Monthly Archives: December 2015

December 27, 2015 · 2:48 pm

QUEEN ANNE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

A HALF-FORGOTTEN QUEEN RISES…

 
School history was terrible. Terrible! We got the Tudors, and a bore-in about the Thirty Years War, but a fog of confusion and a sense of 1066 And All That has long surrounded the Glorious Revolution, Willamanmary, the Spanish Succession, Whigs versus Tories, and why Blenheim mattered. Shamed but invigorated, I now owe much enlightenment to the RSC; this time to playwright Helen Edmundson, whose marvellous The Heresy of Love threw light on Spanish religious despotism.

 

Now she turns her attention to Queen Anne, associated previously by us ill-taught ignorami mainly with fine square brick mansions. Poor Anne – heir of William of Orange, daughter of the deposed Catholic James but herself a staunch Protestant – reigned only from 1702-1714, weakened by her duties and by seventeen pregnancies resulting in only one survivor; a son who grievously died at eleven. The Georges succeeded her and “Georgian” became an era of fame. We do not speak of the Age of Anne.

 
Yet this fascinating, strongly based reimagination of her years acknowledges a woman who, on the face of it far feebler than the great Elizabeth, held the balance in difficult times and through painful personal relationships, not least with her beloved friend Sarah, wife of the Blenheim victor John Churchill, first Earl of Marlborough. Cannily, Edmundson has us meet her first (and several times again) via satire – rampantly rude skits, songs and droopy false breasts deployed by Tom Turner as a hawkish sneering Swift, Carl Prekopp as Defoe, and Jonathan Christie as the pampheteer MP Maywaring. Her friendship with Sarah is mercilessly guyed; so we are primed when we first see her (Emma Cunniffe) dumpy and sad in a nightie as she recovers from the latest miscarriage, suffering the manipulation and power-play of her glamorous Sarah (Natascha McElhone). Future Queen and subject are more like the needy friendless schoolgirl with a crush on the dashing Head Prefect.
The development, and collapse, of this unequal friendship is the backbone of the play, with a third and equally interesting (and historically real) woman in the background: Beth Park as Abigail a poor relation introduced to the new monarch’s household as a personal maid by the scheming Sarah. Her genuine care and gentleness finally rival Duchess Sarah’s influence, to the latter’s intense rage. Some marvellous snarling insults unveil Sarah’s shallowness: excoriating Anne’s “dumb stupidity..a grub! A lump!” as she sides with Whig pamphleteers against the influence of the unprepossessing but artful Harley (Jonathan Broadbent). Emma Cunniffe’s determined, stolid dutiful growth in stature is immensely moving to watch, duty and faith oddly, poignantly recognizable even in the happier life of our own Queen.

 
It is thrilling and always gripping, Natalie Abrahami’s direction wonderful in pace and variation. As in The Heresy of Love, Edmundson brilliantly creates a sense of an older, historic world by using an old rhythm – a great deal of iambic pentameter – without selfconscious archaisms of speech. So these early 18c people spring violently to life before us, in their rows about money, the cost of wars, scandal and blackmail and political finagling and the fragile Act of Union (“What mean the Scots? What irks them now?” got a laugh). There is pathos, danger, character, fury (not least from McElhone when foiled). It pays tribute to an overlooked woman with Abigail’s defiant final riposte to Sarah’s mockery of the determined little Queen. “She’s kind, she’s wise, she prays and tries to do right” .
Fourteen more performances. Hope it transfers. Might go again…
http://www.rsc.org.uk to 23 January
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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December 19, 2015 · 8:35 pm

THE TALE OF MR TOD Avenue Theatre, Ipswich

DARK DOINGS IN THE BURROW

 

 

I hope that the great Beatrix Potter, out of copyright just last year, would be pleased at the pointing, bouncing, giggling and gasping in Red Rose Chain’s little theatre. At the sharing, too, of jokes between the smallest children, their big siblings, and the parents at their side. For of all “nursery” authors, this sharp-eyed and mischievous illustrator, author and naturalist is one of the most rewardingly dramatic. Peter Rabbit – orphaned by Mr McGregor’s pie habit – escapes, as does Tom Kitten from the awful roly-poly-pudding fate: but even the most innocent of children know, and want to know, that there are real dangers and fates out there.

 

 

Joanna Carrick’s roistering, artfully pretend-improv adaptation launches with relish into one of the more thrilling ones. Tommy Brock the badger feigns friendship with daft old Benjamin Bunny in order to steal his helpless baby-rabbit grandchildren, and gets banished from the house by tearful Mummy Flopsy (we’ve all had relatives like that). Brock breaks into Mr Tod’s fox-earth to use his batterie de cuisine for rabbit pie, but falls asleep with his boots on; the fox comes home indignant (but nervous, for badgers have bigger teeth), and makes such a mess of his revenge that under cover of their brawling, two heroic rabbits rescue the babies from the oven. Dramatic? Star Wars, eat your heart out!

 

 

It’s a three-hander, with hasty costume-switches which amused the children greatly. Carrick frames it as two disgruntled urban kids exploring their new attic in the countryside: Lawrence Russell and Kirsty Thorpe kick around old dust-sheeted toys, cookpots and random furniture and find the old books “Baby stuff!”. The ghost of Beatrix Potter appears – Rachael McCormick – grumbling at their bleeping, rackety modern ways, and counters their scornful “nothing ever happened in the olden days” with a few hair-raising Victorian headline tales – kidnappings, a baby set afloat in a cradle, a woman buried alive, dogs boiled up for margarine. That made the older kids sit up a bit.

 

So they all set out to act the Tale of Mr Tod, and great fun it is: plenty of physical jokes, pratfalls, unexpected props (an epidiascope, for heaven’s sake, projecting shadow-pictures) and inspired improvisation: the rabbits’ tunnel needs front row co-operation, which I was proud to join, holding up the wall. Some knowing gags too: the wicked badger turns TV presenter of “Baking with Brock”, Russell as Mr Tod is rather camp and preoccupied with the state of his soft furnishings, and McCormick does a saucily twerking Mrs Tiggywinkle. Nor does Carrick shy away from Potter’s grand vocabulary : Tommy Brock is still ”an incurably indolent person, snoring industriously”.

 
So we all had a grand time. And most strikingly, this being Ipswich, and only 90 minutes, many parents (including our local MP Ben Gummer with his alert small Wilfred ) had brought technically too-young children, a few under two. And they probably didn’t get the whole drift, but crowed and pointed and laughed and stared at the capering adults and daft hats. Result.

 

box office 01473 603388 http://www.redrosechain.com
to 3 Jan
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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December 17, 2015 · 11:49 pm

LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES Donmar, WC1

A WHIFF OF SULPHUR UNDER THE BROCADE…

 

There are certainly crinolines, but Quality Street it ain’t. How smart of Josie Rourke to offer adults, worn down by fairylights and panto duties, a tart, sour and thrillingly unwholesome morsel. It is Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of a 1782 shocker, an epistolary novel of high society and low sex by Choderlos de Laclos, his only work. As is the Donmar habit, it is faultlessly and unfussedly set: characters stride diagonally across the space moving props as scenes change, and until the final cruel dowsing of flames and merciless daylight all the intrigue happens below flickering real candelabras, amid Louis XV chaises-longues and big 18c landscape paintings (plus one small canvas, briefly and chillingly carried before her belly by a particular character).

 
Despite the costumes, Rourke wisely directs her cast without ‘period’ stiffness, so they spring into appalling, modern life: I did wonder whether the ideas of sexual corruption and détournement de jeunesse could still work in our age of commonplace sexual exchange, but the whiff of sulphur is still there all right. Particularly in Janet McTeer’s smoothly alarming performance as the prime conspiratrice: a voice like poisoned velvet, eyes glowing with an elegant malicious despair which deepens as the more violent second Act develops. Dominic West is Valmont, convincingly charming with an edge of savagery: the classic bad-boy who makes women think they can change him, and whose moral emptiness can sometimes ring like a summoning bell.

 

 

For those who never saw the various film adaptations (the classic Vadim with Jeanne Moreau, the Frears one with Glenn Close which was based on this play) the plot is simply, arrestingly damnable. At its heart former lovers Valmont and Mme Merteuil, bored and discontented, play sexual games with innocents. He wants to bed the famously chaste and married Mme de Tourvel (Elaine Cassidy, whose resistance and succumbing are both superb). To Valmont, though, it will only be truly satisfying if by doing it she feels she is betraying her principles rather than discarding them. Sulphur? Oh yes.

 
At the same time Merteuil has challenged him to take the virginity of her friend’s fifteen-year-old daughter Cecile, fresh out of a convent, to spite the girl’s intended husband. Since Cecile herself fancies the music-master, Valmont finds it easy to cast himself as a trusty messenger and get hold of her bedroom key “to deliver letters”. The scene where he overcomes the frightened teenager with blackmail and a hand thrust up her nightie is genuinely, nastily uncomfortable (young Morfydd Clark as Cecile plays it with awful sincerity). Worse is the faux-maternal satisfaction of Merteuil telling the shocked girl that it’s all good “education”, and Valmont’s laughing boast that he has trained the child to do “services one would hesitate to ask of a professional”. Then just as you think he is going to get his comeuppance by finally falling in love with the surrendered Mme de Tourvel, the fatal dominance of Merteuil, even more powerful in her dissolution, takes revenge on them all.

 

 

The alarming thing, well served by fine performances, is the psychological acuteness of Laclos and an underlying sense almost of feminism: outrage at the inequality of sexual power in that society and the consequently nasty tactics women may adopt to even it out. There are comic moments – not least Valmont writing an earnest seducing letter to Mme T, using a courtesan’s bare bum as a desk as she sprawls on the harpsichord. But nobody, innocent or not, ends well. Brrrr!

 
box office 0844 871 7624 to 30 Jan
Rating: four   4 Meece Rating
Principal Sponsor: Barclays
Live cinema transmission http://www.ntlive.com on 28 Jan.

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December 17, 2015 · 12:20 am

THE LORAX Old Vic SE1

THNEEDS MUST WHEN CONSUMERISM DRIVES…

 

It’s a heartfelt welcome. The Old Vic, for a long while fiercely grownup, throws its arms open to children under Matthew Warchus’ leadership with a fabulous pre-curtain soundscape (25 minutes of it as they settle) . Whooshes, bangs, tinkles, hisses, crashes, buzzes and cracks echo all around, followed by an avuncular announcement from “Old Vic” himself about turning phones off and behaving reasonably well.
And when the show does start, in Max Webster’s production there is immediate evidence of something close to love. Dr Seuss’ less-known rhyming fable of the Lorax is slight enough. The protective, yellow-moustached purply-orange blob of the title is a creature who “speaks for the trees’ and the wildlife among them. He tries to stop the Onceler from chopping them down; but the latter discovers that he can make their fronds into useless but heavily desirable Thneeds – sort of ragged knitted nothingnesses – and builds an arid, polluted industrial empire where once was paradise. The environmentalist moral is so sharply and unforgivingly pointed that I was tempted to buy a novelty Lorax-‘tache in the interval (so much for condemning consumerism) and post it straight to George Monbiot.
HOWEVER – the wit, absurdities and extra dotty rhymes of David Greig’s adaptation , combined with some great songs by Jon Clark (especially the protest song, very Les Mis) , the fabulous design (Rob Howell), headlong ensemble work and enchanting puppetry by Finn Caldwell of Gyre and Gimble all together make up for the tale’s moralistic simplicity. Great multicoloured trees grow from the stage, fabulous golden swans flap over the stalls, big-bottomed loopy bears dance with comedy fish. I could watch it for hours. And there was a good bit when the lawyers turn up to back the villain, with barristers’ wigs and sparkly pink cocktail dresses, and the nice five year old next to me asked “Mummy, are they actual real lawyers?”. Alas, no..

As to character, a brilliant Simon Paisley Day as the Onceler holds a share of sympathy, being no cartoon villain. Thrown out by his green-haired industrial family of Moof Mufflers (no idea) to earn his own living far away, at first he realizes that his knitted Thneeds are pointless, and accepts a rebuke from the baggy but authoritative Lorax. Which has a highly expressive moustache and a fine baritone singing voice (respect to Simon Lipkin who has to produce this while in the awkward position of a puppetteer bent double over a wonky 3ft moustachioed flourbag). When greed takes over the Onceler and he builds the dark Satantic factory, all dustbin-lids and pipes and smoke) we see where he’s coming from. When he delivers a sermon of regret for the pollution and advises us all to give up buying stuff and go back to the stone age, he follows it with a roistering product launch of Thneed 2.0 , a very fine gag indeed.

 

And in his final exile, reduced to two baleful yellow eyes and green-wooly paws peering from a dark tower, he has a near-tragic pathos. And so has the child who plants the first new seed of hope in the bare soil. Lump in throat. Didn’t expect that.

 
box office 0844 8717628 to 30 Jan Principal Partner: Royal Bank of Canada
rating four    4 Meece Rating

 

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December 16, 2015 · 1:32 am

THE DAZZLE Found 111 WC2

SUICIDE BY THINGS...

We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin’s School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock-ish iron lift-shaft. Our rickety random chairs surround a domestic interior: piano, junk, a chaise, the litter of a never-tidied hideaway. Andrew Scott, farouche and “méchant”, a man-child oddity with a painfully fastidious musical ear, is the concert pianist Langley Collyer: David Dawson, already haggard with care and half-infected with his brother’s impossible mentality, is Lang’s brother Homer. We will watch their deterioration: not without laughs but ultimately with a disturbing pity.

In America the Collyer brothers are a legend: recluses and hoarders at the turn of the century, both found dead in 1947 amid 140 tons of collected objects and rubbish, having set up tripwires and booby traps to fend off (not without justification) the persecution of their neighbours after the area went downhill in the Depression. The author Richard Greenberg blithely says that his award-winning play – a dark, disturbing imagination – is based on the lives of the brothers “about whom I know almost nothing”. Yet there is a compelling truth in this odd claustrophobic evening, the latest enterprise from the Michael Grandage Company directed by Simon Evans. Convincing truth, that is, about the sort of damaged psychology which does grow into hoarding and – you must conclude – in Lang’s case a condition well into the autistic spectrum.
For Andrew Scott is extraordinary: part childlike, often sharp, with repetitive gabbles and pauses he clutches for sameness and clings to the very tassel he first saw from his cradle; but adult too, and suffering a poetic yearning for normality. A speech about his seven o’clock evenings, looking out at the blowing curling leaves and the slow happiness of homecoming businessmen, breaks your heart. He is reaching out too, though jerkily and unreliably, towards the wholly imaginary character of Milly (Joanna Vanderham), a rich Fifth Avenue heiress who has taken a fancy to him, and who Homer feels Lang should marry, to move their stuck lives on and pay some bills rather than rely on the pianist’s “policy of caprice with booking agents”.

Vanderham – whose awful home back-story emerges, terrifyingly, in the second act – plays it wonderfully: Lang insultingly speaks of her as being “like an unremarkable narrow body of water” which it would be tranquil to live alongside, and initially her socialite psychobabble and politeness are cruelly ludicrous. But Homer’s plan, a bit like a rather madder Henry James novel, collapses in chaos due to her inclination for “a renovation” . The interval sees the prop team fill the room to the ceiling with sitll more junk – cooking pots, suitcases, drifts of paper, a birdcage, a lacrosse stick, a softball jammed in a typewriter. And Vanderham’s return in the second act is startling, alarming and tragic.
All three performances are shattering at times: the first half belongs most to Scott, with his social impossiblity and savant concentration on remembered detail (“Nothing is ever lost on me, nothing ever leaves”) . In the second, Dawson rises to a truthful grief for their isolation and co-dependence, addressing us through the fourth wall, lunging for normality, falling back, wanting “a tiny thing to happen”, anything. Scott nw becomes his albatross, simian, angry, insistent and needy; Vanderham speaks the slender hope that “We might have a final time, we three…”
Disintegration, trapped lives, slow suicide by Things. I never want to see it again but am glad I did. And glad, too, that our own too-cluttered house-move with its sentimental clinging and discarding was over before it opened.
box office http://www.thedazzle.co.uk to 30 Jan

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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December 15, 2015 · 11:06 pm

THE DAZZLE Found 111 WC1

SUICIDE BY THINGS…

 

We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin’s School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock-ish iron lift-shaft. Our rickety random chairs surround a domestic interior: piano, junk, a chaise, the litter of a never-tidied hideaway. Andrew Scott, farouche and “méchant”, a man-child oddity with a painfully fastidious musical ear, is the concert pianist Langley Collyer: David Dawson, already haggard with care and half-infected with his brother’s impossible mentality, is Lang’s brother Homer. We will watch their deterioration: not without laughs but ultimately with a disturbing pity.

 

 

In America the Collyer brothers are a legend: recluses and hoarders at the turn of the century, both found dead in 1947 amid 140 tons of collected objects and rubbish, having set up tripwires and booby traps to fend off (not without justification) the persecution of their neighbours after the area went downhill in the Depression. The author Richard Greenberg blithely says that his award-winning play – a dark, disturbing imagination – is based on the lives of the brothers “about whom I know almost nothing”. Yet there is a compelling truth in this odd claustrophobic evening, the latest enterprise from the Michael Grandage Company and Emily Dobbs Productions,   directed by Simon Evans. Convincing truth, that is, about the sort of damaged psychology which does grow into hoarding and – you must conclude – in Lang’s case a condition well into the autistic spectrum.

 
For Andrew Scott is extraordinary: part childlike, often sharp, with repetitive gabbles and pauses he clutches for sameness and clings to the very tassel he first saw from his cradle; but adult too, and suffering a poetic yearning for normality. A speech about his seven o’clock evenings, looking out at the blowing curling leaves and the slow happiness of homecoming businessmen, breaks your heart. He is reaching out too, though jerkily and unreliably, towards the wholly imaginary character of Milly (Joanna Vanderham), a rich Fifth Avenue heiress who has taken a fancy to him, and who Homer feels Lang should marry, to move their stuck lives on and pay some bills rather than rely on the pianist’s “policy of caprice with booking agents”.

 

 

Vanderham – whose awful home back-story emerges, terrifyingly, in the second act – plays it wonderfully: Lang insultingly speaks of her as being “like an unremarkable narrow body of water” which it would be tranquil to live alongside, and initially her socialite psychobabble and politeness are cruelly ludicrous. But Homer’s plan, a bit like a rather madder Henry James novel, collapses in chaos due to her inclination for “a renovation” . The interval sees the prop team fill the room to the ceiling with sitll more junk – cooking pots, suitcases, drifts of paper, a birdcage, a lacrosse stick, a softball jammed in a typewriter. And Vanderham’s return in the second act is startling, alarming and tragic.
All three performances are shattering at times: the first half belongs most to Scott, with his social impossiblity and savant concentration on remembered detail (“Nothing is ever lost on me, nothing ever leaves”) . In the second, Dawson rises to a truthful grief for their isolation and co-dependence, addressing us through the fourth wall, lunging for normality, falling back, wanting “a tiny thing to happen”, anything. Scott nw becomes his albatross, simian, angry, insistent and needy; Vanderham speaks the slender hope that “We might have a final time, we three…”
Disintegration, trapped lives, slow suicide by Things. I never want to see it again but am glad I did. And glad, too, that our own too-cluttered house-move with its sentimental clinging and discarding was over before it opened.
box office http://www.thedazzle.co.uk to 30 Jan

RATING   four   4 Meece Rating

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December 14, 2015 · 11:54 am

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS St James Theatre, SW1

A LORDLY FOGG  WITH  UNDERSTAGE COGS AND A  FAITHFUL FROG…

 
If you can’t face another panto (oh no you can’t) but want to share a treat with the young, this is one to head for: classic yet daft, constantly playful, even faintly educational if you insist (well, you could discuss Victorian Britain afterwards), and directed with holiday relish by Lucy Bailey. Whose designer Anna Fleischle has taken crafty advantage of the ultra-steep rake of the St James to create a glorious view into a pit in front of the stage: here are Heath-Robinson contraptions, bike wheels, cogs, brass levers, a piano, a kettle and innumerable small trapdoors through which hands of unseen workers briskly pass up – or take away – props.

 

As the auditorium darkens there is even a violent hissing and a steam whistle going POOP! on top of the proscenium. Thus the whole stage is a machine, with a stretch of treadmill for running along city streets. Later , with equally jolly home-made-looking adjustments, the framed stage becomes a train, various ships, and an elephant (big flappy sheet ears, flexible tubing, sound-effects). In a nicely pointed manner the Reform Club card-players who challenge Phileas Fogg to the high-speed (for 1872) circumnavigation sit right outside this vivid little rectangle, perched in high club chairs on the wall beyond the wings.

 
It is pointed because Laura Eason’s adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel is at pains to mock the mechanistic exactitude of the hero’s affluent clubman life: he sacks a valet in the first scene for delivering his tea three degrees too cold, thus enabling Passepartout (SImon Gregor, neatly nimble, every inch the French acrobat) to get the job. The fact that Fogg’s life is underpinned by others’ unseen efforts is indicated by the hands rising through trapdoors from below; sometimes the engineers on ships and trains huff visibly below him. Eason is also, the programme anxiously says, keen to point out that such Victorian Englishmen had an armour-plated sense of Imperial entitlement, and little respect for foreign cultures.

 

 

One’s PC alarm goes off at this, but in the event it gives Robert Portal, who looks very fine in snow-white spats, a lot of opportunities to be ludicrously stiff. These he takes with relish (I specially like his refusal to go and see the Pyramids because “I have seen it all in the journal of the Royal Geographical Society” and has a date to play whist. The gradual unfogging of this semi-autistic savant (he has Bradshaw railway timetables by heart) is surprisingly touching. And one of the best laughs (not in the script, I notice) is when he has hijacked the tramp steamer and the skipper growls “there’s something of the docker about you” and Portal replies “Sweet of you, but I think not”.

 

The journey itself becomes increasingly fun, as he is pursued by Tony Gardner’s gloomily deadpan policeman who thinks he is a bank robber, and encounters foreigners and rescues the glamorous Indian widow (Shanaya Rafaat) from suttee, in a stiff dutiful Baden-Powell spirit which she gradually melts. It reaches a crescendo in the second act with a stormy, noisy struggle across the Atlantic; there’s even a moment of cast clambering through the stalls (Passepartout panhandling afte rhe misses the ship home after being stuck an opium den), in which Gregor climbed over me in the matinee pointing to the notebook and shouting “Une critique! Une critique! Zey can close shows! Zis never closes!” .

 

But the physical comedy and the small supporting cast’s quick-change characeters t make it most fun and playful (children love shows which they think they can go home and do themselves, with sheets and an upturned kitchen table) . The various interludes on swaying decks are done with great precision and there are some priceless moments of deliberate upstaging , especially by Eben Figueiredo and Tim Steed, who are hilarious. It’s all just far over the top to reassure you that yep, it’s Christmas…
box office http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk | 0844 264 2140
to 17 Jan

rating four4 Meece Rating

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December 11, 2015 · 4:00 pm

A CHRISTMAS CAROL Noel Coward Theatre, WC1

BROADBENT & BARLOW BRING BACK THE BIG BAD BANKER… 

 

Tom Pye’s design of Victorian découpage creates a toy paper-theatre within the stark stage area: the scenes revolve like worn pages of an old storybook; 2D, apparently lashed-up cutout props are dragged vigorously on and off – doors, fireplaces, a gramophone, a London panorama, a newsboy’s banner saying QUEEN MARRIES GERMAN. Basic puppetry pops up, including some very entertaining human-puppetry as Scrooge and the ghosts fly through space and time with fake legs. (at one point Scrooge protests “Oh no, not the legs again!”). It all lies within the playful metatheatre world of Patrick Barlow (National Theatre of Brent, The 39 Steps, the Tricycle’s current Ben-Hur). Scrooge is the irresistible Jim Broadbent, in great white candyfloss sideburns.

 
It is almost wonderful. In a less grandly West-endy theatre it would be. Director Phelim McDermott and Steven Edis make fine use of music, old carols in particular. Broadbent starts off as a smooth, payday-loanish financier, whose hostility to Christmas is diluted by the fact that he has just discovered marketing, and put up a big banner wishing compliments of the season to his clients. He is pleasingly defiant of Marley, whose yawning, decomposing mask like a Munch scream has him saying “keep your chin up!”, a nice black joke. He adopts, initially at least, a rather wonderful cod-Edwardian accent (“Decrease the sarplus population”). As the back-story of his sad beginnings and lost love is unfolded, he offers some real moments of feeling, and there is a sharp Barlowesque tearing-down of the fourth wall as the Ghost of Christmas Future shows him dead, and the rest of the cast tell him it’s all been a play and it’s over.
But some problems never quite resolve. You’re not quite sure whether it is sincere or send-up; the language jerks between modern realism and sudden “thees” and “thous”, a device which worked fine in Ben-Hur because from the start we knew they’re just playing at it. Here, we’re less assured of that. The larky home-made look of the production is endearing, and I greatly approve of shows which give children the feeling they could do it themselves at home that night because a play is just play: but it may disappoint some families who reckon you pay huge West End prices for something that looks seriously expensive. Even if it’s a bit of a turkey.

 
There are some terribly overdone passages too : the brutal schoolmaster goes on way too long, twice, and the wenchy, squalling Ghost of Christmas Present is Samantha Spiro, doing an ooh-get-me! Ruby-Waxish brand of chirpiness which made me want to leap up and throttle her with her crinoline. Though to be fair, Spiro is rather sweet in her other five roles, and some of the audience palpably thought she was a scream. Maybe one has to be a bit drunk. Never underestimate the fatal need of critics to be soberer than the rest of the audience.

 
And let it be said that the other bit of OTT works splendidly: is Keir Charles’ turn as Mr Fezziwig, doing a crazed Irish dance with his wig falling over his eyes. Now that, I loved. Wanted to love the whole show really; in a smaller venue I probably would have done.
box office 0844 482 5130 http://www.noelcowardtheatre.co.uk to 30 Jan
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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December 10, 2015 · 12:01 am

HAPGOOD Hampstead Theatre, NW3

 

UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLES AND UNPRINCIPLED CERTAINTIES

 

It is a mildly shaming reflection that  Tom Stoppard plays generally dismissed by his cadre of scholarly admirers as “not his best work”, str going to be the ones I enjoy most. While I am often left cold by those cited as masterpieces. Never mind. This one – written and set in the last days of the Cold War 27 years ago – is a thoroughly enjoyable espionage comedy-thriller. Ideal for a John le Carré fan and Cold War kid fresh from enjoying BRIDGE OF SPIES, who also enjoys fleeting moments of thinking she understands particle physics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Which is to say, it was just my bag. A pre-Christmas treat.

 

Stoppard gleefully picks up all the spook jargon about ‘joes’, safe houses, American CIA “cousins”, drops, assets, and dead Bulgarian pimps at “Athens station”. Though he does take care to mock himself for all that, in the person of the Russian double (or possible triple or quadruple) agent Josef the physicist who points out that in the end the villain is always the nice guy everyone liked. With equal magpie pleasure the playwright also picks up the physics, as a complex double-triple-crossing plot rejoices in parallels with electrons. These can seemingly be in two places at once, just as one – or possibly all – of the main protagonists may actually be twins. Or may not. Anyway, there is much verbal play with the ideas of positive/negative, matter/antimatter, presence/absence , truth/lies, science / art, etc.

 

The heroine Ms Hapgood is (presciently for the ‘80s) a senior spook and agent-runner, known as “Mother” to the men alongside or below her. She is also mother of a nice muddy little prep school boy, and therefore uses the red scrambled telephone regularly for messages about his rugger boots and hamster. Lisa Dillon gives Hapgood a sort of sharp intelligent anarchy, making wholly credible the situation she has landed in – a single mother, involved professionally and personally with one of the key men, with inevitable complications. Dillon is also – no spoilers – required at one point to perform something quite different and intensely entertaining, possibly as part of a deceit against one colleague, or perhaps another.

 
Tim McMullan, deploying a perfect Establishment face, is dryly funny as Blair, described by the engaging Josef (Alec Newman) as “a Bachelor of Arts First Class with an amusing incomprehension of the sciences” yet who has less soul than the Russian physicist. Gerald Kyd is the more gun-happy, macho Ridley, and Gary Beadle brings just the right air of affronted CIA arrogance to the “Cousin”, who reckons these damn Brits are leaking particle-chat to Moscow but doesn’t know how.

 
Howard Davies’ production is elegantly set before a changing video-wall and some sliding steel cubicle doors, sometimes representational (it starts with assorted spies and their shadows creeping around with briefcases at a swimming-pool) sometimes semi-abstract, expressing the equations and diagrams of Josef’s secret antimatter research. Which, in the most serious twist of all, is revealed as a completely pointless non-weapon in what was fast becoming a pointless spying war. It’s all the opposite of the deadly seriousness of Michael Frayn’s COPENHAGEN, if you like. Which is the last time that this arts graduate sat in the stalls getting properly excited about electrons.
Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com to 23 January
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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December 9, 2015 · 5:48 pm

CYMBELINE Wanamaker at Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

ALL IS FORGIVEN   (UNLESS YOU’RE DEAD, AND DON’T DESERVE IT) 

 
This is part of Dominic Dromgoole’s candlelit farewell to his tenure at the Globe: a set of late Shakespeare romances , and follows his own fine PERICLES the other week. This one is directed by Sam Yates, and with its geographical wandering, improbable happenings, and odd lumps of possibly-non- Shakespeare text it is even knottier. But in the end, a fine and satisfying knot, finished with a  neat bow.

 
The plot is borrowed from a mixture of Holinshed’s chronicles of ancient Britain, mixed up with the sexier bit of the Decameron. Some scholars have thought that by now Shakespeare (int 1611) was actually in a mood to parody his own earlier work: there are strands of Othello-esque misunderstanding and Leontes unreason, Learish kingship, a defiant daughter, lost children recovered, a murderous wife, a cross-dressed innocent, a wrong corpse and confusion over an apothecary’s sleeping-draughts. In fact, it is hard to find an earlier Shakespeare play which does not somewhere foreshadow it.

 
So in brief: King Cymbeline and his second wife (who is trouble) want his daughter Imogen (here Innogen, more correctly) to marry her loutish stepbrother Cloten (great nominative determinism, the innocent and the clodpoll) . He is the Queen’s son. Our heroine however has secretly married Posthumus, who is lower born but decent. Until he isn’t decent at all , because when he is banished the Iago figure, Iachomo, tries to seduce Innogen and then pretend he has, and Posthumus falls for it, just about credibly. Meanwhile there are two missing princes, raised as rustic huntsmen., and a row with the Romans about tribute.

 
Of all the ‘romance’ plays this one requires the steadiest directorial nerve in turning on a sixpence from comedy to horror, tragic loss to ludicrous absurdity and back again. Yates holds it together beautifully. Not least because at its heart is Emily Barber as Innogen: graduated only last year and a real find. She is gloriously at home with the verse: can with equal naturalness rant it, prattle it, argue in it , weep or yawn to sleep it, all with proper enchantment. Moreover, she makes an adorable crop-haired boy when she is on the run; not least in the rough-and-tumble, deeply endearing reunion with the brigandish lads who turn out to be her long-lost brothers. Her affronted line that the life of a man is tedious, what with sleeping on the ground, brought the house down.
Jonjo O’Neill is her beloved Posthumus, Eugene O’Hare a sneaky Iachimo (who is, unusually, actually rather credible when he finally repents) But they’re all a delight, playing the emotions and the absurdities with equal relish: notably Trevor Fox’s Pisanio, always the right-hand-man, and Brendan O’Hea as the gruff old Belarius who stole the boys. Joseph Marcell is a fine King, matched with a fabulously nasty Pauline McLynn giving the bad Queen the full Cruella de Vil treatment. Calum Callaghan as the clottish Cloten plays it Tim Nice-but-Dim, but gives the often undervalued character a real air of offence. He may be an aspiring rapist and a Mummy’s boy, but you see his point. .Callaghan also gets the honour of having been made a fully detailed and wholly convincing (if bloodless) decapitated head, waved in the face of the startled Pit audience.
And so finally with battle, smoke, clashing shields, and misapprehensions so entangled that they require Jupiter himself to descend “on a thunderbolt” from the very high painted roof (the programme suggests that it was the exciting new mechanism at the Blackfriars theatre which made Shakespeare do that stage direction). Jupiter in this case is female, briskly spoken, wearing a bedsheet toga, pompadour wig and what looks like a gold bra. McLynn again…

 
And all the joking, beheading, brawls, heart-deep grief and entanglement ends in a very deft treatment of the long final explanation-and-forgiveness scene. Which could be boring, but here, as every character throws in their shillingsworth of dramatic revelation and Marcell the King gawps at each one, Yates’ cast permit us (amid the moving embraces) to shake with gales of laughter. That’s the way to do it.
box office 0207 401 9919 in rep to 21 April
rating Four   4 Meece Rating

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December 8, 2015 · 5:05 pm

SLEEPING BEAUTY Bristol Old Vic

SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL…GET OUT OF BED AND PULL HIMSELF TOGETHER…
It is almost comically calculated to stir up timid traditionalists. The enchanted sleeper is a bloke – David Emmings the cheerily Woosterish Prince Percy  in plus-fours . His rescuer is a lairy black modern streetwise girl from a hovel : Kezrena James as Deilen. She doesn’t kiss the centennial snorer for his beauty, but in a heroic attempt at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She then reluctantly allows the rather wussy, cottonwool-raised Prince to join her heroic quest for something from a different fairytale altogether; she shares her bivouac and saves him – and some enslaved fairy- godmother aunties – when he is turned into a pig by the bad fairy though “actually I rather like you as a pig”. That the couple share a final kiss does not imply any surrender of her fierce feminism, perish the thought. They go off adventuring, and she is still the leader.

 

All of which is fine by me, since I know at least one real Bertie Wooster saved by a tough street girl. But some have taken the gender-swop amiss, especially from director-deviser Sally Cookson whose wonderful Jane Eyre on scaffolding also upset a few hardened bonnetophiles.   For me, a bit of vigorous PC and reconstruction is welcome in the saccharine season of Disneyish princesshood. And Cookson’s conflating of the rather exiguous Sleeping Beauty tale with an odd old folktale of “leaves that hang but never grew” , plus a dash of Hansel and Gretel, is ingenious. So is the odd framing of the whole play, fore and aft , in the plight of the prince having been made amnesiac and depressed until Deilen brings back his lost diary.

 

Emmings’ softie Percy gradually becomes likeable, although pretty irritating at first: frankly at the point of crisis a jaundiced adult might mutter that the achievement of the bad fairy’s pin is not the only prick in the room. Kezrena James is a fearless likeable Deilen, Stu Goodwin a more than satisfactory drag villainess fairy, the music is jolly and the design by Michael Vale clean and atmospheric. The chorus of comedy aunty frump-fairies (which the principals hastily change to join) is colourfully Pythonesque.

 

So, much to approve. But theres a problem,  most un-Cookson, of pace. The first half is often worryingly static, people standing talking in straight lines, nobody scampering or energizing matters. The logical flaw of it being not a “true love’s kiss” that does the waking bothered some children at the interval who take magic seriously (Cookson could have left the true-love line out and just said kiss).  The songs also tend to stop the action dead in this first half.  Whats gone wrong?

 

I dunno.  Maybe it is deliberate, a posh-panto ploy to make the school parties sit still and concentrate for once, before the clapalong whoopee and considerably more exciting wickedness of Act 2. Which does work, and include satisfying emotional development for both the leads and scope for Goodwin to dress up as Bo Peep over his ciré cocktail frock and do amusingly evil things involving sheep and domestic slavery. So I cheered up, and the kids visibly left in a good mood. But I hope they all get to a really noisy panto this year as well. Can’t be too genteel.

 
box office 0117 987 7877 to 17 January http://www.bristololdvic.org.uk
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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December 6, 2015 · 4:04 pm

BEN HUR Tricycle, Kilburn

WHO NEEDS CHARLTON HESTON? 

 
I have a weakness for schlock-historical movie epics, due to a regular childhood treat when I was at school in France and my Dad and I would sneak down the Rue de Bethune in Lille to find one: Quo Vadis, The Long Ships, The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra… Of course the emperor of them all was William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur – a Tale of the Christ”, based on a stonking great overblown 19c novel by the Civil War General Lew Wallace, in which a heroic Jewish boy Judah Ben-Hur triumphs over Roman imperial bullying. It is all set between the Nativity and the Ascension, with Jesus popping up at various points to inspire. It won eleven Academy awards, cost $ 15m dollars, employed 50,000 extras, 365 actors and 78 horses for the nine-minute chariot race. It makes today’s CGI epics look wussy. But apart from epics, another weakness I admit is for larksome, apparently hasty and low-budget performances like The Reduced Shakespeare Company.
So when Patrick Barlow – famed for The 39 Steps and the National Theatre of Brent – decided to do Ben Hur with four actors and a few props, framing it as a misguided megalomanic’s project with an emotionally fraught cast, I naturally threw myself at it.

 

It does not disappoint. Tim Carroll directs with brisk wit, and Michael Taylor’s designs ensure happy visual moments, all the way from the Magi’s stuffed camels awkwardly kneeling at Bethlehem as plywood angels are noisily cranked over the stable, to the stuffed galley-slaves, entangled toga-sleeves, overhasty quick-changes, lawnmower-powered chariot horses , collapsing pillars and spectacular Ascension. The text meanwhile mingles beautifully awkward backward-Latinate syntax and faux archaisms (as indeed does Lew Wallace’s book). And, as traditional in these performances, the internal disaffection of the cast provides an underplot.
John Hopkins plays the hero, Ben Jones hops in and out of being the villainous Messala and half a dozen others, Alix Dunmore plays (among other things) the two key women and is very funny too: but the greatest joy of it for me was the veteran: the comedically nimble Richard Durden, playing an elderly RSC retiree dragged back by Hopkins to play the elderly matriarch, a Roman admiral, various others, and the weary voice of sanity when the young cast members get their love-lives in a twist. The school parties around me at the matinee loved every minute, and so did I.

box office 020 7328 1000 to 9 Jan
Joyfully joint-produced with Fiery Angel and the Watermill
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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December 2, 2015 · 11:58 pm

FUNNY GIRL Menier, SE1

THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE  OF ALL…

 

For half a generation there has been a truism in the musical theatre world that nobody can do Jule Style and Bob Merrill’s FUNNY GIRL, because Streisand played the 1920’s eccentrically comic Ziegfeld star and nobody can beat her. So why try? Thus not many have done so: one Broadway revival got “postponed”. But nothing daunts the Menier, fount of daring musical revivals. Michael Meyer from New York directs, the Savoy transfer is already in the bag, and the starring role is our secret weapon: Britain’s own high-voltage electric waif, Sheridan Smith.

 

She nails it: every wisecrack and every nuance, and she takes several opportunities for sly, new and very British moments: for instance when the dashing Arnstein (Darius Campbell, looking about 8ft tall) has first impressed her with his ruffled dress shirt, she coos that even his fingernails are polished: and then allows herself the tiniest moue, as a girl does when a heart-throb seems potentially too camply groomed for safety. She acts every song, hurls every long money-note into a gasping auditorium, and brings truth to every emotion, turning on a sixpence from brash jokey confidence to anxious selfconsciousness as her love-match flowers (what a seduction scene!) and then goes sour.

 
Matthew Wright’s costume and hair design artfully make Smith look dumpier than she could ever be in real life, closer to the dynamic plain-girl that Brice must be. Next to a superbly tall ensemble of chorus girls and boys, and even more alongside Arnstein, she is almost dwarfed. Her early galumphings and deliberate ungainliness – remember Smith’s masterly deployment of ‘comedy legs’ in Legally Blonde all those years ago – can shade into professional grace, and comedically snap back again.
Mayer keeps it moving, the ensemble neatly dancing scenery and props on and off with Lynne Page’s choreography whirling, tapping, offering sudden glorious jokes like the Rat-tat-tat-tat soldier number, a brilliantly absurd bit of ballet and above all the Henry Street party . Where the old ladies Meeker, Bride and Srakosh are glorious: Valda Aviks, Gay Soper and Marilyn Cutts, the latter celebrating fifty years onstage. Joel Montague is a touching, skilful Eddie, Bruce Montague the great Ziegfeld (“The headdress is too tall for the arch? Raise the arch!”).

 

Alan Williams leads a ten-piece band, and – well, we all left very happy. Obviously we did: Sheridan Smith made us all, for a brief moment as we stood to cheer, join in the last bellow of “…are the happiest people of all!”

 

Sold out at Menier 0207 378 1713: booking fast at Savoy Theatre till July
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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December 1, 2015 · 11:44 pm

LINDA Royal Court SW1

 YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL! SURE YOU WANT IT?

 

 

Revolving sleek as a spaceship is Es Devlin’s multi-layered set: the office and neon slogans of Swan cosmetics: bottles and jars, seductive smartness and ethical boasts of “changing the world one girl at a time”. Making a sly point, the white futuristic plasticity also contains the heroine’s home, where her husband Neil grunts unresponsively at the kitchen table to her teenage daughter. At fifty-five Linda has risen to “have it all”, and it’s all-of-a-shiny-piece. Much good will it do her. Penelope Skinner’s artful new play, alternately hilarious and alarming, makes sharp feminist points but dryly suggests that while 2015’s women and girls do have a lot to contend with, some of the shitstorm is (if not totally our fault) encouraged by the ways we tackle it.

 

It opens with Linda, senior and award-winning brand manager, doing a presentation about a new cream to be marketed with realistic images of women over fifty, rather than showing women who don’t yet need it. She speaks of the middle-aged problem of “vanishing”, not being whistled at by builders, etc: I jibbed. Some of us find the vanishing restful, don’t envy the catcalled young and think the beauty industry is a bit of a ramp anyway.

 

But Skinner is well aware of all this, as becomes clear when Linda’s family swim into focus: Imogen Byron a delight as the stolidly sane14-year-old who isn’t interested in that stuff, or in her mother’s gushy tributes to her ‘beauty’. She has other ambitions, involving everything from armed robbery to travel, shipwreck and shark attacks; for a school audition she plans to do a male Shakespeare speech and resents the drama teacher’s view that in plays about men the stakes are inevitably higher because, unlike us, “men, like, actually kill each other”. There’s a lovely ironic scene near the end reflecting that line: won’t spoil it

 

Then there’s Alice, a truly stunning performance by Karla Crome. She is 25, depressed, and actually wants to vanish: dressing fulltime in a skunk-themed onesie because of a peculiarly awful bit of female victimhood she suffered at fifteen. Linda has unwisely got her work-experience (without admitting the relationship) in her office. Where we find the horrifying corporate-Barbie Amy (Amy Beth Hayes) who definitely wants to have it all. Wedding now, then “Three years to get promoted before optimum baby age, if you go much past 29 you risk being phased out in the workplace and your body doesn’t ping back into shape. And if you don’t ping back into shape you could end up being fat for the rest of your life and if you’re a fat woman you actually earn less…”

 
We laugh. But my companion , a former corporate executive winced in recognition. We laugh a bit at Linda too, though her misjudgements are subtler – ordering her daughters “don’t take racist of sexist people too seriously” ,being fixated on staying size 10, and rushing home to make risotto superwoman-style rather than actually listening to her daughters. Her nemesis approaches: Amy undermines her at work, there’s trouble with the CEO Dave (Ian Redford nobly sacrificing vanity to look tubby, grizzled and unlovely while patronizing “a woman your age”). Neil has a fling to feel like a rock star not a middle-aged schoolteacher, and Linda’s mental cracks culminate in a properly apocalyptic King Lear moment, with the revolving set flashing in a rainstorm. What has been a funny, sharp, satirical comedy of manners darkens satisfyingly , with some really cruel twists well laid down in the first act.

 
Excellent. But come last to the headline story: Michael Longhurst lost his star Kim Cattrall to health issues only ten days ago. Noma Dumezweni stepped in as Linda. On press night – impossible at this time of year to delay – she was script-in-hand for some sections. She is superbly nonchalant with it (after all, women execs do carry paper around a lot). And she inhabits the central role with dry wit, crackling energy, lovely comic timing and real heart. What a star. The play is actually better than HANGMEN (lately transferred) so let’s hope the Court scores another West End hit.
box office 020 7565 5000 http://www.royalcourtheatre.com
to 9 Jan
Rating four   4 Meece Rating

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