Monthly Archives: August 2023

 HAVING THE BEST OF TIMES IN THE PARK

    Even in familiar classics you can never predict which anthem will set you dabbing your eye.    You might expect it at Albin’s anguished ‘I am what I am”.  Or,  since it’s the only big musical-theatre hymn to dutiful parenthood, might empathize in a midlife way with  “Look over There”.   But in this time of social and planetary dread, my own moment of helpless snivelling was to the credit of Carl Mullanney,  in his mumsy mother-of-the-bride suit,   swinging into “The Best of Times is now!” .   He draws in,  one by one,  Georges and his embarrassed son,  the homophobically hostile in-laws , all the diners and waiters in sight  and (well under their breaths) more than a few audience members in Regent’s Park.  All for a moment can think yes,  this is it:   “not some forgotten yesterday, not a future far away…”.  Just now right here in the park, hearts singing together, under the trees in the summer dusk.

       Magic, it was.  We know what to expect from Harvey Fierstein’s defiant 1984 musical (launched, remember, at the start of the AIDS  terror) and from Jerry Herman’s songs.    We’ll get  a celebration of drag : old-style and joyful,  drily self-aware without the  aggression of current culture-war.   We’ll get  an affirmation of the gay family  in midlife domesticity beneath the glitter . We expect the gently louche humour,  a sitcom moment with the visiting bigots, and a great deal of tits-and-tinsel, thrilling frills,  high kicks and high camp and the odd drop-dead gag  (“there comes a time in every Salome’s life when she should no longer be dropping the last veil”).  

          Tim Sheader’s swansong as leader of the Open Air Theatre gives us all that, and is glorious.  Mullanney is perfect  from the first glimpse of him scrubbing a casserole in housewifely dudgeon and a glittering negligee,  through the ‘girlish excitement and manly restraint” of the mascara moment,  to utter ownership of the cabaret stage,  and onward into anxious sacrificial motherliness and resolution.   He and Billy Carter’s  genuinely touching Georges hold the emotional line of the play perfectly, painfully real in their devotion (Carter’s Song on the Sand is beautiful).  

          There  is real power in that emotional line, as well as the central and  excellent joke when,  in the beautifully executed scene with young Jean-Paul,  Georges and Alban have to  come to terms with their son’s straightness (“What have we raised, an animal?”). It’s a perfect mirror image of the way straight society had to accept homosexual partnerships.   And sly about the differences of presentation:  as Georges says sadly before the Dindons arrive, “My mannerisms can translate into tasteful affections.  Yours are..suspicious”.   Mullanney’s gallant attempts to look and move like an alpha “Uncle Al” are glorious.  But so is the moment when, having mastered living in the prison of hunched slobbish masculinity and followed instructions to act manly, having nobly agreed to “dispense with everything that brings you personal joy”,    Albin cannot bear the impersonation,  and flees.  

         But just sit back, banish culture battles, and enjoy.   Musically it is lovely,  and theatrically particularly masterful:   flowing,  holding or moving the mood, the scene-changes elegantly achieved by the Cagelles with countless small witty physical asides.  The choreography is fabulous, just the right side of silly;   the costumes magnificently absurd (o, those spotted-and-striped tights on the peacock dancers) . And if you get a row-end seat you may find an occasional  pastel-tulle volcano brush past your very ears, most  thrillingly.    I also love the offstage collapse of those dancers, sprawling laddishly, ouch-ing their poor feet,  abandoning their borrowed she-grace and  not pretending anything.  A particular sort of guys,   but guys all the same.   Irresistible.

         Everyone’s giving it five, and everyone in the company, and Sheader himself,  utterly  deserves it. The musical mouse below is for the Cagelles.  

openairtheatre.com    extended to   23 September

DOPAMINE , DRUGS, DANGER, DOCTORS

  This intriguing play by Lucy Prebble  aired in 2012 in the intimate Cottesloe space , with Billie Piper and Jonjo o’Neill as paid subjects in an antidepressant drug trial. They are falling in love  – or are they?  Are their elevated moods and dopamine surge just the effects of psychopharmacology,  a neural trick played on the “three pounds of jelly” that is the human brain and hence the whole of human identity?   

        Great topic to come back to,  after a decade in which national obsession with mental health and emotional hygiene became increasingly heightened  even before the lockdowns sent us all a bit nuts.  It’s just the play to meet our boom in media-friendy selfdiagnosis,  mental-misery memoirs and GPs badgered to prescribe for everything from anxiety to grief.  It’s a sharp moment when Prebble’s grumpier woman psychiatrist challenges her boss with the possibility that we will look back at the whole concept of happiness as ‘chemical balance’  like a modern version of the medieval “four humours”.

        It’s packing them in, and rightly:  Pebble’s text emerges   revived and sharpened in a big space ,  directed by Jamie Lloyd with  high tech non-naturalism (no props, even when mentioned).  On a transverse lighted runway of a stage,  book-ended by the two psychiatrists,  the young people are questioned, instructed and set going with the first doses.  Papa Essiedu’s Tristan is cheeky, street-smart, funny (irresistible, indeed) . Taylor Russell – in a remarkable stage debut – is Connie, at first a rather irritating know-it-all psychology PhD student.  There’s a lovely moment when, all for medicalisation of mood and personality,  she assumes nobody believes in God any more , and discovers to her social horror that Tristan sort of does.  

       Roaming the stage around one another, teasing, comparing notes on the dreams the drug gives them,  briefly escaping against the rules to lark in an asylum courtyard,  they move towards a mutual adoring fascination . It culminates in wonderful, laughing, childlike  romping.  I remember the earlier production as far more obviously sexy: this is infinitely more endearing,  silly gymnastics in their hospital tracksuits as she loosens her prim middle-class academic persona to meet Essiedu’s wild happy laughing joy. 

          No spoilers,  it’s a curiously intense, hypnotic 100-minutes  (Jon Clark’s LED set has much  to do with that). but the plot has several sharp twists, because trials have a placebo element and psychiatrists too can lie.  Dr Toby (a soft voiced rather sinister Kobna Holdbrook-Smith)  and Dr Lorna have their own journey through truth and emotion to complete:   Michele Austin’s Lorna is the warmer and more drily funny figure but also – it is wrenchingly done – a victim of both dangerously depressive episodes, and of love.    

nationaltheatre.org.uk. to  7 October

FORTY YEARS ON, FROM TWO PERSPECTIVES

    This is a properly interesting RSC commission: a history play about the Falklands invasion by Argentina in 1982 and the British task force which ended it.  Accidentally topical too, three weeks after the EU had to apologize for sycophantically calling them   “Malvinas” in a Brussels trade deal announcement.   And  thrilling if you lived through that time as an adult journalist, felt the nation’s temperature and knew  some of the protagonists.  The play’s author Brad Birch comes at it new, born six years later , with an uncle in the task force,  and appreciating the event’s uniqueness via excellent anecdotal research and a brief visit to the islands. He does two things, one successfully and the other not.  The best of it – most of the gripping 2 hrs 50 – is an intimate portrait of the tiny island community in Port Stanley and moorland beyond.  The unsuccessful bits are attempts to evoke, in cartoonish simplicity, a portentous historic moment:   a post-imperial, disaffected, strikebound ’80s Britain  trying under a tough new leader ( Thatcher)  to forge an identity in military victory.  The show’s publicity says Falklanders were “living in someone else’s metaphor”.  

         But this virtuous decolonializing urge runs  up against the fact that the  Falklanders were English-speaking, ancestrally settled (no local indigenes on that bleak outcrop),  and  absolutely did not want to fall under the tyrannical General Galtieri.   Birch presents them  beautifully: a handful of islanders (composites, of course) introduce themselves and their ways, lively and likeable, getting on with old-fashioned  lives, three generations grumbling at one another, welcoming John the new teacher, getting along fine with Argentinian Gabriel from the marine science centre, running the store and local government and sheep and chickens,  excited by occasional imports of luxuries like cherries, and in the case of Sally the teenager, desperate to get off to college in England. They blow off steam in  “two-nighter” hooleys, and orcas and penguins are everyday sights.  They are rural people a bit out of their time, but not rednecks.   It prompts parallels like the brilliant COME FROM AWAY, about Newfoundlanders differently shocked by history in the 9/11 plane diversions.    

        .It’s a great ensemble:    Joanne Howarth especially wonderful as old Mrs Hargreaves (“gossip, done right, is a form of exercise”) and so is Eduardo Arcelus as poor Argentinian  Gabriel, at first wholly at ease and later miserable in his alienation, disliking the invasion but knowing that back home there is whipped-up national pride.  They begin in relative insouciance with streaks of rumbling concern  – a school trip cancelled on HMS Endurance because it has to sort out the “scrap metal” invasion of South Georgia (I remember that, naval friends were suddenly alert..).  Then comes   a call to the ‘defence force’ to get into their uncomfortable uniforms (a wife incredulous:  ‘how’s he gonna fire a gun, he misses the toilet seat!”).  From the roof a ring of assault rifles descends,  pointed at them for the next two hours.  A new flag flies,  there are orders to stay indoors, carry an  ID card, drive on the right.   A gradual uneasy fraying of tempers  is beautifully done;  news of the Task Force is met not only with relief but with a sense of fragility: hardy people humbled by the need to be saved from thousands of miles away , almost an insult to their self-reliance.  

      The land invasion and shelling of Port Stanley are done with effective restraint by director Aaron Parsons and Aldo Vazquez’ spare design ( little lit model houses and blocks moved around by the cast) .  Evoked with sympathy is the grim decline of the  young Argentinian conscripts, some dying of exposure and hunger;  the local commandant Sebastian (Alvaro Flores)  gives orders with dwindling confidence.  Confrontations are rare but  telling:  fury  at the invading militia’s dogs bringing diseases,  and one descendant of 200  Falkland years baldly pointing out to Sebastian that her family  “go back here  before Argentina was a country!” 

       In all this the ensemble is subtle:  less so when intermittently made to play UK voices in a modern-millennial-left simplification  of  ’80s Britain as a declining “near-ungovernable” jingo state  led by a fanatical Thatcher who  ” needs to pick a fight and win it”.   That it was Galtieri who picked it  is hardly acknowledged: to create a chorus of wicked-stupid-arrogantTories on the gallery above was obviously tempting given our current lot,  but spoils  the real delicacy of Birch’s delineation of  islanders,  invaders and saviours.    There is little acknowledgement of the risk (we might well have lost, the military knew it, and defence cuts had sold our only aircraft-carrier, Invincible, Australia and had to claw it hastily back).  And  while the GOTCHA! STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA!  Sun headlines were indeed horrible, anyone with Royal Navy connections or losses will cringe at seeing the task-force depicted by comically jingo men and a Thatchery woman all in white-topped naval officers’ hats. Forget the Sun: Portsmouth and Plymouth did not set out in a triumphal spirit, more in apprehensive dutifulness. Many men died. 

         Never mind: a new generation must assert its virtue,  the Thatcher legend is powerfully theatrical, and the few cringes are outweighed by Birch’s thoughtful contemplation of the islanders and the way that local and family identity is not the same as  aggressive nationalism.  

     PS.    if you’ve visited the more prosperous Falklands lately, watching the dismay as Mary’s town store burns down makes it oddly pleasing to have seen that 41 years on,  there’s a Waitrose..

Rsc.org.uk.  To 16 September

Rating four.

SORROW AND SUSPICION

    This one had me from the first few minutes: another Jermyn find.   A new play, whose young actor- writer Abigail Hood and director Kevin Tomlinson both perform in it, might rouse suspicions of indulgence or amateurism.  Not a bit of it.:  it is a grownup and serious piece about sorrow and suspicion, friendship and loss and hope in a time of sexual obsession and dread.    It repeatedly grabs you by the throat, pulling  small significant coups  to overwhelms you, as theatre can , with the “sweet sad music of humanity”. 

      As it opens, a rather moth-eaten middle-aged man is greeting his blonde schoolgirl daughter back from detention. In the first minute we realize she is no such thing: it is him in charge of the script. She is Leah, an escort he has hired to fulfil  a needed fantasy.  But not with sex:  he just wants his real daughter, vanished over six months ago: needs to  “be in Sophie’s world again”,  pretend for a few minutes by making her talk about maths classes and telly and a boy she might innocently be dating. In eases his constant, sleepless, terrified pain. 

     A sad resource, edging towards sick. Or is it?  Moments later Tom is with his wife Gill, who is drinking too much and heading for church, which are her two resources.   The sorrow in that scene hangs thick, palpable in two remarkable performances: both Jasper Jacob and Rebecca Crankshaw are faded with grief, fragile, holding on to the girl’s stuffed toy,  but the paths they struggle along are diverging.    Wonderful, spare writing.  Both are teachers: before long the tentacles of suspicion will curl around him for being kind to a girl pupil, and  that  will drive Gill to suspicions of her own. “I won’t be that woman who turned a blind eye”.   It is always the father police look at first.  And it will not help that the poor fool has, in his desperation,  resorted to that sexless but unsettling escort incident. 

    In a other part of the forest we keep seeing Leah (played by Hood herself with endearing simplicity)  with her boyfriend Mark.  She is back from another no-contact fantasy escort gig, being grilled about how far she let the client go: a mere touch on the thigh, but Mark is angry and truly terrifying. Tomlinson unleashes something familiar and dreadful.   Being angry, possessive and controlling, with a nasty kink about domination and vicarious excitement, he sends his girl out for money,  and then punishes her  for imagined infidelity.   That is horrible, all the more for not being onstage explicit.  

        Leah encounters Tom again, returning a wallet he dropped in the park,   and a more innocently fatherly bond begins to form.  Again it is believable, understated, carefully written.  Maybe he is rash and she naive,  but the dialogue enables us to accept the nature of their friendship in a way that – obviously – society and social media absolutely do not.   

      The tale develops:  not every turn in it is entirely believable,  yet it takes us with it.   The parallels are elegant: one young girl, vanished but cherished, is grieved for, hoped for;  another is abased and abused by a thug – “You’re a nothing person, your Mum and Dad fucked off, you’re fuckable, that’s all”.   And here are two men: one decent and gentle and broken by loss and terror for his child,  and another a brute who owns and shames his girl for power.   It raises odd truths about men, women, and young girls, and the strange beauty of the way that sometimes deep grief and misfortune create in the sufferer a passionate desire to find someone weaker to help.  

    Frivolous it may  be to say so –   but it’s a mark of how carefully this barely staged play is produced –  both men’s hair is absolutely perfectly created for the part.  Jasper Jacob as Tom permits his hair to suggest  both teacherly respectability and months of neglectful sorrow;  Tomlinson as Mark has adopted that particularly oafish side-shaved brutal crop which sends any woman scuttling to the better-lit side of the road and makes fathers dread their daughters bringing that boy home.  Brilliant.  

Jermynstreettheatre.co.uk     To 19 aug. 

A CORONATION YEAR ROMP ANYWAY

         A neighbour in the stalls confided that she sees a lot of West End theatre but avoids “the more highbrow sort”.  She was in the right place, absolutely.  So after you’ve spent West End money on this show, don’t come crying to me  because you expected a nuanced history play,  a window into the feelings and influences of human beings in past centuries.  You should have gone to Semmelweis, or the RSC,  or  Hamilton, for that.  

      On the other hand,  if you hunger for a top Al Murray gig, with the artist-formerly-known-as-the-pub-landlord camping it up with ridiculous vowels while wrapped in many metres of extreme brocade and a curly poodle-wig down to his nipples , and harassing the front rows with “do not come to court again dressed as a swineherd!” , then this is your bag.   No risk of it demanding heavy brow work.

       Likewise, if Carrie Hope Fletcher has been missing from your life since Bad Cinderella closed, be assured that she is an excellently wench-ish Lady of the Bedchamber with some big numbers to sing, doubling as the frustrated daughter of the Crown Jewels’ steward. Oh, and Mel Giedroyc is the wife of the said steward (who is Al Murray again).  She is entertainingly obsessed with setting up Tower of London merchandise made of dough, and doubles as a random French noblewoman.  No idea why, but she does light up the stage.  And at one point climb off it.

    The story is based on real events of the 1660’s,  when after the Restoration of the monarchy in the dandyish, theatreloving person of Charles II,   a maverick Irish rebel called Colonel Blood stole the Crown Jewels, was caught, and ended up sufficiently forgiven to be a spy on other potential Irish rebels . (Royal fears of an enemy within were not unreasonable: Cromwell’s head was still on a pike,  and as Robert Harris’ new novel ACT OF OBLIVION tells us,  regicides were still plotting in the colonies).   If I am making it sound thrilling, either with the story or in well deserved praise for the comedians trapped in it,  it is only for the sake of my non-brow neighbour and friends.  In all honesty, even as a keen fan of The Windsors onstage  I found much of it – mostly the chat between the conspirators – woefully flat. The script is actually a criminal waste of Aidan McArdle as Colonel Blood and Neil Morrissey as Perrot.  Though Morrissey has a doubling cameo as a brocaded tourist, which he does with elegance.   

       It’s billed as a heist comedy, but Simon Nye’s  play is not tensely enough constructed  enough for that;  nor is it selfconsciously arch enough for Blackadder fans. It’s as broad and delighted with low jokes as Horrible Histories, though without as much education and more sexual references. .  But be assured, Al Murray has still got it.  I am not on a newspaper with rules now, so I offer two entirely separate mouseratings below…

Box office. Crownjewelsplay.com. To 16 sept

Rating          As a play.   

But as a comedy gig it works

THREE GENERATIONS UNDER SMARTPHONE RULE 

Bit late to this one, and it had mixed reviews – largely I suspect because Michael Wynne’s play, a two hour four-hander all-woman slice of life in Birkenhead doesn’t offer aa  strong satisfying  conclusion or denouement. But that can be quite refreshing:  just life,  reflected with little polemic intention other than a murmur at one point that the world is uncertain (always was) and that there is absurdity in  living life through your phone with its pings and. Notifications and Facebookery and Xtwitter opinions. Not to mention all the swipe- right data opportunities for all generations and sexual possibilities.  

      But it’s  truthful,   and its funny in moments without straining to be so, and the women are real. Right from the opening moment as we find the three generations awaiting a chippy tea , three glued to phones exchanging joke memes and  the sudden irrelevant awareness of a distant car crash in Germany.  That they would be better employed in more actual conversation about their actual lives and feelings is apparent from the first , since Megyn, the teenage daughter of the exasperated Carmel (Michelle Butterly)  has left school with no qualifications and speaks rarely, preferring to text. Jodie McNee’s Sarah,  fetcher of the chips and pop, is a teacher, beguiled by her idealistic new head, and kindly suggesting the morose kid  comes as a work experience. No dice. No reply. Widowed old  Doreen (Sue Jenkins, understated comic brilliance clearly her forte) discusses her eBay online buy and sell business a bit and can’t finish her fish. Of all of them she is the most contented, and even dashes round to the kitchen to conduct a surprisingly flirtatious giggle with someone on the phone. Unnoticed  by her phone staring relatives. Sarah extols her new chap, a dentist hence very clever (“well,  not doctor-clever…” is one of the treasurable nuggets of real-lifery in the script). 

    No sooner are the chips eaten than abruptly Megyn dashes upstairs, holes up in Grandma’s bedroom and silently refuses to leave. Doreen, benign as ever, says she will take the settee, since the daughters’ own bedrooms are full of her online sales junk. When we rejoin the family two weeks or so later ,after a brief blackout with oddly eerie music, Megyn is still up there, food left out for her by the placid grandmother,  with whom she communicates only by text. 

         At this point I bristled: there is a tediously overdone dramatic trope, from Mike Leigh to Florian Zeller’s only turkey The Son,  and among their imitators.  In this now- hackneyed setup,  after writing some sprightly and reasonably credible family bickering dynamic the playwright sends the  teenager to his/her room. And you sit there thinking “yup, it’s either a gunshot or a scream of ghastly discovery..”. And so it befalls,  thus labelling the oeuvre a serious examination of teenage suicidality, which it generally isn’t. 

     But my suspicions  were lulled by the selfaware  line uttered by an irritable adult when  dragging sounds are heard overhead, that she’s readying the chair ” for the noose”.   Wynne signals he is not not falling for a cheap shock.  

        What he gives us instead is an unravelling of clues, subtle and credible. Carmel returns furious because Megyn’s social media is full of a fantasy of needy praise for her missing father, who clearly walked out ages ago, not giving a damn. Sarah is in shock from being conned and dumped  by her boyfriend.  (Tremendous line of outrage – “Is he even a Dentist?”).  Old Doreen  shocks her two adult daughters by preparing, tweezers and lippie and all, to go out on a date with a man off the internet called Barry.  They think this  disrespectful to their late Dad , whereon Mum offers the truth bomb that it wasn’t all that great,   he being fussily, coercive controlling, not letting her work and refusing to allow fish and chips or coleslaw in the house.  Oh, and  the reason she loves her eBay pursuits pinging good news into her phone  is at last having money and a purpose of her own.  They’re stunned. Then Megyn appears downstairs and…no spoilers.  To be fair, nothing that dramatic happens. But there are deeply touching moments here , and human absurdities. I don’t quite get the need for such eerie music but otherwise enjoyed my two hours there.  And came out thinking a bit about the small secrets of uncelebrated female lives and conversations,  and how unfortunate it is when too much of it is stolen by online vapidities.

Box office royalcourttheatre.com.      .    To. 19 august

Rating three.

NEVER MIND THE MOUNTAIN, OVER THE ROAD CHICHESTER ROCKS 

    Now here’s a perfect gig for us 1970’s leftovers, though I suspect today’s young rockers  will also love the shiny leather pants off it.  For it has everything for today:   female friendship defying patriarchy, protesters with placards on the streets decrying poverty and monarchy,  and a condemnation of male profiteering on the talent and looks of young women.  Oh, and some storming rock numbers old and new,  by Howard Schuman and Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay.  Dominic Cooke and musical supervisor Nigel Lilley rather brilliantly do not allow them to stop the story dead by running them too long (the main fault, remember,  of Standing at the Sky’s Edge).  Sometimes just a verse or an introduction or reprise hits us as the tale of three women gallops on. We want more every time, and then get it as the story evolves.   

       The play is Chloe Moss’ spinoff from the famous 1970s TV series ROCK FOLLIES, an event for which people hurried back from work in order to share several series’-worth of the saga.  It tracked the fortunes of three young women forming a fictional rock group  – as friends, not manufactured-assembled products like the Spice Girls. It was a time when despite the US  Supremes and Ronettes, British girls were expected to be backing acts for male rock gods.  It mesmerized people: those who were around then were positively a-quiver with excitement on spotting the flaming locks of one of the originals, Rula Lenska,  and next to her the series’ creator, the real Schuman.  

        We meet our three first as they stomp out of a rude director’s tired chorus line in spangled pink boxer shorts, and resolve to do their own thing.  There’s Zizi Strallen’s “Q”,  who lives with a parasitic no-hope bodybuilder and does ooh-Mr-Milkman porn films, albeit with  lot of “beige Lycra between us”. There’s  Angela Marie Hurst’s Dee who lives in a very ’70s commune in a squat, all menstruation-haikus and chakras,  and Carly Bawden’s Anna.  She is posher than them, went to Cambridge, writes songs and has a patronizing husband who  reckons she’s “more Susan Hampshire than Suzi Quattro”.   

    And off they go:  all great movers and glorious voices ( Hurst is truly remarkable),  falling in with sweet gay Harry (Samuel Barnett, a delight) as their musical director, and falling out with their blokes. Though Stephenson Ardern-Sodje’s Spike does stick by Dee, after one lapse when another lass unblocks his chakras.  The trio get gigs, exhaust themselves on lowgrade tours, audition for record labels and get discovered and bullied into fame by the agent Kitty (Tamsin Carroll magnificently scary in a  70s Purdey wig).  She’s a sister at heart, but there’s also Fred Haig as nasty pink-suited David ,  who undermines them by shoehorning in Philippa Stefani as his girlfriend Roxy, while Dee struggles with her conscience over replacing harmonies,  Q tries to mediate their weary  rows (Strallen is fabulously likeable) and Anna hits the booze and coke.   

       It’s not particularly deep, but a fairytale rock epic from a past time which remains absolutely one for our own, and has  some wonderful set-pieces.  Gasp at Sebastian Torkia as a sort of satanic Jethro Tull wannabe who makes them be a backing group in cat costumes emerging from dustbins.  Enjoy their  defiance of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee: this  may baffle the new generation, but we old salts remember all too well the punkish counterculture fury of that time which makes many of today’s genteel whining issues feel a bit wet (I make no judgement, but simply record the thought that went through my head at that particular moment).  There are some lovely thoughtful, lyrical songs as well as rock stormers, and the ensemble and cast change costume in seconds to leap gloriously round the three women’s  tale : as stylists, audiences, demonstrators, all flowing with energetic joyful speed.   Serious  fun. 

Box office cft.org.uk to 26 August

Rating 4.