Monthly Archives: November 2022

CELEBRATORY, MY DEAR WATSON 

I had come from the magnificent Old Vic Christmas Carol, where once again with mince pies,  bells and lanterns and Dickensian cheer and a message about how poor Scrooge was maltreated by his father long ago.   Still worth it, a cracking family show.  So it felt like fun to travel three miles north north across Dickens’ city,  beyond 221b Baker St to the new  Marylebone Theatre for  Mark Shanahan’s A Sherlock Carol,  which did rather well in New York and cheekily opens  with the Dickens echo –  “Moriarty was dead..”.

          It’s a mash-up, a tribute, potentially a great deal of fun.  And historically a good jokes: for now it is 40 years on from the time of A Christmas Carol,   and Holmes is terribly depressed and purposeless after defeating Moriarty the master-criminal at the Reichenbach Falls.   He is visited by the middle-aged Dr Cratchit:  Tiny Tim!  He has grown up and is earnestly curing other children in a hospital once funded by Scrooge’s benefactions but now a bit short of money.

         Moreover, Scrooge has been murdered.  And there’s a  shenanigan about  a lost will and the precious Blue Carbuncle, which could save the hospital but is gone.  It may or may not have been stolen by a descendant of Scrooge’s old employer Fezziwig. Who, in a completely pointless sub-plot, is in love with a descendant, of I think, Scrooge’s old girlfriend Fan.   It’s a brilliant and cheeky idea,  and Shanahan echoes lines from both books.   For instance, when Holmes who famously doesn’t believe in spirits is visited on  Christmas Eve by Scrooge’s ghost, the ghost mockingly quotes him  –   “if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains ,however improbable,  must be the truth”.  

      I wanted to adore it.  I really did.  And it’s only two hours,  but the first half is fussy with sub-plots and awful comedy accents your kids may love but I didn’t.   You could trim down the longer first half very smartly and run it as 90-minutes-no interval, though that would cut down on the mulled wine which was rather good in the bar.     Kammy Darweish is a gorgeous Scrooge,   and the crinolined ensemble telling the story are fun,  but there’s a problem with Ben Caplan’s Sherlock.   I know it’s hard to act as if you’re disillusioned and depressed – you need Hamlet-style poetry for that –  but the whole of the first half saw him irritatingly mopey and low-key,  not a Sherlock we can love.   Maybe he will dial it up as the Christmas spirit rises. I hope so, because it’s a hell of a good idea.  God bless us, every one!

marylebonetheatre.co    to 7 Jan

rating three

CLEVER, CLOWNING, CLASSIC 

   What could be more seasonal than Flaubert’s tale of wifely frustration, romantic illusions, disastrous adulteries and ruinous shopaholic debt?  This adaptation is a clown-skilled four-hander by John Nicholson – founder of the gleefully clever  Peepolyukus.  So there’s a lot of sudden hat-swopping and artful prop-work and chalk scribbles made real by pinpoint-skilful sound effects. There’s a scene of fine erotic prestigiditation (magic, to you) and a jokey meta-theatrical “framing” of the story by two travelling ratcatchers who encounter poor Emma Bovary at the point of her proposed suicide.   

     So it starts with an author-narrator explaining that since it’s Christmas there’s going to be a happy ending for once,  and begins at the end of the book , promising that  – after Emma has told her whole tale of frustration  – one of the ratcatchers will thwart her suicide and bear her off to the bright lights of Paris to fulfil her hopeless lifelong provincial dreams.    But will he?   Remain on edge of seat, though you might fall off laughing. 

       Any classic tragedy has a potential to be darkly funny:  this is. The amiably boyish Sam Alexander is Charles Bovary,  unsuspicious and devoted, while an irresistible Denis Herdman plays  her two lovers,  and Alistair Cope wears many hats as  – well, basically the rest of provincial 19c France (very convincing when he milks a table as a  cow, properly evil as a bailiff).  In the midst of the three men is Jennifer Kirby as Emma Bovary: the  axle around which they whirl.  And what is so brilliant about Marieke Audsley’s direction  – and Kirby’s assured, RSC-honed performance  – is that poor Emma is played pretty well straight. 

       That works wonderfully: the book, which profoundly shocked France in 1856, is after all a dark satire on the helplessness of energetic women trapped in an unreasonable male society,  stuck with dull unchanging domesticity while being fed romantic ideas in novels and tempted by aspirational consumerism.   It is also a study in depression.  When Kirby speaks lines like “life is a dark corridor with a locked door at the end” there’s a proper shudder;  when she flings herself recklessly at bored lovers,  there is good physical comedy because all four are accomplished clowns,  but she retains the grim dignity of her plight.  The show is laughing at the men, not the woman.

   Which is appropriate, given the theme.  But one of my favourite things  is that it pulls off the classic trick of suddenly, briefly, demonstrating that these are not just comics but actors who could have done it straight, had they chosen to. The old ReducedShakespeare Company used to do that:  in the middle of  riotous hat-and-prop jokes suddenly deliver  “O what a piece of work is Man..” or “Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, to silence the waves of  laughter before rapidly stirring it up again.   Here the cast finally quarrel among themselves because Emma loses patience and wants the proper tragedy.  So movingly – and straight – she and Charles enact her last moments.   

       But well, can’t keep jokey blokes down, can you?   Cue a fine denouement.  Go and see for yourself.    But book.  This early matinee was packed solid.  

      Box office jermynstreettheatre.co.uk.   To 17 december 

Rating four.

A DAUGHTER OF DISREPUTE  

1893, and here’s George Bernard Shaw passing the Bechdel Test with flying colours by centring the action on two women at odds , with surrounding men remarkably disrespected.  Mind you, to get this play onstage it took  32 years, a war and women’s suffrage:  and even then the Lord Chamberlain only just choked it down.  It belongs to that angry Ibsen,Chekhov, serious-Wilde era as Victoria was dwindling,  the press noticing child-prostitution , and intelligent playwrights thinking, appalled, about how the roots of polite society sucked the life out of women.

        It’s still a barnstorming play, especially in a final mother-daughter confrontation,  and with all the twisty argumentative vigour of GBS.   Like all his plays it is a challenge to modern actors, with no argument knowingly understated and the need to be natural even while preaching.    But Anthony Banks’ cast handle it bracingly: Caroline Quentin is excellent as the mature lady calling herself Mrs Warren,  and her own real daughter Rose Quentin rises to match her as the daughter Vivie who long ago she bore to – well, who knows who? . Vivie’s upbringing was lavishly  funded all the way to mathematical-wrangler level at the newly founded Newnham College, Cambridge.  It took money.  Not respectable money .

    Quentin senior is abundant, vigorous, bossy, overdressed , affluent but delightfully prone to betray in sudden vowel sounds her unladylike beginnings;  Vivie is a casual no-nonsense bluestocking in culottes , who enjoys a whisky and a whodunnit and enjoys working out actuarial calculations in a liberated friend’s legal practice up Chancery Lane.   They haven’t met that often over the years,  but we encounter them reuniting in a country garden (with a cottage so undersized in scale that I fear it may be a metaphor for trapped womanhood).  Mrs W is introducing her friends – a geeky architect Praed, who seems to have wandered in from an EM Forster novel,  and Sir George, a galumphing baronet with a silvertopped cane.   Shortly along comes Vivie’s half-boyfriend Frank and his father the Rector. Who ,to general delight, is played by Matthew Cottle, a man whose drop-dead comedy timing  has never yet missed its chance.

         Both the Rector and the baronet may, we quite soon realize, turn out to be Vivie’s father, though Mrs W would never tell.  You can see why 1893 panicked over this play once the baronet  (Simon Shepherd, beautifully high-Tory) has made a play for Vivie,  while Frank flirts toyboy-style with her mother.    But the core of the plot lies in the revelation – made surprisingly early by the mother to her daughter – that her wealth and position came from prostitution.   It was,  Shaw makes abundantly and angrily clear,  society’s guilt:  the pretty daughter of an unmarried east end fried-fish seller had a choice between marrying into enslavement by some drunken labourer,  dying of lead poisoning in a factory or  selling herself at a price.  All women do, or did:  “How does a marriage ceremony make a difference to the right and wrong of these things?”

      The topical fascination of the play is the way that Vivie at first buys into her mother’s story with compassionate affection for a victim of the system.  But in the second act, after a brief glorious appearance of a hungover clerical Cottle alongside another undersized building, his church,  there are some audience gasps. The baronet reveals to scornful Vivie  that the business –  houses of ill repute in Vienna, Brussels, Budapest, Berlin and other sinful un-English places – is still well up and running.   Mrs Warren is thus no longer a repentant victim of circumstance but a bit of a white-slaver .     It is made clear to Vivie that the whole society, from Dukes and Archbishops down,  is  rotten ,so one might as well join in and profit from it. 

    Appalled, she storms off,  pausing only to face another unwelcome revelation, and in Act 3  – the Chancery Lane set now full human size, which again may be a metaphor –  two showdowns result. Mrs Warren makes one last throw for the status of treasured old Mum: Caroline Quentin truly  magnificent, ropes of pearls swinging,  accent cruder,  frank about her needs.  She won’t give up the management of her houses – must have “work and excitement, or I’ll go melancholy mad!” .   Vivie, a chip off the old block, also wants work, but the excitement of actuarial calculations and legal papers is her shtick.    Frank,  in an authorial gesture of utter contempt for the supposedly likeable character,  makes a despicable decision too.   

             Here the scandal was about sex;  but 129 ever more sexually liberated years later,  generations are still at odds over hypocrisies , and a sweatshop global society selegantly veils  its abuse of the weakest.   Those who live on the profits need the same discomfort, and  shouting, and have decisions to make about who to shout at loudest.  The final moments were refreshing.

To Saturday in Bath then Richmond, Chichester 

https://www.ents24.com/uk/tour-dates/mrs-warrens-profession

Rating 4.

PURE PLEASURE AT HER MAJESTY’S 

      It seemed worth the money – these were not press tickets – to check out how good old Fanty is getting on after 36 years at Her Majesty’s Theatre down the Haymarket.  It’s survived the Covid interruption,  worked its way through a phantasmagorical procession of Phantoms and Christines since Crawford and Brightman,   and has had to  pare its orchestra down from 27 to 14.    How would it feel?    I remember seeing Lloyd-Webber’s CATS onstage in its last London days,  and a terrible disappointing sense of its weariness. Hard to pin down why – with good talent, decent audience and the classic Gillian Lynne choreography – but it felt stale, hopeless.  I feared the same.  A decline into exhausted tourist-fodder.

    But no: Phantom is fresh as a daisy, its gorgeously over-the-top staging as hilarious and glorious as ever:   a gilt proscenium-within-the-proscenium complete with boxes,  a nostalgic opening at the auction with the great chandelier draped in sacking,  then a flashing reveal of a grand cod-opera rehearsal complete with stern ballet mistress and roll-on elephant onto which the heroic tenor struggles to climb.  Honour to the new resident and associate directors: the cast give the impression of  having a ball,  and possibly even enjoying the extreme costumes (I gasp at the thought of the wardrobe team).   And our latest Phantom is Killian Donnelly, back for a second go, or  third,  given that he has been Raoul as well.  

      He’s splendid: wide gorgeous vocal range, swashbuckling authority,   just the chap you need to punt you through a subterranean lake studded with giant candelabras, and pop up dramatically, whether from a giant winged horse’s head on the opera roof or looming on a tomb.   Lucy St Louis is a properly charming Christine, too  (last saw her as Diana Ross).  The ensemble are as tight and delighted and delightful as on any first night, and as a sober ROH regular I had forgotten the pleasure of the three bursts of grand-opera pastiche.  This time that enjoyment was  inflated further afterwards by the amusement of getting online to read reading anguished real-opera-buff commentaries on what their bete- noir Lloyd-Webber got, in their opinion, wrong.   

       I also realized, in the first song “think of me”,  exactly where Victoria Wood must have got the inspiration for the rehearsal scene in her Bessie Bunter The Musical sketch…the one with the line about Anthony Eden..

       It was a family outing, the show chosen because some 25 years ago, over 5 years into Phantom’s epic run, I took a posse of  11-year-old girls to it for (we think) my daughter’s birthday.  I had encountered the show first when it opened and Cameron Mackintosh came on MIDWEEK (radio 4).  I  remember saying to him, as a humble non-affluent punter,   “Gosh I wish I was a theatre-angel, an investor”. Not just because it was obviously going to run, but because it would be fun to be involved in something so gloriously preposterous, so drenched in the romance of bygone theatre and opera and staged with éclat,  sentiment, and jokes about the business.  And a collapsing chandelier… O, how many times has that thing been up and down, skimming the heads of row F?  Honour to three and a half decades of technical crews

      Anyway, the affection years ago was increased because when my rabble of little girls shot out chattering at the end via the merchandise stall, the cry that went up was not for T shirts or badges but an amazed, delighted “Look, Mum, you can buy the SCORE!”   Suddenly all those music lesson fees felt worth it.  Which is yet another reason I won’t hear a word against dear Fanty, not now, not ever.  The faint tooting of “Angel of Music” on many recorders afterwards is alone a justification. God bless ALW, I say.

DRUNKENNESS AND THE DARK

    The  studio at Hampstead has been on a roll recently, with  intelligent and emotionally honest plays : FOLK, RAVENSCOURT, THE ANIMAL KINGDOM et al.  It nurtures new playwrights, gives actors scope and challenge, invites NHS and emergency workers in for a tenner.  It  did not deserve to be  stripped of its public funding just because someone  thought Hampstead sounded, politically, a good place to kick.   

         This is another sharp, pared-down studio production:  in 95 minutes Joe White delivers a necessarily painful two-hander about youthful  alcoholism and the disaster of  colliding addictions.  We watch two  lovers, over an uncertain wavering timeline,  who can neither control nor remember their lives and real selves: we get flashes, snapshots of their meeting, coupling, celebrating, fighting, betraying.    

         It is cleverly constructed in its time-shifting,  rather like Nick Payne’s  CONSTELLATIONS (though don’t listen to me about that:  I was one of the few who didn’t like its showy cleverness).   But here the blackouts and timeshifts  and crossed-confused memories of reality are put in the service of stark illustration of  what addiction to getting off your face does to people.     There are two brilliant, fiercely identified performances : Alex Austin is the more vulnerable geeky one, an art student;  Rebecca Humphries, posher, entitled, swishing around in a strappy dress and afghan coat falling off one shoulder,  is sexy and selfish and horribly lethal.  This is apparent from the first moment when she drags him away for a drink  as an AA meeting is about to start,  because he’s only just thrown up his last load in a passing bin so – “It’s medicine, one in twenty people die, going cold turkey” .   She also plans to have sex with him, because that is what she does when she is, as she says several times,  her true self. She is the classic drunk who believes she was born three drinks under par and will only be real when she’s had them. 

     Their relationship  is an object-lesson in  AA’s advice that you shouldn’t strike up relationships in recovery,  and for most of the first hour Humphries’ gives a fabulously dislikeable evocation of the poisonous self-absorption and cruelty of the career drunk.   Which I have to say I found a bit of a problem: there’s a fine line between brilliantly loathsome and unwatchable.  Though some critics (male) found a rom-com meet-cute sweetness in it at times,  and White creates a sketchy back-story excuse about a famous father who wasn’t there for her ,and  being sent to boarding school at six.  He also gives her some beguiling verbal flights of fancy . That helped a bit. 

            Austin as the man is less toxic,  eagerer,  scruffily hopeless and beguiled by her,  but ironically he is the one who does at some point in the switchback timeline  get sober.   Unless that is another fantasy.   He too is the one with some understanding of love as a gift of appreciation rather than a shag-happy snatching of fun:  his line about how you “carry” with you people you have loved is at the core of the play,  and underlines its sorrowful message  that carrying a fellow-addict is hard, perhaps impossible.

         “I might love you, or maybe I’m just drunk” she observes once; and another startling moment in their courtship comes when,  as they raid a church for communion-wine the man says  “you know we’re just drinking buddies? I’m going to forget you”.   But later he accuses her of having said that to him.   Brains are damaged. 

      Hard, clever, truthful.  And sometimes funny: there was laughing around me at times (Austin is physically good in clowning, dancing moments, and Humphries deft in the fantasy speeches).  But  it was the younger audience who were laughing, recognizing.   Not the parent generation .

Box office Hampsteadtheatre.com.  To 10 December

THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT BEING TOO TRADITIONAL ABOUT IT

This cheerfully exuberant rendering of Oscar Wilde’s witty rom-com  is also a sort of political act. In the foyer a gorgeous selection of photographs from the Black Chronicles exhibition shows elegantly posed black and Asian Britons of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Onstage,  director Denzel Westley-Sanderson (whose last credit was for Steven Kazuma’s “Another Fucking play about Race”) has assembled a cast appropriately Black,  and promises a vibrant retelling of a tale about ” dysfunctional families, class, gender and sexuality” .  

       Fear not.  He’s having us on, a bit, and is as wild about Wilde as any director.  The cast are resplendent in all the right  bustles and tailcoats – plus  in Algernons case  a silky lounging gown and in Jack’s the most ridiculous Victorian mourning-hat ever. On the wall of Algernon’s rooms the gilt frames sing with bright African art: he’s just finishing one as it begins. Later ,down in Cecily’s drawing room the family portraits echo the exhibition outside.   Hell, people of colour were here too,  in the culture, so  why not the literature?  They were: remember how in  Vanity Fair there is not only the loyal black servingman but the heiress Miss Swartz: friend of Emmy at finishing-school and the nicest soul in the book.  So it is fun set today’s generation, so much more breezily visible,   to rollick through The Importance, and do it loud and proud and broad and devoid of traditional period primness.

           First thing to say is that Mr Westley-Sanderson’s direction pretty much worked: got roars and shrieks of proper laughter in Kingston, indicating that a lot of people hadn’t known the play’s jokes or had forgotten them. Old stagers might slightly regret the way the fine-clipped Wildean epigrams move past too quickly,  and are often shouted,  and yes, I did wish  Lady Bracknell – Daniel Jacob from Ru Paul etc – was less of a noisy Panto Dame.   Some Bracknell jokes work  better when she has an underlying  dignity based more on confident status than glaring drag-club bullying.  Others might find Cecily and Gwendolen a bit wildly shouty too –  Cecily is played as a full-on hoyden and Gwendolen a caricature of gloriously orgasmic bossiness.  Yes, I do mean orgasmic.  Her talk of “vibrations” at the name Ernest is well used.    But they’re funny. Just not quite in the delicate sarcastic way we’re used to.  

        And the chaps are perfect in anyone’s terms, and Wilde would have loved them.  Abiola Owokonira is one to watch, lithe and sharply funny and judging the lines perfectly on his first professional job as the elegant Algernon,  while Justice Ritchie is a good foil (and wrestling partner at times) as the more earnest Jack.  Oh, and it’s cucumber martinis, not sandwiches, and there’s  real bread and butter for Jack to abuse. 

           The programme’s appropriately earnest line about “class, gender and sexuality” made me half-expect a blokey Cecily in a Corbyn hat ,and possibly  an inserted lecture on the human right  to self-identify as Ernest, but no. In the event the only adaptation is that Canon Chasuble is a padded-out Anita Reynolds,  to provide a sapphic  frisson with Joanne Henry’s Miss Prism.  Unless you count an earlier frisson between Algernon and Lane the butler (Valentine Hanson, even foxier).  Both pairs  fun with that.    And the denouement is fantastic,  Jack ransacking an attic overhead with deafening crashes and making the lights flicker as they all stand frozen in panic,  finally to produce a very nicely sourced leather handbag and a deafening cry of “Mother!”. 

       Altogether, it’s a hoot. A lark.  Especially the gag with Cecily and the spade.  

Box office rosetheatre.org.  To 12 November.   

Rating four