Monthly Archives: March 2019

March 30, 2019 · 7:53 am

ADMISSIONS                  Trafalgar Studios , SW1

CRACKS IN THE LIBERAL VENEER

   

  I adored the energy, cleverness and cheek of BAD JEWS so much I went twice, as the pitiless author  set his characters kicking, twisting, protesting and fighting about principles which are as much emotional as moral,.  If  not more so.   ADMISSIONS is by the same Broadway writer – Joshua Harmon   – and even better.   And nicely topical too, both sides of the Atlantic, since it’s about the middle-class obsession with shoehorning their 17 and 18 year old kids into the ‘right’ colleges ,  by hook, crook, donation or ‘legacy’ status, all the while protesting how liberal and inclusive they are.     So I rushed keenly along. And was not disappointed.

    

   Mr Harmon must put in a lot of stage directions saying “Shouting!’  “Furious”  “Ranting”  and  “He/She explodes”.    For as in Bad Jews,  the temperature takes little time to rise past boiling and into superheated-steam.   The setting is a US private school, Hillcrest,  where the extremely correct-thinking dean of admissions Sherri Rosen-Mason  (Alex Kingston )  is the wife of the head and mother of a promising lad Charlie.  Her best friend Ginnie (Sarah Hadland) is married to a black teacher and has an equally promising son,  Perry.   The boys are best friends.   

  

  That Sherri is sincere in her quest to get the  visible “diversity” of the school up to 20% , and has done so with some success,  is sketched in a very funny opening scene where she upbraids poor Roberta from Admin (Margot Leicester, nicely dishevelled)   for not getting enough Students Of Colour in the brochure.   Nice Roberta is baffled “I don’t see colour, I’m not a race person”,  and protests that Ginnie’s son Perry is in it.  But to Sherri,  Perry doesn’t photograph quite black enough, being bi-racial.  There have been complaints from her too about “ethnocentric meal plans”  to which poor Roberta cries “Kids like pizza!”.   They also like Moby Dick, but it’s banned now for being by a dead white male.    You get the picture.

    The glorious central conflict comes when Perry gets into Yale.  His friend white Charlie doesn’t.  And blows his top, saying how hard it is having “no special boxes to tick”, and – tellingly – remembering that on all their college visits the Deans were visibly more interested in Perry than in him,  more conscious eye-contact and laughing at his jokes.  Especially if Perry’s fully black Dad was next to him….

        Ben Edelman as Charlie, over from the US production, is a treat:  six feet of coiled adolescent rage at the world’s unfairness,  his long rant has a Just-William ability to argue :  as when he roars  that a Hispanic student might well be descended from colonialist conquistadors, and that one is the son of the Chilean ambassador,   whereas his grandparents’ cousins were at Auschwitz so where’s the white-privilege in that?  This outrages his father, who is also rabidly PC and fears he has  “raised a Republican”.   But in a savage turnaround wholly credible in a 17 year old boy,    Charlie piously decides he was wrong, so wrong that he must recuse himself from all the high-status universities and privilege in a way that guarantees that his parents shed all their principles in an even more violent emotional conniption. 

      Gales of appalled laughter run through the audience.     Glorious, a sharp and timely treat.

   

box offfice www.atgtickets.com    to 11 may

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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March 30, 2019 · 7:50 am

MARY’S BABIES            Jermyn St Theatre, SW1

A COSY NIGHTMARE LEGACY OF THE 1930’S

 

  From the late 1930’s for nearly forty years,  Mary Barton and her husband Berthold Wiesner ran a pioneering fertility clinic: they were among the first to offer, with full anonymity,  artificial insemination by donor for couples they thought were “good stock”  ( it was a eugenic time in many quarters ).  The hitch is that although they destroyed all records in 1967,  it became apparent that Wiesner himself supplied the great majority of the sperm, and therefore fathered between 600 and 1000 children over the years.  

  

    To be fair,  the modern emphasis on the uniqueness of DNA was not regarded with the mystique that surrounds it today . Actually, in my own lifetime it was only when women began donating eggs that I ever heard people talking about “genetic material” and the need o know “who you are”.   Most families, on Barton’s insistence,  never told the child at all.  It was only in 2005 that the law gave AID children the right, at 18, to know about their biological progenitor.   However, the scale of what they did – maybe a thousand babies, all in the middle class cadre of a country not immense  –  was appallingly,  shockingly,  wickedly irresponsible.  It sowed seeds of accidental sibling incest and diseases of inbreeding. 

  

      This odd, rather creepy play by Maud Dromgoole is not about the couple,  but imagines meetings and gatherings (a few of which did happen) of the “Barton brood” years later.  Tatty Hennessy’s production uses two actors – Emma Fielding and Katy Stephens – and a series of changing lit frames on the wall to indicate who they are being. It isn’t perfect:  the changes are not well signalled, and the characters they all seem too similar in generation, accent and body-language.    Each is respectively 18 and 23 characters,   Stephens often recurring a key figure as “Kieran”,  a lonely man obsessed with finding as many siblings as possible.    To the point that when one poor girl is having a baby,  he throws a baby-shower which overwhelms her, full of strangers instinctively buying the same nappy-cake gift and gleefully comparing noses, jawlines,  gluten-intolerances, gag reflexes, tastes in marmite etc.  It’s like a cosy version of the Midwich Cuckoos.    Another is “Bret”  who discovers to his horror that he has married a sib, and wants their baby aborted.  No spoilers, but I shuddered at the actual outcome.

     There are a dozen tiny plots:  a lesbian couple who discover their link and realize it doesn’t matter, a bereavement,  family back-stories,  hospital scenes, a quite funny moment with a chirpy registrar and a great deal of musing (especially from the really creepily obsessed Kieran)  on the importance of family. 

    

   But it isn’t family.  It’s a genetic disaster,  a sad heritage of medical arrogance,  and I found it hard to believe how many of the characters seem pleased to find their weird, unfamiliar sibs.  I’d run a mile.   There are also a couple of bafflingly unnecessary whimsical scenes, one about a ventriloquist and one about chickens, which add less than nothing.   For all the ingenuity,  it just didn’t click.  Yet I would love to see a play imagining the monstrous Barton -Wiesner marriage and the eugenic satisfaction they drew from their vainglorious biological cheating.   Hope someone writes that. 

 

Box office 0207 287 2875 www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

rating  three  3 Meece Rating

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March 29, 2019 · 3:05 pm

DOWNSTATE Dorfman, SE1

BRILLIANT, NECESSARY,   QUESTIONING

  

   If we accept that people are widely diverse,  we have to accept that paedophiles are too.   Not all the same identi-monster.    Moreover,  if their horrifying actions pose us questions we need to think very clearly about answers.    If Bruce Norris’ disruptive, thoughtful play for Steppenwolf of Chicago does nothing else it hammers that home.  

 

 It is set in a group-home for released (but tagged and restricted) sex offenders, somewhere in Illinois.  Here is Fred,  Francis Guinan as a gentle Chopin-loving old chap in a wheelchair who used to teach piano.  He is  confronted  after 30 years, in a painful, funny, startling opening scene, by a former victim Andy.  Who has come with a rather pushy wife and  wants a “reconciliation contract” and to inform him to his face, awkwardly from a written script,   “You are a fundamentally evil person”. 

       

          Fred, disarmingly, just says it’s real nice to see him again, and protests mildly that he admitted his crimes years ago in court.    Meanwhile distractingly for poor Andy, the housemates wander through,  in from shopping or arguing about the lavatory.   One by one, we will learn their backgrounds too.  Gio (Glenn Davis) is mouthy, bible-spouting, and slightly delusional about his business future after doing a course in jail.  He’s furious at being in with these ‘grade 3 pederast motherfuckers’ because all he did was sleep with a girl who, he says, lied about her age.   Felix is Latino,  dimly angry, and doesn’t see why he can’t contact the daughter he abused at 13.    Dee, perfectly rendered by K Todd Freeman,  is slightly camp and selfconsciously well-educated (“Ou sont les neiges d’antan?”), and we find that his crime was, in his view,  mutual love with a teenage Lost Boy in a touring Peter Pan where he was dance-captain.   Unlike Gio And Felix he isn’t working because hell, “the job market is limited for the elderly black homosexual ex-convict”.   His care of old Fred – wheelchair-bound after a savage prison assault – is sweetly exemplary. 

   

      Four different men, meticulously acted and wholly credible but in no way excused.  For at the heart of the piece, wonderfully realized,  is Cecilia Noble as the big tough black probation officer,  gun tucked under her shapeless cardigan.  She comes in to inform them of more restrictions on their tag-limits,  meeting great and very non-PC protests about  getting cut off from the better food shops and the “retarded school” being beyond six lanes of elevated highway.   It is she – chiefly in a long confrontation with Felix, but with the others as they flit through the second act – who makes clear their various denials and conflicts.     Felix just expresses dim rage;  others make you stop and gasp at apparent reasonablenss,  as with Dee’s barrack-room-lawyerly argument that while some US states tried to bring in a death penalty for child sex offences,  they didn’t do so  for GBH,  so why (forgive my quoting this one) is it not death for chopping off a child’s penis  but death for sucking it?  

     

    The probation officer, with a caseload of 47 such men,  attempts patience and a little tolerance (really, Gio should not be bringing in his defiant, gum-chewing  trailer-trash workmate  – a very funny cameo from Aimee Lou Wood).   But as she says exasperatedly,   in her line of work “everyone’s a victim, the system’s broken,  the system’s not fair…hey,  if y’all are so victimized,  maybe you can see how you made other people feel?” 

 Andy’s return and more eloquently painful  rage at old Fred – ending in chaos – underlines that too.  But Norris is fly enough to give us a moment to wonder about how necessary, for how many decades, Andy’s pain is, and how reliable his detailed memory.   The audience shivers at that. 

     

    Norris’ wonderful Clybourne Park ten years ago crossed boundaries of the unsayable in matters of race, class and sexuality,    and gave us a famous snowstorm of mutual offence in the second act.  Now he takes it further across the boundaries, and he is right because the resultis both brilliant and necessary.  We do not have the American system of an open register of ex-offenders and their addresses,  and I doubt many of our probation officers are quite like Ivy (she sees through every lie, a fierce Momma to the lying Felix).  But very distancing that this setting brings, as we sit in the civilized Dorfman,    is oddly useful in helping us to think more widely.  What do we do with these guys?   When,  if ever,   can we trust them in the open?  Can they ever convince us that, short of a broken back and a wheelchair like old Fred, they are safe?  

box office  020 7452 3000       nationaltheatre.org.uk  To 27 April

rating five 5 Meece Rating

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March 28, 2019 · 5:45 pm

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY              Theatre Royal , Bury & touring

WHAT THE BUTLER CAME TO KNOW…

 

From its premiere at the Royal & Derngate and on the first leg of its tour,  here is the stage version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-winning novel.  It is a melancholy reflection on mistakes made and a life wasted,  through the eyes (and at last the heart)  of a traditionally stiff-principled butler:   Stevens, son and successor of an equally buttoned-up and undemonstrative father.     He has devoted his life to the perfection of running a grand house (nicely suggested in sliding, grand framed panels by Lily Arnold and some moody lighting).     He genuinely believes, or at the start still tries to,  that he has had “the privilege of seeing the best of England from within these walls”. 

    But he didn’t.  His lordly employer was, in the 30s,  an appeaser of Hitler to the point of making Stevens sack chambermaids for being Jewish.  This  outrages Stevens’ closest friend  the housekeeper Mrs Kenton, and widens the rift in their relationship – the only emotional tie he really has – until she leaves for an unsatisfactory marriage,  and he must soldier on through the war years, his employer’s disgrace and death,  and the postwar sale of the house to a cheerful American.   Who, unlike past toffs,  tells him to take the car and have a holiday going down west to visit his old friend Kenton, now separated.   

 

  Barney Norris, himself a master of melancholy and regret,  has adapted Ishiguro’s book,  and uncompromising direction by Christopher Haydon mingles the two periods,  pre-and post-war, within same scenes, with little cueing except when the post-war excursion is largely set in a pub. That is fine, but it takes concentration. And as the butler,  Stephen Boxer is given very little to express in the long first half, except in a blessed scene where with Kenton he unbends and admits to enjoying her company, albeit in the most proper way. 

 

 

      Boxer is, as always, brilliant  (I drove to Bury for his sake absolutely, has never disappointed).   He is  subtle, deep-feeling,  pinpoint-accurate in the moment.  But  it must be hard going:  he does best in the scenes where the bombastic appeasers plot around him in the house and he stands aloofly loyal.   Niamh Cusack, also the safest of hands,  is livelier as the housekeeper and often very moving in her gentle friendly matronliness.   But sometimes it feels as if she is in a different play from the grimly repressed butler, and indeed the terrible grandees.

     

    So it is a relief when in the second half,   the emotion explodes – as far as it ever can in such a man –  and on his excursion to Dorset he meets  again the woman who should have been his life’s love.  The  power of his struggle with emotion,  his admission of wasted loyalties and loss,  is rightly heartbreaking.  It is a play about things not being said,  directions not followed, love not expressed.  Whether redemption is found in his admission of this,  audiences have to decide.  No trite happy ending is offered .     So what we have here  is a masterclass in acting, deft in direction and  a rightful meditation on an England that so nearly went into the dark.   But still, for all that, more of a novel than a play.    

 box office   01284 769 505   to 30 March, 

 –   then touring to 25 May: Southampton, Guildford, Oxford, Derby, Salisbury, Cambridge, Bristol

rating:  three   3 Meece Rating

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March 25, 2019 · 10:50 pm

THE PHLEBOTOMIST                 Hampstead Theatre, NW1

WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD

 

What great timing!  Just as the worried-well Health Secretary gets rubbished for taking a commercial DNA test,  announcing that it has “saved his life” because it posits an increased prostate risk,  and getting firmly told by the profession that he is ‘astonishingly ignorant’, and is wasting NHS resources by “booking a completely unnecessary appointment with his GP to discuss a course of action to address a problem which essentially does not exist.”   The haplessminister, though, is only a few decades ahead of the curve according to Ella Road’s dark dystopian play. 

 

    In this future world gene sequencing is instant – none of this sending-off to the lab for a fortnight’s wait, but in the phlebotomist’s laptop within minutes.  And everyone is given a “rating”,  according to their physical and mental disease risk.    Hence employers and immigration authorities demand tests and disclosures,   there’s a rising culture of “rateism”  and a Pandora’s box of  consequent evils ranging from “post-natal abortion” for low-scoring babies,  low-raters urged into sterilization,  panicky   blood-cheating and thieves with syringes puncturing high-raters for the red gold.   Not to mention moments of rage and dread in surgeries when the laptop reveals you, as our heroine puts it, as “a cocktail of crap!”.  

  

      The tale is  set in a futuristic but recognizable bleakness, and adorned with mischievous projections which begin with the real Dame Sally Davies looming at us with her view that full gene-sequencing is everybody’s right. They  progress through a dating video,  fragments of political interviews , snake-oil promotions like Crispr gene-editing therapy to improve school performance, and news bulletins.   Our heroine is the gamine Bea (Jade Anouka), a  phlebotomist scoring about 7, who meets and marries the 9+ Aaron (Rory Fleck Byrne)   from a smoother, posher family.   In an electric scene Bea has to tell her old friend Char (Kiza Deen, in a cracking mainstream stage debut)  that her score is low, due to Huntingdons likely to flare within years.  

    

        For her friend’s job application she cheats out of kindness,   then over a couple of years and marriage we witness her corruption :   first into cheating for money,  then at last (or almost at last)  internalizing the vicious rateism of society.  In a great reveal  there is rage and dismay and a bit of violent domestic phlebotomy which must be a stage first.  

    

      By contrast, though,  Char with the doom of disease hanging over her abandons the mainstream job she won,  sets off on the hippie trail, embraces risk and fate like a real human, and works  as she declines for a charity for the low-rate ostracized.   It’s a stunning performance,  as is Anouka’s, the counterbalance of the two girls’ trajectories perfect.   

 

  All this is splendid.  There is an oddity in the play, though:  the excellent Mark Lambert plays David, a hospital porter whose attitude to life is the opposite to the poisonous culture.  He speaks of his wife -a  low-scorer due for Alzheimers – and his abandonment of grander careers.  But he is also given a long monologue about a chap he knew who became such a perfectionist gardener that there was no room for his children to play, and choked on a cherry tomato because it was perfectly formed.  Which might be intended as a metaphor, but slows the moment and misses the target by miles ,  not least because (equally inexplicably) this dystopian Britain is also malnutritionally short of fresh vegetables and fruit.   With so much more interesting stuff going on, that chimes oddly.  Not sure either that Aaron’s gambling addiction is wholly necessary.   

      But never mind.  Under Sam Yates’ direction it’s a spirited page-turner of a tale, with some marvellous leads.  Drop a couple of unnecessary scenes and it would be an electrically thrilling 100-minutes- no-interval, giving us no  respite from a satisfyingly likely dystopia. Brrr.  

box office  hampsteadtheatre.com   to  20 April

rating four  4 Meece Rating

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March 24, 2019 · 6:01 pm

AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’         Mercury, Colchester then Southwark

I’M GONNA SIT RIGHT DOWN AND WRITE MYSELF A REVIEW…

 

So dress up sassy, shake your chassis, get some mesh on your flesh like the ladies who sing with the band. Sell your vocals to the yokels, get cash for your trash!   

        Tamasha’s romp through the great Fats Waller’s songbook is a two-hour treat,  with a reeling, rocking cast of five and a joyful five-piece combo.  Huggin’, jitterbuggin’, they get the joint jumping with the defiant appeal of the downtrodden:   the 1920s and 30s explosion of black jazz defiance clothed as irresistible entertainment for all.  It’s the music which helped make the Afro-American black experience resonate so strongly for generations,  and to this day inspires the African diaspora across the world.   

        “The music is the star”  in Richard Maltby’s creation, says Tamasha’s debutant-director Tyrone Huntley (more familiar onstage himself in Superstar, Memphis etc).  There is sparse dialogue and no ongoing plot, more a  stream of consciousness.  It is  played out in a Harlem club of extreme glitter, gold staircase and shiny floor,  but sometimes suggesting the hard pavements outside, where a man alone dreams of a reefer five foot long,  “king of everything before I swing”.  Once there’s  an uptown foray to the Waldorf – “Don’t rock, they love jazz but in small doses,  don’t shock, don’t sing loud, muffle the drums , you’ll do swell with the swells..”.    The bass throbs, the piano sparkles, trumpet, sax and clarinet soar in triumph or mourn in melancholy.   The songs yearn, woo, bicker, rejoice, and sell.   Once, the staid Colchester audience is defied to join in with the shout “Fat and greasy, a fat and greasy fool!” and does, mesmerized. 

    

  The choreography, new, is by Oti Mabuse;   Adrien Hansel and Wayne Robinson are the men, smart and cool and agile.   The women are all stunning in different idiosyncratic ways:  Renee Lamb  (SIX’s original Catherine of Aragon)  big and powerfully gorgeous,  Carly Mercedes Dyer the athletic jitterbug-queen, spiky and cheeky,  Landi Oshinowo provocative and wild.  

  

  The energy of them all is  exhausting,  gold heels flashing, tireless.   In the second half particularly the songs become more pointed, poignant:  the quieter moment when all five ask “What did I do to be so black and blue?” pierces the heart.  More of a gig than a play but, who needs an actual story when the whole defiant, struggling story of the black journey to freedom swirls around us still?     

   rating  four   4 Meece Rating    

Box Office: 01206 573948 / www.mercurytheatre.co.uk  to 30 March

THEN

 FRIDAY 19 APRIL – SATURDAY 1 JUNE 2019      SOUTHWARK PLAYHOUSE

020 7407 0234 / www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk

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March 22, 2019 · 2:39 pm

PRIVATE LIVES Avenue, Ipswich

NOT AT ALL FLAT, SUFFOLK…

 

      Exuberantly funny,  elegant as a Deauville  hotel balcony and  sharp as the crack of a 78rpm record over a lover’s head,  Joanna Carrick’s witty miniaturized production  does Noel Coward’s sparkiest comedy full justice.  I say miniature – it’s full length –  only because of the venue:   the tiny but vigorous  home of Red Rose Chain.     An outfit which on the face of it should be far too ‘woke’ for Coward,  being a non-profit but professional theatre company, deep in community projects with young people and care homes (the group working with dementia sufferers put on their five-minute workshop piece after the show on gala night, which is definitely a first for Private Lives).  

 

       But the intimacy, and the cheeky sense of inclusivity which always marks  RRC shows, actually serve dear Noel very well indeed.    I suspect he would rather like the moments when Fiz Waller’s nonchalantly irresponsible Amanda – trying to make light conversation with her fellow-runaway or the other furious couple –  decides to direct  her remarks on the scenery intimately to the front row. Or when Ryan Penny’s furiously virtuous Victor makes them hold his coat while he executes a fist-jabbing haka at the languid Elyot, who stole his wife from their honeymoon balcony.  Setting it in the round, with the balconies separated by a diagonal parterre of flowers, brings us dangerously into the action.

 

       The young cast make the well-worn famous roles their own.   Waller’s Amanda, elegant though she is in pale satin, negligée or daring beach-suit,  is not the slinky cooing seductress some have made her .  Rather she is very Gertrude Lawrence:   a comedienne who one should remember  crossed the Channel on a landing-craft with ENSA after D-Day to perform in shell-wrecked cinemas.    Her insouciant toughness rises to just the right heights in the combative second-act,   with a memorable close-up fight as the couple’s banter turns to fury.     Harriet Leitch as the aggrieved bride gives Sybil the precise,  prim, pleated-skirt virtue covering tyrannical wifely viciousness  which the world’s Cowards so dread.     Ricky Oakley is young, thus a more schoolboyish Elyot in appearance than usual,  but actually Elyot’s  best jokes (“Its a very old sofa”  and “strange noises”)  suit that interpretation well.     So it all holds together beautifully with this young cast;   the grace-notes and scene-shifts are typical of Carrick’s directorial wit,  not least  the deployment of Victor’s golf club in the first half , and Amanda’s final dive for a brioche at the end.  

        And from the volunteer cadre and the youth theatre, Rei Mordue’s cameo as Louise the maid doesn’t miss a trick:  proper French contempt in every move she makes.  I’d go again.  Some days, you can have a prosecco tea before the matinee. 

 

box office  redrosechain.com   01473 603388.   to 7 APril

   

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March 21, 2019 · 12:00 pm

BETRAYAL Harold Pinter Theatre, WC1

POISONED LOVE

  I sometimes wish Harold Pinter had written more plays  like this:  decadent, agonized, helplessly sensitive to the nuances of friendship and treachery.  More praise has always met the political paranoia and over-relished bullying aggression of his other plays, long and short:     Jame Lloyd’s Pinter season has been a triumph.  But for me this was always going to be the treasure. 

 

      Ironically in 1978 it was not well reviewed -critical triumph – my friend and idol Benedict Nightingale was about the only one to spot how good it is.  It is the tale of a seven-year affair,  told backwards in a series of scenes from the guilty couple’s reunion over a drink two years after it ends, right back to its beginnings at a party nine years earlier.   It  had its moment of gossipy fame when we all learned how painfully close its story ran to his own affair – while married – with the equally married Joan Bakewell, whose husband (his close friend) then upset the playwright by revealing that he’d known for ages.  

 

      So here we have Charlie Cox as Jerry the interloper,   chirpy at first about how secret they were (“we were brilliant!”),  Zawe Ashton as his lover,  and Tom Hiddleston as her husband Robert.    Jamie Lloyd directs, in the best and subtlest bit of work of his I have yet seen:  slow-motion,  he gives such weight to the pauses  that you sometimes want to shout out the unspoken words which  each of these helpless, hopeless people should be uttering, if they were not trapped by their selves.   It is  starkly set in a whitish box with three chairs and, briefly, a table;  the protagonists mainly all on stage at once, though one watching,  left out, watchful;   brilliant use is made of the revolve, particularly when Hiddleston, enigmatic and restrained, circles around the lovers.  Once  as he moves past them unseen he is holding closely to his small daughter: the emotion, the sense of a family damaged,  is intense.  

 

    In the scene where he lunches with his rival he is briefly given a chance of volcanic anger,  all misdirected,  snapping at the waiter.  Here’s a man trapped inside masculinity, friendship, shame, bewilderment.  In fact Hiddleston, again in his best performance yet,  is the emotional core of the production.   Charlie Cox as Jerry is chirpy, unrepentant, proud of his own rhetoric (especially in that extraordinary last-but-first  scene where he declares his love in pretentious eloquence)  and striking in a different way.  If you take the parallels,   the play is painfully hard on Pinter himself .  Zawe Ashton’s Emma,  tall and rangy, loose-limbed and unconventionally sexy,  comes increasingly to seem like a pawn between them,  as the real energy is   emitted from the male friendship.  I have never seen a production of this play which made Pinter’s misogyny clearer.    But there is much else in it, worth picking up,  spiky with detail, reekingly honest about dishonesty.   

Box office 0844 871 7622, until June 1.

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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March 20, 2019 · 1:58 pm

THE RUBENSTEIN KISS              Southwark Playhouse, SE1

 MARTYRS OF THE MCCARTHY YEARS

    

    Ideological hostilities across the world,   fake news and paranoia, a resurgent deep left,  uneasy relations with Russia, antisemites questioning the patriotism of Jews:  no bad time to revive James Phillips’ powerful play.   It is based on the 1950’s trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing details of the A-bomb to the Soviet Union.    Revulsion at McCarthyism and the electric chair provoked decades of liberal rage and campaigns to prove their innocence:   still later, records revealed that they probably were indeed doing it.  

       With little changed but names,   Phillips creates a play in the spirit of Arthur Miller:    about belief and betrayal, idealism and vanity, family shame and pride.   With deft timeshifts it is set half in their time, half in  the 1960s where the couple’s son falls for his cousin, daughter of the uncle whose evidence betrayed them.  Sometimes they  are onstage together,  the four elders like ghosts;  sometimes round a very significant table.    As Joe Harmston’s long, careful production swings into its second act, you can hardly breathe for tension and pity.  

 

           But it takes time. I must be honest and say that the first half didn’t engage me fast enough.  Henry Proffit, long and lean and scholarly,  is a marvellous Jakob,  every generation’s dangerous academic idealist;  his passion is reflected back to him in Ruby Bentall’s fragile romantic Esther, forever singing snatches of opera because it “makes working people big inside”,  while her bluff brother complains that it is bourgeois and Italian a “fascist language”.   But in that first act the growing relationship of the young people drags a bit,  and it is only after the interval that we get an electric, eloquent,  Milleresque piece I would kick myself to have missed. 

 

        Never mind.  When Stephen Billington as the FBI agent Cranmer engages with Jakob then Esther,  pity and terror crackle as violently as Matthew Bugg’s menacing soundscape.  Cranmer says his  war service was against  “the enemies of my country”;   Jakob, excused the draft on health grounds,  only wanted to “fight Fascists”.  It’s a telling distinction:    the Soviets after all were allies.   Deeper division is philosophical and practical:   trying to persuade them to make a deal and talk  Cranmer cites Stalin’s murders  while Jakob refuses to believe it.  To Esther’s proud “we have courage because of our convictions” Cranmer cries “you are dying for a lie…you will orphan your son for an idea!” . Jakob piously returns “Ideas are more important..I can’t deny the man I have spent my life trying to become”.   With ten days to go before execution,  Esther’s operatic preoccupation makes her sing “Un bel di” from Madam Butterfly and vaunt her “pure hope” to the interrogator;  the FBI agent exasperatedly begs “don’t wait for the white ship in the harbour, Esther!” .

  

    Echoes of Antigone, of Joan of Arc of the perilous streak of vanity in martyrdom.  It is  reflected again as 25 years later  when Katie Eldred as the niece confronts her father with a half-hearted suicide attempt.  Phillips is grimly aware of every irony:  when Jakob (more scared than his wife) shudders about the inhumane horror of his coming death,   we sharply remember his insouciant blindness about Stalin.  The coda, with a final physical reveal and a still more ironic decision by Dario Coates as the son Matthew,  leaves you reeling.      

box office 020 7407 0234 | www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk

to   13 april

RATING  THREE

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March 20, 2019 · 8:02 am

ALYS ALWAYS Bridge, SE1

A GOAD FOR THE GLITTER-ARTY 

  

  Late to the party, due to holiday,  but Couldn’t miss Nicholas Hytner’s bit of mischief :    after  his years of being being alternately feted and rubbished in print,  he displays directorial glee in sending up the noisome denizens of a broadsheet arts desk. Lucinda Coxon’s black-hearted comedy of modern media manners is the tale of a mousy newspaper underling, Frances,  who happens to be first on the scene on an icy Suffolk night when Alys,   lovely wife of a celebrated writer,  is killed (it’s a hauntingly staged car crash for those of us who drive icily home from Manningtree most theatre nights, I winced).  But in the world Frances inhabits, a celebrity tragedy is a foothold.  

     

    The play’s eye is pitilessly sharp.   Sylvestra le Touzel is a queen-bee book editor,  snarling at the idly bitchy Oliver (Simon Manyonda)  “I pay you to party with the PRs”;   Manyonda “a good writer when he bothers” chucks books straight in the bin and hoovers up freebies;  Frances is everyone’s dogsbody,  the rarely-seen Editor obsessed with “clicks and pods”,  and they are all afflicted by  hot-desking and wistful longings for a Russian with a cheque-book.  Sacked,  Oliver snarls “the ship’s sinking, one rat leaving won’t change that”.     Gales of giggling met lines about the meretricious dazzle of arts -cum-celebrity  media and its familiar  rumours of nobodies whose novel got optioned by Spielberg; Alys’ memorial service is crammed with broadsheet-editors, style icons and Melvyn Bragg.   Satisfyingly niche:  wish I’d been there on press night, because  it’s not so much ‘preaching the the choir’  as putting sneezing-powder on the pews, setting fire to its hymn-books and blaspheming its saints. 

 

         Joanne Froggatt’s Frances ably meets the feline subtlety  of the text:  she is kind and humane with the dying woman in the Suffolk darkness, like  any nice girl;  but asked by the police to meet the family and tell about the mother’s last words she refuses.  Until she learns how famous they are, goes, and can’t resist embroidering sentimentally .   She becomes a mentor by the daughter (a nice ghastly rich-teen turn by Leah Gayer) and joins the great and good in their gorgeous second home by the sea.   As she turns to narrate asides to us  – it’s very novelistic –   Froggatt’s little shrugs of rising satisfaction at each opportunist success is perfect.   So  is the way her editor suddenly treats her with respect. 

 

      In the interval one fears that part 2 might be less beguiling,  as her expedition into the Kite family’s glittering lives reveals (quelle surprise) that all was not idyllic after all and the great man himself is up for a fling.   But Coxon has  wicked  fun  with the spoilt rich kids ,  the self-absorbed writer ,  and our heroine’s ever deeper encroachings into the dead Alys’ life and possessions (an artful Manderley theme here, but with a savvier heroine so closer to All About Eve).  When her annexation of the great writer becomes deeper (“Second shot at happiness for tragic brainbox”  cries the Mail-Online) she has new decisions to make.  Like how useful a conquest he really is,  this nicely moth-eaten Robert Glenister who ooofs! at his bad back and  reaches, as the arts journos point out,  the  stage of “sciatica and falling sales” .   But once Frances has changed the locks against his children, copped the Arts Ed job and had her editor to dinner,  she may not stick it as long as patient Alys.  Why would you? 

 

Box office: 0843-208 1846.  to 30 March

rating  four   4 Meece Rating

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