Monthly Archives: June 2023

COME ON MY SONS…

    At the end of the first half of this exhilarating play, England is through to the World Cup quarter-finals in Russia after several bracing straight wins and  an agonizing penalty shoot-out.  Which – hurrah, off to the bar! – has defied recent history by giving Gareth Southgate’s team victory and a place in the final.  Penalties indeed lie at the heart of the England football story, and especially that of the quiet, gentle manager whose understated epic journey from 2016 to now has caught the imagination of our best political playwright, James Graham.

           For football is not happy with the concept of a draw, a tie:  if exhausting, brilliant acrobatic atheticism for 90 minutes plus extra-time can’t produce a win,  selected players face the terrifyingly exposing ordeal of penalty kicks.  Which often – as in that final in Russia – lead to blame falling unfairly on the lad who misses that one lonely, vital goal. Southgate knew all about that crushing blame:  at the start of the play , in the great blank circle of light with a crescent faint historic film behind,  we see a flashback ,watched by the older man in his waistcoat on the touchline of memory, of the moment in the 1996 World Cup semifinal when he was that man.  Germany won and he was mocked ;   Just as in the European final in 2020 even more vicious hatred, this time racist,  met Rashford, Sancho and Saka.   It is one of the oddest, hardest ordeals in sport,  a thing to dread.    The heart of Graham’s play, therefore, is about character: about admitting doubt and fear, and  defeating them , whether you win or not.   There were no hugs for him in 1996, so when he was the boss he stood alongside his men before and after, fatherly. 

           He was brought in, twenty years after his own penalty moment and after years of coaching the under-21s,  as a supposedly temporary manager by the bluff Gregs Clarke and Dyke – (John Hodgkinson and Tony Turner).   It was a low moment.  “we lost to bloody Iceland – a volcanic rock!”  There is a nicely harsh satirical sense here of low expectations , and quick sharp impersonations of Graham Taylor,  Sven-Goran Erikson etc .  Rupert Goold’s  direction and the movement  choreography are glorious: a fast, agile ensemble, a swirling charivari of fans and players  out of which individuals begin to stand out sharply as the story develops. It gives the onlooker the necessary, and breathtaking,  sense both of a lumbering random nation of fans and the fine-tuned trained agility of players.

      Southgate – Joseph Fiennes an almost uncanny lookalike – does things which alarm Clarke and the rest as he deselects Wayne Rooney, assembles the youngest team yet,  and begins to change the culture – laddish-to-loutish  – by bringing  a female team psychologist,  a serene Gina McKee as Pippa Grange,  and saying he wants to get them “smiling again” .   Over the Southgate years even football outsiders like me started to notice that a quiet gentlemanly figure in a waistcoat was doing something different, creating a civilized , even old-fashioned atmosphere and ambition laced with modern emotional intelligence.    As performed here it feels like a benevolent miracle.  One glorious moment has the manager telling the lads that they must use their upstairs, their heads, as much as their brilliant legs.  Dele Ali objects “I don’t have an upstairs” and is told yes, he does, even if it is a bit ‘spacious’ up there.  Gradually, they are asked to do unspeakably unfootballerish things:  talk to one another, admit doubt and fear,  lark innocently with pool toys. 

        It is a lovely portrait of team-building and confidence.  They win, we rejoice, they lose, we watch to see if they will crumble, how Southgate will manage.    HIstory rolls along: Brexit,  Covid and the aftermath,  anger of black players leading to the defiant taking of the knee,  hasty moments of May, Boris, Truss. And underlying it all a growing sense of why – as laid out in Southgate’s real open letter, Dear England – the effort and skill of a national team matters in many backyards across the nation which one player says “sound like shit places, are shit places, but they’re OUR shit places”.    So it matters as Southgate says  “how we conduct ourselves”. Part of it is learning how to lose,  and still dance.    

      It’s a riveting evening:  and what resonates into the wider national spirit is that while they have to forget decades of defeat and declining morale  it is a broader, longer tradition that can hold them steady: Southgate gives each the number that they hold in a 150-year procession of England players and as each takes a penalty, he speaks his name and number as he shoots. The past does not have to be a burden.   Even when we end in Qatar with…you know what.  And Gunnar Cauthery reads the obit,  characteristically smug overhead,   as Gary Lineker  

       I saw this  few days early, before going on holiday,  and have thought fondly of the Southgate spirit during these days of petulant Boris-Dorries-Moggery.  Sometimes you just need to be a bit proud to be English…

Nationaltheatre.org.  To 11 August

Rating four.

1926 AND ALL THAT, ON THE AIR

Fresh from doing cartwheels in the Bake Off musical up the road, Haydn Gwynne is now a strangely convincing Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin , in pinstripe.  Oh, and a studio singer doing Abide with Me. Which is definitely something to celebrate.  Actually, I wanted to love everything about this new history-play by Jack Thorne about the General Strike of 1926 and the battle between the government and the fledgling BBC,  if only because I rather revere the idealistic Reithian early history of radio.    It starts well, and Laura Hopkins’ multilayer design is glorious: behind gauze at first we glimpse and hear the clanging racket of mines, heavy industry and railways,  which suddenly  ceases  to become a song of union solidarity. And as the light rises we see that the set is made also of vintage radios, hanging microphones , musical instruments and speakers.   Radio is a marvellous fresh invention around which bustle the keen new staff of the four-year-old “British Broadcasting Company” . There are snatches of singers and comedians (Beatrice Lillie doing “don’t be cruel to a vegeta-buel, remember a lettuce has a heart”, etc), an onstage musician, sound-effects people snapping celery and crunching gravel, bits of drama,  HG Wells deploying his famously squeaky voice: all the romance of early radio.  A few anachronisms jar for us aficionadi:  Sandy Powell’s sailor act didn’t start till the 1930’s,  and mentioning “Jennings” on Children’s Hour is bizarre when the character wasn’t invented for another 20 years. But it’s fun. 

        At the head of it all was John Reith.  Stephen Campbell Moore gives him to us not as the towering martinet of legend but a man still young,  starting to understand how immense is this tool put into his inexperienced hands: a way of democratically offering information, education and entertainment.    But this is the first of nine days of General Strike:  Britain coming to a halt,  democracy stretched to breaking point as strikebreaking volunteers man trains and buses. There are imminent riots and street battles and real dark poverty .  No newspapers can come out, so suddenly the little BBC – previously confined to one bulletin at 7 pm so as not to upset the press barons – is a vital source of all-day information and communication.  Churchill has set up the “British Gazette” as a substitute newspaper whose  message is entirely the  government’s, and wants Reith to deliver that message too. Not the point of view of the strikers in their real poverty and desperation. Or, crucially, a speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury advocating goodwill and a policy change by the stubbornly dug-in government. 

       It is, as Thorne has said, a fascinating turning-point in history: if broadcasting had been quashed or commercialized on the American model rather than becoming a licensed independent Corporation, there would be no BBC now.   Gwynne as the level-headed PM Baldwin is no disappointment, and nor is Adrian Scarborough’s puckish, grumpy Winston Churchill as his Chancellor:  a man impatient for the top office, aware of his Gallipoli debacle and the fact that his rigorous gold-standard policy of the year before was partly responsible for the strikes. He is determined to  use “an instrument like the BBC to the best possible effect”. The scenes between politicians  and Reith in the first half though do drag a bit;  it gets better when the big issue arises of whether the Archbishop  can go on air.   Reith agonizes: his lieutenant Eckersley (Shubham Saraf) wants him to stand firm.   The government wants the BBC, not them, to be seen as refusing the broadcast.   It’s a crux: and handled strongly.  

        But Thorne is unable,  given a sacred-monster like Reith,  to stick to a play of ideas and political conflict without  soupy emotional overdrive. This is provided,  in lavish bucketfuls,  by the great man’s bisexual yearnings and confusions, both in personal flashbacks and during the 1926 decision.  We know from his own writings about his  profound romantic love for Charlie Bowser, a youthful friend;  also  that Charlie (a pretty, lively Luke Newberry) was the original suitor of Muriel Reith at the same time Reith proposed ,  some years before. We know that back then, years before the events of the play,  Reith was distressed by the idea of their boyish friendship being hampered by marriage.  But there is no record of repeated homosexual kissing, or of a fight over Muriel ending in a full  mouth-to-mouth snog .  And honestly,  I do not quite believe it.  Maybe a degree of extended sexual/emotional imagination by the author is fair enough, wanting to show not the immense, granitic, righteous Reith his colleagues remember in memoirs but a 21c idea of the man’s inner life.  But somehow I just don’t buy the picture of this son of the manse, in the middle of a professional crux,   lying sobbing curled up on the floor while his employee (Kitty Archer, every inch the brisk BBC pioneer woman) brings him tea and  a ginger  biscuit and offers to lie down beside him.  

Donmarwarehouse.com. To 7 October

Rating three.

QUIET DESPERATION, NOISY GUNSHOTS

“Everybody tell the story

Everybody sing the song,

Every now and then a country

Goes a little wrong…”

        Hard for it not to feel topical,  Sondheim’s extraordinary romp through the thirteen assassination attempts on American presidents since 1865 – four of them successful, some baffling, one downright comic.  Polly Findlay’s big-scale spectacular production ( orchestra a powerful 13 strong, ). is set not in the normal funfair but (with  rallying from costumed creatures beforehand) in and round the Oval Office where our host, unsurprisingly,  has a more than passing resemblance to Donald Trump.  It is topical too for hitting at the American culture of letting guns freely fall into the hands of the crazy or vicious –  “move a little finger and change the world”.  And more globally,  topical because so many of the perpetrators indulged a deep  sense of entitled, privileged victimhood:   unfairness either real or imagined,  an outraged belief that  “Everybody’s gotta right to be happy”.

        So here’s a resentful Confederate, a failed lawyer with diplomatic ambitions, a bottle-factory worker,  the lovelorn and the angry and  starstruck and disappointed,  all confusedly thinking that they must make a mark and headline the news.   The particular primacy of US Presidents made it especially obvious.  

         The structure of Assassins keeps it intriguing: we begin with John Wilkes Booth and the death of Lincoln, but the thirteen shooters are pretty much with us all the time, so that the culminating moment – the one we all remember – sees a sad suicidal  Lee Harvey Oswald encouraged not only by Booth and his first successors,  but by figures from his future : Sam Byck who shot at Nixon,  Gerald Ford’s two incompetent wannabe killers, Hinckley who landed a bullet in Reagan.  

 It’s 105 minutes and beautifully paced: just when the racket and the rantings might oppress you comes some  quiet passage.  One is the shamingly comic interaction between Carly Mercedes Dyer, tuneful and wild as Fromme the Manson follower,  and Amy Booth-Steel, grumpily frumpy as Sara Jane Moore who took her kid along to her attempt on GErald Ford (who pops up from the orchestra pit, chivalrously, to hand her back her lost bullet).   Sometimes it is mesmerically sad, mad and troubling:  Jack Shalloo picks up the real pathos of Hinkley’s lovelorn fan of Jodie Foster,  and above all Nick Holder is Samuel Byck, in a grimy Father Christmas outfit. He delivers with rare brilliance the yearningly hopeless depressive monologue the man sent on tapes to Leonard Bernstein.  You can  hear a pin drop.   Harry Hepple is a nicely camp Guiteau, delivering a fairly tasteful tap-dancing gallows moment;   Danny Mac as Wilkes Booth has an unnerving authority throughout. 

       It is one of the biggest stagings of Assassins we have seen in recent years, and some may flinch (you have to be absolutely up for a lot of sudden gunshots and barrels pointed right at you).  But it is more than worth it for the spectacle, the comedy, the compassion and the outrage as we contemplate  “the hopeless, the lost ones”.   I hope it transfers…

Box office cft.org.uk. To 24 June. 

Rating five (after sleeping on it..it stayed with me that much..)

WELCOME BACK TO PUNXATAWNEY

       Seven years after its premiere at the Old Vic earned a  flurry of Oliviers, by way of a pandemic and a disappointingly short Broadway run ,   here it is again.  Hurrah! Tim Minchin – as clever as Sondheim and as melodious as Gershwin – put music and lyrics to a reworked book by Danny Rubin from the famous film, and turned an amusing, original but fairly forgettable movie into something still funny but  bigger. It is noisy, joyful,  arresting and wise: a modern myth with all the absurdity and grandeur of any classic of redemption. 

       I had forgotten how much I loved Matthew Warchus’ extravagant production, a daft silly grin spreading over my face from the warm opening ballad to spring and first glimpse of the tiny lit houses (Rob Howells’  set is adorable,  the town literally wrapped around the action).   It feeds, ironically,  off the beloved old movie image of middle America’s  Main Street,  as Punxtawney is  scorned at first by the hero singing “nothing more depressing than smalltown USA”.   In a fabulous outbreak of Groundhog Festival capering the town ensemble is a hero itself: a community of the unselfconscious ordinary.  

       Again we have  the irresistible Andy Karl as Phil the big-city TV weatherman doomed to mend his arrogant ways by having to relive the same February 2nd every day afresh in a place he despises.  He has a lively and beguiling new co-star in Tanisha Spring as Rita the put-upon producer, and  Eve Norris stops the show with Minchin’s melancholy song about  the doom of “being Nancy.. a perky breasted one night stand” in careless men’s stories.  There’s another piercing solo moment as the darker wisdom of the show develops in the second half.   Andrew Langtree is Ned the widowed insurance-salesman  , expressing the small-man heroism of unremarked endurance in a tiny Death of a Salesman moment:  “On and on you stumble, towards the fading sun…rest assured the night will come”

           Minchin, the man who in Matilda gave Dahl the warmth he never had,  has done it again with this transmutation,  joyful in its razzmatazz speed and racket (ever wilder as poor Phil realizes he is trapped) but unashamedly touching both the despair and the hope which make us human.  The music explodes the clever story into a big shining cloud of philosophical and moral questioning: laced with killer jokes, wickedly clever lyrics and joyfully witty choreography. 

        Nick Karl at its centre is a miracle of driving energy, his physical comedy irresistible from the scornful athleticism of his beginnings to his manic runs for escape or diversion (the drunk truck scene is a masterpiece of staging and lighting).  And there are small things too: A  kind of sigh rose from somewhere close to me in the enraptured audience at his morning line “There will be mornings when you’re utterly defeated by your laces’.  

         I noticed no suicide trigger warnings, though there may have been some – and honour to the Old Vic for not playing that tune –  and the handling of his ‘resurrections’ fromthat  despair are fleetingly elegant.But there is both serious feeling in the nightmare sequences which develop ,  and hilarity for our mental-health obsessed age in the sequence of Phil seeking  help (reiki, soup, isotopes, enemas.…”I dunno what I’m sayin, but this guy’s desperate and he’s payin’”.)  More fun still, may I say as a once-young woman,   in the sliding-doors repetition of his failed attempts at seducing Rita.   

      But, as I said seven years ago,  even with all that individual glory it is the big leaping, revolving, singing human stew of townsfolk who turn your heart over: officials, workers, bandsmen, carnival revellers, old ladies, slobs, shmucks. The ensemble sing big joyful anthems to spring and hope and groundhogs; all the innocent human smalltownery which Phil is punished by the wise gods of myth for despising.   Not many shows involve both a giant groundhog playing the drums and  tearful resolution to live better.  Minchin magic. 

oldvictheatre.com  to 19 August.    rating  5

  Tickets few but precious and it says  “Check Groundhog Day performances 09–12 Jun for last-minute tickets released for some of the best seats in the house. Tickets available from £13”

A TIME CAPSULE OF OPEN MARRIAGE

  I am pleased to find out about Miles Malleson:  an Edwardian student joker,  WW1 conscientious objector, Bolshevist, founder of Left drama groups and the actor who played the poetic hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets who instists on the silken rope for a Duke.   He was also a playwright, and we owe this revival – its first London production apparently – to the New York director Jonathan Bank of Mint Theater, over here and he says enjoying a British cast.  

       It is a fascinating time capsule of 1930 psychology as applied to  a particular social set attempting “open marriage”,  and serendipitously perfect to follow this theatre’s Jules et Jim , which was about the confusions of sexual freedom and open marriages, 30 years later in the  1960’s.   Malleson’s  central couple are Anne and Stephen – Guy Lewis as the nervy, restless husband,  first seen ranting about his father the Canon – “Padre”” – who was also his school housemaster,  and who he regards as bigoted by stiff Victorian Christianity.   Amusingly, when the Padre drops in he uses almost the same words about stubbornness as he son does about him.    Anne (Laura Doddington)  is soothing and approving of their philosophy of freedom,  encouraging Stephen in his sudden fancy for their friend, the glamorous widowed Diana.  She herself has had a past affair, with Stephen’s approval,  with the onlooking, amused, slightly concerned Dr Alan (Dominic Marsh). 

          In the flawlessly genteel set, pottery and tea-table and settee,  these are the inter-war freethinkers:   Malleson’s people,  inspired by the Woolfish Bloomsbury Group.  These were  people for whom it was almost de rigeur to let Bertrand Russell have a go at one’s wife (the great moral philosopher cuckolded a willing Malleson around the same time he was making TS Eliot so miserable). They are even running a freethinking school together.  So his insider eye catches the well-meaning earnestness of these people,  sympathetically set against the stiff  – though equally well-meaning  – principles of the cricket-mad Padre. For whom interest in sex is only going to lead  to “illness, lunacy and wrecked lives”. 

        But importantly,  he dives right into the awkward natural human problem total liberation throws up.   Anne finds she is jealous: Doddington perfectly evokes the battle between baffled instinct and lofty freethinking principles (and in the final scene,  surprises us).  Stephen is a big baby,  less mature than her, thinking it’s all fine and especially good for the book he is supposed to be writing.  But he’s miserable when he finds she minds,  and even more miserable when he gets a taste of his own medicine and nobly, tearfully has to fight a primitive instinct to “go all pistols and horsewhips and call you a wanton”.   The metaphor  which the pair find late on is a nice one:  they are forever balancing on a narrow ridge between featherbedded moral cosiness and life-seizing, inspiring adventure.   

     There’s ironic humour in that, but also a real sympathy in the portrait of people genuinely groping around for a better way to live, love and mate in a post-Victorian,age rattled and shocked by WW1.     When Anne feels humiliated at her husband being known to stray,  he asks with real bafflement ‘why should you care about what that kind of people think?” . There is even space given to the old Padre’s idea that it’s worth hanging on to fidelity for the sake of something “spiritual’ in a marriage bond.   Interestingly, it made me reflect on how, despite those freethinking 30s and the even more freethinking 60s,   nothing’s changed:  in modern  soap-opera culture there is uproar and disapproval about “cheating” even if it’s just a drunken kiss.  

     It’s perfectly performed,  not least by Dominic Marsh as the often silent, thoughtful Dr Alan, who sees through the whole delusion of sacred-infidelity.  My only unwelcome distraction was a small first-scene costume one:  why, with a daytime tea-table on set, Anne informal  and Stephen in shirtsleeves and braces,  is Diana wearing in a full-on spangly bare-backed cocktail frock?   

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk   to 1 July    Well worth it.  Rating 4 

BIG SHOW, BIG HEART, SMALL SPACE

       This, I urgently must tell you, is rather wonderful:    an example of the way that  sometimes a big show in a small theatre can be a revelation.   It was eight years ago that the West end fell  back in love with the Laurents-Styne-Sondheim ‘fable’ about the childhood of Gypsy Rose Lee and her pushy mother, when Jonathan Kent’s glorious, big, splashy Chichester production came to the Savoy.  It reminded us how brilliantly it  mixes the comedy of pastiching the vaudeville-to-burlesque 1930’s with  a poignant eye for neediness, maternal delusion and betrayal. 

      We were also reacquainted with Sondheim’s genius lyrics (nobody else could start a big number with “Have an egg roll, Mister Goldstone”  or let a stripper in a centurion’s uniform warn colleagues to get a gimmick:   ‘bump it with a trumpet’ don’t ‘sacrifice your sacro working in the back row’.   But there is an immediate and  even more moving quality about seeing Joseph Pitcher’s production close up  under the low beams of the Mill’s little theatre with a cast of fourteen – three of them actor-musicians with instruments forming half the band –  plus two children.  The tots casting rotates, of course, but I am sure that on any night you always will absolutely be given the right shudder by Baby June’s first scene.   Hilariously high kicks and gleaming baby-teeth below the Shirley Temple curls set your own teeth correctly on edge before, elegantly in mid-number,  the  infant shrill-monster turns into the adult performer Marina Tavolieri. And her poor sister Louise, in boy’s costume,  becomes Evelyn Hoskins.  

         Hoskins is in herself a revelation, slouching and shy, forced onto the stage by a  domineering mother whose crazed ambition is to make her little sister June a star and Louise a useful support act and seamstress.   Hoskins’ voice is lovely, in the wistful  “Little Lamb” particularly,  and when she finally morphs into the burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee she is deft , credible and moving as her initial unwillingness changes to  addiction,  and at last to defiance of Mama Rose.            

          Rebecca Thornhill as the matriarchal monster is also a revelation (she has played it in Manchester,  and since then I’ve seen her as an unforgettable Mrs Burke in the Girl from the North Country tour) .   Honey-voiced even when shouting,  striding with nervous competence (especially in the audition scene as she tries to adjust it on the hoof, dodging round the dancers)  she creates her own Rose,  different from the strident Ethel-Merman style in a good way, a modern way.    My companion, veteran of posh London school-gates,  said she recognized the classic ambitiously demanding  everyMum.  But Thornhill also conveys Rose’s  personal neediness and vulnerability, even before the huge final number, and interacts  beautifully with Daniel Crowder as the likeable agent-lover  Herbie.

         There’s character and humanity in it all the way and oh, the choreography!  Joseph Pitcher, associates Alex Christian and Rachel Moran and the versatility of  the ever-mobile actor-musicians Tim MAxwell Clarke,Seren SAndham-Davies and Susannah van den Berg,  creates a masterpiece  of small-stage movement.  There’s tap and splits, romps and robotic exactness, tableau-building and contrasts,  vaudeville whoopee and burlesque coyness.  For two and three-quarter hours the  whole show flows, grips and enchants. It also knows when to stop in its tracks, as in the frozen moment when Baby June has defected and tMama turns on the harmless Louise with a terrifying  “I made her, and I can make YOU!””  People gasped. 

         So by the time Van den Berg knocks out her Mazeppa centurion number,  with Natalie Winsor turning on her flashing blue tits and crotch as Electra,  even though the denouement is to come you already feel spoilt. As  if you have been given more than you possibly deserved.    And your ticket will have cost less than the West End, with  a hearty dinner thrown in.  Honour to the Mill.

millatsonning.com     to 15 July

rating five