Monthly Archives: July 2021

THE DARK SIDE OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT. DON’T TELL JACOB REES-MOGG

          Hats off to James Dacre’s Royal & Derngate for bravely slapping on a brand new musical in the very week Lloyd-Webber and four other London shows got abruptly pinged-off by test ‘ n trace (more like trick-or-treat, frankly: isolation blackmail).   Even better, April de Angelis and Lucy Rivers happen to hit some nicely topical nerves in the time of Bum Flare Man and rabble-riotous, boozy footie-fans and clubbers barely controlled by the police.    The result, directed con brio by Michael Oakley,  is picaresque fun in the tradition of beggar’s operas (echoes of John Gay, and musical nods to Kurt Weill’s  Threepenny Opera songs) .   It’s hits the spirit of the 18c before the Victorians clamped down on behaviour: it’s  joyful and dark , scholarly and fantastical , finally rather serious but often very funny and breathtakingly rude (parental advisory: there are some cheerful genital references, sung and otherwise, with words starting with C and an earthiness regarding trouser-contents).   

            It deals with the mid-1700s,  when Hogarth drew the exuberant horrors of “Gin Lane”.  A trade deal with the Dutch made the spirt “Ginever” suddenly cheap and plentiful. A populace used to ale and mead  – wine and French brandy being for the gentry – started downing the stuff by the pint.  It assuaged the grim social conditions of the London mob and panicked the ruling classes into severe and ineffective licensing laws.    When our heroine Mary (Aruhan Galieva)  is starving, milkless, cradling her new baby after being raped by a genteel cleric and sacked by her employer,  ragged Suki from the gin community offers comfort.   Mary accepts:   “I am a mother, that’s what I am – I can give comfort, comfort’s a dram”.

         She allows Suki (a  Rosalind Ford as a farouche ginger firecracker)  to take the baby off to supposed safety.  Unless you know that there was a profitable market in baby-clothes and plenty of drains to dispose of the young owners, you might believe her.  

     Grim?  Well, there’s bleak-grim, of which theatre offers more than enough, and there’s energy-grim.  This goes for the latter.  Wild music-hall-cum-folk-rock numbers (“it’s the Law, it’s the Law! It’s the law to keep us poor!”) explode as the actor-musicians, instruments in hand,  dance or brawl.  Mary is rescued from brothel rape by Lydia, who gives up her role as a callous madam to strip the victim, reinvent herself as a man called Jack,  and develop  a touchingly domestic loving relationship with Mary.  But a prison beating and unspoken yearning for her lost child makes her leave him, accepting a job from Sarah, the eccentric writer sister of the  Tom-Jones novelist Henry Fielding.   In a flash-forward at the start we have seen Mary as Henry’s new wife. 

        Meanwhile, on the scaffolding above, with  an occasional full royal palace backdrop,  periwigged toffs attempt social control.   De Angelis has artfully ransacked history:  Queen Caroline was indeed affronted by the state of the mob ,  there was a Mary and a Suki,  Fielding did indeed marry his maidservant and become a magistrate,  and his brother did set up the first formal police, the Bow Street Runners. Into which, naturally,  the fake Jack gets recruited…

      See?  Picaresque. And finally tragic for some, even the survivors.  But there are tremendous laughs even before the comedy coffin and the (absolutely historically true) invention of a mechanical wooden cat, the Puss-and-Mew machine which dispensed gin through a paw if you put a coin in its mouth.  It defied the licensing laws because the server was behind a wall, unidentifiable.  The best  laughs are for  the magnificent Debbie Chazen as Moll, a bundle of colourful, ragged amiably drunken  disgracefulness.  Over the matter of Mary’s baby,  the veteran streetwalker is asked if she’s ever had a child. “Dunno” she says cheerfully.  “When you’re rat-arsed you don’t notice…must have…but you put things down and…?”   She also has a dreamy, heart-stoppingly plaintive pissed  line early on about the joy of gin.  “Ever see a pig’s brain?  All coils and coils…ginever runs through the coils, makes it all pure..”.  She is of course a theatre veteran  (“Used to blow the understudies”).

         Chazen doubles as the almost equally tipsy Queen Caroline of Ansbach , with a disgraceful faux-German accent with some startling phrases.  She is a joy. And for all the criminality, even the darkly guilty Suki’s, you’re on their side  against the  pomposity of the men (Alex Mugnaioni and Peter Pearson are six between them in fetching wigs and breeches). 

      As for the music, nimbly arranged by Tamara Saringer, there are rumbustious ensembles and one or two lovely solos, especially from Paksie Vernon as “Jack”.   Others don’t quite hit the musical-theatre showstop button as they need to, but why should they?   They impel the story, , and we’re alongside these girls.  On their side against the double oppression of poverty and sex.  

box office royalandderngate.co.uk    to 31 July.   There’s even an audio-described show on the 28th.    It’s designed to tour, so…long may it…

rating four    

ROARING BACK TO LIFE

 

    Almost the most magnificent part of Daniel Evans’ production is that it’s happening at all:  despite the distanced glimmer of blue paper masks, Chichester affirms that big musical theatre is back with almost insane defiance: cast of 32, 16 part orchestra,  singers who had to be rehearsed in visors, Ann Yee’s big wild ensemble choreography practiced at first in masks.   Cheering and clapping started with the dimming of the lights, and at the end we were on our many feet.  Audiences are glad to be back,performers gleeful, directors and producers nervous (four West End shows are currently suspended by Test ‘n Trace, with only hours of notice).

      So the night was in itself a celebration, but by no means a dumbly flippant one.  Rodgers’  crashing romantic music and the big songs  are better known now than the storyline – Some Enchanted Evening, Bali Hai, , Gonna Wash that man right outa my hair,  Younger than Springtime.  Some quail at putting it on, remembering the racial caricatures  of earlier productions.   US troops are occupying a Polynesian island in the WW2 conflict with Japan:   Hammerstein and Logan’s book has nurse Nellie Forbush, blissfully in love with Emile the French planter, rejecting him in visceral disgust for having two children by a (now dead) “native” woman. “A shock to think of you with a -….it is born in me!”.   And Lt Cable in turn decides that he can’t marry his lover Liat, daughter of the farouche camp-follower Bloody Mary, because he’s a Philadelphia boy.   “Lesser breeds”, see..

   But Evans and Ann Yee recognized – it’s archive fact – that in 1949 in American segregation, Rodgers and Hammerstein were making a powerful statement.   Nellie and the Lt are wrong. Cable, heading on a suicidal mission in his despair, strikes up with the bitterest, least-remembered number “You’ve got to be  Carefully Taught” about the ingraining of fear and hatred towards “people whose eyes are differently made.. skin of another shade”.  Liat, almost silent in the text, is the ballerina Sera Maehara, Japanese-trained and a mesmerizing presence,  dancing and moving with peerless, ancient grace like a daughter of the sun from a culture older than the whoopee knees-up romping of the Americans.    Bloody Mary pleads for her with real maternal agony and none of the familiar twee or light tone about “Happy Talk”.  As for male attitudes to women and the MeToo are, I have never seen a more threateningly macho take than Yee’s choreography of “Nothing like a Dame”.  You’d want chaperones round that lot. The words are full of wittily pathetic longing, but these lads are dangerous.

   O God, now you think it’s all terribly ‘woke’ and preachy (like the ’49 critic, a US NAvy officer,  who wanted rid of Cable’s bitter song about taught racism because it was like ‘a VD lecture’ and not fun).   But it isn’t a sermon, I assure you;  as a night out it is a happy riot. Gina Beck’s Nellie, at first a striding, robustly pretty naive Navy nurse, grows in character, romps and larks gorgeously, and belts out some of the most thrillingly fine low notes anywhere; Julian Ovenden is not only a fine actor but proves to have an immense, exciting operatic voice.  Seabees and Ensigns are a roaring, storming ensemble, set-pieces like Honey Bun stopping the show with our glee; and the colours are set against sobering late reminders of the seriousness of the war and – with Emile’s peaceably doubtful remarks before his heroism – its limitations.

  We know what you’re against, he says, “What are you FOR?” A question for all times.

Box office http://www.cft.org.uk.    

Rating five

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IF RANSOME MET ORWELL

 

  It’s 1939 in Southwold harbour (nicely resonant  for me to see this in Southwold  itself, on its second night).     Arthur Ransome, famed already for his children’s books, is sailing up the coast from Pin Mill to lay up his boat for the war years.  HIs wife Evgenia finds a visitor fallen asleep in the cabin:  it’s Eric Blair, who under his pen-name George Orwell has published four novels (mixed reception) and non-fiction accounts of being down and out, fighting in Spain and observing the poor of Northern England.  He’s been burying his father in the town, and found out who was in the harbour.    Soon he will write Animal Farm and become more famous himself.  

          Orwell wants to meet Ransome, not because of wanting to write ‘as if for children’  nor about fishing (on which they find common ground , with a very English social wariness). It is almost certainly because the older man lived through the Russian revolution in 1917 as a reporter (and maybe a spy, that runs through the whole play) .  Better still,  his wife Evgenia was Trotsky’s trusted secretary.   Orwell, with the pigs of animal farm not yet formed in his mind, is  thinking of the Russian revolution and of the new ally Stalin, and is already full of doubt at the outcome of the state socialism which seemed so natural and necessary to his generation.  In a nice moment Ransome teaches him fly-tying with bits of bread as bait:   our author is canny enough not to quote, but to leave it to us to remember Orwell’s great line – “Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait”. Nice idea that he got the metaphor off old Arthur Ransome…

       The meeting is entirely fictional,  an invention of the author, Ivan Cutting of Eastern Angles ; so are two further meetings in the play,  one in the Lake District and one in Orwell’s last illness.  All might have taken place, none did:  fair enough.   Laurie Coldwell, dark and intense, is a perfect Orwell not only in looks but in catching a very credible manner: a nervy intense troubled intelligence, his physical restlessness in contrast to Philip Gill’s relaxed, worldly Ransome .  Orwell sees the cataclysm of war and totalitarianism coming (his Coming up for Air is the book he has with him) but Ransome growls “Keep Adolf quiet and stay out of his way”.   

     What Evgenia thinks we only discover slowly:  at first I was doubtful about Sally Ann Burnett’s portrayal, as she seemed plain silly,  but as the play goes on her layers of experience and understanding of the Bolshevism she lived through, and the question marks hanging over how she and Ransome got out so smoothly. 

     There are moments of real credible connection, though as the years go on – we are long post-war by the second half  –  there are far too many words and not enough real clashes or understandings.  Evgenia becomes ever more central, Burnett gradually evoking the long, half-buried emotional reality and political half-belief of her years working for Leon Trotsky (“It was where I was sent”).    The most dramatic moment comes when Orwell, having once again crashed in on their peaceful elderly lives,  is the one  to tell her of Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico.

     It’s a great idea, much  of it well performed and imagined,  but if ever a play needed cutting, especially in the second half (unwisely, as long as the first or longer)   this is it.   Nor do we really need the appearance of various dream-women (all Bronte Tadman) representing Orwell’s agonized love life in contrast to the uxorious Ransome’s.  Though Tadman’s last incarnation, as Sonia Orwell, is beautifully done: crisply ruthless, socially assured.  

        Other imagined meetings – Frayn’s Copenhagen, Bennett’s spy plays – benefit from brevity: at a tight 90-minutes this would have had twice the power.   It may yet have. It was worth seeing,  though.

box office 01473 211498 (Mon-Fri, 10am-2pm)  

www.easternangles.co.uk    

Touring across the East of England to 31 JULY, final week at Sir John Mills Theatre Ipswich

rating 3

MIDLIFE, MIDNIGHT, MEMORY

  

  Fittingly, Deborah Bruce’s  play is set over the night the clocks change back.  It’s   about Time, its reverses and attritions;  and being about loss and dislocation and domesticity,  it is set in an empty rental house about to be sold.    Some say that this tight, 80-minute three-hander tackles too many things at once – middle aged reawakening of old liaisons, the menopause, grief, haunting, student sexual accusations, therapy, parenthood and the unwisdom of defining yourself round sex. But hey, that is adult life .   Hassles do not arrive neatly separated and convenient for the dramatic unities.  

      For Alex, who has pitched up at a university reunion thrilled to meet her once- casual boyfriend Jason and has brought a bottle back to his old university house, the wearing “assault” of a hard menopause is being aggravated.   By a stale marriage, a husband reportedly too bored with it all even to have an affair, a son accused and  sent home “under investigation”  from university who doesn’t speak much, and a general sense of horror at being in her fifties and suddenly realising the world of “young bodies and lots of sex” is gone forever   Claire Price beautifully deploys a staccato,  nervy, overbright manner just this side of mania.  Jason (Bo Poraj) who appears more sorted, having ridden the 90s wave of software, marketing and branding and acquired  a therapist wife and two daughters.  He’s selling the old uni house now, it’s his wife who handles the letting.  He mentions (top high-achiever clue) also an “Airbnb in Suffolk”. 

         Alex knows unnervingly much about his life from stalking him on Facebook, something he doesn’t bother with;  she is too wound-up to take any heed of his present reality and guarded manner,  even when he mutters that the social media pictures are out of date.    I must admit that I spent the first twenty minutes admiring the chutzpah of a woman playwright willing to demonstrate , mercilessly,  how unnervingly bonkers a menopausal woman can be.   I wanted Jason to run for the hills.  I would.    For she reminisces embarrassingly, flirts, and drags out a narrative in which she alone rescued and shaped his sexual confidence so he ” owes” her.  She hisses the words ” your WIFE” to sound like KNIFE, and demands a night of adulterous passion, having only pretended she has a hotel. Poor Jason shies like a nervous horse. We’ll know a bit more about why at the end, but meanwhile it is Alex who mesmerises us with her sheer needy awfulness.  I mean that in as praise.

     Then a teenage dea-ex-machina invades – an ex tenant having broken into the empty house because, as she gabbles (brilliantly, torrentially) she has fouled up her key arrangements and needed to crash.  Alannah (Shannon Hayes) gets that bang on; when  Jason flees upstairs to leave Alex on a floor bed,  she crashes in again as excitable young adults do,  and decides Alex must be his wife Raya –  who has as landlady-therapist counselled her  kindly on email after her father died.   So here’s another unmanageable female (this is a brave playwright, God bless her) spilling out her feelings to the dumbfounded  Alex under a misapprehension.  She is not disabused, what with it being the middle of the night and Alex being half-loco herself. But she does get warned, with furious inaccuracy, that she should enjoy youth because “once the oestrogen runs out, it’s game-over”. 

     There’s a tremendous conclusion, a proper twist, a fourth character and delicate moment of real compassion.  Roxana Silbert’s direction and some sensitive sound by Nick Powell are faultless.  So by the end two women, one young one older, have made fools of themselves spilling every extreme feeling while a man has done himself harm  by failing to share even a drop of it.  They’ve all been intensely and messily human and all too recognisable. What more can we ask of  theatre? 

 hampsteadtheatre.com    020 7722 9301   to 24  July

rating four

FORMAL. INTERVIEWS DON’T END JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE DEAD

    The afterlife is out of fashion, at least in traditional religious forms – harps and angels, heaven and hell, reincarnation or squads of waiting virgins, all start to seem as embarrassingly dated as Valhalla.  But most unfashionable of all are the ancient Christian notions of Purgatory – where suffering purges you of sin – and the other waiting-room option, Limbo (virtuous pagans and unbaptised babies).

 All the same, the idea is always gripping, and  attempts get made on it: this one by Jack Thorne, based on a Japanese film by  Hirokazu Kore-Eda, begins with a crashing boom of doom and puts the newly dead in a bleak office block lined with filing cabinets (Bunny Guinness’ designs throw a lot of good tricks at us).  They are greeted by a senior manager and questioned in turn by his staffers about their most meaningful and precious memory. 

        One could reflect (I did for a few intrigued minutes) that it is indeed Purgatory to be not only dead but processed by a pinstriped chap with a gleaming tie-pin and his rabble of weary, sometimes bickering aides whose attempts at authority reminded me at times of a group of disaffected McKinsey or Deloitte interns.  Luckily, their first clients tend to feel this too,  June Watson’s magnificent nonagenarian Mrs Killick worried about her cat, Olatunji Ayofe as a stroppy black lad who doesn’t get it at all, and Togo Igawa – a distinguished, senior after a stellar career – unable think of any precious memories at all . But you have to come out with one, and allow the staff to ‘recreate’ that memory with various props   because otherwise you can’t  happily ‘pass on”  to wherever you go next.  And might have to join the staff here, processing the next few lots,  until you work things out.  

       I feared sentimentality at “May your memories make you fly”. But Thorne, who gave us that glorious Christmas Carol at the Young Vic and added depth onstage to JK Rowling’s more plodding fantasy,  is no fool.  The  stresses , inhibitions and character-flaws of the dead candidates – and their griefs, Mrs Killick’s especially – draw you in. And around in the little Dorfman I could actually feel people wondering what their own memory would be (there’s an opportunity to record them, they run before the start).  It’s not a bad exercise. 

        Sometimes the ‘guides’ seem to be a cross between social workers and a frazzled am-dram group with prop problems,  but they too become distinct and interesting.   Philosophically ideas drift through as it progresses, – `’memory can free you or imprison you” .  A good plot line develops (a bit late, after the bit halfway through where you risk drifting away) . And with that, it  becomes clear that sometimes we can redeem each other.   

 Where Jeremy Herrin directs and Bunny Christie designs, you expect something pretty damn theatrical before it ends, and this we get.  No spoilers, but it’s surprisingly beautiful.  And after a year of  shared griefs and doubts and fears and hopes, it’s an honourable human document. If there are more tickets after the distancing rule ends (none now), worth grabbing one.  Anywhere, like I did up in the gods.    All the sightlines are fine..

Box office Nationaltheatre.org.uk.     To 7 August

Rating four  .  

SHEEN SHINES AS THE WELSH WORD-WIZARD

      It might be helpful if critics admitted sometimes arriving bad-tempered, hot, out of tune, dreading the long masked late night train journey home. Even, perhaps,  churlishly admitting that they really hate the laboriously, Covidly, reconfigured Olivier in the round and the prissy – compulsory – rules like the poor usher having to push the lift button for you, even though fomite surface-infection has been discredited for months. 

           So there’s the confession:  sitting in the Circle  for half an hour of  1950s cheesy-listening music before the start,  I was a dreadfully bad subject,  wondering why I’d spent £ 20  (press tix are like hens’ teeth for us marginals in  these socialdistanced days, quite rightly).   But I  worship Michael Sheen , who gets Rylance-ier by the day in his eccentricities, adored  his Hamlet-in-a-psychiatric ward at the Young Vic,  and even, forgave him those cringey Zoomathons with Tennant.  And  I hadn’t read or heard Under Milk Wood , Dylan Thomas’ play-for-voices, for decades.  Actually, not since those  cheesy-listening tracks were the grownups’ hip-hop.   I remember being thrilled aged eight to find out, against parental intention,  that the village of Llareggub whose day the poet relates is a palindrome of “bugger all”.  

          Given that filthy mood,  an extra mouse is awarded because within 15 of its unbroken 105 minutes the show became an unmissable joy. It is framed by Sian Owen’s extra scripts,  set at first in a care home.   Young Owain (Michael Sheen)  has come to visit his old Dad, unresponsive on the edge of dementia.    Frustration, edging on irritation,  arises as it must do so grimly often in such homes,   until the son launches into “To begin at the beginning..” and that torrent of Dylan-magic words evoke the the crow-black, sloe-black, fishingboat-bobbing sea –  and we’re off!

  If you don’t know Under Milk Wood and  its cast of townsfolk,   they are gloriously enhanced-commonplaces:   you and me and the neighbours,  in the days one knew one’s neighbours.  Every auntie and uncle and local disgrace is there,   woven into the headlong half-punning lyricism of Dylan Thomas. So each of the care-home residents and staff flowers from stasis into vigour, personality, wickedness, pathos, goodness, doubling and shifting  characters  and picking up their words as Sheen tells the tale.   It’s elegantly choreographed by director Lyndsey Turner, atmospherically lit by Tim Lutkin.  Old blind Captain Cat (Anthony O”Donnell) breaks your heart,  listening to every footstep in the street outside, dreaming old love and bygone seas.  Poor Mr Pugh reads Lives of the Great Poisoners at table with his menacing wife,  Susan Brown is the even more menacing Mrs Ogmore Prichard and Polly Garter is up to no good in the wood.. 

      It may be “A play for voices”  but there’s joy in seeing them at it. And Sheen ,sounds as if he was making it up as he goes along, which is just as it should be  (if the NT doesn’t bring him back to do A Child’s Christmas in Wales this winter, they’re not concentrating).   The pace is perfect.  And it’s a perfect piece to contemplate after a year when the shrinking worlds of lockdown made every neighbourhood a village and every one of us was connected in fate and behaviour whether we liked it or not.  

         Llaregub’s long day faded and the raring pub became once more a care home, final words were spoken and bows taken, and around the drear-arena came pattering-paws applause, distinct-distanced,  Dylan-dreaming of the Sheen-shade…..see?  a couple of hours of it and you’re talking like Dylan Thomas yourself. 

     I leave you with the words of the Rev. Jenkins  and ask forgiveness for the initial bad temper: it fits our times  and moods:
    “Every evening at sun-down

    I ask a blessing on the town,

     For whether we last the night or no 

     I’m sure is always touch-and-go.

     We are not wholly bad or good

     Who live our lives under Milk Wood,

     And Thou, I know, wilt be the first

     To see our best side, not our worst”

box office nationaltheatre.org.uk    to 24 July

rating five

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