Monthly Archives: December 2023

JAPAN MEETS THE NOISY WEST

       This is exquisite, and not only in Paul Farnsworth’s dreamy set and Ayako Maeda’s costumes, from peasant fishermen to Shogun magnificence.  The Menier, always good at capturing the bracing intelligence of Stephen Sondheim’s work, jointly with Umeida Arts Theatre offers us a rare production of this atmospheric, serious and elegant meditation on the opening up of Japan. The Americans arrived in  1853, over two centuries after an earlier  European incursion was decisively ended.  The story (book by John Weidman). expresses what happened when brash new America – and then the rest – crashed unwelcome into a  “floating empire, untouched kingdom”. its earth so sacred to its gods that the grudgingly built ‘treaty house” on an island was immediately burnt and the land disinfected after the first ship delivered its fraternal greetings from President Fillmore.  It was a “pacific” approach (see what they did there) for trade rather than a colonial grab, but its effect was shocking to an old world,, hierarchical and  bound by custom.  “Out there are wars..here we grow rice, paint screens, more beautiful than true” explains Jon Chew’s lively ‘reciter’ of the tale, as delicately choreographed movement evokes a countryside and a reverent bowing to custom and authority.  

    It is a place where when American ships are spotted,  the stiff Shogun (Saori Oda) can brusquely appoint a peaceable Samurai Kayama (Takuro Ohno) to be chief of police,  and leave his peaceful fishing by the riverside to “order them” to go away (the river is gently evoked by light, flowing between the tiers in the elegant trans staging).  Kayama recruits a former fisherman who had been picked up at sea and spent time in  Massachusetts , and gets some of the way after the lad assures him that to deal,with Americans “you just shout louder”… But of course the foreign barbarians come back. And others follow.   There is lovely character and pathos in both of the hapless envoys, quiet comedy in the central colonialist absurdity , and for a while high comedy in the subsequent arrival of the other powers, all wearing their ships round their waists and appropriate hats and tunes  (the British Victorian is given pure G and S,  good  to hear in among the more meditative Sondheim evocation of old Japan  with bell, flute and drum).   Dutch, comedy French and Russians vie for space.  Only the local Madam, fan-drilling her girls (Saori Oda again, a witty performer) welcomes them, though as foreigners pour in the exoticism of three- piece suits, bower hats and pocket watches beguiles some.  Notably Manjiro (Joaquin Pedro Valdes) .  But in a truly alarming, short and delicate number “Pretty Lady”  three British sailors approach a pale very young girl (Joy Tan) in a garden:  first admiring, then coaxing, then oafish and finally threatening until avenging samurai swords cut it, and them, off.  There were a lot of such murders, understandably.  And samurai resented the ‘disrespect’ of the invaders.   This is no  Madama Butterfly.  

      Balanced to perfection, light and dark and mournful and fascinated, Matthew White’s direction moves us on to the end and a  land divided, saddened, but inspired; the Emperor at last decides the only way is for Japan to become as modern, well-armed and rich as these invaders. Which it has.  The whole thing is gorgeous, evocative, thoughtfully serious amid the absurdity.  It runs straight for 105 minutes, every one precious .  

Menierchocolatefactory.com. To 24 feb

Rating five.

BRAINS AND HOW TO MAKE THEM USEFUL

     Clearly it is the mission of Hampstead Downstairs to broaden our education,  no bad ambition.  Not long ago I learned a lot about the life and emotional feelings of octopi down there, and now Jonathan Spector’s strange engrossing three-player brainstorm takes us into a philosphy lecturer’s world of analysing the different ways knowledge hits the human awareness and how we process it. There are three kinds of heuristic response ( philosophese for common sense and experience), plus confirmation-bias , overconfidence bias (Liztrussitis) and anchoring and experience biases, as widely found in newspaper columns, hem-hem, say no more.   

        Our lean and bright-eyed lecturer hero Lukesh  (Esh Alladi is , as ever, enchantingly watchable) demonstrates this stuff with pictures and a peach (later it turns out he does conjuring too, as all good psychological philosophers should).  But something is amiss. His wife Natalya (Natalie Klamar) has suddenly announced she’s off, not his fault, just off: and the next he knows of her is a call from a train across Russia.   He suspects himself of hitting on the wrong heuristic by thinking she had got over a car crash she was in earlier (lots of flashback’n forward) but in fact she is trying to find out whether her grandmother, or possibly great-grandmother, was murdered by Stalin even though her best friend was his daughter Svetlana, who could have (might have) pleaded for her.  Oh, and meanwhile poor Lukesh is having to supervise the PhD of a student from a white-supremacist family  – : Oscar Adams playing nicely hapless and selfrighteous, forever explaining to the patient Indian academic how he’s not a Nazi really and it’s nothing personal, and how it’ all in HG Wells’ The Time Machine because we need Morlocks and Elois, or possibly not) .

     Well, no further spoilers,  because you’ll enjoy the ride, remember this man Spector gave us the fabulous Eureka Day at the Old Vic;  and Chelsea Walker directs with commendable speed and use of the tech.   But both Klamar and Adams move between characters, undisguised at a breakneck pace,   she often taking us through Svetlana’s sudden defection in 1967.  Footage of Stalin coheres sometimes with the white-supremacist Dad, neatly making a point about similarity and the general absurdity of tidy extremes in dealing with untidy humanity.  And Esh Alladi remains always beguiling, whether his mode of each moment is tutorial, irritated,  or maritally baffled. 

       And Natalya’s vodka scene with Adams (temporarily an aged and venal Soviet archivist) is a proper treat.  You won’t regret it.  More fun than the Stoppard upstairs, actually. 

Box office hampsteadtheatre.com. to 27 January

A BLAST FROM THE PAST TO INSPIRE OR IRRITATE

      By the interval I was mournfully unconvinced that there was any point at all in reviving Tom Stoppard’s 17-year-old play , about Communist ideals and philosophical betrayals in Cambridge and Prague 1968-1990 –   all reflected through a young male obsession with rock and roll albums and the Velvet Underground.  The  background story  is worth telling:  the Prague Spring, Charter 77,  the rolling-in of Soviet tanks, dissident heroism , the ascent to  Presidency of an actual playwright, Vaclav Havel.  It is close to Stoppard’s own heritage and deeply felt.  I wanted to see it, having held a candle in the treet as a student in 1969 in tribute to Jan Palach’s suicide and since made the liberal’s pilgrimage to Wenceslas Square.  

       But Lord, despite Nina Raine’s deft direction and some wonderful performances, the first half both drags and – if you were around in the late 60s – irritates.  Those clever yet compliant and usable women, still in awe of the men!   That  shaggy Syd Barrett figure fascinating them with his panpipes!  Those self-important philosophical debates about whether the mind is just the mechanism of the brain ,  or the vital conflict of international Marxism versus Czech nationalist socialism, and whether to side with Havel or Milan Kundera!  It felt prehistoric, irrelevant, self indulgent,  frankly dull.  

         Never mind. What keeps you there and gets you back after the interval are the characters, all perfectly shown:  Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as earnest Jan is patronized by Nathaniel Parker’s peppery self-righteous Communist believer Max:  Jan goes back to Czechoslovakia to be part of the dissident movement, which is heroic,  while Max remains in uxorious academic comfort with his dying classicist wife – Nancy Carroll, as ever, magnificent as Eleanor, sharply aware of the student Lenka who eyes up her husband.   Jan in Prague suffers for his patriotic belief that socialism can have a human face,  Max remains unwilling to admit the crushing cruelties of the Soviet Union and thinks only of  ‘the workers’ (who are absolutely absent from the play, and I doubt Max personally even helps the women with the washing up).  

       There are  as usual some wonderful Stoppardian insights into the psychology of our settled old Land (it’s still the 70s, remember) like the observation that while for comfortable people like us, freedom just means “leave me alone” while for the masses it means “give me a chance!”.  Meanwhile the post-Christian angst about whether there’s a soul tangles up with the middle-common-room politics of socialism,  while the Pan-like figure of a Syd Barrett  (Brenock O”Connor, rather brilliant) scampers around bashing a guitar because once people give up on religion they need a bit of mystery to spice life up.  There is little sense of the reality of human sufferings of the time,   beyond the secret police smashing up all Jan’s albums. Except the Beach Boys.

          But after the interval, praise God, it comes good and moves faster.  Years have rolled on, Nancy Carroll is now playing the dead Eleanor’s hippyish daughter, divorced from a ghastly journalist and still dreaming about the Pan-figure “a beautiful boy, as old as music, half goat…we were all beautiful then”.  Jan, older and sadder after prison, twelve years enforced labour and his country’s climb into freedom, is back on a visit to the old parlour-Stalinist Max. Who still has “nothing to defend” and remains dismissive of the women he uses (“take a woman to bed, don’t take a woman to bed, it’s the same”).  

           Jan  has a revelation for him: they were, to some extent, in the police-state years each betraying the other.   In an amusingly hideous Cambridge-academic way the characters  – plus the awful journalist’s even more awful columnist wife –  are all to meet for a fish pie meal .  Lenka the student has grown up and stayed safe in Cambridge to read Sappho and sneer about our British “democracy of obedience and apology”.  But the story is completed,   as the century creeps to its end,  with a kind of acceptance of the laziness of the twin  ‘60s simplifications – make-love-not-war and workers-of-the-world-unite .  There are a few sharp lines about modern journalism, which are true.  One moving love story is completed, and so are two rather less inspiring ones.  

  So not sorry I went. But I’d take an axe to some of the first-half dialogue.  

box office hampsteadtheatre.com. to 27 Jan

rating 3

  CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SPIRIT 

    Can this really be the first Jewish pantomime?  Oy vay, surely this culture with its musical genius,  ironic jokes , family warmth,   tall tales and matriarchal instinct for decorative hyperbole has long been crying out to be amalgamated into the great Panto tradition.  The fit is uncannily perfect, so  mazeltov to JW3 for commissioning this,  and putting it before hordes of riotously thrilled schoolchildren and us admiring adults and gentiles.  It  is also nice to be in a show where everyone knows absolutely and reliably how to clap and stamp in time, and  catches jokes on the wing, at speed.

        The tale is a folktale mashup:   three generations of women – ambitious  young scentist Red,  her mother and her grandmother – have to foil the Big Bad Pig  (a powerful Josh Glanc, looking uncannily like Giles Coren in a bad mood).  He has betrayed his Jewish family by working in the City and taking control of all the power supply in the Edge of Ware to threaten the lights of Chanukah.   He captures Jewish grandmothers,  because they are the strongest known form of power. His sidekick is the neurotic , ashmatic and useless Wolf, who he contemptuously calls Fluffy, and who is still traumatized from falling down the chimney of the brick house into the pigs’ hot soup in another tale.   The answer to the power problem is, of course,  wind:  thus enabling a massive running fart joke to thread through the show.   This we cheered to the echo. We’re British. It’s panto.  

    It’s low-budget (the cast whipping the curtains aside between scenes with brio) but not short on glitter and movement.   It  throws into its soup every proper seasonal ingredient:   a villain to boo, journeys through a magical wood,  gags and ghosts requiring cries of BEHIND YOU , a water-pistol assault on the audience,   a rude song  and even  a bailiff.  There’s a bit of conjuring with eight Martini bottles by Mother Hoodman in her Dreidl-shaped frock (she later appears as a giant pickle) and while she is technically  the Dame, she’s  played by Debbie Chazen  –  what Jewish matriarch would hand over such a role to a mere man?  And besides, her own mother is a very acrobatic male, Tiago Fonseca:  wizened old Bubbah appears at one point climbing over the railings behind the audience  and somersaulting down the stairs past us ,  floral pants akimbo; she also ties up the big bad wolf in bunting made of clothesline knickers. Double-dameing, excellent.    

           Nick Cassembaum’s script is remarkably good:  there are a few standard  panto jokes but the best are puns on Jewish words,  most of which I got with assistance from my good friend Shirley:   the most outrageous being the complaint from the North London  cab-driving rat ,   fed up by competition from the  “Cat Uber” – Katubah! – cars.  There was also a gale of adult laughter ,  drowning even the school parties,  when the bailiff claims to be the Pig’s official deputy.  Mother Hoodman snorts “I”m so bored of deputies!” .  And every minute or so there is something slyly funny, as when  Red solicitously asks the disguised Wolf  “are you comfortable?”  to which he shrugs “I make a living..”   And when in the final moments an unlikely  romance springs with the reformed pig there’s a cry of “marrying out  – of species?”   To which the response is “Oy, you  have to let these things go…”. 

           The high-spirited self-mockery is warming. .  It is also is musically  sophisticated,  under Josh Middleton (Accordion, keys, trumpet, percussion, fiddle and guitar, always with a klezmerish edge) with terrific songs, never overlong, and tunes which cannily mine into  Jewish musical genius  by pinching tunes  all the way from Rodgers, Gershwin,  Berlin, Sondheim,  and  Lionel Hart to Amy Winehouse (her “ No No No !” becomes the villain’s anthem ). And while I had to look up the fact that the writer of “We don’t talk anymore”  Charles Puth had a Jewish mother, it is glorious to have that song given to Mother Hoodman about her longstanding “broigus” with her her own mother, Bubbah.  

          Such fine Jewish family jokes are  woven all through it, all the way to the big soup session, but so is Jewish genius.  Every panto has a character who demands that the audience should shout a magic phrase to help them in any crisis.   Here ,  it’s the science-minded heroine Little Red (Gemma Barnett) and she demands that whenever she says “My mind’s gone blank!”the audience should shout THINK! THINK! THINK!.  Of course: it’s what Einstein would want. So  s a clever show, warm and fine and funny ,   and I couldn’t have done better after grinching out of doing any other 2023 pantomimes after being spoilt by McKellen’s last year.   Chanukah sameach  to JW3, Mr Cassenbaum and Mr Middleton and their doughty cast.  Take your inner child , and any outer ones you can lay hands on.   Well worth the gelt!

Box office jw3.org.uk.  to 7 Jan

ANOTHER KIND OF INQUIRY 

  I suppose we will have to wait a few years for the dust to settle and James Graham to write a nuanced play about the Boris-Covid-Tory-pocalypse. Meanwhile this 80-minute storm of fury from Armando Ianucci will do very nicely. It’s directed by Patrick Marber at a furious pace, from the first descent from heaven of a tousled blond wig onto the head of Paul Chahidi as “Orbis Rex”,   to the striking finale of the entire group violently fighting one another  in the trapdoor entrance of Hell itself.    They are all clad in black, with the odd pantaloon , and tights (though the character of “Richer Sooner” obviously has too-short trousers) there’s a stovepipe hat or two, and they often speak in rhyming couplets.  

        Eng-Lit graduates will have expected that cod-17c costuming, from the retro framing announcement;   “Being a Scornful Account of the Activities of Mr Boris Johnson and Others during the Pandemic and its Aftermath” .   Ianucci’s inspiration is  largely Milton, but also nods to Dryden’s satirical Absalom and Achitophel,  a mock-heroic epic about Charles II,  Whigs, the Popish Plot etc, and chucks in a few Shakespeare lines as well.    The author has talked of the Greek heroics, but this feels more like our own 17-18c takes on the form:  it’s a good model, and once the great monchrome backdrop descends with its Grim Reaper skeleton,  the mood reflects the age of furious, debunking, coffee-house rationalism.  With a lot of necessary laughs.

        There’s a sparky virtuoso cast of five doing it all:  Faye Castelow, Debra Gillett, Natasha Jayetileke and Amalia Vitale,  gathere around Chahidi’s magnificent rendering of “Orbis” (get the anagram?).  He  declares “I am a god, descended onto this withering globe..”   and after a bit of dithering over two scrolls for Remain and Leave,   rises to power amid his confreres, veiled by joke names but all too familiar:   Gove curly and earnest,  Jaytileke as a glorious tap-dancing Rishi,   Cummings memorably described as  “a day-long shout on legs” wearing boxing kit.   Dido Harding in a jockey cap,  put unsupervised in charger of Test and Trace after fouling up at TalkTalk,  protests only mildly that “ability to control a flood of data’ is hardly her forte.   Above all there’s Matt Hemlock,  a creature conjured from a swamp:  “poisonous ooze incarnate, and born to take the blame!”.   The green slithering is something to behold, as he assembles his “circle of friends” to sell him dodgy PPE, and finds love and a grope in a flashbulb moment.  

      There’s much bravura in occasional chainmail from Orbis himself: when two calm white-coated scientists tell him about the vaccine and he ceases dithering for a moment to send out an Agincourt of needles like arrows;   there’s Jacob Rhesus-Monkey explaining how the cake was wholly responsible for attacking his lord and master, and a vast pink frocked “TrustLess” who becomes a pink collapsing jelly at the question “have you costed anything?’. 

          You get the idea.  More than fun, a necessary rage, elegant mock-heroics.  Some wonderful lines from our hero, as when the police turn up accompanied by a hooded, grating, weirdly ghostly Sue Gray  – “I am Orbis Rex, and wht I feel is more solid than facts or law”.  But Ianucci does give us  a few more sombre moments,  the poetry – doggerel but effective – suddenly rising to express the enormity of lockdown losses,  “Mocking the dead with rivers of wine…cries of pain and anger stilled…goodbyes by broadband”.   Before the final chaotic  mass-Breughelian-descent into a brawling  hell, Orbis realizes he was never a god at all,  and that his classical deities were all in his own head.  That’s an odd unexpected bit of psychology, stilling the rage for a moment.  But then there’s the hellscape, all that is left after the brawl a sad dishevelled blond wig. And finally the cast infomring us that never mind, there were  heroes all the time:  it was us, the people,  who worked and loved and cared and kept the rules while “dunces “ danced above.  

        Fair enough.   Quicker and  less pompous than the real Inquiry. And I gather that  Ianucci donated proceeds from the book that spawned it to Mental Health UK. 

sohotheatre.com. to 6 Jan

DICKENS IN RIOTOUS RHYME AND BAGPIPES – ON TOUR

     Wouldn’t be right to get through December without Dickens, would it?   But I have seen the magnificent Old Vic adaptation by Jack Thorne three times now, and don’t seem to find Simon Callow on rumbling through the story anywhere.   So I crept through sodden lanes in a gale to  drop in on Chris Green and Sophie Matthews,  whose leftie Good King Wenceslas  I so approved a year or two back  (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-need-more-than-good-king-wenceslases-c07knplnb). 

          For it’s a big tour, and , accompanied by Jude Rees and her melodiously gorgeous oboe,  they propose to sing the whole thing at us:  Scrooge, Marley, back-story, triple-ghosting and a Fezziwig party so festive it involved two separate bagpipe attacks from Sophie.  All in 55 spirited minutes after the break. 

        But the fact that it’s a lovely show is not least because a first  half beforehand offers Christmas songs which Dickens himself would have known:  with musette pipes, melodion, flute, oboe, guitar and keyboard we hear among other songs a wassail, a fascinatingly different Holly and Ivy,  the Sans Day Carol, a coyly naughty music-hall song about mistletoe behaviour, and best of all a glorious “Time to Remember the Poor” ,  from the 17c collector Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, author of Onward Christian Soldiers. 

          They all sing,  Green plays guitar, keyboard and a big fat thing apparently called a mandocello;  Matthews has her flute and various bagpipes,  and Jude Rees the oboe (least duck-squeaky oboe I have ever heard, very beautiful)  and  picks up an occasional melodeon.   

        The Dickens tale itself is neatly rendered into rhyme, using  carol tunes (a lot of God Rest Ye Merry, since that is the one the boy sang outside Scrooge’s house) and familiar folktunes, with lovely woodwind interludes for the poor old miser’s sleep, and a mournful oboe carrying his nostalgic memories of a more innocent youth.  It is nicely paced on the whole – good musical shocks,  transitions to match the story – and Green uses all the eloquebt Dickens words which fit best into the fast-moving narrative.   A simple thing, and rather lovely.  Even if you think you’re not a folkie…  Happy Christmas all.   

On tour till 23/ 12 – LINK BELOW

Christmas

(Leicester tonight, then Wallasey, Sale, IoW, Southampton and others till 23/ 12 )