Monthly Archives: February 2024

AN ATTIC WARNING

     Fasten your seat belts for a bracingly odd German play by Marius von Mayenburg; hold on tight as it veers  in a switchback weirdness, which  I for one ended up thoroughly relishing.

       Its a simple enough story, on the face of it:  two siblings and their partners, clearing out dead Dad’s attic (boxes, a drip stand, pushchairs, a music-stand) discover a neatly wrapped picture of a church in Vienna. It’s signed A.Hitler.  Bossy Nicola (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) , who did most of the end of life care and resents it,  scoffs that it can’t be Hitler and is just awful anyway,  banal.  Her husband Fabian (Gunnar Cauthery) –  is excited at the possible price,  and so is brother Philipp, a nicely wet John Heffernan: he  works out, with splendid unselfawareness,  that it’s OK to profit from because it represents a vision of a better age. You know, the imaginary one when young Adolf hadn’t failed his art school exam and thus became a harmless bohemian (extra pleasure may be felt by Times Register readers, since the 100-year-ago anniversary report this week was about the future Fuehrer’s trial (Feb, 1924).  He already knew what he wanted all right, spoke for 4 hours about the need for  National Socialism) .  

         Philipp’s wife Judith, being Jewish, is just horrified at the picture and wants it destroyed.  Jenna Augen as usual is terrific, small and angry, here a  witness to history.  All of them of course need its “provenance” if they sell,  and call in an icy Nuremberg museum lady – an unrecognizably chilly Jane Horrocks –  to admire it. She confirms that the  label is from a Jewish framer  Adolf regularly used before refusing to save him from the camps .  All of this leads to Nicola’s revelation that Dad had specially asked for all Granny Greta’s stuff to be binned, because she was a Nazi party member.  Like any German family  (von Mayenburg knows his people) they reassure themselves  that everyone joined the party if they wanted a job,  and she was an Opera singer.  But she was also sleeping with Martin Bormann, Hitler’s top aide. So   maybe  those initials on dear Grandma’s ring  – which the prat Philipp gave to Judith  – are well, awkward. But also handy to back up the picture’s provenance…a buyer finally appears. And is nastily thrilled. 

         Good story, but wow, how it lurches gleefully around.  One might unkindly suspect that there was a bet going: how many kinds of play can von M  squeeze into 95 minutes in a piece concerning the Holocaust.  An Ayckbournian comic family row about money, a serious Stoppardian discussion about the morality of the individual as artist,  a touch of incest, a brief surreal ballet interlude with an unnamed chap in peephole fetish underpants and an Aryan-blonde  galleriste, plus a writhing tetanus attack ending in heil Hitler by a man covered in jam aftr rolling in a skip with Greta’s Nazi love letters. Add an erotic bargain, a farcical conclusion,  some courageously overwritten soliloquies, and  the most terrifying surroundsound evocation  of the year by Richard Howell, based on an unseen bathroom door.   

      There’s even a line which in the present febrile national mood felt topically and salutary.   Nicola begins to turn on Judith about Israel and the suffering in  Gaza, offering  the hideous common trope: “Jews, of all people,  should know..”. To which Judith snarls “I didnt realize the Holocaust was an education project to make Jews nicer to people in Palestine”.  

     It’s a grand oddity, and, for my money von Mayenberg  wins the bet , and keeps us on edge. So  does the almost worryingly fearless director Patrick Marber, never one to swerve away from weirdness.   And none of us, however flawless our ancestry, can afford to swerve away ftom the perennial risk of  resurrection of the far right.  The players are all fine, particularly Augen;  Jane Horrocks has an unexpected gift for Germanic stiffness, and Angus Wright – an actor of great  natural presence, authority and threat –    deserves some kind of award for deploying both that and a mercifully unsuspected gift for twerking in fetish underpants.  

Youngvic.org.   To 20 april

THEY SHALL NOT PASS

   Given the current swell of antisemitism there was a heartstopping moment from Jez Unwin as Yitzhak Scheinberg,  patriarch of a hardworking East End Jewish family whose son Sammy is leaning towards direct action against the British Union of Fascists.  Keep away from trouble,  the older man says, dreading the “Jewish lightning” arson attacks and the beatings-up.  A pogrom surivor, he asserts an ancient grim humility:   Jews cannot afford to give their enemies reasons,   and “Everything we have is borrowed, they can take it back”.  Meanwhile,  when the ensemble become an occasional capering chorus of newspaperst the Jewish Chronicle is echoing it in a mockingly rhyming lyric “The Board of Deputeez/ says don’t get involved –  it’ll bring us to our knees!”

      But doing nothing will not do. Outside, the community chant is “No-one sees eye to eye, but everyone agrees – this is my street!”  Irish communist Maraid  (Sha Dessi) who works in a Jewish bakery makes common cause with the dockworkers and multicultural immigrants (making sure the audience on three sides is plentifully leafleted) against the thuggish BUF . These march under Mosley with black shirts,  red lighting-strike  armbands,  slogans about foreign masters and ‘honest work for British workers..get rid of the Yids” .  Maraid forges a friendship with  Joshua Ginsberg’s Sammy.   But these are hard starving times for everyone,  in 1936,   rents are rising ;  elsewhere in the tenement building  young Len from Lancashire is gradually drawn to the BUF by their promises of work.  When the barricades are up, he may be on the wrong side..

      This one was always going to be a rouser. With the Merchant of Venice 1936 now up West after Stratford and Wiltons,  displaying THEY SHALL NOT PASS at the curtain call ,  it is grand timing for a fresh fringe musical to remind us of when  old perils met old decencies:   the Cable Street riot of October 1936 when immigrants, Irish dockers, Jews and indigenous working-class locals refused to let the DUF march through their streets, defying police and thuggery alike.   

        Tim Gilvin and Alex Kanefsky do it proud, musical numbers ranging from Sammy’s urgent Hamiltonesque rap to mournfully beautiful ballads like Maraid’s “Bread and roses” as she toils through the night inthe bakery. There are barking BUF chants, the yearning cry of the fascist recruit “Let me in!” And of course a great “No Pasaran!”as the communists make common cause with the Spanish Civil war and adopt the defiance for themselves.  Adam Lenson directs a vigorous ensemble of eleven (feels like more, with neat doubling and trebling)  and Kanefsky’s book – framing it in a modern history guide competing resignedly with a jack-the-ripper tour – carries on beyond the barricade to the aftermath,  the complexities within and between families, and a final community effort in the citywide rent strike. 

       He makes the divisions clear: Sammy, trying to get work which seems sewn up by the Irish dockers,  claims to be called “Seamus O”Dublin”.  Maraid’s old Irish mother  (Debbie Chazen on fierce form)  thinks Jews own the banks and doesn’t approve of her daughter “consorting with them” , let alone distributing Commie leaflets.  A Black character observes in passing that it’s all very well for people who can change their accent but it’s harder for him.  

         The vigour and sound of it are overwheming,  the messiness  and doubling all part of the joy. Ginsberg’s Sammy is a mass of tousled energy,  Dessi a powerful musical presence;   Unwin’s switching between the role of Jewish patriarch and fascist leader is powerfully uncanny.  All power to Southwark and 10 to 4 productions. I hope this one grows and meets wider audiences.  Its entire run is sold out, which does the creators and London audiences credit. 

Southwarkplayhouse.co.uk to 16 march

1948 AND ALL THAT

   Right now, the birth of the NHS in 1948 is more than appropriate to write about (there’s another play about Nye Bevan next week).  For as the most jaded doctor predicts late in the play,  the gift and joy of free healthcare would never be enough – “the beautiful new girlfriend is bound to become the tired snappish wife who keeps you waiting too long for your supper”.  

       So as Britain fights to revive its old passion,  what fitter direction for the politically witty Lucy Kirkwood  (remember Chimerica?) than an ironic tribute to another 1940s monument: Brief Encounter: monochrome Pathé News, waisted coats, modest stout hats, railway carriage banter and occasional swells of romantic music.   It is all there  and nimbly staged:  only this time the housewife is the doctor: Iris Elcock, GP, local councillor , housewife married to another GP and earnest assistant to a flamboyantly sweary Labour woman minister.  She wants to be a MP and change things for the poor.  

         The man is of another world and mindset:  George is a local boy long emigrated to middling Hollywood fame, married to a starlet, never votes or gives a damn. But oh, the chemistry of middle-aged temptation!  They meet first of course on a train (the set, a spare revolving square of light,  becomes with neat scooting furniture changes an office, home, train, seafront).,   Hours later, on a home visit, she is doing a discreet intimate examination of a cantankerous old lady when her son walks in. George! 

         They spark all the genteel fire of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard but with added political argument, and are wonderfully matched.  Keeley Hawes gives Iris a worn maternal loveliness  and luminous benignity about her work and causes; Jack Davenport irresistibly handles the Coward-esque dry wit of George’s lines, cynicism covering increasing need.  Iris’ husband Julian is a lame war hero,  and one of the majority of doctors who furiously opposed the National Health Service Act because they didn’t want to be state employees:  Bevan finally had, he sourly said, to ‘stuff their mouths with gold”.   He resents his wife’s ambition and socialist fire – at one point humiliatingly rejects her “pawing at him” to try and revive their marriage.  Later we will, fleetingly, learn better of old pre-war self.    As for George’s wife – well, late on in a slightly unnecessary dramatic reveal, we learn more of her too.

          Hawes and Davenport are wonderful,  rich passion warring with adult responsibilities;  around them the outer world of 1948 and its attitudes comes alive, from social unease to the arrival of Dior’s shockingly wasteful New Look.    Deft doubling and trebling of roles actually helps:   Siobhan Redmond is the fiery minister (very Barbara Castle), several patients  and  also Iris’s crisply snobbish sister-in-law – “People are romantic about the working-class since the war, but meet one, they are so bovine” as she laments the loss of 193s  middle-class comfort and way of life.  Tom Goodman-Hill’s Julian is nine other people, Pearl Mackie about eleven: but  the direction by Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee means that both this shape-shifting and the filmic, fast-changing scenes on the open set do much to create a sense of an evolving period.  Iris’s child, to her socialist  despair, is obsessed with pictures of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding-dress.  

       Onstage cameras and high moody monochrome closeups overhead are used with unusual economy and taste ,  evoking the eternal tangle of politics and human emotion. I have rarely seen this fashionable stage technology done better.  Kirkwood as ever has some lines too good to spoil in a review, but given today’s repellent political culture it is good to report how angry Siobhan Redmond’s minister is at Nye Bevan’s famous description of Tories as “lower than vermin”.  She felt it alienated people from the fast-closing window of real change, because British people  simply won’t tolerate rudeness.

        A terrific, grown-up and engrossing history play.  And for me, fascinating to come to after an afternoon watching Southwark’s “Cable Street”  on the other side of the river and the far side of WW2. (review later).   Sometimes a double theatre day just meshes and clicks… 

Donmarwarehouse.com to 13 April

WANNA BE IN MOVIES? REALLY? BRRRR!

We open in a chilly Suffolk cottage in the rain (I  am tonight probably the only person here to have come direct from a chilly Suffolk cottage, in rain. Call it Method Criticking). 

     But in this case there is a sinister banging on the door, which opens to reveal – aaaagh! Jonathan Hyde as a gloriously  convincing Vincent Price, veteran horrror movie star in  a bad mood. He is suffering from “irreconciliable differences” personal and artistic, with the 24 year old director Michael Reeves (Rowan Polonski), and citing clause 17 paragraph 5 of his contract to get out of the film “Witchfinder General”. 

    Reeves thinks he is making an art movie about the truth of  human violence – hangings, rape, the rack “for serious cinema is about discomfort” . Price reckons its just  a job, knowing that the studio plans to market it as horror – like his Edgar Allen Poe films – and that  a memo instructs the director with demands like  “girl’s tits nude, and blood on tits”.

      Having  been reprimanded for overacting all day by this whippersnapper,  he wants out. Reeves pleads, but then. explodes into “Go back to America you old side of ham, I’ll get Donald Pleasance like I wanted in the first place”. But the power is not with him, and he pleads again. Funny, but already uneasy.

         Then, unseen by either, in the same set we are in a similar cottage – Alfred Hitchcock’s fanciful bit of olde England in LA –  where three years earlier the master is alone with his tightly contracted discovery, Tippi Hedren the last Hitchcock Blonde: Joanna Vanderham exquisitely lit  in iceblue silk suit, respectful but rightly wary of the man’s toadlike vastness and legendary power (Ian McNeice is mesmerisingly unnerving). 

So the sharply comic mood changes, though at the same time the other pair – Price with the upper hand, Reeves nervy and troubled – continue their evening, the veteran taking over cooking.  There is no confusion in Janathan Kent’s nimble direction, though sometimes fragments of director-actor dialogue in parallel cause a moments synchronicity.

   This in ninety minutes John Logan’s thoughtful – and much  researched –  play interweaves two actor director  relationships at points of crisis. It is full of ideas but sketchy – even a bit cartoonish – in character – which given the pace and interest did not particularly bother me. Themes of age and experience are reversed, but within each pair the power shifts.  In a startling moment Reeves (who died young of an overdose a couple of years later) is trying to tone down Price’s usual grandiosely sinister manner in a condemnation scene,  and babbles half crazily about the world’s   horrors.  A silence, and suddenly Price gives the condemnation speech coldly, matter of fact, chilling. Nazi. As Reeves had wanted. 

        Hitchcock meanwhile is also building mastery, more horribly, over Hedren: very Harvey Weinstein, very nasty. He will make her immortal on that screen. But the immortality he wants is trauma – torment – as it always is with Hitch and beautiful icy blondes. All his films he says are the same – “kiss kiss, kill kill, in any order” – and Marnie will end with a kiss , though only via the famous cabin scene of marital rape.  He needs her caught in trauma, her nakedness the moment the male “creates” her.  The rapist is like a director for whom the actor’s welfare does not matter: the  theory, a patiarchal sub- artistic wank  that still exists, is  that the greatest screen moments caught forever like flies in amber can come out of real abuse. Especially of a beautiful woman

      That could hardly be more topical. Vanderham however  rounds brilliantly on Hitchcock in this play though, giving Hedren a very modern moment of defiant rage, turning the tables, telling the old goat that in seducing her he is just the ugly boy in school screaming to be Clark Gable, wanting a co-star more than a whore, a trophy. And that people will only  laugh at him for it.  

     Pow! Cut! And that’s a wrap. Though in the 1960s it probably wasn’t, theres satifaction in it. And a play that leaves you thinking, not  least about cinema. A good one for BAFTA week. 

Hampsteadtheatre.com to 16 march

Rating 4 

TENTACLES  STRETCHING INTO PAST AND FUTURE

    Electricity is coming to the village but the elderly Randolphs wont bother, preferring the paraffin lamplight of their forebears.  Their house ,  comfortably middle-class, has seen generations play in its nursery.  It’s their heart,  and the family gathering fourteen-strong with children  for Dora and Philip’s golden wedding have it embedded in their memories.  Not always benignly,  for Dodi Smith’s1938 hit play focuses sharply both on  the perennial pains and joys of kinship – including losses – and on the  social changes of the interwar period. Emily Burns’ production does it proud:  it’s an exquisitely performed watercolour of a play,  a  period piece capturing a moment when not only was war looming  – on its  first night the news was of Chamberlain meeting Herr Hitler – but England was feeling the pains of evolution.  

         For late Edwardiana is there, as Lindsay Duncan’s amiable, demanding  (and often very funny) Dora has a lady-companion Fenny:  an unenviable status hovering awkwardly  well above mere servants but below the actual family.  In opening scenes the child Billy  (the kids are terrific). perceptively observes it might be better to be a maid, because “they get a day off”.  Charles the patriarch is a man of enough private means to have done nothing in particular with his life  – always meant to write a book or go into Parliament but settled for being “happy..so happy I sometimes think of raising  a statue to myself”.  They hung on to the old nanny, who is now tending a visiting great-grandchild in his cot , but nannies are already a luxury the young parents can’t quite afford.   One daughter Marjorie is a contentedly surrended traditional wife,  whose wooing was  a simple matter of just “twining myself round Kenneth”.   Yet alongside these happy relics the 20c is advancing fast,  so their remaining  children – two lost to the first war or after it –  are far more modern figures.  Nicholas is an emotionally underdeveloped advertising man who talks on radio panels,  Hilda an estate agent making thousands a year and anxious phone calls. Cynthia is broodingly  recovering  from an affair in Paris, and there’s Belle,  a widowed septuagenarian sister-in law fresh from America with dyed hair and a facelift which makes silver-haired Dora murmur that it must be dangerous taking a face like that out in the rain.  Belle in turn sweetly says to Dora’s daughters  that “only a very happy woman can dare trust to nature as your mother has”.  A wonderful  pair, Lindsay Duncan and Kate Fahy on top form. So is Malcolm Sinclair as Charles, dodging featly round the fact that Belle only married his late brother because she couldn’t have him. Bethan Cullinane’s Cynthia offers a fine, low-key portrait of a woman who broke the rules for love’s sake and lost:  there is a deeply affecting nursery conversation between her and the orphaned child “Scrap” about the way that grief creates a limbo of non-feeling. 

       The yearnings and frustrations,  old griefs and frivolous , sentimental or painful memories of all the family  – the dear octopus whose tentacles hold them all – are delicately drawn. It is a fine ensemble cast in a glorious set by Frankie Bradshaw, revolving rooms each with a flickering  real fire. The whole thing feels Chekhovian, though the ending – no spoilers – is less so.  

      But best of all, at its centre is the wonderful performance by Bessie Carter as Fenny,  the ‘companion’ who is not quite family:   patronized and pitied by some of the sisters ,used as a gofor with charming unconcern by Dora, and flirted with by the coxcomb Nicholas,  who is too immature to notice that she is longingly in love with him.  Carter brings it immense dignity,  and great emotional power in her gentle  self-control ,  shading to an edge of girlish hope as Nicholas teases her by marooning her on top of a nursery cupboard,  then into humiliation and a reckless attempt to be like other young women,  carefree at the evening dance.

        As the first half ends and the others wander off unconcernedly,   she is the one we glimpse as the set revolves again:  a stalwart faithful helper, alone  the high stepladder hanging all the damn bunting for their revels, with no sign of any chivalry to assist her.  And again towards the end she is the one relied on  to make waterlilies out of napkins when the first starched lot fall victim to  an emotional rapport between mother and wayward Cynthia.       Bessie Carter is, in short, understatedly, intelligently, feelingly terrific. A new star on an NT debut.   

Nationaltheatre.org.uk. To 27 March.  

Rating 4 

WHEN THE BOOMERS WERE ROCKIN’ ALL OVER THE WORLD...

    “We were there!” cry the cast of John O’Farrell’s jukebox tribute to the 1985 Live Aid concert. Memories undimmed nearly forty years on, heres a  Coldstream Guards bandsman proud to be opener for the greatest rock bands ever; here’s Suzanne (Jackie Clune) who was an A level kid in a record shop in Weston Super Mare;  here’s the sound guy and the admin assistant who surfed the chaos of Geldof’s determination to get the vast transatlantic gig up in 38 days.  A burst of We Are The Champions rises – the famous numbers are, throughout, elegantly inserted to the story as chorus or solos with a band overhead . 

     But for a moment I quailed at their triumphant claim “we will be heroes for ever” and the elders’ lordly patronizing of a  new- generation sceptic  who just sees “a lot of rich white men” purporting to save Africa.  But fair dos – the familiar whining about postwar boomers ruining the world for Gen Z means forgetting what this extraordinary bit of musical philanthropy did. For all the snags and frustrations, Bob Geldof’s simplehearted horror at the newsreports and his stroppy, sweary risk-taking recruitment of all the big rockers did save tens of thousands of lives, and force the developed West to look at hard global realities.  And this show gives 10% of the take to the Band Aid charitable trust.

     Craige Els as Geldof (who is a collaborator with O’Farrell) centres the story with powerful sincerity: when he is persuaded to visit a refugee camp and hold a dying infant, the shock holds the house still for a real moment.  It becomes clear that his headlong simplicity of purpose, a “this will not do and I must fix it” conviction – parallel to Thatcher’s own though in a different direction – was key to his success. He is not  daunted  by the slow assent of the other bands, the appalled logistic protests of Harvey Goldstein the promoter,  nor by the angry “how dare they sing about us” expressed by Abiona Omiona’s  black aid- worker when the disco lot stage becomes a fiery desert sunset and we are forced to look away from the glamour and excitement of the gig.  Geldof tramples on, while around him the ordinary fans are fired with his rockstar intransigence.

    The first half mainly deals with the original moment when Geldof and Midge Ure made the Band Aid Christmas single, hauling together a supergroup including Status Quo,Bono, Genesis, Spandau Ballet et al.  Barracking of the BBC got it traction (Michael Grade knew when to give in) and fans rose magnificently to selling it. It’s good that the show admits the lyrics’  absurdity about snow, and the  cringe over “tonight thank God its them instead of you” which apparently Bono hated singing. But it is how Geldof felt, and a supremely honest line.  The startling success, and a cameo of Charles and Di there, is nicely done; the subsequent frustration at corruption and undelivered grain is painful.

     Then the second half is Live Aid, the tempo rising even more.    Luke Shephard’s direction keeps it going. It isn’t  a classic: the side-plot of Suzanne’s teenage romance is sweet but flat, the disco choreography gets quite dull, and two  cartoonish panto-rap confrontations between Geldof and Thatcher over the VAT refund are frankly awful.  But the genius is in the music,  and the briliance of the show in how those classics serve the mood. Matthew Brind, as musical supervisor, earns every plaudit going.

    Joel Montague asGoldsmith the fixer delivers a bruising Pinball Wizard, the lone aid worker’s “Blowing in the wind” asks the eternal question behind all misery, there is an astonishing shared rendering of Bohemian Rhapsody, a 2024 teenager picking up the timeless  strop of “My Generation”. And finally – and dammit the eyes water – a  Mc Cartney moment. The Beatle was, that day,  singing live for the first time since Lennon died.  As the cast old and  young  ask the hardest question,  why misery still stalks the world,  his words are the ending:  “There will be an answer….Let it be.” 

Oldvictheatre.com.   To 30 March

Rating three.

FAIRYTALE AS FESTIVAL

     “The lunatic, the lover and the poet”  are all served in any Midsummer Night’s dream.   Here the first two get most traction,  the poetry least (until Puck’s last farewell). It’s a trippy,  psychedelic ’60s teenage dreamworld that director Eleanor Rhode conceives: far from leafy tradition but highly entertaining.  A mass of round paper lanterns hang high overhead the whole vast auditorium ,  a brief flash of old TV-screen test cards hits us at the start, and the forest magic  is a thing of voices from every direction, lights and flashes and colours,  hovering bright pinpricks and voices  creating Cobweb, Peaseblossom and the rest of Titania’s entourage.  

        John Bulleid adds illusions  – understated but striking when they occur  – to Lucy Osborne’s bare design.   But beyond that,  the production’s power is its sense of of youthfulness (a good few RSC debutants),  expressed with constant liveliness in the movement across a big empty stage: the mortal teenagers, fighting and loving and quarrelling,  are set against both the initial business-suit blandness of Theseus’ court and then the eerie ancient authority of Oberon , Titania and their exasperated intern errandboy  Puck. Bally Gill’s Oberon,  mutated from the authoritarian Theseus to a scruffy military-jacketed glam rocker, is is particularly memorable in creating the fairy king’s odd otherworldly goodwill:   the prank on Titania (what is he but a prototype drink-spiker?) is oddly mellowed as he hangs about invisible to the mortals:  watching, pitying, interfering, and learning.  His reconciliation with Sirine Saba’s dignified queen is unusually touching. 

     We should speak particularly of Puck:   two indispositions in the cast mean that on press night, of all nights,  the understudy Premi Tamang took over the  wild green wig and scampering wit, and was remarkable.  It says a great deal for the meticulous level of RSC full-cast rehearsal that she does it as if seasoned by a long run:   signalling wild flashes, shivers of light and once a shower of ball-pond spheres with casual accuracy and  zipping through several very intensely choreographed and remarkably vigorous fight-and-confusion scenes with two pairs of young lovers.  She never puts a foot wrong:  an exit round of applause after the wildest of those scenes was well earned.  

       It all feels youthful: three  of the lovers are on debut seasons here, Dawn Sievewright’s Hermia at first not totally easy with the verse but splendid in the emotional line of her puzzled rejection and resentment,  and Boadicea Ricketts stunningly energetic as Helena. The brawl between them,  with the men struggling to restrain them  is pure Coronation Street classic,  right up to an eyescratching fury ending with both trying to swam up a ladder, the “modesty and maiden shame” in the text getting laughs.  Its conclusion, with Puck and Oberon zap-freezing them and chasing them off in all directions and got a wild round of applause.   

    And the Rude Mechanicals? Splendidly silly.   Four of the six, including Matthew Baynton’s Bottom and Helen Monks turning Quince into every am-dram matron,  are also on debut RSC seasons:  Rhode has clearly cast about for unrestrained comic talent. Baynton (even without his independently expressive twitching asses’ ears) is a joy, everybody’s  most-annoying drama-school diva.  A lanky shape, he milks his death by the tomb in what one can only suspect to be Shakespeare parodying his own Romeo in the previous year’s play.    But a special huzza to Emily Cundick as Snout,  whose deadpan, determined discomfort in the role of  Wall is a joy.  It’s the first time that I remember the concept of the “chink” or “cranny’ that the lovers kiss through being quite so uncomfortable for the poor battlement.   

     Oh, and one of the pleasures of  oft-repeated classic plays is noticing something for the first time, off the back of topical news.  It had never occurred to me before that what Peter Quince as leader of the Mechanicals is doing,  in those anxious prologues preventing the lion and the stabbing worrying the ladies,  is inventing ‘trigger warnings’ four hundred years before Ralph Fiennes and the rest got so annoyed by them.  Nothing new under the sun. All in all, three very happy hours to remember.  

Box office. Rsc.org. To. 30 march

Rating four 

    LYRICAL, FARCICAL, PERFECT

Figaro, rascally wigmaker and foam-flinging wet-shaver, is  basically the first rapper, isnt he? Staccato eloquence at speed, braggart confidence in breeches,  making earnings out of lovelorn yearnings .  Earning, yearning – see how fast the pleasurable infection of the Holdens’ translation infects you? Its sharp easy wit,  sung in English but with  surtitles) is one of the glories of this beloved 1987 Jonathan Miller production (Peter Relton is revival director). 

     Its a fitting moment for it,  just as the world of music has been rightly set afire with indignation at the government and ACE’s shrugging treatment of the English National Opera. How better to remind us of

ENO’S nimble brilliance, outreach  and welcome to all,  than by bringing back one of its jolliest productions?

   Roderick Cox from America is conductor on his ENO debut;   Charles Rice has it down pat as the eponymous barber, and as for Innocent  Masuku from Cape Town Opera as Count Almaviva,  not only does he sing like a bird – that goes without saying, its ENO  – but as an actor he takes the besotted Count with  aplomb from  mooning naivete to gleeful conspiracy , and hence to magnificent  physical humour in his disguises  as a drunken fake soldier and a mincing musicmaster. His fine knee-work, ‘making a leg’, is immediately parodied by the equally funny Simon Bailey as Bartolo, who achieves not only three full-on pratfalls but, in the second half,  a falsetto Handel parody as he mourns the old days of opera “when men were sopranos”. .From Ireland, Anna Devin gives us a Rosina equally  sharply drawn:  defiant, melodically gorgeous and slyly funny. 

    It”s a treat of a show. Lyrical and mischievous, farcical and glamorous, with all the self-aware absurdity it needs as Rossini sends up the  sombre tragedians of  the genre (the final prolonged love duet, punctuated by Figaro’s stamping warbling panic to get them down the ladder, had the whole house giggling until you could feel it: Rice is masterly. 

      Theatrecat does not generally review opera , having only the most sub-amateur level of classical musicality as a humble awed amphi-rat. But when shows are  as crazily and openly cheerful as any musical comedy, it’s  worth reminding musical-theatre fans that sometimes it’s good to  venture into  the grander gilded houses,  the land of the miraculously un-miked voices.

     Who, after all,  doesn’t want to see Lesley Garrett in a housekeeperly flurry of underwear, or enjoy a household in perfectly timed uproar, insult and deception, being raided by glitterimg soldiery with rifles poised and  everyone closing the act with a crazedly entanglled  mass chorus about headaches and catastrophe?

    Oh, and there’s Don Basilio’s hat to marvel at. And the Don Alonso shoes. Treat after treat. And the music….

Box office Eno.org to 29 feb

Best availability 27th, tickets down to 25 quid,  and none of them reaching the worst  west-end lunacy.

Rating 5

 AMERICAN DREAMS IN FADING BLACKPOOL

    Suddenly within a fortnight come two very classy new plays,  funny and thoughtful and moving beyond the ordinary. Moreover, in a tiny revolution goth are built around women.   Beth Steel’s TILL THE STARS COME DOWN is at the National Theatre (scroll down), and now up West Jez Butterworth follows the mystic-deadbeat caravan England of JERUSALEM and the troubled Ireland of THE FERRYMAN with another mournfully entertaining, dramatically intense tale of female lives. 

              It is set in the weary, decayed Blackpool of  the ‘70s with twenty-year flashbacks to its heyday, and to hopes. The hopes hold a family  in thrall to the passionate ambition of the mother Veronica, the father long vanished, possibly dead at war though the story changes for the ‘widow’s convenience and respectability.. She doesn’t want her girls to lark around on the roller coaster, bear five children and end up slaving at the mangle. She wants glamour, beauty, everything that is the distant shangri-la that America seemed in the Britain’s hard postwar years.  We are to see her drilling her four children in close-harmony and vaudeville tap, lecturing them on the early trials and disciplines of legendary showbiz figures like the Andrews Sisters . We see this making her become,  in some extraordinary moments from   Laura Donnelly,    a genuinely tragic figure for any century.

        But we meet the daughters first as adults in the 70s,  in the battered old front room of Seaviw (formerly Seaview guest house, then dubbing itself Seaview Luxury Hotel and Spa, its backstreet glory indicated by a decrepit juke box and a palm-thatched cocktail bar).  Somewhere up the dim brown stairs – Rob Howell’s set is  so shiveringly evocative you can almost smell the mould –  the mother is dying of cancer. She is tended by a down-to earth nurse who is not above murmuring that if the pain gets too much there is a particular doctor’s number to ring, unofficial-like.  It’s a hot July, enervating:  in a brief bravura scene the piano-tuner (Richard Lumsden) stumps in with eloquently entertaining disgust at the state of the piano – “A piano needs to be played! Salt, damp..” .   Without stress, we are offered two fine metaphors: this house’s life has suffered long enervating drought,  and many a life becomes a sad unplayed piano.  

       The plain, nervous domestic daughter Jill is joined by the others: noisy Ruby from Rochdale with husband Dennis,  and even noisier Gloria, Leanne Best all fuming attitude and fag with her equally subservient Bill.  Missing is the eldest, Joan, who went to America. And perhaps was famous there, only nobody’s heard from her for two decades. Only the adoring Jill thinks she will come.   Because the mother upstairs needs to see her. And to be forgiven for something. 

       Banter, memory, idle quarrels, the nervousness of an impending death hang over  them. But so does memory, so the great room swirls round and back twenty years to a tidy kitchen where the matriarch,  neat and queenly and determined, is drilling the four little girls in their Andrews Sisters harmonies and bewailing the cancellation of a gig at St Bartholomews by some straitlaced congregants who find this saucy American stuff a bit much. 

       It’s perfect:   the little girls’ evocation of that decorously saucy showbiz,   the mother bossing  Joe the pianist, telling off passing lodgers and tolerating the chirpy local comic Jack (Bryan Dick a poundshop Dodd, whose magnificently terrible jokes repeatedly bring the house to hysteria:  “I’ve got a new stepladder, I’m worried about how to introduce it to my real ladder”, etc).  

Of course Jack promises ‘contacts’ in bigtime showbiz, and of course Veronica leaps at it. And one comes:   Corey `Johnson is a smoothly dismissive Luther St John, allegedly Perry Como’s agent and early discoverer of Nat King Cole.   He is interested in one of the girls. But only one.  And maybe there’s a better acoustic to audition her in a private room . Upstairs. And Veronica is worried, as Joan is only fifteen. And decent Joe the pianist is worried. But Veronica suppresses her worry.  And Joe goes, muttering that God forgive her. 

       Time sees the scene revolve to and fro from the battered old front room to the bygone kitchen.     Joan comes home,  and the whole story of longing and guilt unfolds.  At times the later scenes between the sisters lag a little, unusual in anything directed by Sam Mendes,  and make you long at moments for an Arthur-Miller  explosive tragic ending.  But  Butterworth gives us something else valuable,   in an unexpected development a demonstration of the pure messiness of life and the slanting, skewed diversity of what each of the sisters needs as a resolution. 

        It’s a majestic evening,  often funny but full and satisfying, a massive cast of 21 – some characters recklessly thrown away,  though each one makes the best of it .  Donnelly shines,  and all the  adult sisters are finely realized, especially Helena Wilson’s nervy virginal Jill. The young versions are perfect too, and musically fabulous in their terrible postwar routines  (respect to the costume team).     

hillsofcaliforniaplay.com. to 15 June

Rating 4

THAT OL’TIME WESTERN DREAM OF 1979

I have a weakness for this  little theatre under the arches and its Players’ Bar.  Honouring a music-hall history, and with some of the cheapest stalls seats in London,  it often hosts smallscale but determined new musicals.  Which  is , of course,  a  medium with a high potential to be dead ropy. Yet  there are happy memories and discoveries to be made.  Here  TITANIC – later touringly successful – was a delight,  REBECCA was a decent night out, and George Takei\s ALLEGIANCE a good true personal story told with passion.  So  – admiring the cowboysish rust-draped and fringed gallery and illuminated stars –  I settled to this one with the usual hopes.  Some of them bore fruit, though infuriatingly not enough.    

        The book is by Dennis Hackin, a love story to his parents’ obsession with the old pioneer West.  Chip Rosenbloom & John Torres wrote music and lyrics, with Michele Brourman.  Quite a gang effort.  It imagines a touring Wild West show in a truck which serves as  home and circus tent (nicely realized in a big revolving box by Amy Jane Cook).   Apparently it did well in LA and elsewhere, and here a British cast   hurls itself at it with manic energy, as befits an oeuvre whose inspirations according to the director Hunter Bird include Frank Capra, the Muppets, Joan Collins in Dynasty, Roy Rogers, and Buffalo Bill.   The setting is 1979, chosen apparently because “the country’s going crazy, partisan politics, civil rights threatened, technology exploding” and everyone needs an escape (Mrs Thatcher’s election gets referred to as part of this apparently terrifying year).

         The story is exuberantly cartoonish : don’t go looking for subtle feelings, though Tarinn Callender as Billy manages to edge towards reality when he remembers a childhood in a Bronx boys’ home, Vietnam service, divorce and prison term, all delivered within minutes.   He has collected his ramshackle troupe to fulfil the showbiz dream.  One is a conjurer, another a stiltwalking clow,  and Karen Muvundukure is a big, big wild voice who introduces it all.  Josh  Butler on, I am happy to report,  a very lively professional debut as Lasso Leonard gets the deathless lyrics “there ain’t no feelin’/ quite like stealin’ cars”. 

       But this low-hope circus suddenly recruits by accident  Antoinette (Emily Benjamin), another great voice fresh from serving as alternate in Cabaret.  She is a chocolate-bar heiress whose husband and stepmother – as we see in neat drop-in New York scenes) have to kill her for the money within thirty days (“drink your murderatini” says the husband, one of the best lines in it).  Hence her flight to the travelling circus.  The problem is that the villains are so much more fun than the goodies; Victoria Hamilton Barritt  as the Dynastyish diva stepmum raises the temperature with sheer physical presence and energy whenever she’s on, as does Alexander McMorran as the hit-man, Sinclair St Clair .  

      But although there were great laughs around me at the matinee, the jokes are oversignalled, and only a couple of songs offer a probability of surviving – notably `Just a Dance” and “Everything is Real”.  Most disappointingly, despite being set amid the eternal cowboy dream,  it all draws harder on bubblegum pop and soft-rock than on the fabulous legacy of Country and Western yearning and adventure.  Not a memory of it, not anywhere that could be noticed.  Why would you throw aside a five-star winner connection like that?  Bring on the harmonicas and hooves. 

    Still, as one song says  it’s `’time to escape for an hour or two / from a world that’s overwhelming you” .  I wanted it to be better.  

charingcrosstheatre.co.uk    to 7 april

rating 3 

SMALL PEOPLE,  BIG PLAY

         A hot summer wedding-day.  The bride Sylvia is a bag of nerves, big sister Hazel competently combing and marshalling her  teenage and smaller daughters while dismissive of the marriage – he’s not a Nottinghamshire lad,  just one of those Poles, whose language that “looks like a wifi password”.   The third sister Maggie has been away, the one defector from the tight but struggling clan in a blighted former pit village.   Enter Auntie Carol with her rollers still in, dating her prime years nicely with “any time I eat a crumpet I miss Kilroy”.  The women’s chat about lip-liner and Brazilian waxes provokes helpless gales of audience laughter to match their wedding-day mood.  The line “Next door’s got a sex pond”  forever skewers hot-tub oneupmanship.  

        Beth Steel’s writing is a firework show, sparkling as any sitcom but artful,  gradually drawing out differences and family bonds, preparing us for conflagration later.    Sinead Matthews’ gruff uncertain dreamy Sylvia is the vulnerable one,  Lisa McGrillis a sassy confident Maggie,  Lucy Black’s Hazel a brave-face wife who works warehouse shifts. Her  husband John is suddenly unemployed, depressed.    Lorraine Ashbourne as Auntie Carol is glorious, determined on fun and fearfully prone to speak truth to the next generation.  When the men appear to be marshalled to the venue they too are defined with deft flicks of language and gesture: Alan Williams the patriarch Tony , an old miner; Derek Riddell the morose John, Philip Whitchurch as Uncle Pete who no longer speaks to Tony in picket-line bitterness from forty years back, but is clearly being made to behave at a niece’s wedding by the formidable Auntie Carol. 

        You have to feel for the Polish outsider.     Marek is a bluff Mark Wootoon, radiating simple kindly warmth as a man who came over on a Megabus with a few pounds, did “shit jobs” in abattoir and up scaffolding, and built his own business.  He has little time for modern complainers.  “You have to decide if you are a victim or superior, can’t be both”.   At the top table of this increasingly tense wedding (the sweaty heat is brilliantly evoked)  he vainly offers both vodka and a job to John ,  tries to tolerate Hazel’s racist sniping and gently points out that the waitress is Lithuanian ,which is not the same as Polish.   His Catholic mother has not come over to approve this culturally alien marriage.   Good old Tony points out that he worked with plenty of Poles in the pits,  after the war.  14-year-old Leanne (who will cause explosive trouble later) has gone vegetarian for the polar bears and evokes a teenage sense of cosmic global doom. This is assisted by Paule Constable’s lighting and Samal Blak’s simple set: the great green arena is both dancefloor and  planet, the glittering witch-ball above sometimes the threat of Oppenheimer’s thousand suns…  

        For alongside  the realism of a struggling working-class community and its incomers (Steel, remember, wrote the marvellous WONDERLAND about the miners’ strike) there is an understated but powerful sense of a wider, cosmic questioning, a deep human need for meaning: like Jerusalem it is both about England and mysterious immensity.    There is humour and thwarted love and social observation  but also wider yearning.  Little Sarah wants to be an astronaut and believes she will; dull unhappy John loved drawing, wished art had been his life;  Tony collects stones, fossils, tells their 480-million year story to his little granddaughter.  You can go for a merry evening of family intrigue and a wedding brawl but come away looking up at the stars, reminded that we are passing ants in a marvellous universe,  for all our heroisms and idiocies.

     That somehing of this quality should be in the little Dorfman might be surprising, except that it so perfectly suits its flexible studio quality: the wedding dinner is at a  round table on a slow revolve, every nuance catchable.  Director Bijan Sheibani keeps the pace up with a series of verbal of coups de theatre,  Steel providing cattleprod shocks to any sitcom complacency.  Not least Uncle Paul’s sudden recitation of the names of all the closed pits, Marek’s volcanic performance of a wedding song, a Tarzan tour de force by Alan Williams,  and Auntie Carol’s post- vomit reminiscences “last time I got drunk on voldka I wiped me bottom wi’ candyfloss..pink, see..”   

       It is also one of those plays where you spend the interval breathing a silent prayer that the second half doesnt fade to melodrama or a predictable political message.   But it  never does.  I rate the experience alongside the first time I saw JERUSALEM. 

nationaltheatre.org.uk. to 16 March

Rating five