Monthly Archives: September 2018

September 28, 2018 · 5:58 pm

PINTER AT THE PINTER: TWO Harold Pinter Theatre

GUEST CRITIC BEN BLACKMORE MUSES ON CHEESE-KNIVES AND TELETUBBY HOUSES

 

PINTER 2 announces itself in bold, Sex And The City-type projections, in the Sex And The City font as though it were the sequel.  The late summer blockbuster you never knew you wanted.   

A comedy from Pinter usually gets treated one of two ways: irony-steeped laughfest or anxiety-inducing fake-comedy, and tonight’s plays go both ways – in more ways than one.The curtain opens first onto The Lover, and one of the gaudiest sets I can remember,  in pupil-dilating Technicolor.  Adorned in kitschy 50s cribbing, everything is either baby pink or radioactive green: a Mr Blobby interior. If it wasn’t for the unsettling restraint shown in the Stepford kitchenette, the whole thing would look as though it were staged on a Teletubby’s tummy. 

 

Richard and Sarah are a married couple, who each speak candidly of having a lover. The not-so-shocking reveal, which comes early on, is the identity of the lovers. Yes, they’re…Richard and Sarah, navigating a delicate, double-dealing game of role play. John Macmillan and Hayley Squires cope well with the relative paucity of material they’ve got to work with.  As if they were melting waxwork figures at Madame Tussauds, their pathos plays out almost entirely in facial expressions: smiles pained and ripping at the seams, alternatively vindictive and humiliated. Yet atop these grimaces is smeared a kind of lurid conviviality. 

 

The whole thing is very disquieting , and all will rejoice to hear that the Pinter-Pauses are out in full force, deployed for the most part as the catchment into which errant and uneasy titters from the First Night audience fell. It does does manage to capture the millennial crisis of feeling simultaneously on the verge of bursting into tears and bursting into flames.  The sexual fantasy  is enacted with compulsive dexterity, as though  expunging  some clinical neurosis. Only lust disrupts the set’s considered symmetry, before the fever bleeds out into a bruised purple vignette. 

 

The second play, The Collection is thematically and stylistically loosened and dimmed down; the stage draped with dusky curtains, evoking the louche atmosphere of a late-night talk show.  Gone is the manic pixie house, dissolved into a dreamlike promontory which two couples occupy, together yet separately, while trying to comprehend their lovers’ infidelities.  The calm doesn’t last long, as The Collection swivel-tilts rapidly towards camped-up ribaldry. Macmillan and Squires are joined by Russell Tovey and David Suchet, whose arrival fleshes it out into a haughty, far more gestural affair.
Tovey is an awkward yet endearing mixture of campy and cockney, inviting calumny at every turn.  Suchet, the arbiter of The Collection’s real comic potential, occasionally pushes it too far in the direction of panto – there’s a moment where he sidles across stage to intercept his lover’s phone call and I was reminded of the Grinch on Christmas morn.

 
The Collection (and The Lover) still feel incredibly modern in their case-study observations on  infidelity and subterfuge, even though none of the indiscretions seem particularly radical by today’s standards. They’re double-edged daggers – or maybe cheese knives – at once  genuinely tickling and instruments of torture.

box office  www.atgtickets.com

rating three  3 Meece Rating

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September 28, 2018 · 8:56 am

PINTER AT THE PINTER –    ONE Harold Pinter Theatre, WC1

STEEL CELLS AND SADISM

 

     Settling in, you’d think you were at the Cenotaph or the Tattoo.   A military soundtrack booms out Imperial Echoes and Jupiter (I Vow To Thee My Country).  The forecurtain has a single word in brutalist stone-grey letters  and as it goes up there’s a deafening Rule Britannia.  Oh,  and a shower of tickertape.

 

 The stony word is PINTER,  and this launches a short season marking his death ten years ago by assembling, in seven sets,  all his short playlets, sketches and poems, with starry casts including (in this first set)  Paapa Essiedu, Maggie Steed and Antony Sher.     This opener is themed on atrocity, repression, dictatorship and state torture.  

 

          It is no secret that Harold Pinter’s gift was for evoking threat, emotional cruelty and downright bullying, whether official or familial. The first half, directed by Jamie Lloyd, starts with the brief “Press Conference”  in which a suave“Minister of Culture” speaks of annihilating subversive children. Next a bufferish caricature of two politicians dismissing millions of deaths, and an audio clip of the author himself about  “putting my finger on the body politic of the world”.  Next a naked figure sits on a chair while two torturers in shades gleefully discuss without detail how much they will do to him: there’s a playfulness which the author is enjoying worryingly much.  The glee continues in the next one, as two thuggish soldiers ask impossible questions of cowering women trying to visit a bloodstained prisoner in a steel cell and the voice of Michael Gambon forbids them to use their language.   In between these imagined atrocities the music blasts out Zadok The Priest, presumably  to suggest that monarchy causes such things.

 

         And on we go to Kate O’Flynn as an American Football cheerleader shrieking one of PInter’s favourite tropes about how “we blew the shit outa them, they’re suffocating in their shit, praise the Lord”.   Oh, and a jejune joke  “undiscovered” sketch in which a bad-wig Trump (a different guest star each time) orders “Nuke London”. 

      

        There is brief relief as Maggie Steed beautifully speaks his gentle poem about death,  and then a longer, quite remarkable performance by Antony Sher interrogating,  in a nightmare of suggestive bullying,  a silent dissident. Then, really nastily,   the man’s raped wife and small child. Sher is of course brilliant.   And of course drama should reflect the existence of torture, fascist dictatorships, bleak cells,  sadism and the banning of free speech (something which the ever-lionized Pinter never suffered).   But the danger of  anthologising like this is the lack of any specificity.   Without relating it  to the realities of Nazi Germany, Guantanamo, Syria ,Russia, China, wherever,  or even and without even declaring it a dystopia –   it can decline into mere sadistic fantasy.  Wallowing. 

Pinter does wallow, no question about it, and the director Jamie Lloyd’s belief that it is amusingly satirical to suggest with his Cenotaph-music that we’re in a fascist state here,   is not only silly but an insult to those who really are in one.   So the lack of context in that sequence bothered me. 

 As for the second half, where Lia Williams directs  Ashes to Ashes with Kate O”Flynn and Essiedu, it is again well-executed. But  dripping with sexual sado-masochism of the kiss-my-fist variety and,   in the woman’s final words, rather disgustingly hijacking  images of the Holocaust trains.   Still, we were spared another blast of Zadok the Priest.    Look, if you love this aspect of Pinter – the wallowing threat –  you’ll not find it better evoked than in Pinter One.   For the other six in the series, watch this space. 

 

www.atgtickets.com   to February

rating  two   2 meece rating

   

 

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September 27, 2018 · 12:12 am

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA Olivier, SE1

A GLORIOUS SERPENT OF OLD NILE

  

  This can be a beast of a play:  epic, three and a half hours,  scenes spread across the Mediterranean from Rome to Cairo by land and sea.  It is also prone to disconcert audiences who came for an archetypal story of doomed passion,  by socking them with a binful of ancient international politics and offstage battles.  It can be a bit of an ordeal.   The last RSC one was.   So I am happy to say that this time, and in the trickily vast Olivier,   director Simon Godwin has absolutely pulled it off .  

 

      And not only by casting Ralph Fiennes and Sophie  Okonedo as the leads, either.   Though yes, Fiennes is a giant:   his Antony solidly credible and pulsing with disastrous energy.    He is first seen lounging around Cleopatra’s tiled and elegant pool in a holiday shirt and wraparound palazzo pants  like any eminent man having a midlife crisis with an exotic mistress.   Then struck by “a Roman thought”  as his scornful Cleo puts it,   he gets into  a linen suit and  a political conclave with the other two rulers of the Roman triumvirate:    Tunji Kasim’s  more youthful and rather prim Caesar  and the ageing Lepidus (Nicholas le Prevost) who is clearly almost a cipher already, even before he gets incapably drunk on the treacherous Pompey’s ship.   That Antony is torn between the ease and love of Egypt and the brutalist war-room world of Rome is beautifully evoked by Hildegarde Bechtler’s contrasting, revolving settings.

 

 

     But it is Antony’s decline we are riveted by:  persuaded into his public duty and accepting Caesar’s pious sister as his wife,  he thinks for a while that  he is his old self again;   but in the battles, the Olivier shaking and echoing with  the racket and flash of modern warfare,   he reverts and shames himself by fleeing after Cleopatra. Fiennes becomes a Lear,  bestial and brutal in his self-hate and resentment of her “You were my conqueror!”.    Even his final and famously problematical death  is made to work.  The muffed self- stabbing which always gets an embarrassed laugh,  and the  equally risky process of being hauled up the monument in a sheet ,  contrive to make more sense than usual.  He abdicated responsibility, has been politically disastrous and morally neglectful, thus he earned his un-Roman death, honour and reputation ruined.  Until, of course, Cleopatra’s  extraordinary final encomium shines his name up into the stars again. 

            And what a Cleopatra!  Sophie Okonedo defined herself tonight as her generation’s “lass unparalleled”.  . Slinkily  serpentine and laughingly seductive at first, petulant in jealousy,  a mistress of comic timing and at one point downright drunk in orange flamenco frills,  she manages in increasing flashes to remind us that “Kings have trembled” kissing her hand.   And in her last scenes, stubborn and resigned and queenly proud,  she is mesmerizing.  

 

           But the whole cast is full of treats;  not least Fisayo Akinade as Eros, forever delivering unwelcome messages (he gets thrown in the pool by Okonedo and drips forlornly in his wet suit repeating the bad news).  Yet he too grows to his tragic  moment of truth.  Tim McMullan as the cynical sarky Enobarbus is tremendous too;  as  is Sargon Yelda  as a cocky, amoral Pompey.  

 

    The staging brilliantly respects the pivotal emotional changes of the play.  Once,  Cleopatra’s pool sinks into the great revolve, revealing a moment’s bleak emptiness as the sacrificial Octavia walks alone crumpling her bridal veil,  then in the same movement the side of a great grey warship rises and we are in Pompey’s navy, politics and war always the other side of the romantic coin.    Indeed Hannah Morrish’s  Octavia, a character often shuffled into insignificance in more hurried productions,    has two other tremendous moments: when she learns that her husband has been flaunting himself on twin thrones with Cleopatra and Agrippa says “each heart in Rome does love and pity you”,  she crouches in humiliation as we all do under such pity.  Her short moment addressing Cleopatra on the monument is striking too. so that you come to feel that for all the war and political machismo and the fall of Antony,   this is a play about women.  

 

    By the way, it’s a real snake. They warn you about that.  But so far Okonedo has kept a firm grip on the writhing, colourful beast even when dying,  so it hasn’t made a break for freedom in the front stalls.  But if you’re touchy on the subject, sit a bit further back…

box office  020 7452 3000       nationaltheatre.org.uk   to 19 Jan     

In cinemas live 6 December

rating five    5 Meece Rating

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September 25, 2018 · 5:00 pm

TARTUFFE                 Swan, Stratford upon Avon

MOLIERE IN THE MODERN MIDLANDS 

 

       It says something good about our arts establishment  that this sharp caper comes from the Royal Shakespeare Company, not some daring pub-room ensemble.   It was Gregory Doran, the RSC’s leader,  who surprised  Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto (veterans of The Kumars, Citizen Khan etc) with the suggestion they adapt Moliere’s 17c comedy of hypocrisy,  and set it in a Pakistani Muslim family in Birmingham, directed by Iqbal Khan.   

 

      Stroke of genius, that:   the play is about a pious fraud,  a religious con-man who dazzles a rich merchant into promising him his wealth and daughter even as he sets about seducing the wife.  It was an attack on corrupt “spiritual directors”  of a more pious era:  logical to head for the most pious community in our midst.   Tartuffe is Tahir Taufiq Arsue,  a showy worshipper from the mosque,  his victim Imran a second-generation immigrant with a  glamorous second wife, flashy house and  “Norwegian spruce decking  on the patio, seven thousand pounds”.  

 

 

       Simon Nagra, round-faced and earnest,  is an absolute delight as Imran:   the  Brummie accent with its plaintive upswing works extraordinarily well in evoking his dangerous innocence as he  feels guilt at his wealth and yearns for the wonders of Tartuffe’s “true Islam”.   The laughs come early with the glorious Amina Zia as the essential bossy old Mama-ji Dadimaa:  the woman has a unique ability to turn her mouth down in a perfect crescent of disapproval, I’ve been practising in the mirror ever since and  really resented her exit.   Raj Bajaj is the teenage son, Zainab Hasan the endangered daughter.    Tartuffe himself only appears after forty minutes:    Asif Khan with flowing robes and beard ,  a faux-Arab accent and rolling r’s grafted on to his Small Heath vowels (the appeal of exoticism is handy for false prophets) .  

 

 

        Cleverly, the framing narrative comes from a very Moliere character, the scornful maid who defies Tartuffe and Imran’s absurd worship :  she too is Muslim, a Bosnian cleaner.  Michelle Bonnard is the sane comedy core, magnificently streetwise in raggedy denim and leggings, and stands up for the appalled, obedient daughter in one of the few almost properly  troubling scenes when the father orders her to marry.  “This is not medieval times”  she snarls, but the girl,  though a university student and supposed feminist,  is cowed. That’s clever too: her subservience is culturally as hard to kick off  as if she was a 17c chattel-daughter in the original.  

 

           Mostly the comedy is good; if at times one tires of Khan’s fearful Tartuffe  artificiality  the glint in his eyes wins you back.  The scene in the second act when the spirited wife (Sasha Behar)   hides her husband in a sofa to trap the holy man into open predation is weepingly hilarious even before the leopardprint underpants.  

 

But it’s the sharp commentary on extreme religiosity which hits home:  there’s Tartuffe’s insistence that the maid cover her hair and her quoting the Qu’ran that she needn’t, while he snarls about “wrong translations “.   There’s  his dismissal of the convert Khalil because the only “real” Muslims are “brown ones”, and when  challenged about Syria  his eye-rollingly pious    “I will never condemn a man for acting as his faith tells him to”.  

 

    Above all there’s Khalil’s  plaintive  “How did we get to a point where the most tolerant and academically inquisitive religion in the world ended up being hijacked by people like you?”   Bravo.    So it’s a fun, sitcom  evening, and though I could have done with fewer rapping, hip-hop rhyming outbreaks  they too are fun in their way and might bring in the kids. Who should, absolutely, see it.   As for the ending, Moliere’s was due to force-majeure and Louis XIV,   so  Gupta and Pinto have freely adjusted it.  Who needs the Sun King when you can have a twist more credible than  Jed Mercurio’s ,  some comedy West Midlands Police, and the  reappearance of  old Dadimaa with the downturned mouth.  ,Who I had been really starting to miss.. 

www.rsc.org.uk   to 23 Feb

rating  four  4 Meece Rating

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September 22, 2018 · 9:29 am

HOLY SH!T Kiln, NW4

PARENTHOOD, PRAYER , PROSECCO

 

The renamed Tricycle (no, I am not taking sides)   Is open:  its leader Indhu Rubasingham launches her sprauncy new theatre with Alexis Zegerman’s dark, sharp new comedy about one of the great corruptions of British society:    the battle of ambitious ,anxious  but atheist parents to get their children places at “faith”schools.  

 

 

    It’s a scam.  Churches are shamefully complicit,  taking a register of attendance knowing quite well that some  people will spend a year of Sundays pretending to worship  rather than risk a scruffier school or pay privately.   “On your knees to save the fees” is common enough  to deserve all it gets from satirists.  But also,  as here, it deserves  a thoughtful as well as comic  treatment of its psychological risks. Might it  sow real spirituality?  Or kill it off?  Frankly, how safe is it to intrude uncomfortable dimensions of eternity and ultimate morality into the brittle self-satisfactions of middle class life?   Is prayer and prosecco too volatile a mix? .

 

 

.   Zegerman shows courage in weaving together many strands of resentment , hidden unease and  “othering” – not only about religion and  education  but race, antisemitism, class, money, and, divergent styles of marriage and motherhood    Two couples are rapidly and neatly drawn,  but then deepen. Dorothea Myer-Bennett is Simone:   noisy, cynically gung-ho and  Jewish (“its a race not a religion” ).  She is married to the fairly prosperous web designer man Sam ,  a heavy pot-smoker and looseish cannon who as the year goes on hates the hypocrisies which Simone is distinctly enjoying :   her very loud and high entr’acte hymns are a treat, especially in contrast to her friend Juliet  (Claire Goose) who is more heartfelt about religion.    She is married to Nick , a black teacher (a really excellent rending by Daon Broni)  who is the most appealing of the four  . But it isn’t long before the irritation of Simone’s gung-ho assault on choir, congregational socializing and even Confirmation gets Juliet down.  

  

  In a wonderful downstage moment both are singing a hymn and Juliet, the quieter voice, gives up in disgust.   We never see the priest or the bells-and-smells HIgh Anglican church, but it comes alive all right.   A telling scene of a Jewish shiva raises something unexpected in the scornful Sam, and echoes of Ibo heritage and beliefs in Nick:  that sense of spiritual priorities edging in on them all is oddly powerful.   And then of course, both parents learn which four-year-old won the place at St Mary’s, and hell breaks out.

   

  There are echoes of the inter-parent rows in Yasmina Reza’s classic God of Carnage, and In a well-syncopated sequence of symmetrical offence there are parallels with Clybourne Park:  both are damn  good company to be in.  But there is real pain:   Juliet expressing, to her husband’s dismay, the agonised worry of a white mother of a brown child, fearing for the future and humiliated that with her French-braid blondeness she can’t manage a little girl’s hair as well as Nick – who used to do his sister’s .    Pain too in Simone’s bereaved loneliness for her parents, and in a sense for her whole heritage, and in the way Sam’s confused, guilty, self-indulsgent pothead paranoia latches  onto his Jewishness and working class pride, whichever is the handies,   In final moments Nick has a weary, desperate statement of the self-evident but often invisible truth about parenthood.   It’s a fine play, and should have sold out and hasn’t yet, so go..

  

     Oh, and the new theatre renovations? Very comfy, and seemingly good for designers too, lots of height and room for classy, understated  sliding scenesets.   I was sentimentally fond of the old Meccano galleries and comradely tip-up  seats, but time moves on.

Box office 0207328 1000.  kilntheatre.com

To 6 Oct

rating  five  5 Meece Rating

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September 20, 2018 · 8:55 am

WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION                   County Hall SE1

DOING JUSTICE TO AGATHA   (She’d have loved it!)

    

      The courtroom is the marbled council chamber of the old County Hall:the story by Agatha Christie even hoarier.  I missed this ultimately site-specific lark when it opened , possibly  due to an edge of snoot.  Because for Gods sake , all but infants must know the twist by now, from the Bergman film? . Or the Christmas TV with Kim Cattrall?  But the news of its extension, until March they say but quite possibly unto the edge of doom ,    and the fact that Lucy Bailey directed it resolved me to go Peak Tourist matinee.

 

 

. It’s probably almost worth it for the majestic brass stair-rods alone on the grand climb up  . Even  more so when you’ve bought the cheapest seat in the cramped public gallery,  peering round a pillar for under 15 quid, and then got  upgraded (I think a coach party cancelled) to the ‘stalls’ , which would have cost in the high 40s.  I was pleased to find myself in the thick of it,  peering closely at the suspiciously clean wig of the prosecuting barrister .    But I wouldn’t have paid 95 quid for the jury box, though they looked immensely happy to be formally “sworn in”.

 

Bailey (of Titus Andronicus fame) is never one to dodge the gruesome, and in the thunderous musical chords of the opening she gives us the judge with a black cap and  a gallows rising from the very floor (scene-shifting throughout is neat indeed, blokes in brown warehouse coats very well in period conjuring up just enough furniture for the barrister’s chambers).  So facing the noose,  the accused Mr Vole cowers and shrieks and faints at the very outset, thus making the uninitiated think they know how it ends.

 

       They don’t. Agatha makes sure of that.  Soon we are in chambers, with the chiselled patrician Defence Sir Wilfred (Richard Clothier, grandly vowelly about circumstaaa-aaarntial evidence).  He decides to take on Rex v Vole, believing the humbly prole’didn’t kill the rich old Mrs French.

And so to open court, which is where the marmoreal and mahogany  Council Chamber stars.  Adorned even more gloriously by Julian Curry as  the judge, giving it the full traditional repertoire:  tortoise-peering over specs, meaningful throat- clearing,  and  that air of soothing judicial fairness we all long to believe in. Though let it be said, in this particular tale Agatha is not un-mocking of British justice.

 

It rocks on nicely, perhaps with a few longueurs when in both halves the evidence gets recapped, but the audience seemed grateful for that.  Certainly we were all taking to Lucy Phelps’ moody German refugee-wife Romaine, and purring a bit over the silver fox Clooneyesque integrity of Sir Wilf. And just as your mind starts to wander over yet another recap of the evidential recaps there’s  a shout, a cry of anger, a fierce chord, or a nightmare lighting effect to get it going again.

And after the interval, just as summing-up threatens and you start worrying about  a vast inconsistency which Agatha herself didn’t quite (a motivational nonsense) up in the gallery pops a foxy dea ex machina. Then another.  And so to the terrific denouement,   which the film slightly scamped but Ms Bailey certainly doesn’t.   Vole gets his best moment too, with a fag in hand.     All made me feel rather wistful for my childhood dream of barristering.   I always thought a horsehair wig ‘n pigtails would be very me, and dreamed of capturing a silver-fox like Clothier.    So oyez et terminez, all rise, happily.  

box office   www.witnesscountyhall.com/tickets      tel. 0844 815 7141.

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 17, 2018 · 9:45 pm

SONGLINES Hightide Festival, now Walthamstow

LOOKING OUT TO SEA,  AT PAST AND FUTURE

 

    With the feral teenage violence of HEATHERS (scroll to it below)  all snarling and murdering in the West End, and the manic cheerleader energy of BRING IT ON just finished at Southwark, what more soothing than an hour in a gentler vision of teenage confusion and calf-love?    Especially with an onstage duo of two of the author Tallulah Brown’s band, the  Trills (formerly Vagabond Trills) ,  punctuating and easing on the mood of the story.   Brown and Serafina D’Arby sing beautifully,  and so at one point does Fanta Barrie  ,  playing a stroppy displaced girl with a problem mother who finds herself expelled from her cool Camden-girl London school life.  Her look by the way is perfect, shorts-over-fishnets-and-scowl, with occasional school shirt defiantly hanging out .  

 

    She is dumped with her stern grandmother on the Suffolk coast, which inspired Brown’s last play Sea Fret,  and falls in with a geeky but far more grounded schoolfriend (Joe Hurst) who works on his family farm.     She’s restlessly defiant, he unimpressed but benign.  Her irritable failed seduction – “I thought you were up for it” is bravado, from a generation confused into thinking the only valid contact is sex.  His “I am just here to cut the grass” is one of the lines of the year.   

  

  But the relationship grows better; he introduces her to the bleak quiet beach where he feels history under his feet, Viking ships never far off. She starts to see what he sees.  Events flicker by (it’s a one-hour show) and the music tells the emotional tale as well as anyone could. Nice.   

 

box office hightide.org.uk

rating  four   4 Meece Rating

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September 15, 2018 · 7:23 pm

FLOWERS FOR MRS HARRIS Chichester Festival Theatre

OUT OF AUSTERITY, A DREAM OF BEAUTY 

     

      A gulf yawns between this musical’s two halves:  a gulf of wealth,  sophistication, hope and colour.   Ida Harris, careworn heroine of Paul Gallico’s novella, is a widowed charwoman in 1950’s London.  A tired place and life: before a smoky panorama of Battersea Power Station and weary grey houses her life is of picking up in richer flats and houses,  stepping in sometimes to “oblige” for the clients of her neighbour Violet.   Doing this for Lady Dant , who awaits Princess Elizabeth to tea,  Ida undergoes a shock of  beauty. A Dior dress in Madam’s wardrobe:  the New Look, loveliest flowering of postwar extravagance and the age of Cecil Beaton (the most famous of his photographs will be beautifully recreated before us later on).   Ida sees the vision Dior called “a return to civilized happiness”, fullskirted and shimmering, desirable, perfect in execution. 

 

 

      We don’t see it. Not yet.   In Daniel Evans’ elegant, heartfelt production, fine-tuned since it ravished our hearts at Sheffield,  we only see the shabby figure of Clare Burt transfixed, kneeling  in a great warm light.  “It’s like somehow I just found a piece of me”.  The sense of that hunger for beauty and perfection is shudderingly powerful.  A widow of Passchendaele, three decades a drudge who consoles herself secretly by talking to her dead husband, she yearns towards the absurd, the impossible ideal.   That new longing even briefly  fractures her friendship with Violet, who cannot understand.   Ida saves and scrimps and struggles month after month,  suffers hungry self-deprivation and hoards a tiny Pools win,  all in the naive belief that she can buy one off the peg in Paris.  Where she goes for the glorious second half. 

         

 

     Rachel Wagstaff’s book deftly amplifies the novella, wisely removing Gallico’s rather embarrassing patronage of Ida’s “twinkly” Cockney ways,  and gives a stronger sense that she is not only starved of beauty but stoically frozen  in her old grief.   Richard Taylor’s music and lyrics are intense and skilful and (in the cleaning sequences, with a witty use of the revolve) they are playful;  but it’s a bit hard going at first.  Light female voices compete too weakly with a ten-piece band below,  in a bit too much operatic sung-through dialogue.    But psychologically, perhaps we need to be a bit impatient.  Because Paris is to come.

 

        There, with nice crossovers, the London cast become Parisians. Lady Dant (Joanna Riding) is haughty Madame Colbert at Dior, who softens towards Ida; Laura Pitt-Pulford’s selfish Pamela plays Natasha, the feted mannequin who dreams of ordinariness,  and London’s gauche lovesick accountant on Ida’s cleaning round  is an  equally awkward accountant at Dior.  She solves all their problems.    Mark Meadows, her lost husband’s imagined ghost,  becomes a silver-fox of a Marquis who also takes to her.

 

 

       They all do.  Shabbiness and simplicity are no impediment to almost instant connection.    That is the  fairytale, the hope.  Seeing it in Sheffield, I observed that one line was an echo from the idealistic founding days of the Arts Council:     “If something is beautiful, it’s beautiful for anyone, no matter who you are”  .  But alongside the idea of a humble woman drawn out of her world by beauty runs an even more powerful dream: that a joyful response  (Burt is luminous, astonishing) will draw grateful, comradely  recognition from the makers and guardians of high art.   It should.  It doesn’t always.   

 

        The parade of dresses is spectacular, and had us all gasping and yearning  (Lez Brotherston’s designs breathtakingly re-create  Dior and the nine models are perfect in gesture , period and impossible tiny waists).  But more arresting and touching is the intensity of the dressmakers,   measuring and reeling and ruffling and  hissing in professional perfectionism,  offering to “sew all night” so that Ida can take her treasure away.   Haltingly, the senior seamstress explains that they have seen too many bored and jaded faces at the collections (think of all those Anna Wintour types, in shades..).  The workroom experts, artists, craftswomen,  are simply grateful for the innocent light in Ida’s eyes.  That’s when the tear rises in yours.  

 

box office  cft.org.uk   to  29 Sept

rating four   4 Meece Rating   

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September 14, 2018 · 1:56 am

HEATHERS Theatre Royal, Haymarket

DARK LARKS AND HIGH SCHOOL HOMICIDE

 

You thought there were enough school-themed musicals?  What with  Bring it On,  School of Rock and our own dear cross-dressing Jamie…?  Make room, here comes Heathers.   It was that cultish movie with the three bullying Queen-Bee girls, all called Heather,  and Veronica who tries to join but falls in with a cool yet psychopathic geek boyfriend.   Now it’s a musical,  with the murders starting briskly at about forty caterwauling, leaping dancing minutes into Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keeffe’s  creation…

 

Imagine Grease,  rewritten by a Joe Orton fan high on Diet Coke and back-bedroom Satanism, yearning for knee socks on sturdy female legs and suffering from a needy urge to outrage public taste.  When the film came out, set in Reagan’s 1989 world when The Simpsons was considered edgy and anarchic, it became a cult. It still is, if the number of bobbysox outfits and Westerberg High sweatshirts in the stalls is anything to go by (I  do not judge the whooping dress-up fans, not after myself  turning up at Bat out of Hell in a Bat out of Hell T shirt).  The point is that those who love the film will probably love the musical. Or fill the seats, anyway. 

 

    It was an  off-Broadway hit and then delighted Lloyd Webber’s The Other Palace on a smaller scale without inviting press. How well it does in this high-profile exposure we shall see.  It will be a useful barometer of public taste, since its USP is extreme tastelessness and its musical default mode an amplified belting of really very same-y tunes.  Carrie Hope Fletcher is Veronica, feverishly supported by a likeable ensemble and a nicely pallid Jamie Muscato as JD the bookish boyfriend turned killer thanks to having a Dad in the demolition business and “freezing his brain” with ice-pops.  And there is a hilarious rendering of the chief bitch-Heather:  Jodie Steele pretty much hijacks the show, composedly vicious in life and barmily so in ghosthood. 

 

 

For she indeed gets killed early on, a fake suicide note forged with artful reference to her reading of The Bell Jar.  Before long two maraudingly rapey jocks share her fate,  another fake note suggesting they were gay suicides.   This enables the school leaders, mercilessly guyed, to hold excruciating therapeutic pep rallies for suicide prevention.  There is something irresistible, horribly so, about the big number where staff and pupils sentimentally hymn the human merits of the girl who had none to speak of, and clasp her ghost to their bosom.  As for the boys,  the gay-acceptance assembly is even heavier with irony,  given that they weren’t:  one  has to giggle at the Dad suddenly seeing the liberal light with  “I never cared for homos much until I reared me one”. 

 

Indeed the lyrics are the real pleasure of this show:  you can even nod profoundly at Veronica’s sudden remorseful “we’re damaged, really damaged, but that doesn’t make us wise”.   A few confessional columnists might take that to heart.   

But that – and the conclusion – are cheating moments in a story which someone described as  “The nastiest cruellest fun you can have without studying law or or girding on leather”.  And as long as you stay on that wavelength it is fun. But it walks a tightrope:  the moment the wild dancing and the snappy lyrics ease off or get inaudible you may wince.   How tolerant is London, a few days after suicide prevention day , with youthful mental welfare an anxiety and  school massacres reported in the US every month? Are we sufficiently, callously tired enough of being preached at on the subject to welcome a blast of black and rackety cynicism?

    I dunno.  Maybe.  I did laugh a lot, until it palled.

www.heathersthemusical.com   to 24 November

rating three   3 Meece Rating

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September 13, 2018 · 8:52 am

ONCE New Wolsey, Ipswich

A RARE OLD TIME IN DUBLIN , IN IPSWICH

 

 

The miniature of Libby Watson’s gorgeous Dublin pub set in the foyer raises your spirits straight away.  Sometimes only an Irish pub will do:  a dream of a pub, rarer now in reality, where  everyone can grab an instrument and joke and blend and drum and pluck and fiddle and defy the hard world outside.  And while as we take our seats it’s Behan’s Ould Triangle and the rest to busk us in,  once the show begins it’s Glen Hansard’s marvellous Falling Slowly:  the song that won the film an  Oscar.  And there you are:  up  walking on the moonbeams with Glen Hansard’s lovely songs.

 

 

      Like thousands during the London run of the Broadway production,   I fell joyfully for Enda Walsh’s glorious opening-out of the quirky film about a despairing Dublin street musician whose spirits and hopes are transformed by a young Czech woman in the street.  Hansard and Markéta Irglova wrote the beguiling, memorable bittersweet songs together and devised the simple pavement story;   they starred in the film, but it’s made to be a stage musical with roaming, versatile actor-musicians.    And Walsh’s book mines all its hope and humour, and adds more.  And, notably, it rounds  out the character of the girl whose forthright hopefulness changes more than one life. 

 

    And goodness,  director Peter Rowe strikes lucky in his heroine.    Emma Lucia is barely a year graduated from Mountview, and almost startlingly perfect in the part of the Czech girl.  Which requires her to play both Mendelssohn and the Hansard music, sing beautifully  and remain convincingly Czech throughout in accent and manner.  Not to mention magnetizing  us with a modest but firm stage presence so that we believe the galvanizing difference she makes to the (equally well-cast) ragbag of Dublin pub regulars and struggling new Czech immigrants.

 

  They’re glorious too, notably Sean Kingsley majestically explosive as the leather-jerkined rocker Billy, Kate Robson-Stuart as the exuberantly tarty Reza who dances a tango duet with him,  and Samuel Martin as the buttoned-up gay bank manager who writes a truly terrible song about Bandon.   And leading the pack there’s Daniel Healy  as the ‘broken-hearted fixer-sucker guy” who mends Hoovers and is on the point of dumping his guitar on the pavement and giving up music forever. 

 

      This joint Wolsey and Hornchurch production, the regional premiere long overdue for this lovely show,   raises the heart and hits the spot.  I wish it was touring everywhere, because to see such quality at out-of-London prices is almost a human right.  And in this time of unease (I am not typing the B-word) what better than to enjoy the gorgeous joke of the way that the melancholy and doubt  of us offshore islanders gets startled, then invigorated, by that slightly terrifying East European directness of address,   and  that ruthlessly cheerful pragmatism.   “Serious? I am always serious. I am Czech”.   When the drooping busker asks the girl where she gets her energy, it’s “I am a young mother.”.  Her own mother – Susannah van den Berg – surrounded by keen compatriots learning English off soap-operas – is another powerhouse of exotic energy.   

 

    The staging is smooth and nimble, the movement and breaks into dance adeptly homelike:  despite the star quality of the two leads it feels the most ensemble of pieces, especially in the magical moments when an intimate number begins,  thickens as the band moves forward to wrap around the moment’s emotion,  then retreat until we are back in the shabby flat or pavement .  The redemptive, hopeful theme carries the slight strong story onwards,  all the stronger for denying us the formulaic rom-com ending;    but on another level the whole show is a chain of moments,  of treats:  musical, comic or touching.  Perfect. 

 

www.wolseytheatre.co.uk  this week – then to Queens, Hornchurch.

rating five  5 Meece Rating

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September 9, 2018 · 8:35 am

THE LOVELY BONES Royal, Northampton

HUMANITY RISING FROM HORROR

 

     It is one of the oldest notions in the world: the unquiet grave.   From Sophocles to modern campaigns we are haunted by the idea that the violently dead cannot  rest until the living either avenge them or find – perhaps carve –  some deeper reconciliation.   Alice Sebold’s remarkable novel caught that timeless strangeness:    the restless electricity of superstition that surrounds shock and sudden loss, and weaved it  into a portrait of an ordinary family’s grief.   Susie, the narrator,   is a 14 year old walking home from school across a cornfield.    Polite and trusting (it is set in 1973, more innocent times)  she lets Mr Harvey the lonely neighbour show her a “clubhouse” underground he has built “for the local kids”.  He gags her with her jingling woolly hat,  rapes and kills her, hides her body, keeps a souvenir charm bracelet.    From an inchoate limbo on the way to heaven Susie watches the investigation,  impatient and frustrated, commenting and  hoping; she  wanders a ghost through her shattered family and sees her little brother growing up, her sister’s first love,  her parents’ dislocation.

      

    Bryony Lavery – no stranger to dangerous topics after her unsettlingly brilliant  FROZEN (https://theatrecat.com/2018/03/02/frozen-theatre-royal-haymarket/)  adapts Sebold’s novel for this first stage version, directed by Melly Still.     The topic makes you shudder,  and the opening moments certainly do despite their discretion: the ultimate nightmare is not treated pruriently, but not softened.   Yet what emerges is a powerful, hopeful  triumph of human love.  A theatrical triumph too,  not least thanks to a remarkable set by Ana Inés Jabares-Pita:   a shimmering cornfield horizon bisects a world below and its reflection far overhead.  Sometimes it is a true reflection,  sometimes showing something else.   Sometimes Susie is brightly lit, the others dim; sometimes all seem to be together, in flashback or apparitions.   

        

     

        Charlotte Beaumont is a revelation as Susie. Looks easily 14, smaller than the others and briskly childlike in her bright yellow trousers,   she roams around her strange reflected ghost-world among adults and siblings who can’t see  or hear her – but sometimes eerily sense her .    As children do  she mainly  takes the strangeness of her new lot pragmatically,   and afizz with young energy moves between brisk teen impatience, astonishment,  dismay , tenderness, laughter and frustration .  She wills Harvey to “make a mistake!” ,  irritated at the detective’s failure to pick up clues in the field, in his house, in his beige-anoraked, bespectacled persona as a tolerated local weirdo (Keith Dunphy) catches that creepy plausibility horribly well).   “He’s got most of me IN HIS BASEMENT!”  shouts Susie, as he bustles carefully around.  

          

          Altogether she is quite wonderful: more than one of us came out asking “Who’s that kid?”.     As her parents,  Emily Bevan and Jack Sandle are all too credible as their marriage threatens to crumble.  Families in tragedy sometimes do.  He becomes obsessed with nailing the suspect Heckler,   and she needs to move on, feed her other children, grieve and seek solace.  

     Sebold does not indulge in any safe-in-the-arms-of-Jesus sentimentality:   Susie does feel – reflecting every bereaved parent’s cry – the unfairness of young death.   “I want to grow up!”  She  calls on David Bowie music for comfort.  Seeing her younger sister – now older than she was – have a tender initiation to lovemaking  the violated, chopped-up victim says sadly  “My sister sails away from me…”.  Her own school boyfriend is with her friend Ruth now, growing up, they talk of her but move on.   A strange ghost moment reconciles her.    Her own companions in the limbo now are Bhawna Bawsar’s Fran, a social worker in life who has chosen helping newcomers as her own heaven, and eventually  a heartbreaking host of puppet-dresses, the other little girls Heckler killed.    

     

       There is a point just after midway in its tight 110 minutes when you find yourself impatient,  feeling too entangled in the problems of the living.  You want the simple Agatha-Christie relief of seeing the net closing around the killer. But like Susie, like all of them,  you need  to admit that no, just zapping the bastard is not enough.  For human resolution vengeance may  not even be entirely necessary.   The “lovely bones” which at last satisfy and give  a heaven to Susie are those that grow around the people close to her: a new scaffolding of love.   

 

Her heaven is to see the world go on, without her yet with herself still woven into others’ identities and affections.  And to turn in the last moment to the audience ,  grin,  and wish well to the living.     In what should be a long and successful career,  young Charlotte Beaumont will rarely get a line that jerks so many tears.  

box office  royalandderngate.co.uk   to 22 Sept  and touring, to 17 nov, see below

RATING   five   5 Meece Rating

   (co-production: Royal & Derngate, Northern Stage and Birmingham Rep,  in association with Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse

 Everyman Liverpool 25 September to Sat 6 October  www.everymanplayhouse.com

Northern Stage  9 – 20 Oct    www.northernstage.co.uk

Birmingham Rep 30 oct-10 Nov    www.birmingham-rep.co.uk

New Wolsey  Ipswich 13-17 Nov    www.wolseytheatre.co.uk

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September 7, 2018 · 5:05 pm

THE HUMANS Hampstead Theatre

 GUEST CRITIC MICHAEL ADAIR IS TRANSPORTED TO NEW YORK, AND FAMILY TRUTH

 

 

The joy of a play like The Humans is that it can take a subject that feels as if it might have been done to death – a family gathering together for their Thanksgiving dinner –  and cause us to forget that it has ever been done before. There is a moment where Arian Moayed’s character, Richard, awkwardly tells his girlfriend’s visiting family about one of his favourite comic books, where aliens share ghost stories about the human race because they consider us to be so frightening. Humans, Richard suggests, are as likely objects of fear and fascination to the monsters as those monsters might be to us. Watching my fellow humans in this superlative performance, I can see his point… 

 

It is making its much-anticipated UK debut, with writer Stephen Karam and director Joe Mantello packing up their Broadway Cast, four Tony Awards and David Zinn’s glorious set to come to London.    The set, recipient of one of those Tonys, is terrific, a rusty, run-down duplex in New York city’s Chinatown, two floors of peeling paint and creaking floorboards with ancient insulation stuffed between. Noisy neighbours thump around upstairs and there is ceaseless whirr and hum of washing machines next door. This transfer has clearly been a labour of love – even the smallest minutiae ensuring that we are absolutely ensconced in modern-day New York with the Blake family for their Thanksgiving. Gifts emerge from plastic bags from Bed, Bath and Beyond, the Coca Cola bottle being poured at the table is the slightly stumpier American shape, so has clearly been imported…there is no suspension of disbelief, everything feels plausible, actual, real. 

 

The play introduces us to the Blakes: Brigid Blake (Sarah Steele) has just moved into the run-down apartment with her boyfriend, Richard. The two are struggling to make ends meet, Richard is a mature student, Brigid is waitressing whilst trying to find work as a composer. Visiting the apartment for the first time are older sister and lawyer, Aimee (Cassie Beck), mother Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), father Erik (House of Cards’ Reed Birney) and his dementia-stricken and wheelchair bound mother, Fiona ‘Momo’ Blake (Lauren Klein). The six characters share a meal – on paper plates, with plastic cutlery – their fold-out chairs squeaking uncomfortably beneath them. All have stories to share: money problems, sickness, revelations that build and break throughout the 90 minutes. Everyone, that is, except Klein’s ‘Momo’ – whose son insists had a ‘good day yesterday’ but whose condition has clearly deteriorated/   We are left with the family to unite in sharing tales of a proud Irish matriarch, who loved a drink and who was once the life and soul of these gatherings. We, the audience, are confronted on stage with only a shell of a person, frail, confused and mumbling unintelligibly.

 

 

 The dialogue is impeccable and authentic, switching constantly and abruptly between hilarity, stubbornness, furious indignation, and complete exasperation in a way that only a family meal can accomplish. All can be forgiven, yet nothing can be forgotten. Multiple conversations take place across both rooms simultaneously and the cast deliver it superbly. There are polite disagreements over the pronunciation of ‘Carnegie’ – settled only by Aimee declaring ‘Everybody’s right, guys!’, and the traditional, tense generational impasse, with Birney’s patriarch at a loss to understand why his daughter is so anxious about money, yet insists on living in an expensive New York apartment .  He smugly asks of her superfood diet, ‘If you’re so depressed, why are you trying to live longer?!’. Over the course of the evening Brigid becomes ever more exasperated with her parents: snapping, interrupting and shutting down even the mildest of statements. The two floors of the cramped apartment work beautifully, everything is seen, everything is overheard – it feels like a real family coming together to make do and endure one another.

 

Karam’s mastery is in making it all so authentic. The play takes place in real time, there are no scene changes – dinner is prepared, served and eaten in the company of the audience and Karam perfectly delivers the clenched jaw and aching temples so easily brought about by a tense family reunion. When the revelations arrive, they hit hard; the Blakes are fondly reminiscing about a past that may never have existed , and reluctantly adapting in the face of merciless change. 

 Believe the hype. The Humans is exceptional. 

https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com    to 13 October

Box Office: 020 7722 9301

rating five  5 Meece Rating

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September 6, 2018 · 11:21 am

THE HABIT OF ART Theatre Royal, York & touring

ONE OF BENNETT’S FINEST , ON THE ROAD AGAIN

  

   Onstage is a shabby rehearsal room,  an Oxford study scruffily indicated with doorframes and signs; at the side a litter of coffee-cups and props.  Neil,  a nervy and easily offended playwright,  sits in while the Company Stage Manager Kay supervises a rehearsal of his new work:   in which WH Auden is fictionally visited in 1972 by Benjamin Britten,  while the young Radio Oxford reporter Humphrey Carpenter is mistaken for the rent-boy Auden booked.    The actors are costive and restless,  the director  has cut lines the author cherished.  They are all in the mind of Alan Bennett:  so here we have  an artist,  writing about an artist writing about artists,  while manoeuvring round the irritabilities of the performing artists who are his tools.   It is about human friction, sexuality, old age and fractured friendship and the impertinence of biography.  And above all,  about the need to go on making: the habit of art.  “Are you still writing?” asks Carpetnter.  “Am I dead?” replies Auden, surprised…

 

 

   It is nine years since Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre opened Bennett’s fascinating play: high time we had it back, and this York-led collaboration does it proud.  There are lines I had forgotten and others (memory suggests) which must have been cut by Hytner and are reinstated here in Philip Franks’ production.    Importantly,  at its heart  the two great men – fictionally meeting in Oxford in 1972, both not far from their deaths – are superbly rendered by  Matthew Kelly as the veteran “Fitz” who becomes Auden ,   and David Yelland as the more restrained Henry who is being  Britten.   Kelly’s Auden is  rubicund and scruffy, sexually and reputationally reckless but a great and open heart, pining for his ever-unfaithful partner Chester.    Yelland gives Britten all his precise, tweedy nervousness and buttoned-down, closeted  yearning for boyish beauty and innocence.   In the second act, as he agonizes over how embarrassingly close-to-home is that theme in his opera Death  In Venice,    Auden challenges him to admit and even celebrate  those adorations.   “Why are you still sending out messages in code?”. 

 

       If that makes anyone uncomfortable in the age of heightened awareness of paedophilia,   it is meant to.   Impossible and forbidden loves are part of many lives,   and of literature down the ages.   And as Britten says,  he plays with his adored boy sopranos only in a musical sense .   “I don’t prey on them..I attend to them.  I listen”.    The discomfort, unhappiness, confusion is all there.   Auden longs to take over writing the libretto for Britten, serving the music which will express all these yearning impossibilities.   Britten is wary,   closeted,  but also lonely for the sensible adult love of Peter Pears who is in Canada.  

 

           In some ways you sense Bennett – long silent about his own loves, but around this time having become  more open, partnered and happy – debating with himself which kind of gay man to be.    But that is small compared to the greater theme of creativity and its parasites:   the itch to work and make new things , the habit of art, the ruthless following of dangerous tracks and the danger of become a national treasure.  Auden is funny about being considered an “oracle” and endlessly repeating himself, rather like Larkin who complained about “pretending to be me”.  And he jeeringly asks Britten about his adoring Aldeburgh  – “do they call you Maestro?”.    

     It’s sharp, and often funny, teasing and important.    And from Bennett – who has written enough diaries  to be a biographer of his own life better than any other will ever be –  there’s a nice swipe at how biographers  simply “hitch a lift” on others’ achievement and rather look forward to the subject’s death because that will tie it all up nicely.    The play holds up, even better, ten years on.

 

        Just a note on the Humphrey Carpenter character:  we were colleagues years ago, indeed around th time the play is set.  It is Bennett’s fictional dramatist (Robert Mountford nicely fretful as Neil) and  not Bennett himself who traduces him:   Humf was a lot sharper, funnier and less of a blundering clown than in the play .   But  in one of those often unwise actor-interviews in the programme,  Matthew Kelly traduces him further by gaily saying that Carpenter was a “great musician” but  with shocking inaccuracy  “knows b+++ all about literature” ,  and that his Auden book looked boring  “500 pages of “tiniest print” so he didn’t  bother to read it.  O, why do  good actors do these dangerous chats?  Why do programmes print them?   But it’s a fine production.  

Box office: 01904 623568  to 8 Sept then yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

Then touring:  www.originaltheatre.com   to 1 Dec

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 5, 2018 · 10:23 pm

DANCE NATION Almeida, N1

GRAND PLIE, FIRST POSITION,  TURN…TWERK…

 

     My friend and comrade-in-the stalls Mr Letts of the Mail has suggested ( by means of Twitter ,review on Friday, always worth a read) that he was less than pleased by a group of grown women pretending to be children  and shouting a chorus about their pussies in a subsidized theatre.  Which is fair comment,  though wilfully unsympathetic toward Clare Barron’s spirited play about a children’s dance troupe in a fierce American competition,   directed by Bijan Sheibani ,  choreographed by Aline David and very fetchingly designed and lit by Samal Blak and Lee Curran.  

 

       Maybe it helps to have been a pubescent teenage girl.  And to come fresh from the more literal but equally endearing Lin-Manuel Miranda BRING IT ON at the Southwark.    As for the shouting about pussies,  fair enough.  My generation felt the term rather too coyly Mrs-Slocombe for our taste, and  it is only lately that feminists and the US President severally grabbed it back for common use.   But let the ladies shout it:   after all we ladies have put up with  years and years of literary and theatrical blokes going on and on  – and on and on  again –  about their dicks.  From Portnoy’s Complaint to  Alan Bennett’s WH Auden demanding to “suck off” a rent boy at the National  (and, review tomorrow, now in York)  the line of literary willies stretches out to the crack of doom.  Dicks have delighted us long enough.  Indeed at one point I declared a critical fatwa on any show about Young Men Discovering Their Sexuality.  

 

          But the aspect potentially most jarring here  – adults playing near-pubescent children – is actually no problem:  once you pass fifty  these days it is quite hard to distinguish between tallish 12-year-olds and young adult women, what with the  flicky hair, scrunchies, ballet flats and trackie-bottoms.   My own daughter at fourteen went to the Old Bailey on an education visit and got asked by an elderly clerk where she was doing her pupillage.   So Sarah Hadland, Nancy Crane, Karla Crome, Ria Zmitrowitz, Kayla Meikle,  and Manjinder Virk are perfectly convincing, in and out of the dance routines and dressing-room banter.  

  

 

     It’s the banter that makes it.  The competitive dance team – overseen by a rather thuggish Brendan Cowell as the teacher, and mystifyingly including one boy, Irfan Shamji less convincing owing to the whiskers  – provides a frame and metaphor for the turbulence of everyone’s female puberty.   You’re learning your dismaying, changing body, comparing yourself with friends and rivals,  fantasising about a future,   half-proud and half-ashamed of the glances in the street.   There are monologues,  notably a tremendous rant from Meikle about her hidden powers which include a good ass and  being good at Math,  and a nocturnal fantasy from Zmitrowitz – the most troubled of them – about how she will lose her virginity to a handsome Canadian fiancé at age 23, having just bought together a New York apartment “with hardwood floors”.   Ah, the impossible dreams of childhood… 

 

 

        Sarah Hadland is both funny and intensely touching as cheerful Sofia who is assaulted by a first period on competition day:  in a memorable triple tableau that night she rinses her pants and wards off a sympathetic Mum, while on the two sides of the stage one girl lays out her model horse collection and the other vainly attempts masturbation.   Tampons and toys, wanking and weeping,  ignorance and speculation and secret societies.  That’s puberty.  And above all, and movingly often in chorus, there’s  a hope that you might make the world  OK  by dancing through it.  

 

 

       It’s an odd, short evening (105 minutes)  but likeable.  And  dickless. Though one memorable line, never explained,  is when a girl blurts out “I saw a penis, once”.   It is never explained how.  Best not to know.

box office  almeida.co.uk     to 6 oct

rating three  3 Meece Rating

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September 3, 2018 · 5:08 pm

LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN LIVE AGAIN…touring

RAN IN MAIL (STAND-IN TEMPORARY CRITIC COULDN’T RESIST THIS.. SO HERE FOR THEATRECATTERS WHO MIGHT MISS IT..

 

THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN LIVE             SEC Glasgow and touringTouring Mouse wide

 

      Remember Royston Vasey?    The endearingly twisted TV saga with its perverse , morbid inhabitants  spoke to a Britain that secretly enjoys hopeless decay,  imagining homely shopkeepers as mass-murderers and uncles as mad buffoons.  After years of individual successes Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton (sometimes with the writer Jeremy Dyson)  are back : every character was greeted by whoops of joyful recognition.   

          The first half sees them in black tie with minimal props, running through beloved jokes:  the dreadful card game Go Johnny Go Go Go Go,  the contemptuous dating agency,  the mad audition,   and a  creepy torchlit moment of Gatiss as Mick McNamara our guide to the “nexus of leylines” which make the town a gate to hell. Or at least to the poisons shelf in a late-night Aldi .    In the second half there are costumes and projections,  and a bracing a sequel to the  Great Wife Mine disaster from the Christmas special. 

          Despite the ghoulish silliness they are disciplined: nothing goes on too long, nothing is banal  (it makes you wince to think of their  imitators, the dismal Little Britain) . Gatiss plays the more mellow innocent characters –   poignant as the sad bingo caller and washed-out rocker Les –  Shearsmith is more often loud and dangerous , especially as the terrifying Papa Lazarou in a Papal mitre making us all his wives.    Pemberton specializes in the extravagantly ghastly (do not get front- row seats for fear of Herr Lipp,  or risk yourself on a row’s-end when Pauline storms through).   

         The spoofiness is occasionally cut with acid satire:    Shearsmith’s Ollie  furiously asks why his “issue-led children’s theatre”  wins no awards.  I loved the Royal Court moment – “Why are you putting bricks on my baby? Down with Thatcher’s poll tax”,  and the 10-second War Horse moment.  The Rev. Bernice roars contempt on  MeToo and self-definition,  signing  off  with “Join me next week when we decide who’s allowed to go into which toilet while western society burns down all around us” .

          It is deadpan and dirty and exhilarating,  the surreal lunacies fed by sharp, exasperated intelligence.   When the  Dentons finally inflict every – I do mean every – bodily fluid on poor Benjamin ,   they have to do it with Auntie Val playing Nellie Dean on the harmonium.  I whooped with the rest. 

rating four  4 Meece Rating

touring   https://leagueofgentlemen.live/   

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