Monthly Archives: January 2024

UNFROGGETTABLE MOMENTS IN THE UNDERWORLD

   Aitor Basauri does not need to be framed in a 20ft-high giant puppet frog in order to be funny,  but blissful overkill is part of the pleasure of Spymonkey.  Making the said frog  try to swallow Toby Park while he plays “All of me” on the bass clarinet is likewise a mere grace-note, part of the finale of this curious piece.  Like the sudden appearance, earlier on,   of the Royal and Derngate community chorus tap-dancing , ribbit-ribbit-frog style, in violently greenish-yellow rain cagoules. Which causes  a “psychotic flashback” interlude,  with Park and Basauri huddling in the Spymonkey office negotiating hopefully with  a billionaire Getty backer so they can to resume their post-Covid-post-Brexit greatness by adapting, with Carl Grose,  a 3000-year-old play.        

    For they are and were Spymonkey, the greatest and most floridly nonsensical clown-trained comedy foursome. But in hard real life Stephan Kreiss died suddenly in 2021, and Petra Massey is off “on loan” doing cabaret in Las Vegas.  These losses to a great extent inform the reason they are hurling their vaudevillean selves  (as they did in Oedipussy) at Greek theatre by the father of comedy.  The model is Aristophanes’ play relating the journey of Dionysius and his slave Xanthias, travelling into Hades to bring back the greater dramatist Euripides  (a bit like the stumbling Conservative MPs struggling to revive Boris).  They borrow the cloak of the hero Heracles,  and are waylaid on the great dark lake by the chorus of scornful frogs . 

   The search at one point becomes one for Stephan, their lost friend,  but without morbidity.  Just feels like another part of the self-revealing courage that marks fearless trained clowning .  We can laugh because they can.  The  mood betwen the two is of Toby the leader and Aitor the clever disruptive absurd sidekick: the Spaniard’s great bushy beard and flawless wise-fool expressiveness a foil to Park’s air of attempting commonsense and failing.   

       With them is Jacoba Williams, a bit of a find (not every performer can fit in with Spymonkey so beautifully). She – pretending to be the backer Getty’s ambitious niece – takes the other parts,  several of which are wonderfully constructed monsters: I cannot get over the moment when as a many-headed guardian of Apollo’s cave she loses her temper and bursts several of her balloon heads.  As Heracles, apparently naked in a tight muscle-suit with full dangling equipment and lion headdress,  her scorn for the bumbling wanderers is magnificent, and so is her foiled attempt to deliver a TED talk about the meaning of this whole performance. 

       It is all very meta, and while I have always found Spymonkey’s disciplined larking a delight – selfconscious without being irritating, and painfully physically funny – some may be baffled. But try it for the ride: for the very silly self-operated revolve, the ridiculous costumes by Lucy Bradridge,  the insane hippyish puppet-dance,  Park’s moments of melancholy guitar strumming and Aitor’s tap-dance break.  Enjoy. It’s all they ask. It transfers to the Kiln in london next..

Royalandderngate.co.uk to 3 feb

Kilntheatre.com. From 8 Feb

A DANCE AROUND AUSTEN’S LEGACY

The book is known and loved enough: Jane Austen’s first full novel,  written with satirical youthful wit but long laid aside unpublished. It gleefully shows how a girl’s  daft  gothic romanticism comes up humiliatingly against the real-world evils of class , money and sophistication.  Love triumphs, with a hero unromantic enough to know that muslin frays in the wash. A classic familiar enough to be played with,  billed as as ‘inspired by” and subverted a bit for modern attitudes by Zoe Cooper .  So under director Tessa Walker here is a three-hander lark, with much nifty work with hats and coats, parents and relatives mischievously cross-cast,  and a bittersweet take on happy ever after.  

        Before the lights are down Rebecca Banatval as Catharine bounces on ,all sprigged muslin and bonnet to tell her story , starting with her birth into a painfully ordinary and unromantic Northern vicarage and the moment her play-fighting with brothers ends with a first period and a sinking into romantic novels and resentment at a Georgian woman’s lot.    It is lively, with  fellow-players Sam Newton and AK Golding playing everyone else – Parents, little brother, midwife , then the Allens, all three Tilneys, the venal faux-friend Isabella and the appalling John Thorpe. They switch around with vaudeville nimbleness throughout :only Banatvala  stays herself  as Catherine nearly all the time:  and very beguiling she is in the wannabe heroine’s energetic simplicity and gentle self-mocking delusions.

       As the scene switches to Bath society Newton is brilliant as both Tilney and the hooray-Henry coxcomb Thorpe, with joyful tangling with carriage reins and some truly funny Georgian country-dance conversations:  that particularly  catches  the awkwardness of communication while meeting and separating down lines in a crowded ballroom (“I am not dancing anyone” pants Catherine “I am dancing NEAR many people”).   All fun,  though  I may have breached a sigh of resignation as, with the first half ending, the erotic adoration switches to being between Isabella  and Catherine. Here we go again, my inner cynic sighed,  another classic forcibly lesbianised and degendered for the Pronoun People…

           But fair enough, gothic fiction and a few Austen passages do offer enough girlish  sweetest-dearest-friendships for such nuances to be permissible, even if here a bit creaky.  And as we move on to the Abbe – , an endearing dollshouse prop whisked out of the many trunks and boxes which have been the various sets –  we get the required creaks and shrieks and haze and Gothic nonsense and the stiffness of General Tilney  (though Cooper mysteriously makes his daughter rather creepy, rather than just downtrodden).   Isabella reappears,  to utter the central message young Miss Austen brings us: that “we cannot escape the world and how it works”.   And Newton’s final speech as Henry is surprisingly, oddly moving in its realism : there is no mystery, no tragedy, no great romance, but flawed people and their sadnesses.  And Catharine becomes neither romantic heroine or happy bride but a writer.  I like that.  

orangtreetheatre.co.uk to 24 feb.  

LEST ANYONE FORGET..

   Storytime!  Before a tangled treescape  Samantha Spiro sits with a book on her lap.   Across the simple stage a few notes from Gemma Rosefield’s ‘cello settle us to listen.   Like all stories for the youngest it begins with a poor woodcutter’s wife in the forest, gathering twigs.  But it’s 1943,  somewhere in Central Europe,  and her husband works under orders from an occupying power.   She  has a romantic dream about the trains with slatted sides which run daily along the new iron roadway: thundering creatures, godlike.   She gazes, hears they are “goods trains”, reflects what wonderful things “goods” might be: imagined riches.

       Far away another story unfolds: a French couple with newborn twins, hustled from home by gendarmes, fear the worst, are entrained.  The wife can barely feed one infant with prison-shrunken breasts; desperately, in hope or despair, the father wraps the other in his prayer-shawl and eases it through the bars to fling it onto the snow.    The woodcutter’s wife has always wanted a child and now, suddenly, picks up the most precious, most vulnerable of goods.  She  struggles to save the baby, feed it and reconcile her angry husband who has been told that the trains hold ‘a cursed race, people without hearts”

       The novella by Jean-Claude Grumberg,  translated and directed by Nicholas Kent, is a blend of stark Holocaust history and fairytale: oddly, I remember such fables from my postwar early-childhood in France, books for the young which acknowledged the camps and killings but yearned towards an imaginative humanity in victims:   one ends with a young girl entering  the gas chamber after a long ordeal of trains and starvation,   to step into warm light and joy.  Here, talking of the mother and twin baby at the end of their train journey, Grumberg simply says they were “liberated from the cares of this world to the gates of Paradise, as promised to the innocents”.  

       But the darkness is all there, unsparing.  There is fear in the story of the imprisoned father forced to shave the heads of the doomed in camp;  fear of the war-scarred, ugly angry firest hermit with whom the mother pleads for goat’s milk;  terror in the woodcutter’s resentment of the child  from the ‘cursed heartless people”.  When the baby reaches a small hand out to him he relents, and there is heroic terror in his brave refusal to drink to the death of Jews amd om the inevitable  arrival of militia trying to take the baby, defended by his axe. 

       Spiro – who took over the role late because of illness – moves easily around, sometimes cradling the prayer shawl. She is a masterly storyteller,  whether in gentle simplicity,  cutting irony or raucously evoking an gang of oafish men drunk on wood-alcohol.  Rosefield’s ‘cello gives ominous or peaceful notes,  a train’s accelerating, a scream of witches, a Brahms lullaby, a Yiddish lament.  It is hypnotic and beautifully pitched,  the terrible lists of names alongside and the projections behind (woodland, rails, faces of the prisoners) adding but unobtrusive. 

      The story winds on, threatening a fairytale concusion then fading to the possible; it laments  the long wanderings of the displaced  thousands after the Red Army and peace bring an end to the war . Lost people, “crowding from all the conquered capitals of the Continent”.  In an ironic kick at the end the narrator shrugs  “it’s a story, just a story, there were no camps, no trains, no chambers…”

       I am glad to have happened to see it at a schools’ matinee, last preview: around me kids held in thrall, brought here as we approach Holocaust Memorial Day. There is   giggling once or twice early on at the word “breasts” , but ever more silent, engrossed attention to Grumberg’s word-pictures of growing babyhood, sharpened axes, shorn hair sent to the conquerors as wigs “or mops”.  

         I think they got it, all right.  I hope it reaches many more, and their elder siblings who might be tempted to shout “river to the sea” without thinking.

Box office.    marylebonetheatre.com. to. 3 Feb

BORDERS AND BRUTALITIES,

Maybe I shouldnt review what is essentially physical-theatre. I have no dance-cred, and I was pleased to be warned years ago by the great Benedict Nightingale, when I took over as Times chief theatre critic. “There’s a marvellous chap called Donald Hutera” he said, “which means you can always get out of doing MIME1 !” And indeed, I like words and complicated ideas alongside emotional and compassionate truths.  

           But this piece is from the British-Israeli creator of GECKO Amit Lahav, and its topic couldn’t be hotter:  exile, emigration, refugees.  Lahan’s grandmother escaped persecution in Yemen and flec to Palestine . He calls this 80-minute piece “a provocative story of desperation, compassion and acceptance”.   

      We can tell straight away that the first dancing group – rather merry in a Mediterranean stomping way  – are border-guard baddies manning a red-and-white barrier, because they have peaked caps and heavy leather belts.  A series of bored refugees are nodded through, then one woman in a headscarf stopped, stigmatized with yellow paint.   She and others manage to end up with a sofa and television and family hugging, but in no time another lot, Central-Asian or North-African looking figures,  crowd in and invade their space. They dance too, but eventually as the show goes on are forced to smear on whiteface and wear cockney caps ,  while a European-white couple waltz through another barrier unchallenged (there’s a satirical Boris wig involved at one point).  The only immigrant who doesn’t whiteface gets sort of crushed under hot lamps. There’s a prison cell door.  And on it goes. 

        Let’s be clear: there are people who will tell you, with some passion,  that this sort of  expression in dance/mime/music/and scattered fragments of languages  (no surtitles). is what theatre should be about . They will agree to Gecko’s website  demand to meet it with “ openhearted emotion”. Some, at the matinee I saw, felt that way and whooped through multiple curtain calls.

    But there are other people who will with equal clarity wish they had not wasted time and up to £69 on it, because for all its impassioned non-stop movement KIN  says nothing more than what we knew. That the world is full of suffering and anxiety,  and that we should know this and give whatever  welcome and money we can .

A third group, those who don’t think we should bother at all,  will not in any case have come to the Lyttelton to be told so.

         It is not my job to tell you which group to side with.  Technically KIN has interest, fascinating surround-sound, and cleverly evocative music by Dave Price . The movement rarely calms,  expressing mainly distress and confusion with little sense of human joy, and there’s some ingenious dim-lit puppetry (the whole show is tenebrous). The message is simplistic but heartfelt, In the last moments, wearing orange lifejackets to remind us of snall boat crossings, the players (none of whom I think actually  arrived that way) step forward and declare their real life personal status – coming from among other lands Mexico and China, and in one case having a Norwegian heritage and therefore claiming to have no home at all. 

     To be brutally honest, after the evocation of harsh  borders, stigmatizing paint and enforced whiteface ,  that personalization feels cheap.   But yes, it’s skilful. Even if, preaching to the choir in the NT stalls, it achieves little. 

nationaltheatre.org.uk

  To 27 jan  

WAR’S LONG SHADOW

           I have a taste for  “Forgotten” plays of  well-made realism, illustrating  how it actually felt to live in Britain through now-distant decades.   This is a very early one by Michael Hastings, one of the Royal Court’s maverick stars (later he wrote Tom and Viv).  But here, young and angry, his  tone is of magnificently unsentimental unease rising to rage.  It is a picture of a London Jewish family and neighbours in a rooming-house in about 1960, where the only solidly reassuring figure is the landlady with her headscarf and mop (Sue Kelvin, a comedienne of great class). 

           Expect no reassuringly comic oy-vay Jewish-family warmth: here’s a young man’s disillusion and confusion, well before the 60s even thought of swinging.   WW2 is 15 years past,  but its disruptive tenatacles are still skewing relationships and emotions.  As teenage Suki remarks to young Sammy : ““All children whose parents have been busted up by war never are the same. We’re a special breed.”  They need to move on and away from the shadow of war; Sammy’s jazz records symbolize it to him, “like life, moving fast, faster”. 

         Old Leo (Paul Rider) is deep in that shadow still,  drinking too much, bickering with the  resentful, bored younger wife Shani he took on after his wife’s death to reconstruct a family . He has summoned his  15 year old son Sammy back from an aunt to complete it but  is wholly unable to communicate with him as the father he longs to be.  Eddie Boyce, on a professional debut, gives us a Sammy nicely naive and openhearted at first ,but increasingly angry in his bafflement about the family and neighbours in the rooming-house (Alex Marker’s set, with stairs and landing, is vital in expressing that world).  

    And who wouldn’t be baffled and angry?  Shani  (Nathalie Barclay). bickers with Leo and is preoccupied, against her bitter husband’s  will, with getting the local Rabbi to meet Sammy ,whose aunt had kept him to shul and kosher ways.  She is sleeping with George the bookie from across the landing, Timothy O’Hara playing it wonderfully loathsome and crass.  Meanwhile up on the landing  and rarely paying her rent to an exasperated landlady is Mrs Pond (Alix Dunmore) who is either deranged or posing as such, with a series of imaginary husbands: one of the most moving moments is when Mrs Miller the landlady berates her as a fellow-widow  – “You should’ve started all over again! Start again!”   Those who can defy and rebuild are OK. Mrs Pond never will. Her daughter Suki (Nell Williams) has learnt, she says, to pay no attention to her mad and maddening self-absorption: “I go inside myself, leave my body so they don’t know I’ve gone”.  

              As the second half begins we are suddenly in a homelier mood as Shani, Mrs Miller and Sammy get out best china, tablecloth  and teapot and borrowed chairs  to welcome the Rabbi:  virtuoso bustling and a little burst of klezmer rarher than jazz gets its own round of applause. A simple soul might expect a bit of  warmhearted Jewish gathering and blessing and there is one, very  touchingly as Nicholas Day’s majestic bearded Rabbi tries to warm and draw out a suddenly rebellious Sammy:  rebellious at the disappointment that is his father , and the Rabbi’s  injunction to “respect his mother”,  a thirty-one year old minx of a stepmother who won’t give him space.  He defies God “For what he’s let happen!” .  Whereon  nutty Mrs Pond joins the party, turning it into a sort of Joe Orton comic nightmare of embarrassment and confusion, until at last  Leo returns,  drunk, and Rider deploys his not inconsiderable power of rage and boiling despair .  

        It is brilliantly performed by all the cast, but it’s  a young man’s play and oddly shaped, too passionately overdrawn out at time. A few last scenes between Mrs pond,  Sammy and Suki make it feel as if it might move to a reconciliatory, youthful hope.  But Sammy’s final despairing question of the universe and its meaning is what leaves us, reeling slightly, after the boiling final act.

    It is an oddity,  not as accomplished as his later plays, but on a freezing night bus back along the Balls Pond Road it haunted me .  The director Tricia Thorns of Two’s Company has thrilled me with discoveries before , at the Finborough with London Wall and Go Bang Your Tambourine (1930s and 60s),  at the Southwark Playhouse with an astonishing trio of contemporaneous WW1 plays about women’s work and lives, and back in the late 50s  Hastings’ never-performed play  – subtler than this one – about his real teenage life in an East End tailors’ workshop.  Her directorial eye is perfectly attuned to these contemporaneous realist plays: in an age of nostalgia , sanitized bonnet-drama  and overimaginative ‘reworkings” it is good to have such productions , and to know and feel  how it actually felt to be there, in 20s or 30s or 1950s. 

        And on that bus through East London  it was easy to reflect that today’s cities are full of families with  just such scars , “busted up by war”,  with impatient children looking for a new life and tempo.

arcolatheatre.com.  to 3 feb

Rating three   

BEFORE THE SALEM TERROR 

     This week, to little acclaim,  the Ambassadors opened Tbe Enfield Haunting,  a play centred on the spooky hysteria of troubled teenage girls.. The following day and just the other side of Chinatown , the little Jermyn offered us this odder, more serious and gripping play about…yes, the spooky hysteria of teenage girls.    

            Talene Monahan’s 90-minute play for four young women is a prequel to Miller’s The Crucible (brilliantly done last year by the NT and still streaming). Set in 1691,  the year before the explosion of witch-hunting and hangings in Salem, Massachussetts, it shows four of the girls who became accusers.  Natalie Johnson’s set evokes that cold, hard, isolated Puritan life : as it opens Betty (Sabrina Wu)  and Abigail (Anna Fordham) are seen in a series of fragmentary scenes –  huddled on heir shared bed,  churning butter, wincing from a beating after saying some forbidden word or, endearingly, acting out childlike role play about  King and a peasant. 

      Abigail, at fourteen,  is pleased with her first job working for John Proctor, and has a burning desire to grow up and work like a man, outdoors and away from the stifling women’s-work indoors.  Their friend Mercy (a powerful Amber Sylvia Edwards): has a  restlessly filthy mind, to the origins of which we get a clue later,  and offers  information about the motherless Abigail’s new monthly bleed, but all   tangled up with fantasies about Lucifer and detailedly physical Satanic nightly visitations:  “this town is infected with lust”.   Witches, she also assures us, have translucent cats.

         The mixture of adolescent absurdity, repression and religiosity is cunningly written; the language lively and modern and real, despite references to  community members as “Saints” .  Abigail loves her new job, the physicality and excitement of helping in the calving and falling for “the good man” John Proctor,  husbamd of an ailing wife.   But  as the Crucible will later tell us, she is sacked for this relationship, and resents it. 

      The fourth figure in their claustrophobic world of awakening sexual exciteent  and desire to fly through the forbidden woods is Mary Warren, a newcomer and given to seizures (Lydia Larson). There is a wild denouement with lanterns in the woods, and the big disaster of Salem awaits.   A final coda, a while later, has Betty looking back unhappily at what happene. 

       A few passages could be tightened, but the interplay between the four girls is riveting, recognizable and intelligently alarming.  Like Joanna Carrick’s recent and brilliant UNGODLY  and The Crucible itself, it holds between the lines truths for every age about repression, superstitious fanaticism, and the unbalances of youth . Another fascinating Jermyn St discovery.   

jermynstreettheatre.co.uk   to  27 January

GRIEF, CLASS, AND THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

          Press night having moved about and gone incommunicado, this is from when I bought a preview ticket at Richmond..same cast and production.  

          Paul Unwin, author of the play, has talked with the chief investigator Guy Lyon Playfair, heard some of the guttural tapes of whatever-it-was talking through Janet. The programme note suggests he emerged genuinely wondering about “forces being unleashed” in that house.  And I expected  it to be a Christmas-season woo-woo ghost story,   to appease the post-Christian generations which , having binned God,  will believe anything.  

       But it turns out a bit subtler than that , despire all the bangs and flashes, a certain Paul Kieve illusion and one remarkable furniture displacement. While it is not as exciting as it hopes, for me above all it holds two remarkable and honest performances .   

     Emerging from the first half, a front of house worker asked what I thought and I found myself saying  “It’s sort of sad”.  So it is.  Lee Newby’s set is wonderful – the dreary little house ripped open, two storeys with the floor hollowed between,  the depressing familiar sense of that time of strikes and power cuts and national decline.   Mum Peggy –  Catherine Tate –  is down-to-earth,  marshalling her two hyper, larking daughters and a small son as they come in from school,  while coping with the pressure of a husband’s desertion (he comes back once a week to get his welfare payment, often drunk and frightening).   As it opens she is trying to get the kids to sit down to supper,  and is interrupted by a bossy neighbour (Mo Sesay) who helps out a bit as “Uncle Ray”. Then more intrusively  the intruder is  a whiskery busybody armed with cameras , a tape recorder and three ice creams,   to disrupt her attept at a family supper.  This is Maurice Grosse, humbler sidekick to Playfair,  ex-army and “inventor”,  who makes himself at home nipping upstairs to install motionsensor camera in the children’s bedroom. 

          It is clear that we are weeks or months into the psychic “investigation’, and poor Peggy just has to put up with it. There’s a sharp sense of class:  these educated men with posher accents make themselves the bosses, feeling quite comfortable invading a working-class home.  When Peggy demurs about how she gets up in the night and might be seen by the cameras, he breezily advises “stay low”, commando-style.  There’s a powercut – this ist the 70s – some bangs and larks from the girls,   strange wild behaviour and coma from Janet and – properly heartbreaking – tears and terror from the little boy.   

   Hence my sadness, rhe one useful legacy of a so so play. A mother is trying to make an home normal against a pulse of poverty ,abandonment and nervousness about the husband’s next invasion;   her situation  is not improved by the psychical-researchers’ interruptions.  One child – Ella Schrey-Yeats as Janet –  is mentally unstable,  or at least hysterical;   the other (Grace Molony’s Margaret) reassures her mother that it\s all just a prank.  Maurice Grosse the busybody is brilliantly evoked by David Threlfall:  he has a cowed reverenace for the unseen Playfair,   and  utter belief about “portals” opening  between  the living and  the dead .   He theorizes, out of his own grief at a lost daughter,  that Janet in her collapse is being “used” by a spirit, and it might be his lost one.    There’s an extraordinary innocent moment cruelty when he feels the child’s head, feverish, and talks of how psychic pseudoscience calls this “the fire!” like the one which caused, allegeldy,  Brazilian child to self-combust.  Tate is excellent in her distressed respectfulness.   I hope these days she’d throw him out.   

       The second half, however – this is a short play, two hours overall – picks up more emotional reality in Maurice:  he is grieving for his lost daughter Janet and, in a creepy nocturnal moment when poor Peggy is trying to get some sleep upstairs, wraps the sleeping child in his own daughter’s blanket and tries to get the dead girl to talk ‘through” her.  Because of the actor’s skill. there is proper emotional power in Threlfall’s  adding his real grief to the household’s alrady heavy burden of hysteria, adolescence, mental instability and fear.   When his furious wife appears late on, the kid emits the famously terrifying guttural devil-voice which convinced so many researchers at the time that Something Else was speaking from beyond. And Maurice is no longer prophet, just a dotty old codger searching for his shoes. 

    Its a sad nasty old story, wrongly puffed as spooky. But as a study in class, hysteria, grief, credulity,  exploitation,  mental disturbance, adolescent power and struggling motherhood it has its place, because of Tate’s dignity and Threlfall’s humanity .

. www.atgtickets.com