality Irving brought to the stage: his quieter-than-Kemble Hamlet, his controversially dignified Shylock, his reluctance to boom for booming’s sake. There are some nice lines (“If Shakespeare was meant to be farted you’re using the wrong hole”) and a good indication of the ongoing insults he received from George Bernard Shaw.

 

 

It’s not the first time this landmark late-Victorian moment in theatre has been material for modern imagination: Michael Punter’s spooky squib STAGEFRIGHT at Bury St Edmunds saw a petulant Irving and his house manager Bram Stoker (of Dracula fame) locked in the Lyceum overnight, and the same GBS tension was referred to there. Shepherd’s piece is interesting for lovers of theatre history , but becomes a bit too narrative “and-then-and-then”, and could profitably leave out one or two incidents.
But it’s Christmas, a time to call up ghosts and remember what lies beneath and behind the age of Rylance and McKellen (and indeed of Brian Blessed, when it comes to booming). And you get The Bells for the same ticket, if something even spookier, more retro and darkly murderous is your bag.
http://www.parktheatre.co.uk to 19 Dec
rating three   3 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE KNIGHT FROM NOWHERE Park 90, NW23

Filed under Theatre, Three Mice

Tagged as

November 26, 2015 · 11:41 pm

LITTLE EYOLF Almeida, NW3

SUNRISE TO STARLIGHT, A NORTHERN TRAGEDY

 

Under a bleak black mountain panorama, this is a shattering play about selfishness, mismatched love, and how grief and guilt can make you monstrously cruel unless it redeems you. It is not Henrik Ibsen’s best-known (though Antony Biggs at the Jermyn did a fine revival a few years back with Imogen Stubbs). But Richard Eyre, following his Hedda Gabler and a still-haunting adaptation of GHOSTS, brings the same deep sorrowing intelligence to bear in adapting and directing this.

 

 

He runs it (as before) straight through in eighty fine-balanced, emotionally gripping minutes. The same design team: Tim Hatley, with Peter Mumford’s vitally important lighting design, take a spare white stage from an opening sunrise beyond the peaks to the final starlit hope. Ibsen was an old man when he wrote it, well versed in its themes: inadequate marital love, the “law of change” which makes all things crumble and re-form, and the terrifying emotional vacuum of fin-de-siecle atheism. But here his catalyst is rawer and deeper: an innocent death.

 

 

Geeky writer Alfred (Jolyn Coy) has never quite meshed with his wife Rita (Lydia Leonard) ,a blazingly sexual, unsatisfied ball of need. He is still babyishly close to his half-sister Asta (Eve Ponsonby, touchingly conflicted beneath a sensible exterior). Rita resents her, and Asta herself finds it difficult to surrender to an adult love of Borgheim (Sam Hazeldine). As a practical road-building engineer the latter is the only sane and happy one – “the world is wonderful!” to him and he wants to share it.

 

Rita’s is desperate for Alfred’s embraces: needy, prowling in a thin wrapper, at one point she opens it to him hurling her desire like weapon, while with superb tiresomeness he chunters of packing up writing his vapid philosophy book about the nature of human responsibility and devoting his life to education their small lame son Eyolf, who alone can “Fill his life with purpose”. She, with shocking openness, cries that she wishes Eyolf had never been born, because she can’t share Alfred. “I want to be everything!”

 

He backs away from her advances. Coy and Leonard make this properly excruciating. “We had a love that wrapped us in flames!” she cries, and he “I wasn’t wrapped in flames”. We learn that he married partly for her money, to give his orphan half-sister security; later, that the child is only crippled because he fell off a table as a baby while they were making love.

 

 

Into this tangle of discontent falls a real thunderbolt, after a very unsettling visit from the Ratwoman : Eileen Walsh a horribly matter-of-fact Irish crone, the travelling pied-piper whose art is to lure to their drowning the “squeakers and rattikins, crawlers and creepers that scamper and plop into the milk-pails” . She gleefully says “Bite the bitter apple, little master!” as she leaves. And while the adults variously vent their anger and delusional ideas, Eyolf drowns in the fjord, watching her row away.

 

 

The rest is grief, a working-out of horror and cruel accusations, and realization that the cruellest thing of all when a child dies is that banal, whats-for-dinner life will go on. “We are stuck on this earth, both of us”. For all his bleakness Ibsen does usually offer a glimmer of dawn, and here Eyre and his cast serve it with delicate, unemphatic precision. Rita is the one who finally sees that even in the last horror, life may, if you can look outward, still be conducted with “something a little like love”. No flames, but a dim, flickering starlight hope.
box office 0207 359 4404 to 9 Jan
Sponsor: Aspen
rating five   5 Meece Rating

box office 0207 359 4404 to

Comments Off on LITTLE EYOLF Almeida, NW3

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

November 26, 2015 · 12:51 am

PERICLES Wanamaker at Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE…
Another flickering evening in the candlelight of the Globe’s Jacobean theatre: engrossing, melodramatic, comic, epic. Ben Jonson was disparaging about Pericles – c “a mouldy tale” . And even compared to A Winter’s Tale with its “gap of time” in the interval, this is diffuse and episodic. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ricochets round the ancient Mediterranean and Aegean between kingdoms: fleeing for his life from the incestuous riddling Antiochus, saving a land from famine, being shipwrecked, finding his armour washed up and winning a fight , marrying Thaisa, losing her in childbirth in a storm at sea, casting her coffin adrift, enduring his daughter’s apparent death while he sails home to duty, roaming long years in his grief, growing his hair till he resembles Ben Gunn.

 

Meanwhile the wife’s and daughter’s fates in nunnery and brothel must be related too, plus the treachery of trusted friends and some random necessary pirates. Then the three must be reunited, with slight assistance from the Goddess Diana descending from the roof in a dream sequence. To keep the audience on-track it has a narrator, speaking as the medieval poet Gower. Add to that the fact that Shakespeare pretty certainly didn’t write the first eight or nine scenes (his colleague George Wilkins is mainly responsible for those, and indeed the early verse does rather plod along in comparison with later glories) . And all this adventure, rom-com, tragedy, romance and redemption must fit in tiny theatre required to be many shores and seas.

 

 

But Dominic Dromgoole’s production has wit, pace and beauty. Three hours fly past in suspense and not infrequent interludes of laughter. There is perfect atmospheric music by Clare van Kampen and a surprising degree of spectacle. Dromgoole – and designer Jonathan Fensom – positively relish the Jacobean challenge of sails, ratlines and ropes descending amid the flickering candelabras, thunder-effects, an altar fire and portable tree, and the creation of an instant brothel with rude picture and naff bead curtains. The Gower narration is, brilliantly, given to Sheila Reid as a diminutive crone, relishing the ancient story as if at a fireside, wandering in and out excited at each new development, scuttling out of the cast’s way to let them do a scene. And the offstage joust, startlingly, happens behind us in the circular corridor as the shutters fly suddenly open to the light.

 
James Garnon is Pericles, journeying from boyishness to manhood and on to Lear-like despair; Jessica Baglow a dignified, soberly virtuous pragmatic Marina: her scenes with her would-be rapists and her shaming of Lysimachus are done with defiant fire, and her trembling revelation with a hysterical father is properly moving. The play’s themes pulse through: hope, endurance, chastity and fatherhood (Simon Armstrong plays both the incestuous Antiochus and the hilariously jolly King Simonides; Fergal McElherron enjoyably doubles the decorous honest Helicanus and a hawking, spitting priapic brothel-keeper) .

 

 

The Shakespearian beauties of language multiply – “Born in a tempest where my mother died” says Marina sadly “The world to me an everlasting storm”. The magic intensifies. And for all the foolery, asides and absurdities, Dromgoole never lets us lose sight of the central strange beauty: amid late Shakespeare plays this is unique because Pericles is innocent. No tragic flaw: this is not an arrogant Lear or Cymbeline , jealous Leontes, nor even a plotter of vengeance like Prospero. He is just tossed by fate like his ships in the sea-storms, grieving but unblaming, pure in loving sorrow. So when the redemptive resurrections come, high emotion dissolves into laughter at the absurdity of his delight, pure relief without remorse. “New joys wait on you” says old Gower, signing off with satisfaction. Beautiful.

 

box office 0207 401 9919 to April
rating four4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on PERICLES Wanamaker at Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

November 25, 2015 · 6:53 am

EVENING AT THE TALK HOUSE Dorfman, SE1

ARID, PRETENTIOUS, POINTLESS
The last American import Rufus Norris brought to the National – The Motherf—-er with the Hat – was a five-mouse delight, a bold choice which rightly just won a Best Play award. Less welcome is this Wallace Shawn premiere, with the author himself bagging the weirdest and probably the most rewarding role, as a moribund old has-been TV actor , Dick.

He doesn’t turn up for the first fifteen minutes, which are occupied by a long narrative monologue by Robert (Josh Hamilton) who explains that it’s a ten-year reunion of the team from his play “Midnight in a Clearing with Moon and Stars”. It was convened by Ted, who wrote the music and now does occasional advertising jingles, and includes Annette the wardrobe mistress – large , glum, and broke – and Bill the producer, now a “talent agent”. The only other one who is still successful is Tom (Simon Shepherd in matinee-idol mode) as the hero of Robert’s ongoing TV soap. Robert now feels, and smugly announces, that theatre “came to seem a rather narrow corner”, and that the 30-minute TV show is the thing. Coming to this endless monologue cold, you muse that the man is a right prat, and worriedly hope that this is deliberate. Then Dick (Shawn himself) materializes, pretty drunk and lately “beaten up by some friends, a short battering, informal” , and finally the rest of them arrive.

 

 

 
And indeed they are all pretty frightful, endlessly and circularly discussing (in a sort of Beckett-and-soda manner) who liked who, who was a good actor, and which of their acquaintance has dropped dead. Some relief is offered by the landlady (Anna Calder-Marshall, playing it just sufficiently odd) and the maid, the wonderful Sinéad Matthews, always a treat. The tedium of the men’s conversation – mostly woefully static, despite being directed by Ian Rickson – is relieved a bit by Shawn’s surrealism: there is a government somewhere which is doing a universally approved “programme of murdering” people who “pose a threat to us”. Topical, at least. It transpires that the maid has just got back from a murdering job “mainly in Nigeria and Indonesia”, and Matthews’ account of this – and her final meltdown- provide the few streaks of arresting sincerity in the piece.

 

 

It’s all too artfully knowing and nudgingly self-referential to engage you much, despite the best efforts of a fine cast. It would help, perhaps, if he went the full horror-movie,  and had Calder-Matthews poisoning the lot of them with her Emerald Surprise punch.

 

At one point, at least, it is properly confirmed that Robert is indeed a prize prat , with Dick doing a reading from his celebrated play. It is pure Game-of-Thrones or sub-Tolkien nonsense, full of names like Beltramidon and Queen Ameldra of Garmor, and warriors eating “the meat of the golden antelope” after defeating some Marmidons.

Shawn’s play lasts 105 minutes. It is more than enough.
box office 020 7452 3000 to 30 March
rating one. 1 Meece Rating Just. For Sinead Matthews. Otherwise,  verging on  Dead Rat

Comments Off on EVENING AT THE TALK HOUSE Dorfman, SE1

Filed under Dead Rat, Theatre

Tagged as

November 24, 2015 · 9:23 am

The Homecoming TRAFALGAR STUDIOS SW1A

STILL SHOCKING,  STILL SEXIST !    GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES SMACKS HIS LIPS OVER A VINTAGE PINTER…

 

 

I get the itching feeling that if anyone else had written this play we’d call the police. But they didn’t – Harold Pinter wrote it – so we won’t. Like all the best thrillers it is absolutely outrageous. Prostitution, death, perversions of every aspect are indulged  and laughed at and we’re all 100% complicit.

 

 

Teddy has been away for a number of years (in America , being a Professor in Philosophy of all things) but has returned to visit his family, new wife by his side. And what an awful place to bring a woman. His father hates women, his uncle has  an aversion to them, both his brothers are boasting rapists and one is a pimp. The poor dead mum is a conversational vigil and punch bag – all very Freud.

 

For all its chilling flights of lunacy, Jamie Lloyd has compacted this troubling, tense, intriguing, sexist and furiously crackers play into something incredibly lean and precise. Everything is incredibly measured, making the flashes of anger even more terrifying.   Soutra Gilmour’s brilliant set is a deep, abstract room which zooms backwards as if looking down the barrel of a gun. A single door gloomily stands at the end. Home sweet home.

 

Ron Cook as the furious father Max gives the kind of terrifying performance only someone under 5ft could. He’s planted in the middle of the empty living room, sitting in the only armchair, spitting about sluts, hatching disgusting plans and presiding over his perverse family. The dialogue between him and his brother Sam (Keith Allen) is where Pinter’s lines really get cooking. Both have that excellently distracted, hauntingly calm  Pinter delivery, without sounding like actors doing Pinter. Keith Allen is camp as tits, and nails every gag.

 

Gemma Chan is thankfully one of the sturdiest performances on stage. Everything in the play is geared to make her the victim but with the few lines she’s given she chills the rowdy male atmosphere in a brilliantly icy fashion.Gary Kemp as her odd, odd husband (Teddy) and John MacMillan as his younger, simpler, brother (Joey) slice through the comedy and the darkness well. John Simm as the third of the boys (Lenny) has moments of sheer perfection, but occasionally slips into ‘I’m speaking Pinter lines’ mode.

 

 

Despite a distracting interval (they should just run it 1h45 straight through), Jamie Lloyd has pulled of yet another tightly wound and wildly chilling Pinter revival. The duller moments are quickly glided over and the awful sexual and jealous tension is fully indulged in. We all felt at risk.

 

Box Office 08448717615   to  13 Feb  (alas, a day too early for a Valentine’s Day outing for the brave…)

rating  four   4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on The Homecoming TRAFALGAR STUDIOS SW1A

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

November 20, 2015 · 10:23 am

FLOWERING CHERRY Finborough, SW10

DREAMS WITHOUT DETERMINATION: THE DEEPEST TRAP OF ALL

 
Mid-life, an insurance salesman who will never be a big enough man to fulfil his big dream. Better to pretend- plan, to deny daily reality in the glow of an imaginary future and sanctified childhood memories worn meaningless by retelling. An anxious wife strives to hold on to her affection; there are two increasingly disaffected teenagers, an uneasy home atmosphere: ordinary failure and banal tragedy. Small wonder that Robert Bolt’s 1957 play was compared to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

 

 

But the comparison does it no favours: Jim Cherry is less self-aware than Willy Loman, and in a way more grimly tragic. Where Loman can reflect “I still feel kinda temporary about myself.. a man has got to add up to something”, Cherry suppresses his awful self-knowledge in drink and bluster, stretching his wife’s tolerance to the point where at one startling moment the neat split set – a sliver of garden alongside the suburban kitchen – sees them momentarily separated, each speaking. He is overacting, declaiming “O for a Muse of Fire!” and saying he has resigned to start an orchard in Somerset. She, outside the back door, is repeatedly praying for strength, just for long enough, for a mere moment of strength to leave him…

 

 

It is a wrenchingly sad slice of life, a portrait of the damage wrought by fantasy and bombast. Liam McKenna is Cherry (the part first taken by Ralph Richardson) , fuelled by a kitchen barrel of scrumpy ever more fortified by gin, poring over nurserymen’s catalogues and farm advertisements, chunkily eloquent in his memory and dream of an apple-orchard down West. The blossom, the harvest suppers of bread and cheese and bacon, the strong men, real men… To his modest, bumbling old colleague (beautifully evoked in appearances fore and aft by Benjamin Whitrow, who also direct) he brags about handing in his notice, but cries wolf once too often. At the heart of the play, in a restrainedly fine performance, Catherine Kanter is Isobel, 1950s everywife in a printed pinny, driven beyond endurance by the fantasy and pretences and discontent but in one final, dangerous throw willing to call his bluff and back his vaunted new life.

 

 

Whereon, of course, he shrinks back. During the gradual endgame it transpires that his daughter is afflicted by the same tendency to falsity, and his son , driven by the family atmosphere to get out at all costs, longs for his call-up. Into this mix comes the most hard-headed and hearted of catalysts, the daughter’s idolized friend Carol: Phoebe Sparrow wonderfully poisonous, young, calculating, amused, lethal. It’s another Finborough rediscovery, as relevant to the midlife dreamers among us still as to those of sixty years ago.

 

 

box office 0844 847 1652 to 20 dec

RATING  four 4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on FLOWERING CHERRY Finborough, SW10

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

November 19, 2015 · 9:06 am

ROBIN HOOD Chipping Norton Theatre

OH YES IT IS!     CHIPPY , HOME OF PANTO, STRIKES AGAIN

It is, famously, the local panto for the Cameron family, though the paterfamilias PM himself might want to avoid swivelling heads and accusing stares when Robin, robbing the rich to give to the poor, chucks the last handful of chocolate coins out and sneakily mentions tax credits. The even better joke is when Denis the tax-gatherer opens the Sheriff of Nottingham’s filing cabinet to find , as the late Coalition’s treasurer did, a note saying There Is No Money left.

 
But never mind that: Ben Crocker’s latest is an absolutely cracking, proper pantomime, directed with gleeful inventiveness by Abigail Anderson in storybook sets (Russell Craig designs) and with fine songs ranging in style from nonny-nonny folk to music-hall. No stupid smut (well, one child-friendly poo-joke), no weary pop songs , no bought-in megastars doing their standard ‘turn’. Just wit, storytelling, enough participation to keep the young happy, and all the traditional elements – songsheet, water-fight, spotted bloomers, damn good female legs in tights – woven in without any exhausting overkill (“Behind you” occurs just once, neatly, as part of a door-joke).

 

 

There are four children onstage, and very good too; the villainous Sheriff (Andrew Piper) is all one could ask for, a failed Richard III with personal issues. And its pacy: before you’re through your first ice-cream, ten minutes have seen a song, a chorus of sarcastic pop-up puppet rabbits , Marian in shapely tights, a stave fight (girl-on-girl with Rosanna Lambe’s gender-changed Little Joan) ; plus all necessary back-story and the explosive entrance of Dame Connie Clatterbottom.

 

 

 
Ah, the Dame! Astonishingly, it seems that this is Andrew Pepper’s first outing as Dame, and he is a joy: of the rangy rather than tubby variety, which is handy when forced onto a giant swivelling archery target, but exuding warm flirtatious absurdity and effortless stage presence. He’s pure music-hall in his big numbers, and as schoolmistress saying “No-one needs a machete or a pump action shotgun in class” to the disguised villains he-she has fine authority. And in the magnificent bedtime strip sequence, some fifteen layers down to the bloomers, he must have brought tears of joy to costume designer Emily Stuart: few gentlemen can flick a pantaloon across the stage with more brio.

 

 

So yes,we three adults loved it, and so did every child in earshot (they were all in earshot,as well they should be. By the way, Crocker also respects the Robin Hood legends, down to Alan A’Dale’s lost love and the outlaws’ dismay at Robin’s cockiness in contesting for the silver arrow and landing himself in prison. Go for the big rackety starry spectaculars if you must; but this is a fine start to Christmas. And even better, it confines its nod to the season to one tuneless joke version of Jingle Bells, and spares us a premature Santa. Joyful .

 

box office 01608 642350 to 10th Jan
Sponsored by Kingham Hill School
rating five   5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on ROBIN HOOD Chipping Norton Theatre

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

November 17, 2015 · 10:53 pm

BADDIES THE MUSICAL Unicorn, SE1

DOWN WITH PAN AND CINDERELLA!

 
After the high-priced saccharine vapidity of ELF , it felt like time to check out something both classier, and more affordable. Always perilous for the lone critic is a primary-schools matinee, but I have forgiven this dedicated children’s theatre for the time I emerged with bubblegum in my hair from an enthusiastic blower in the row behind. I recommend the nice solo bench at the back by the door. Defensible space…

 
Anyway, it was well worth it. if only for the unusual spectacle of 250 young children enthusiastically booing a melodious and comely Peter Pan (and Cinderella) and rooting for the Big Bad Wolf and Cap’n Hook. Nancy Harris and Mark Teitler’s new musical opens with Red Riding Hood arriving chez Granny-wolf – Dean Nolan a splendid hairy-biker figure with a majestic beard and gut. Just as he is about to eat her, a swat team from the Bedtime Stories Authority arrests him, to the indignation of both (“It’s part of the story!” protests Red Riding Hood, entirely complicit.) In prison, on bleak bunks poor Wolfie finds the Ugly Sisters (Clare Sundin and Kelly Agbowu in garish urban bad-girl kit) . There’s a suave gangsta Hook in two-tone shoes, (Miles Yekkini) and the nerdy, gnomelike ginger Rumplestiltskin (DAvid McKay) who the others bully at first, for being good at mental arithmetic. “What did you think we were? snarls Hook at the audience “Care Bears?”. They all get their arias – the Ugly sisters beautifully bemoaning how they get judged on their looks, but then refusing pity in favour of feminist fierceness.

 
But the five baddies are united when it turns out that their real captors are a smooth-suited Peter Pan, selling his system for eternal youth (Christian Roe every inch a PR millionaire) and a wonderfully princessy Cinderella, KAthy Rose O”Brien as a sort of Zoella-ish selfie-queen in a ballgown, trilling her song “If only the uglies were pretty..” and chucking around sparkly cushions , pink teddies and air-freshener.

 
Turns out this pair, who even have a Powerpoint presentation, want to rebrand the baddies, turn Wolf into a rescue-dog and Hook into a cloakroom assistant, and promote role-model characters like the cheekily named “Fluffalo…a bestseller with a positive message loved by parents and teachers”.

 
It’s snappy, sassy, and knowing: the children all seemed to get the interwoven fairytale and Peter Pan references with no trouble. It lightly carries its themes of bullying, individuality, hypocrisy, the emptiness of “boys who are best at everything and girls everyone loves”, and the need for stories. “You need bad guys in a good story..without the sinner there’s no saint, without the darkness there’s no light”. There are some jolly songs, and director Purni Morell gives us sufficient coups de theatre to keep everyone happy – a flash-bang, an offstage roaring monster, a rope swing, a cracking good roughhouse fight and the final contest (high-speed mental arithmetic won by Rumpelstiltskin) roused a deafening , screaming roar of complicity. Splendid.
box office 020 7645 0560 to 24 Dec

rating  four   4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on BADDIES THE MUSICAL Unicorn, SE1

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

November 12, 2015 · 11:19 am

THE MODERATE SOPRANO Hampstead, NW3

OPERA’S THE THING!   YOUR LIFE IS BUT A SIDESHOW!  HURRAH! 
A play about the foundation of Glyndebourne Opera – “Snobs on the grass” as some cruel postwar journalist wrote? Tartan picnic rugs, Fortnums’ hampers, corporate networking? By David Hare?? Get away with you!

Yet this is a heart-soaring, joyful and sad and humane piece, and if it doesn’t follow Hampstead’s other recent triumphs and storm the West End, I’m a tartan picnic-rug. It was after Hare dramatized his his jaundiced memories of a constipated 1962 public-school in “South Downs” that the producer, Byam Shaw, suggested he take on the story of how John Christie, an eccentric wartime soldier and Eton science master, inherited the estate in the early ‘30s and decided to build an opera house and a festival. The “moderate soprano” of the title is his wife, the singer Audrey Mildmay, who he besieged with gifts and flowers until she married him: he was already fifty. Ironically she died before him, leaving him bereft. For the festival seasons he recruited Rudolf Bing, Fritz Busch and Carl Ebert: its a memory-play of the interaction of the five, of Christie’s explosive energy and his love story.
It is glorious. Simple in a way, discursive as characters speak their memories in between scenes. Sometimes it is very funny, at times profoundly sad. For what Hare makes of John Christie’s story is not “heritage theatre” but a hymn to art and its ambiguities, an elegy for the passing of life and a portrait of a man who is energetic, self-willed, choleric, impassioned. Sometimes Captain Mainwaring, sometimes almost Eric Morecambe, he is absurd but awe-inspiring, a “character’ but also a deep and needy personality. Roger Allam is perfection: chubbed-up, in a bald wig, here is the bluff reckless middle-aged soldier who one night in Bayreuth discovered “the sublime – until I heard that music I had no idea who I was”. Line upon line he delights: “Hate music-lovers, awful people, do nothing but complain – but I love music!”.

With his team assembled and the first season coming, he reacts with explosive horror to Bing and Busch telling him it can’t be Wagner – “you’ve built a jewel box, not an epic theatre” and shudders at the thought of Mozart, in the immortal line – “He may be great but is he any GOOD? Samey, jangly, it’s all servant-girls and awful giggling and big wigs”. As for his furious insistence that operagoers must pay heavily, wear boiled shirts and get on a train to deep Sussex on a working day, it is superb, and nobody could deliver it like Allam. These damn people must, he says, not just fiddle around with “ telephones and whatever they do in offices” then ‘take in a show’. They must accept “It’s their lives that are the sideshow! Opera’s the thing! And if it uses up their time and wipes out their savings so be it!”. And you know what – I was sort of with him there…
Nancy Carroll is a perfect foil as Audrey, sinking her identity and her art in his explosive will, loving him, her postwar decline tragic. Paul Jesson and Nick Sampson react wonderfully as Busch and Ebert, and George Taylor is a sinuous,sardonic Rudolf Bing. Who had to spend the war years working in Peter Jones, and only felt at home in the hair salon because its febrile atmosphere was most like opera – “I love hysteria…Nietzsche said, for art there must be frenzy”. The frenzy of a tubby, determined man with a yearning for sublimity receives, in this lovely play, the respect that it should.

Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com to 28 Nov

rating  five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE MODERATE SOPRANO Hampstead, NW3

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

November 11, 2015 · 1:10 pm

WASTE Lyttelton, SE1

POLITICS AND SCANDAL; IT WAS EVER THUS..
You’re an MP, a clever lawyer with cross-party popularity, newly invited into Cabinet to steer through a Bill to disestablish the Anglican Church and reform education. You’re passionate about this cause: defying the “barren minds and wills” of other MPs, arguing with vigour and humour. But you never quite fitted in to the high-Tory social circle at the heart of things. And just as you’re preparing for the big push, declaring that you are “In love!” with the Bill and the cause, in comes a nervy, distressed woman in a cloche hat with whom you tangled (very briefly, and not in love at all) in a previous moonlit scene. Announcement: “There’s a danger of my having a child. Your child”. She hasn’t been near her husband for a year.
Charles Edwards is magnificent as the MP Trebelle , expressing both a workaholic passion and a cool but decent core which makes him meet with i revulsion her insistence that she doesn’t want it. She demands, with rising hysteria, help towards abortion. He offers to help her go abroad and have it and be divorced. “You’d marry me?” “That is the usual thing” says Edwards glumly. She, however – and this is Olivia Williams on top ranting form – is resentful. “I can’t see why you don’t love me just a little!” she wails, though the reason is increasingly clear to the rest of us: because he’s a dry stick that way, and she is a pain in the neck. Something she proves by instantly switching off the emotion and getting gay and flirty when other men come into the room; not to mention her wail that it’s all “Beastly! No civilized woman wants children growing up around her to prove she’s getting old!”.
During the interval – for this is a political play, the female dilemma merely an inciting-incident – she dies of a botched abortion, and the long central scene sees a meeting of party grandees deciding whether or not to dump Trebelle, thus endangering the Bill, or whether they can square the estranged husband into not outing him as the adulterer at the inquest. (It’s Paul Hickey, sourly Irish, observing “She was a worthless woman, we are brothers in misfortune”).
It is riveting, director Roger Michell moving his cast with deft tone and body language to the degree that my companion (a seasoned political animal) gasped that it was horribly credible in any period of the Party. Gerrard McArthur’s aristocratic, chilly religiosity as Lord Charles hardly moves from the sofa, sitting in judgement on them all ; Louis Hilyer is northern, pragmatic and willing to dilute the legislation to get rid of the scandal; others dithering and hope. A wonderful and timeless political line is “In this sort of case, one talks a bit and then does The Usual Thing”. They bin Trebell.

It is, for him, the end: Edwards, movingly weary, expresses the despair. “I’ve never, so to speak, given myself away before. To be part of something…! Having lost myself in it, the loss of IT leaves me a dead man”.

Harley Granville Barker’s play was written in 1906, banned for being near the knuckle sexually and religiously, and revived and revised thirty years later. But over that gap of time, and the nine decades since, little changes in the cuthroat world of political intrigue. Only the cloche hats have gone. I took a while to warm to the play – the opening country-house scene is chillier and duller than it need be, partly due to Hildegarde Bechtler’s irritatingly minimalist, geometric sliding scenery (I suppose they were anxious not to Downto-nize it with too much Edwardiana, so fair enough).
But it gathers pace, and all the cast is strong: Emerald O”Hanrahan as the bluestocking Lucy and Sylvestra Le Touzel as Trebell’s sister are particularly striking. The end is grimly moving as the young secretary, Walter, angrily grieves the waste of Trebell’s talent. It’s Hubert Burton’s debut on the London stage, and he deserves an extra bow because on press night his important moment was delayed by a dead stop: a heart attack in the stalls meant a 25 minute wait for an ambulance. The last five minutes were played out to a reducing house with the medics and patient in situ. Respect to the family, who allowed it; and to Burton who achieved his moment with grace and sincerity.

box office 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk to 19 march
Rating four   4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on WASTE Lyttelton, SE1

Filed under Four Mice

November 8, 2015 · 2:58 pm

HARLEQUINADE / ALL ON HER OWN Garrick, SW1

A DOUBLE BILL: RATTIGAN AT PLAY AND IN GRIEF

There may be voices which jibe at Kenneth Branagh for being producer, deviser and co-director of a year-long season, finding starry casting like Dame Judi Dench and Michael Pennington and then giving himself the central role of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale.

As it happens, he may be the boss but he is superb in it (see below for five-mouse rave). And he also neatly undermines any murmurs of “who-does-he-think-he-is-bloody-Garrick-or-what?” by running it in rep with Terenace Rattigan’s gleeful parody of the theatre world in Harlequinade, himself playing the dedicated but dreadful Arthur Gosport: producer-actor-manager of a government-subsidized wartime initiative to take Shakespeare to a depressed Midlands town which doesn’t particularly want it. This gives him ample opportunity to portray vanity, directorial incompetence, and aching middle-aged insecurity over having to play Romeo opposite his younger wife (Miranda Raison, here spoofily actressy). Thus the entrepreneurial actormanager Branagh neatly takes the mickey out of those who take it out of him.

Harlequinade itself is a bit creaky, Rattigan enjoying the typical theatre-man’s sentimental self-mockery. It opens with a balcony scene rehearsal in which the female “darling”on the balcony asks the male ‘darling” below whether he’s going to keep in “that little jump” tonight? Huffily, the male darling says “I thought it helped the boyishness of the character”. As the wig does, until he pulls it off in exasperation to reveal the thinning pate. What is even less helpful is that he is back in Brackley, a rep stamping-ground of his youth, where the chirpy intruder Muriel turns out to be the result of a 17-year-old fling and the pram in the wings makes Romeo a grandfather. Aptly – given Branagh’s other opening production – he is auditioning Perditas for The Winter’s Tale when Muriel pounces on him with a cry of “Dad!” and all he can splutter is “Which text are you using?”
So there are some good jokes, and a gorgeously bossy Zoe Wanamaker as Dame Edna, the formidable aunt and grande-dame of the company with her devastating “notes”. But in this 100-minute double-bill evening which runs in rep alongside the big Winter’s Tale, the real find is the twenty-minute opener, ALL ON HER OWN, a dark Rattigan monologue by Zoe Wanamaker as a widow with a whisky decanter, addressing the husband who probably killed himself.

As she breaks into his voice in imagination and memory the widow strips her own pretentions bare. She reveals a life cultured, upmarket, but always a bit ashamed of her rich builder husband, impeccably polite to him but failing in love . She strips her pretensions bare, speaking for him at last in the inescapable haunting that is memory. “DId I kill you?”. Rattigan’s own lover was a suicide: grief and understanding blaze through this short, painfully arresting piece. It makes a curious bedfellow to Harlequinade, but worth seeing.

box office 0844 482 9673 to 21 Jan http://www.branaghtheatre.com

rating four, but only  because of the Wanamaker parts!
4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on HARLEQUINADE / ALL ON HER OWN Garrick, SW1

Filed under Four Mice

Tagged as

November 7, 2015 · 11:23 pm

THE WINTER’S TALE Garrick, SW1

IN WHICH FAITH IN BRANAGH AWAKES...

Kenneth Branagh’s Garrick year as actor-manager opens in unquestionable triumph. One of Shakespeare’s greatest, most redemptive plays is richly served without flaw or gimmick, traditional in this l 1889 theatre but fresh, clear, heartfelt.  The court of the jealous Leontes profits from being set not in antiquity but in a late Victorian – perhaps Tsarist – red-velvet palace in a Christmas season: under the tree a cosy opening vignette of the child Mamillius at old Paulina’s knee, begging “a sad tale’s best for winter”. His mother, prefiguring her statue moment, stands pensive aside, a column of white.
The perennial problem of Leontes’ sudden crazy suspicion of his wife and Polixenes – which can be a barrier to credulity – is softened as the family party begins with grainy old home-movies of the friends as youths, projected on a homely sheet. This, and one unmanly embrace, offer without simplistic emphasis the possibility that the jealousy is of both wife and friend. But as in life, its origin ceases to matter once self-deluding righteousness drives the sleepless half-crazy tyrant onwards, hurling terrible words at a bewildered, dignified Hermione.     His faintly Tsarist air also supports the superstitious reliance on the oracle (Hermione is the emperor of Russia’s daughter in the text, something I had never noticed; Rasputin did, after all, get a grip on that menage). The emotional hit of the first act (co-directed by Branagh and Rob Ashford) is shattering.
Judi Dench as the indignant, matriarchal Paulina is as you would expect matchless. But the sense of greatness, of timeless truthful wholeness which hangs around her in these great and generous parts, is shared this time by Branagh himself as Leontes. I have been in the past a Branagh-sceptic, but I take it back. This is an honestly great performance, restrained but vibrant with crazy emotion, the actor fully inhabiting a Leontes gripped mid-life by an emotion he cannot even understand, let alone justify. “I am a feather for each wind..” The bewildered dignity of Miranda Raison’s fine Hermione cannot reach him, nor the reasoning of Camillo and Michael Pennington’s sorrowful, appalled Antigonus. Branagh’s scenes with Dench crackle as vividly as the real brazier centre stage as she berates his “needless heavings”, thrusts the newborn Perdita into his arms and, when threatened with the fire herself, flings back “I care not!”. The emotional tornado pauses for its still centre during the solemn trial scene, as a calm, wounded Hermione mourns her newborn infant torn from her to murder, “innocent milk in innocent mouth”. Apollo’s vindication comes; as Mamillius’ death strikes Leontes, Branagh curls like a wounded dog, howling agony, drawing even Paulina to attempt some comfort . As the palace dissolves into a bare seafront old Antigonus sweetly cuddles the baby he must leave on the strand, and a coup de theatre of “pursued by a bear” echoes the home-movie moment we began with (indeed Christopher Oram’s designs serve every nuance and mood of the play with quiet precision).

Dench as Time speaks the sixteen-year gap; amid the fleeces come John Dalgleish’s lanky folksinging chancer Autolycus, the two shepherds (again perfectly judged, unclownish, decent) and the rustic, simple-hearted charm of Jessie Buckley’s Perdita. Polixenes’ irrational rage mirrors Leontes’; then back in the now pale, marble-grieving halls of Sicilia the family resolution is, as always , brilliantly given by Shakespeare to mere third-party witnesses – “Such a deal of wonders!” says Cleomenes happily. This is the late, mature playwright, aware that a classic neat romance-of-revelation moment must not dim the surreal beauty of the resurrection scene. As Dench’s steady voice injuncts: “It is required you do awake your faith”, we do. Heaven knows I have seen this play half a dozen times and read it as many, but I gasped, and tears came. For the lost ones – Antigonus, Mamillius – and for the fragility of new joys and the remission of old sins.

box office 0844 482 9673 http://www.branaghtheatre.com
rating Five    5 Meece Rating
It is, of course, sold out. But if you can’t arm-wrestle a ticket off somebody…there is a relay in cinemas worldwide on 26th November. It runs in rep with the double bill of HARLEQUINADE and ALL ON HER OWN: review of that follows tomorrow.

Comments Off on THE WINTER’S TALE Garrick, SW1

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

November 7, 2015 · 8:11 am

LA SOIREE Spiegeltent, South Bank

ROLL UP, ROLL UP, ROLL OVER…

It’s back for Christmas: pure entertainment, faux-decadent but full of heart, skilful and cheerful and elegant and daft. In the great glittering tent by the Thames battering circus music softens us up to be astonished by miracles of grace and balance, to catch our breath at impossibilities and giggle at benign naughtinesses. Over eleven years the “new variety”, boldly burlesque grown-up circus has refined and perfected its formats, and collected artistes from across the world: aerialists and exhibitionists, jugglers and jokers, Weimar wannabes crooning darkly in preposterous feathers, acrobats in bondage gear. On any given night a selection of them hurtle and fly and preen and beguile and clown. I fall for it every time, one of the best , racketiest of nights out with never a minute wasted.
That lack of time-wasting is a prosaic thing to mention, but it matters: there is no ringmaster to drive you nuts with drawn-out pleasantries and unnecessary build-ups. Once it begins, smooth stage-management whirls it from act to act, balancing silent astonishments with sharp (and yes, some very adult) verbal jokes. Old hands will recognize seasoned Soirée performers. Clarke McFarlane in his studded leather biker outfit and bare tummy makes a couple of appearances as Mario Queen of the Circus, makes us sing We Are The Champions in tribute to the great Freddie, juggles and crowdsurfs and attempts a world record for the most people inside a hula-hoop. (Two. If he catches your eye to help him, don’t).

Captain Frodo the Norwegian contorionist does the thing with getting his body through two tennis-rackets: I have to cover my eyes intermittently in horror, but he is so verbally funnyand so likeable as he delivers an earnest commentary with one arm and leg through a racket and tangles himself in his microphone that his final extrication is cathartic. Australian Asher Treleaven with his “Sexy Diabolo For Ladies” and disgraceful Mills and Boon reading is a joy still. The English Gentlemen Denis Lock and Hamish Mc Cann, in bowlers and pinstripes, again do headstands and impossible balancing acts on one another while reading the Financial Times or puffing a pipe. Seen that and loved it several times, including the bit where they strip to union jack underpants and sock-suspenders; but Denis Lock now returns with another turn. It is a new, extraordinarily beautiful and scientifically fascinating bubble-blowing act. What? Bubble-blowing? for grownups? Yes. Astonishing.

Among these favourites are newcomers: Melanie Chy, androgynously ferocious doing hand-balancing on a smoking giant motorbike; Bret Pfister tough and tattooed swirling in a hoop overhead; a remarkable, sultry new aerialist General Yammel, who smokes a cigar while gyrating crazily on slings. The linking chanteuse this year is Miss Frisky (without her familiar cabaret oppo Mannish), doing the Weimary thing in an explosion of orange hair and gold lamé.
It couldn’t be done better. And for all the adults-only lines (well, I’d happily take a savvy mid-teen) the overarching spirit is of innocent, astonished joy.

http://www.la-soiree.com to 17 Jan   5 Meece Rating   give ’em the cheese!  Five.

Comments Off on LA SOIREE Spiegeltent, South Bank

Filed under Five Mice

Tagged as

November 5, 2015 · 11:05 pm

ELF Dominion Theatre, W1

CURLY HAT AND STRIPY STOCKINGS TIME

Play critic-cliché bingo once they’re out! One point each for “Elf ’n Safety”, “National Elf” , kids with phones outside taking Elfies , pixie-lated publicity, gnome runs, and anyone saying “this’ll sleigh them”. The one about feeling good “from head to mistle-toe” is actually in the lyrics, so that doesn’t count.
But who am I to, er, rain-deer on its parade? The story is from the much-loved film with Will Ferrell, about an infant who stowed away in Santa’s sleigh as an orphan and is raised by elves before setting out to find his neglectful human father. It is determinedly good-hearted. The press night was an Alzheimer’s Society gala, the producers donating all the free press ticket prices to the charity. Ben Forster bounces enthusiastically around in an embarrassing green elf-suit with no sign of discomfort, and Kimberley Walsh of Girls Aloud deploys – in the one decent solo she is allowed – a dry wit and really beautiful, strong musical-theatre voice . For the benefit of Dads, she is first spotted in an elfin skating-skirt high up a stepladder in Macy’s (New York has long since stolen Christmas from old Chas Dickens’ London). And she accepts without snarling the possibly suggestive line from Buddy the Elf “I’d like to stick you on the top of my tree”. Hmmm.

If I was a starry-eyed seven-year-old, or if its ferocious Christmassiness wasn’t launched on Bonfire night to an almost totally adult audience, I might record more pleasure. The score and songs by Matthew Skier and Chad Beguelin are OK – Ms Walsh’s “Never fall in love with an Elf” being the best, and the reiterated “Christmas Song” the catchiest . The ensemble tap-breaks are professional, and there are two or three genuinely witty moments. The best involves the panic to pitch a children’s book and save the Dad’s publishing job; by happy serendipity the show opened the day after the cringiest Apprentice show yet when the teams had to devise a toddlers’ book in four hours and sell the ghastly result. Even they didn’t suggest “a family of asparagus children”.
But over and over again the word in my mind was “workmanlike”. It isn’t special, spectacular or magical enough to justify the record seat prices (from the high fifties (bargains 48.50 on one site)   to £ 160-plus, with no halves) . This production, by Bord Gais Dublin and the Theatre Royal Plymouth, is not a slick Broadway stunner. The story, with its moral of goodwill, family, and a Scroogeian grump learning “It’s never too late to grow” is simple even by child standards: children’s theatre these days is nuanced, strong-flavoured, thrillingly demanding. Yet it isn’t full-on panto either.

And to be honest, for most of its length – when Buddy the Elf is being no help in either Macy’s or his Dad’s office, playing with the shredder and throwing “snow” around like the intern from Hell – his “ lovable” naivete gives a worrying impression of bordering on serious mental retardation. He’s supposed to be thirty years old, and is expert with an iPad. Was there no wifi at the North Pole? One should not, perhaps, find oneself siding so exasperatedly with the nicely sour Joe McGann as the unwilling father…

.

Box Office: 0845 200 7982 to 2 Jan
: http://www.elfthemusical.co.uk / http://www.dominiontheatre.com

rating Two. You can add a third  if you’re under ten and get a bargain ticket.

2 meece rating

Comments Off on ELF Dominion Theatre, W1

Filed under Two Mice

Tagged as

November 5, 2015 · 12:48 pm

LOVE FOR LOVE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

FLOUNCES AND FLIRTS,  INSULTS AND INNUENDOES…A RESTORATION ROUT 
There’s a bustle of backstage larking before the curtain, cast dashing around in shirtsleeves, manoeuvring a hamper , getting stuck in ropes and tripping over a life-size model crocodile. So get in your seat early. Especially if you want a random hug from Mr Scandal (Robert Cavanah) or to be picked on to represent Queen Anne with a polystyrene crown from the gift shop plonked on your head (the Queen, it seems, saw Congreve’s play on her 32nd birthday, in 1697).
Director Selina Cadell notes joyfully in the programme that Restoration Comedy was always complicit: actors and audience alike letting it be known that it was all “play’ and the relationship was open: not until 1912 did the idea of the “fourth wall” get traction. So throughout this riotous, consistently entertaining evening characters make eye contact, confide, point, and require the front row to look after their jackets or hats. Not (be reassured) embarrassingly. There is even, briefly a tatty songsheet lowered from the gallery in the hope we will join a sailorly chorus.
I will not attempt to lay out the plot, how the spendthrift layabout Valentine wins his Angelica, whose ruse foils Sir Sampson Legend’s attempt to disinherit him, or why the straying wife of Foresight the duff astrologer is in cahoots with the equally loose-bloomered Mrs Frail to stop the favoured sailor son Ben marrying Miss Prue. It’ll all come clear in a firecracker onslaught of sharp lines, witticisms, flights of fancy and splendid insults. “Dirty Dowdy!’ “Stinking tar-barrel!” “Crocodile!” “FIsh – impudent tarpaulin!”. Not to mention double-entendres of magnificent clarity – one discussion about whether a woman went “to World’s End” takes us way beyond Chelsea. Enlightening that it was deemed suitable for Queen Anne, when you consider how strictly Royal Variety Performance artists are warned off innuendo today.
The joy of it, credit to both Congreve and Cadell, is that for the whole of the first half never five minutes passes without some new, distinct and preposterous character arriving. As costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt has opted for period silhouettes but “modern hair” rather than alienating periwigs, they are both appropriate and cartoonishly familiar today. We meet Valentine – Tom Turner as a languidly poudré rake lounging in his rooms in peacock blue and being berated about late payment by his valet (nobody in this play has any humble respect for anyone else, which is bracing and very Congreve). Soon Cavanah’s dark, sarcastic Scandal joins VAlentine, then – leaping over the chaise-longue in a Tintin quiff and a plump fluster of pink bows and orange tags – we have Jonathan Broadbent, who was so enchantingly touching in My Night With Reg. Soon there is the vain, tyrannical, affronted father, Nicholas le Prevost (an actor so accomplished that he can growl out Georgette Heyerish lines like “faith ’n troth she’s devilish handsome!” as if it came naturally). There’s the earnest fool Michael Thomas as Foresight with his astrolabe and stuffed croc; Hermione Gulliford upmarketly tarty as his wife, Zoe Waites even more so as Mrs Frail, and at last the seafaring Ben, very ahaaarr-Jim-lad, attempting vainly to woo the mummerzet -accented and pink-haired loutess, Miss Prue (Jenny Rainsford, gloriously funny).
In a riot of colour and choler, furbelows and flirtation, tricks and traducings, with a surreal Benny-Hill dash-through, two sweetly mournful songs and a rude shanty, it scrambles rumbustiously to its end. The Restoration had years of dreary Puritanism to get over. In the age of political correctness its spirit returns to comfort us.

box office 0844 800 1110 rsc.org.uk to 22 Jan
rating four   4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on LOVE FOR LOVE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

Filed under Four Mice

Tagged as

November 5, 2015 · 12:45 pm

ANITA AND ME Theatre Royal, Stratford East E15

MEERA SYAL’S MEENA…A MEMORY OF THE 70s, THOUGHTFUL FOR TODAY

Any show playing Slade and T. Rex standards before the curtain has me well softened up So does the wide, generous vision of Meera Syal, whose 1996 novel (set twenty years earlier) was a teenage-rite-of-passage story . Meena is kicking against her dignified Punjabi family heritage in a rundown slate-mining village in the Black Country. Tanika Gupta adapts it for the stage as a play with songs, understated and simply accompanied, by Ben and Max Ringham, It references glam-rock, morris-tunes and Indian rhythms, though the most an irresistible moment is when the schoolgirl yowls out Cum On Feel The Noize with her uncle’s enthusiastic tabla accompaniment and a chorus of supportively clapping family. Followed, alas, by the teenager’s enthusiastic cry that she loves the song so much she “wants to shag its arse off”. This, of course, being the most vigorous affirmation of affection the innocent moppet has learned from her rough-edged local heroine, Anita.

So there are some terrific moments, and in Bob Bailey’s lovely bricky street set Roxana Silbert directs a nostalgic portrait of the age of tie-dye, Jackie magazine, the coming of Comprehensives and motorways , dogs which still could be called “Nigger” and (let’s face it, since it happens halfway through) the hideous and ignorant youthful sport of “Paki-bashing”.
So far, so good. But it feels more like an observant novel still, series of sketched moments: small conflicts in family and community. Which is interesting, not least in artfully pointing up the irony of Asian immigrant families coming into rough, disaffected white areas and struggling to maintain in their children the dignity, moral standards and family piety of their tradition. The community’s hearts of gold with fags and pinnies are beautifully- notably the marvellous Janice Connolly as Mrs Worrall with her jam tarts and rugged kindness ; but Joseph Drake brilliantly evokes the boy Sam’s journey from an amiable doofus doing wheelies on a Chopper bike to a jobless, half-educated, angry bovver boy lashing out at the Punjabi planning official. Mandeep Dhillon as Meena is a delight, striding and scampering, her body language a lovely innocent contrast to the knowing, roughly sexualized and abused Anita (Jalleh Alizadeh). And as the parents, Ayesha Dharker and Ameet Chana are dignified and touching , especially in Dharker’s sudden expression of lonely, homesick despair at this hard life under an alien sky. Yasmin Wilde, too, is solidly noble as the grandmother, setting the history of colonialism and Partition into intimate family history. And that’s all good.

But as a play, a drama, it doesn’t catch fire until almost too late. All the strong events are in the second half, including a fine showy conversion of the set into a sinister canal-bank. To put it bluntly, not quite enough happens, and not so disastrously as to create a real, shaking conclusion. The plot needs a moment of recklessness to take it beyond a slice of good-hearted soap-opera. Everyone moves on: as it does in a novel, as it does in real life. Not quite theatre: maybe Gupta should have taken more liberties with the novel. But as a slice of 20th century life, it’s perfect.
box office 020 8534 0310 to 21 November

rating three 3 Meece Rating

Comments Off on ANITA AND ME Theatre Royal, Stratford East E15

Filed under Theatre

Tagged as

November 5, 2015 · 12:34 pm

LOVE FOR LOVE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

FRILLS AND FLIRTATIONS, TRICKS AND TRADUCINGS…
There’s a bustle of backstage larking before the curtain, cast dashing around in shirtsleeves, manoeuvring a hamper , getting stuck in ropes and tripping over a life-size model crocodile. So get in your seat early. Especially if you want a random hug from Mr Scandal (Robert Cavanah) or to be picked on to represent Queen Anne with a polystyrene crown from the gift shop plonked on your head (the Queen, it seems, saw Congreve’s play on her 32nd birthday, in 1697).

Director Selina Cadell notes joyfully in the programme that Restoration Comedy was always complicit: actors and audience alike letting it be known that it was all “play’ and the relationship was open: not until 1912 did the idea of the “fourth wall” get traction. So throughout this riotous, consistently entertaining evening characters make eye contact, confide, point, and require the front row to look after their jackets or hats. Not (be reassured) embarrassingly. There is even, briefly a tatty songsheet lowered from the gallery in the hope we will join a sailorly chorus.
I will not attempt to lay out the plot, how the spendthrift layabout Valentine wins his Angelica, whose ruse foils Sir Sampson Legend’s attempt to disinherit him, or why the straying wife of Foresight the duff astrologer is in cahoots with the equally loose-bloomered Mrs Frail to stop the favoured sailor son Ben marrying Miss Prue. It’ll all come clear in a firecracker onslaught of sharp lines, witticisms, flights of fancy and splendid insults. “Dirty Dowdy!’ “Stinking tar-barrel!” “Crocodile!” “FIsh – impudent tarpaulin!”. Not to mention double-entendres of magnificent clarity – one discussion about whether a woman went “to World’s End” takes us way beyond Chelsea. Enlightening that it was deemed suitable for Queen Anne, when you consider how strictly Royal Variety Performance artists are warned off innuendo today.
The joy of it, credit to both Congreve and Cadell, is that for the whole of the first half never five minutes passes without some new, distinct and preposterous character arriving. As costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt has opted for period silhouettes but “modern hair” rather than alienating periwigs, they are both appropriate and cartoonishly familiar today. We meet Valentine – Tom Turner as a languidly poudré rake lounging in his rooms in peacock blue and being berated about late payment by his valet (nobody in this play has any humble respect for anyone else, which is bracing and very Congreve). Soon Cavanah’s dark, sarcastic Scandal joins VAlentine, then – leaping over the chaise-longue in a Tintin quiff and a plump fluster of pink bows and orange tags – we have Jonathan Broadbent, who was so enchantingly touching in My Night With Reg. Soon there is the vain, tyrannical, affronted father, Nicholas le Prevost (an actor so accomplished that he can growl out Georgette Heyerish lines like “faith ’n troth she’s devilish handsome!” as if it came naturally). There’s the earnest fool Michael Thomas as Foresight with his astrolabe and stuffed croc; Hermione Gulliford upmarketly tarty as his wife, Zoe Waites even more so as Mrs Frail, and at last the seafaring Ben, very ahaaarr-Jim-lad, attempting vainly to woo the mummerzet -accented and pink-haired loutess, Miss Prue (Jenny Rainsford, gloriously funny).
In a riot of colour and choler, furbelows and flirtation, tricks and traducings, with a surreal Benny-Hill dash-through, two sweetly mournful songs and a rude shanty, it scrambles rumbustiously to its end. The Restoration had years of dreary Puritanism to get over. In the age of political correctness its spirit returns to comfort us.

box office 0844 800 1110 rsc.org.uk to 22 Jan
rating four

4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on LOVE FOR LOVE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

Filed under Four Mice

Tagged as

November 4, 2015 · 11:26 pm

ANITA AND ME Theatre Royal Stratford East, E15

CHOPPER BIKES AND CHANGE,  TEENS IN THE DAYS OF TIE-DYE…
Any show playing Slade and T. Rex standards before the curtain has me well softened up So does the wide, generous vision of Meera Syal, whose 1996 novel (set twenty years earlier) was a teenage-rite-of-passage story . Meena is kicking against her dignified Punjabi family heritage in a rundown slate-mining village in the Black Country. Tanika Gupta adapts it for the stage as a play with songs, understated and simply accompanied, by Ben and Max Ringham, It references glam-rock, morris-tunes and Indian rhythms, though the most an irresistible moment is when the schoolgirl yowls out Cum On Feel The Noize with her uncle’s enthusiastic tabla accompaniment and a chorus of supportively clapping family. Followed, alas, by the teenager’s enthusiastic cry that she loves the song so much she “wants to shag its arse off”. This, of course, being the most vigorous affirmation of affection the innocent moppet has learned from her rough-edged local heroine, Anita.

So there are some terrific moments, and in Bob Bailey’s lovely bricky street set Roxana Silbert directs a nostalgic portrait of the age of tie-dye, Jackie magazine, the coming of Comprehensives and motorways , dogs which still could be called “Nigger” and (let’s face it, since it happens halfway through) the hideous and ignorant youthful sport of “Paki-bashing”.
So far, so good. But it feels more like an observant novel still, series of sketched moments: small conflicts in family and community. Which is interesting, not least in artfully pointing up the irony of Asian immigrant families coming into rough, disaffected white areas and struggling to maintain in their children the dignity, moral standards and family piety of their tradition. The community’s hearts of gold with fags and pinnies are beautifully- notably the marvellous Janice Connolly as Mrs Worrall with her jam tarts and rugged kindness ; but Joseph Drake brilliantly evokes the boy Sam’s journey from an amiable doofus doing wheelies on a Chopper bike to a jobless, half-educated, angry bovver boy lashing out at the Punjabi planning official. Mandeep Dhillon as Meena is a delight, striding and scampering, her body language a lovely innocent contrast to the knowing, roughly sexualized and abused Anita (Jalleh Alizadeh). And as the parents, Ayesha Dharker and Ameet Chana are dignified and touching , especially in Dharker’s sudden expression of lonely, homesick despair at this hard life under an alien sky. Yasmin Wilde, too, is solidly noble as the grandmother, setting the history of colonialism and Partition into intimate family history. And that’s all good.

But as a play, a drama, it doesn’t catch fire until almost too late. All the strong events are in the second half, including a fine showy conversion of the set into a sinister canal-bank. To put it bluntly, not quite enough happens, and not so disastrously as to create a real, shaking conclusion. The plot needs a moment of recklessness to take it beyond a slice of good-hearted soap-opera. Everyone moves on: as it does in a novel, as it does in real life. Not quite theatre: maybe Gupta should have taken more liberties with the novel. But as a slice of 20th century life, it’s perfect.
box office 020 8534 0310 to 21 November

3 Meece Rating

Comments Off on ANITA AND ME Theatre Royal Stratford East, E15

Filed under Three Mice

Tagged as

November 3, 2015 · 11:29 pm

AS YOU LIKE IT Olivier, SE1

A MAGICAL GLADE OF OFFICE FURNITURE…

Of all Shakespeare’s comedies, this is the one which most combines memorable lines – the seven ages of man, Rosalind’s quickfire epigrams about love – with a defiantly absurd plot and a rejection of every probability except that of young love. Indeed I should confess that the prolonged homoerotic practice-wooing between Orlando and a disguised Rosalind in britches has in many productions made me what to howl “Oh, tell him you’re a girl! Get on with it!” And that’s even without the lion-attack-rescue-reconciliation between Orlando and Oliver, – covered in one rushed speech – or the sudden resolution of the old feud as a messenger turns up in the last minute to announce that the wicked Duke has met a monk and changed his ways. It makes you suspect that Shakespeare, up against a deadline, suddenly realized he had got four girls in wedding-dresses and their grooms, plus a long-lost father and a depressed Jacques, all stuck in the middle of a forest with no money. Quick! Reform an offstage Duke!

Its central theme, though, is eternally appealing: that a stiff, unhappy, formal and arid world must be shaken up, its inhabitants thrown into a hostile forest so they can re-work their relationships. So director Polly Findlay opens it in a formal office, where bells govern everything and the only foliage is screensavers and stunted bonsai trees next to the shredders . It looks like a bit of a City trading-floor, not least when Joe Bannister’s blond, public-schooly Orlando has to wrestle, first with his domineering brother (Philip Arditti) and then more dangerously, with Leon Annor, enormous in Lycra and fright-mask, who has been tipped to kill him.
When Rosalind and Celia flee , rather than replace the office set by flying in some trees, designer Lizzie Clachan offers a scenic coup de theatre. Desks and chairs fly upwards, toppling and spilling to hang: monochrome, tangled and threatening as a winter forest. Some chairs still have cast members lurking aloft on them, making sinister woodland sounds. It looks like a freeze-framed explosion in Staples.

At first it felt a bit too clever, a desperate measure; but on the ground there is solidity, and the two fugitive girls carry it. Rosalie Craig is an utterly charming Rosalind, suddenly powerful and confident in her drag, and Patsy Ferran a mischievous physical foil as Celia: nimble and scornful and practical. The forest people too become foils and mirrors: there’s John Ramm as the exiled Duke clinging bravely to decency, Paul Chahidi an unusually troubled Jacques deep in questioning depression, and the shepherds. Among whom Siobhan McSweeney is a standout funny Audrey, and Ken Nwosu delivers the famous definitions of love with a poignant perfection.

So gradually the production drew me to its weird, angular, ultimately bright neon heart. The company singing, by Orlando Gough, is ravishing in it its eerie yearning harmonies. And the introduction of a flock of sheep played by the huge ensemble crawling around in Arran sweaters is a definite enhancement; especially as so many of them make the additional effort to jostle, try and mount each other, graze nose-down, and chew showily. One heroic ram fully consumes one of the hundreds of green Post-It notes on which Orlando writes his awful poems. Actors, gotta love ‘em!
box office 0207 452 3000 to 5 March
In cinemas on 25 Feb 2016
Rating four   4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on AS YOU LIKE IT Olivier, SE1

Filed under Four Mice

Tagged as