Monthly Archives: April 2024

A FEARFUL FUTURE 

  I am wary of futurist dystopias, but this is a real treat: intelligent sci-fi with serious thrills.   As it opens, we are the 2050  audience at the celebration of ten years of “British Pre Crime” : we hear that in  2040 a referendum agreed with the plan to implant “neuropins” in all citizens, behind the ear and near the brain. Through these transmitters a central cadre of trained “precogs” can scan powerful computers every sixty seconds for any sign of amygdala activity indicating a preparation, even subconscious, for violence.   Each pre-murderer, who may have no idea the killing is brewing inside them,   gets put in a Humane Detention Centre. And  bingo!  Suddenly the streets are safe.  Rebels in “Cogito”  (yes, ergo sum, you gottit) break in to demonstrate in favour of free and private thought, and are severely quelled. 

     Our heroine Julia – Jodie McNee in a truly barnstorming performance- is CEO of Pre Crime, dedicating herself to it in memory of a murdered  sister. But the computer suddenly reveals she is a pre-killer herself:  she has to gouge out her neuropin with a corkscrew and go on the run, aided by the Cogitos. Her husband George and smooth MP Ralph are not necessarily  on her side: they are, after all believers,  admitting openly that having  a few accidental innocents picked up by the precogs is  worth it for the scheme’s success.

      It couldn’t  be more timely, for all its fantasy. Not only are we rightly wary of  AI and the pitiless judgment of algorithms in daily life (ask any HR computer analysing CVs) , but have seen the  extraordinary recent idea that  a  “non-crime hate incident” can go  on our record every time  someone overhears a disobliging opinion.   So topicality is  all there, intelligently pre- cogged by the adaptor David Haig’s sharp contemporary references (delightfully, despite all the robotic taxis and video-programmed skyscrapers, the 2050 train still says Mind the Gap).  

     There is little space for character, but McNee and Nick Fletcher’s  George express some realities of grief, jealousy and living with a partner’s obsession. And more widely  the final scenes touch, melodramatically but without preaching, on truths about deterrence, moral self-mastery and redemption

      The plot’s ancestor and skeleton is Philip K Dick’s Cold War novella; it became a Spielberg film. But Haig’s  adaptation carves its own track, adjusting much and keeping the weirdest revelation – which Spielberg threw away to make max use of Samantha Morton with no hair –  till near the end. It is bracingly theatrical and properly thrilling: full of gorgeous contemporary jokes – like the one about Apple watches being back as trendy retro toys, or as a robotic  personal AI laser—-  annoys its owner and is threatened by being de-programmed to be a mere Alexa, or worse, Siri.  

     There is also a lovely parallel laid before us in Max Webster’s sharp ninety minutes of accelerating direction.  In the Pre Crime procedure  human neurons are still needed – at a nasty price – to supplement machine learning.  And  here the  fabulous scifi projections and near-holograms  are combined with warm human messiness:  wild crowd choreography in the street scenes and  a lot of spectacularly athletic clambering and  crawling by the fugitives,  as they fight their way into weird laboratories over  breathtaking frames and along high steel catwalks.   McNee kicks out the window of two robotic taxis, beautifully.   Jon Bausor’s design and Tal Rosner’s video projections combine breathtakingly, and the costumes have a lovely sly futurism , odd lapels on an MP’s pinstripe and peculiar jodphurs on Julia. 

     So anyone with a teenager who only does video games and chase movies can here, in historic theatre surroundings,   convert them on the spot to understand that sometimes, live action by real people in the very room is irreplaceable. Loved it.  

lyric.co.uk.   To 18 may.   Let’s hope it transfers.

Rating 4.

Sent from my iPad

THE COURT AND THE BEDCHAMBER

      Theatre will never tire of the Tudors, nor should it.  From every new angle they offer a dramatic gift which never stops giving.  Here’s 1534,  and Mary Boleyn  in a very understandable temper, telling it like it is.   “I am an adulteress and a whore” she says .”My sister is an adulteress, a whore, a bigamist and Queen of England!’ 

     Mary  (a spirited Lucy Phelps, crackling with defiant life) has had enough of being ordered about  by a lordly patriarchal society, including her ambitious, nervous, probably gay brother George.  She’s done her turn as royal mistress,  lost her husband to the sweating-sickness, and now wants to be left alone down at Hever Castle with the man she properly loves,  the low-born farmer Stafford. Small chance.  Above them all, throughout this properly thrilling play there hang jousting-lances pointing downward:   sometimes descending to become barriers or the posts of a great bed.  None of the characters have ever been safe or fully in control of their lives, not from the very start.  Except, of course, Henry VIII. 

         This is a very classy production indeed, which must surely live beyond its Chichester summer.  Mike Poulton wrote the play based on Philippa Gregory’s carefully researched novel:  he knows his Tudor world, having brilliantly brought the first two of Hilary Mantel’s  Cromwell trilogy to the stage (his absence from the third being the reason it was sadly flatter).    And Lucy Bailey directs with characteristic speed and brio, having wisely enrolled Ayse Tashkiran to create the movement. That’s a key to its atmosphere and solemnity,   renaissance dance from time to time illustrating  the fragile marital, sexual and power politics of that edgy court.   Orlando Gough’s music, under ChrisGreen of GreenMatthews,  is perfectly judged too:   evocative of period but without pastiche (the religious chants wisely avoid the easy cliché of plainsong).   The whole thing is just very, very good: it  holds together, and holds the heart.

      We encounter the Boleyn siblings – Mary, Anne, and George – at first ten years earlier, huddled together in nightgowns, laughing. They are all under the sway of Alex Kingston’s ferociously  ambitious and not at all maternal Lady Elizabeth and their noble  Howard “Uncle Norfolk”.  Mary has been married off to a discontented but complaisant husband,  who puts up with her having become  the King’s acknowledged mistress “before the wedding flowers faded” , and mother to his illegitimate son and daughter (the latter ancestress of the late Queen Mother, by the way).  But as the elders say `”Bastards are worse than girls!”  .

          Anne has a passion for  Harry Percy, and the three hold a ceremony of  wedding vows – “Once betrothed and bedded, what can they do?” she says – Freya Mavor playing it rather colder and more selfish than her sister.   The elders are furious – “beds are business!” and love irrelvant.  Queen Katharine, a stately Spanish galleon stepping through the dances,  is kind to Mary; having failed to produce the essential male heir she will shortly be divorced. 

          The King’s eyes are on Anne now: watch James Atherton, predatory, circling round the dance. She holds off his physical approaches until wedlock, as the Harry Percy marriage and bedding  are hastily denied.  Cromwell and Cardinal know which way their bread is buttered and how to keep their heads safe. George, the loving brother,  pulls rank because he is the man,  but lives in dread because the rumours of him and his very close friend Francis are increasing as his sister’s star fades.  Lily Nichol, as the thwarted and bitchy wife forced on him, is no help.   Anne’s mother and uncle moan of Anne’s desperate reproductive attempts “Until she gets him a son and heir we tread on glass!|”   It is all,  as Mary so rightly observed in   that outburst above, disgraceful.   

          But fantastic drama:  by focusing on Mary and Anne,  on the helplessness of women in that world and the guile they are forced to use,  a real sympathetic urgency throbs through the story.  There are terrible rows,  fears, pregnancies, births,  and when poor Anne has a malformed “Satanic” foetus which assists her progress towards disgrace and death,  there is treachery by a terrible old midwife (Kemi-Bo Jacobs nicely doubled with Queen Katharine) .   But there is loyalty and determination in the story,   and in the manipulated women, especially Mary, a humane nobility .  Character and endurance ring down the centuries.  Altogether terrific. 

box office cft.org.uk  to 11 May

rating five

MEN BEHAVING RIDICULOUSLY

The lord of Navarre and three nobles have resolved to retreat and study for three years, eschewing  female company: so even the princess  suing for land has to be encamped outside the court with her ladies, with messages  exchanged  more or less comically through interfering underlings. But of course all four men fall in love, break their vows, find one another out in forbidden yearning, break the vow  and proceed to be tricked by the wily ladies.  In Emily Burns’  s lively, rather overlong production it has been sportily set on a Pacific island and the lords, in shorts and shoulder-sweaters, are the tech bros from Silicon Valley who run our lives now.

     Abiola Owokonira ‘s prince  is good and Luke Thompson as Berowne (an RSC debut) is the life and engine of the Lords group,  and the only one showing some depth of intelligence, while Melanie-Joyce Bermudez, also new here,  carries real dignity as the Princess, even in the scenes where she is amid her gigglingly Instagrammy gal-pals. But It’s an odd play, early Shakespeare; overrich with wordplay and banter (indeed it has the longest madeup word in the canon,  ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’. That  crops up in one of the more entertaining moments between Tony Gardner’s surefootedly funny Holofernes and his underling (Nathan Foad as Costard, generally seen in chaotic remnants of a spa-day wrapper).  There is a comedy Spanish idiot called Don Armadio, shamelessly overdone in tight tennis kit by Jack Bardoe, and a lot of physical comedy elsewhere, most effective in the hiding scene where up and down the palace staircases and trees the four lords spy on each other. Jordan Metcalfe’s Boyet is reliably funny, and at one point does the same terrified squeeze-past as he did in the same director’s Jack Absolute.

     For Shakespearian interest it is useful: here are prefigurings of later plays: disguises, overhearings, Mercutioid banter, clever shrewish womanhood outwitting men, classical references, a play within a play messed up by underlings. But it hasnt the tautness and pace of the great plays, and the director does little to tighten it,: a lot of the allusive wordplay needs cutting to keep a modern audience halfway content and up with the story. Last time it surfaced here was in a brilliant double with Much Ado, and set on the eve of WW1, which gave pathos to the stoey of overheated young men and their delusions about love and women.  This one is baggier, more pleased with itself, indulging every red-nose physicality.  There are moments when you suspect, sitting in the big theatre, that this production’s  very presence there is sending a smug message  like the M & S ad which presumed too royally on respect: as if it was saying “This is not just larks with background ukeleles and actors gurning and doing silly voices and messing around in beachwear – this is ROYAL SHAKESPEARE  actors gurning and larking around in beachwear. Therefore it must be good.” 

     And you think OK, inconsequential as the story is and overblown the playing-for-laughs and real golf-buggy antics, they will come to a resolution, surely?  They will move the heart as even great comedies do,  and earn our forgiveness for the longeurs between the good  jokes over three hours,  and the almost unbearable final  dressing- up- box sequence of classical-sixth-form  jokes about Pompey , Hercules and Hector.  

     In the famously shock ending,  when news that the  Princess’ father king has suddenly died and all revels and wooings are postponed for a year and a day, that redemption almost happens: suddenly the Princess stands crowned above, and the ensemble sing, bery beautifully, a Polynesian hymn of homage and nationhood. And you leave wishing you’d stayed as engaged as that all through. Not least because a fine cast deserved a tighter, better show. 

Rsc.org.uk to 18 May

Rating 3. Just.

MUD, MARSH, MONEY

     Now here’s a bracing new way to do Dickens:  avoid sets full of Victoriana by keeping the stage pretty much empty beneath a set of uneasily moving lighting-bars evocative of a tidal river. Cut out all the harrumphing Cheeryble rhetoric and lovable Peggotying; choose a late,  least-familiar novel and  get Ben Power to fillet the meaning out of the story  in short scenes, as he did with the Lehman Trilogy.  Then find a modern , eerily original and hypnotic songwriter – PJ Harvey –  to set  thirteen songs for individuals and whole-cast chorus  at moments of high emotion.  

       I suspect Ian Rickson’s production , based on Our Mutual Friend,  will be, as they say, Marmite.   It’s over three hours long , lacks set-piece glamour,  has no desire to razzle-dazzle you,  and Bunny Christie’s strange set of moving bars of light overhead may be  downright unsettling until you see it as reflections from our ancient uneasy estuary.  

        But  it is a sort of weird masterpiece and exactly what the NT should be doing.   I was drawn  into the idea of the murky old river-life of the London Thames from the moment the cast (21 strong) scrambled singing from the downstage pit and Jake Wood’s Gaffer Hexam – a plank representing his boat –  found a drowned corpse, picked its pockets  as was his way,  and towed it home while his gentle daughter Lizzie (Ami Tredrea)  began narrating their world.  

     The plot has all the intricate bonkers quality we love in Dickens: a bad old miser has left his money , made in “dust” – rubbish disposal – to his son John who ran off to Africa.  But the condition is that John marries Bella, from a low-born but respectable family. Since the returning son is thought to be the corpse, the money goes to Noddy Boffin, an employee who is thus propelled into the affluent middle classes and adopts Bella into his richer home out of kindness.  Baffled by business, he takes on a secretary who is of course actually the non-dead John (Tom Mothersdale).  He observes and falls in love with Bella, who is getting a bit flighty in her new upper-middle status and unkind to her honest struggling real family.   Meanwhile back down the social scale Gaffer the corpse-fishing riverman is thought to be a murderer, and dies – leaving daughter Eliza to struggle alone to get her brother Charley the education which will enable him to rise in society,   while their reputation is blighted by the father’s crime.  

       Which by the way he didn’t do. Oh, and up in Holborn – each London district flagged in surtitle – there are lawyers, as ever in Dickens,  including Eugene (Jamael Westman) who is fated to fall in love with Lizzie and educate her by reading Ovid together in the sunset beside Deptford Creek.

        So it’s all about money and class and injustice and deprivation and the upward struggle of education, and it’s complicated.  But Rickson keeps it absolutely clear:  characters are drawn economically but sharply,  Bella McLean’s Bella able, within brief moments of dialogue, to develop and grow up. The two romantic heroes’ glamour is  offset by the fact that by and large the women have more sense than the men, though tending to be victims of their own generosity (Dickens by this time knew a lot about that, not to his credit).  

       And there are moments of great entertainment: some considerable laughs  are provided by Jenny Wren,  fiery little Ellie-May Sheridan on a lovely professional debut as the teenage daughter of a drunkard ,making her way by confecting dolls’ bonnets in Limehouse poverty with Eliza.  She embodies a pitiless adolescent feminism,  her one-line retorts bringing more than one snort of unexpected laughter.     Other good laughs  are provided by Scott Karim , barnstormingly nasty  as prim Bradley Headstone,  the savage rote-learning schoolteacher who certainly deserves to end up in the river.  

      The quintessential Dickens lines Power picks up  or adapts are always choice ones, like the policeman explaining that it’s hardest to find murderers because  “Burgling, and pocket picking, wants apprenticeship. Murder, any of us could do”.  Or bumbling Noddy Boffin, proud to have his “shirts made by a an who goes on holiday with the Prime Minister”,  and advising Bella not to write off John as a lover since “When Mrs Boffin met me she thought me an utter vegetable, (but) she’s grown to tolerate me”.  

         The pleasure is like reading a long novel,  flowing alongside and immersing yourself in the brawling, hoping, tragicomic business of small significant lives both middling and harsh.  You live with them in a London of intermingled fortunes and feelings.   To build those three hours of escape and empathy PJ Harvey’s music plays a vital part. The singing is simple and  unadorned,   every song natural to the moment, expressing its truth.   Harvey’s tunes are struggles and yearnings, long mournful notes and falling triplets. They have all the atmospheric power of a river buoy’s whistle and clang on a foggy night.  Loved the journey. 

nationatheatre.org.uk. to 22 June 

Rating four.

REFLECTIONS ON A FAT KNIGHT

Due to train disruption – speak not of overhead wires and wind – I had to bail out at the interval,  from  Robert Icke’s epic three and a half hour modern-dress combination of Henry IV parts 1 and 2.

         But I got my money’s worth, oh yes.,  Patt I, the least cut down, takes us to the interval in two magnificent straight hours.  We reach Hotspur’s desth at Shrewsbury and Falstaff’s faked death,  with almost all the favourite Falstaff moments   (though I would have liked to see more of Clare Perkins’ Quickly and may have to go to Norwich for that later).   But we do see the beginning of young Hal’s journey to becoming – well, to put it in modern terms, more of a William than a Montecito-poloplaying Harry (though heaven knows Meghan is no Falstaff or Quickly). 

    But I digress. This turns out to be not only what we all, lip-lickingly, expected –  a chance to see the tireless Ian McKellen doing Falstaff – but an intelligent, fast-paced modern take. Icke gives us surtitle information about where we are, and – importantly – about the losses in battle: these are khaki troops, Falstaff and all, and there is immense sound and flash of all too familiar battle, though Hal and Hotspur end up close, with knives (and in a departure from custom, Prince Hal’s final blow makes no pretence at chivalry: almost in that moment a rogue alongside Falstaff. The “reaurrection” of the fat knightis brilliantly handled, his desecration of Hotspur’s corpse both repellent and irresistible.

   And that is the first moment when I properly felt what McKellen has been talking about: that the beloved Falstaff is in no way lovable, no cosy rogue but a gangster. It ahould be apparent earlier, with his venal abuse of the  conscription powers given  him by Hal: the only time I have seen that forced-labour of convicts and cripples come to lofe is in Greg Doran’s RSC production when the cannon-fodder victims limped, in silent silhouette, behind Sher’s joshing Falstaff.  

      But McKellen leaves it longer to repel us.  His take on the great speech decrying “honour” is very much his own, too: he means to duck the fighting , of course he will,  but makes it a joke and a mockery of those who believe in honour. . Another way to take it is what Roger Allam did at the Globe: his was a Falstaff whose shining quality was that he was cleverer, just thought more than his fiery young friend: he made you feel that he feels the pity of war. This Falstaff just makes you feel what a good chance it is for personal profit. Both being truths, that’s another pleasure of seeing Shakespeare well done.

Toheeb Jimoh’s  Hal is good, especially in his moments of tryihng to be, or look, grownup at last.   His desire to reform bubbles under the surface even at his wildest: the  tavern play-acting of his confrontation with his father is fascinating,  as Falstaff takes the mick but then Hal tries on the kingly manner, half-uneasy.  

Richard Coyle’s tweedy, impatient King is good too:  suits the sense of a selfconsciously heavy father,  weighed down by his own past of rough dealing.    And of course at the centre always is  Ian McKellen:  vast-bellied, contemptuous, nearing his end and knowing it but burping noisily into unrepentant old age.  Had to see him: he’s  lately been Lear and Hamlet and pantomime dames and a sly gay seducer in Frank and Percy, and this Falstaff is a pleasure, a masterclass:  every pose and pause immaculate, every unnerving moral question tantalizingy dangled. 

        Had I not had to flee in disorder to Shenfield and beyond to have any chance of home , I would have stayed rhe last 70 minute sprint to “I know thee not old man “.   Probably will, as the tour goes on. It’s a heroic tour:   here till 22 June then Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich,  Newcastle, many very good prices.  Is it not wonderful that one of our premier stars,  in his eighties, should be determined to do this for his country?   

all boxoffice bookings:  playerkingstheplay.co.uk 

Can’t ‘star’ it, as lost the final hour. 

WHY HALESWORTH MATTERS TO THE NATIONAL DRAMATIC ECOSYSTEM

   The other day I did an overview-preview from some dress rehearsals at the INK short play festival in Suffolk (scroll below),  where each “Pod” may contain up to five short plays.   Now its four crowded days have passed, a few comments.

         Firstly, an audience point was made at the Future of the Arts debate:  that we should respect the short play – 5 to 15 minutes – just as we respect the short stories of masters like Graham Greene or HH Munro.  A lot can be conveyed in a short time.  Some of the fun at INK lies in comic pieces which would not fall amiss in a TV sketch show – another ignored art form, too expensive for the networks now:    whatever happened to the golden age of Armstrong and Miller, Victoria Wood,  Enfield?    But others are seriously thoughtful plays in their own right; and others again may prove to be the seed of full-length drama.  That is why INK is so important, and so unique.

         So – aside from the ones mentioned in the preview below – here are a few others worth picking out. I liked Richard Laurence’s quickfire cocktail party in which ideologies converse, unite their sympathies or bicker about outsiders  – Marxism and Conservatism both hating Environmentalism and the suspicion it is gangng up with Populism to give birth to  Authoritanism.   In the same pod Martin Foreman offers a wicked take on the age of doorstep delivery;   and two plays about gay and teenage-influencer culture were met, respectively,  by close interest and hilarity by an audience which probably never touches much  discussion of such lives on TV or in print.   that’s another boost to human awareness that INK provides.   Sometimes it’s familiarity -like the  one on doorstep deliveries – and sometimes unfamiliarity that does the trick.

     In another pod there were Celtic nuances at the White Swan:    JOhn Boyne’s gloomy Galway landlady but better,  Mike Guerin’s duel between political bill-posters.  LLoyd Evans “Terrorist working from home” neatly skewered both that culture and the familiar misery of bureaucratic form-filling.     But above all a really remarkable comedy by Tim Connery,  LIght Entertainment,  set up rivalry  for a  new quiz show job between the two most familiar figures of our time.  Viincent Franklin is the Les-Dawson or Brucie figure, the old pro comedian with a daft but irresistiblg gag for every subject.  HIs rival is closer to a handsome smoothie presenter fresh off reality TV and one bland album.  The former, monstrous and hilarious,  knows that controlling an audience involves creating a kind of helpless terror (think of Dame Edna). The latter wants to be smooth and cosy and safely dull , with scriptwritten gags provided .  But they are both  men terrified of not working, not being seen.   It is the cleverest piece I have seen for months. I will look out for Connery’s name everywhere now.  And Franklin’s too: he is also credited as directing that pod.  

    There were more; it is sad to have missed them.   But pay attention to INK: it is always worth it.

      CROOKBACK DICK REIMAGINED

         Saving Richard III from Shakespeare’s calumny seems to have a particular appeal to women: probably because around his accession in the 1480s there surged both female ambition and female victimhood . Both are stunningly present even in Shakespeare’s story of his murders and infanticide , which was basically a 16c court  conspiracy-theory to solidify the dubious legitimacy of the Tudors.    Josephine Tey wrote the brilliant detective story “The Daughter of Time”,  debunking that theory and making a hero of the King.  Then Philippa Langley, an ardent Ricardian,  discovered his skeleton twelve years ago beneath a council car park in Leicester,  and put paid to the hunchback story (mere scoliosis, hardly crippled at all) .   Now comes Philippa Gregory,  a distinguished historical novelist (her Boleyn girl is at Chichester shortly).       She was among the entranced crowd at the royal funeral in 2015,  and resloved to make a new play of his life. 

          Which, she honestly admits, cannot ever be the whole truth.  The result is no classic, but interesting and – thanks to Katie Posner’s imaginative direction and a rather wonderful in-the-round disc design of stairs and trenches by Richard Kent – often very fine to look at.   Smoke rises, firelight burns,  hooded figures process and chant,  and Gregory’s determination to get inside the medieval mind does at times produce a useful spookiness.  Talking of curses and witches  the narrator – Tom Kanji’s lecturing  “Historian” – at one point usefully remarks “This is the sort of thing they thought when they were thinking that kind of thing”.    Fair enough.  It wouldn’t be the same without the rhetorical Shakespearian reference to an unseen world, and indeed once or twice Richard quotes Macbeth directly.  

       There’s an awkwardness, though , in the fact that the Historian figure at first doesn’t seem aware of how much has been pretty well debunked already (the murder of the young princes, the hunchback, the incestuous marriage to his niece).  And a more terrible clunking awkwardness when – just as it becomes clear how many other suspects there are for the Princes’ murders, including an order from the terrifyingly Margaret Beaufort – the historian starts talking about how it’s hard to focus on these two when so many other children die as in small boats “on a darkening sea”.  We know this. We know that she is trying to tell the story in two periods and that ours is far from perfect.   But it grates,  makes you feel as if you’re at school assembly.     

      Aside from that, the storytelling is good , the characters sharp (plenty of neat doubling)  and the experience becomes better in the second half (the first  risks confusion, despite a wonderfully cheeky rap-type sequence when all the characters explain which of their in-laws or relatives they have had killed).    But once Richard is crowned, and embarking on his wish to create a free and peaceful land,  the excitement does rise.  And it is quite funny when Laura Smithers’ genuinely threatening matriarchal Margaret,  determined to get her “1-32nd royal” son Henry on the throne,  barks “I will never obey a man”   “She doesn’t mean it!” squawks the Historian in his white suit and Burberry,  anxiously  mansplaining that ‘medieval women” accepted being second best.  

        And so it wends on to the end on Bosworth Field, a battle beautifully staged despite a mere cast of 8,  and there is majesty in the moment when “the Tudor dragon comes out of the sun”  and the last Plantagenet is the last English King to fight and die in battle.   But if part of the aim was to make us fall in love with Richard as a person, it doesn’t quite get there.  Kyle Row is a solid performer,  but plays it a bit thuggish, a bit unsympathetic despite the King’s virtues.  And the script does not catch fire to help him.     

theatreroyal.org  to 27 April

rating three 

DIVING ABOUT IN A UNIQUE SHORT-PLAY FESTIVAL

         Join me on a parked Hoppa minibus where Henry VIII is chatting up a new Jane.  She is not impressed by the Tudor-Tinder qualifications  of a man who divorced two wives and killed two,  but he  protests that he was “in a bad place back then”.Since faking his death and living on for 477 years  he’s taken up yoga, and deserves a new start.

        This fifteen-minute treat is in the most unusual of the Halesworth settings for this year’s INK festival;  why not, since the bus usefully ferries people netween the venues around the Cut ?.  Next I dive down to the Kiln studio for one of the radio plays, where  Richard Braine pays homage to his fellow Ipswichman, Sir Alf Ramsay.  It imagines the 1974 moment when the hero of 1966 was sacked as England manager and his (real) friend Richard Burton might have invited Alf to join him  and Liz Taylor in Mexico. Romantic Welsh actor tries to make staid, seasick Ipswich man go marlin-fishing. 

          I am in mid-festival (runs to end of Sunday ) and diving in and out of several days dress-rehearsals  at INK ,  to report on what sort of fun is on the way this long weekend.   The festival , in its tenth year, is unique in the UK as a showcase for new short plays: it’s  enabled many first-time and improving writers  to see professional actors and careful directors of all generations make  their work come alive.    In a nationally stressed theatre ecosystem this seed-corn of theatre art is vital.  For the rest of us,  as  pure entertainment  its one-hour “pods”are a treat.   Each one holds  up to five different plays ,  enabling  audiences to see characters, ideas, and some very good jokes professionally delivered without a journey and a long evening.  

       Topics  this year  range from shivering threat to sly comedy:  plays  about families, love, crimes, artificial intelligence ,  scams,  drones, ageing, gangsters: all of life.     There’s speed-awareness and speed-dating, smartphone-flirting and, in Guy Newsham’s play in Pod 6,  the funniest launch into space you’ll ever see:  Newsham is  Canadian,   and remarkably knowledgeable about blast-off protocols. 

          In Pod  2, just up the road where Suffolk New College becomes The Apollo .   “Bed Head” is a  beautifully off-the-wall imagining in which a young man gets trapped inside a girl’s imagination about him;  in the same set Hattie Chapman becomes  a modern take on Eve in Genesis , a gangster in leopardprint and, most strikingly an grumpy, aged Welsh grandmother who is being headhunted  by a smooth American  as  a quarterback in his American football team.  Watching his pitch, absurd as it is,  I kept thinking about every USA big-talker who has taken  over dazzled British companies and changed them.  No idea whether WIlliam Patterson wrote it as a parable, but that’s the pleasure of theatre: pushes your head outside the box.    Chris Larner , playing her son in that one, was only five minutes earlier doing an arresting, tenderly moving monologue by Gary Ogin in which he explains a man’s OCD and army career while skilfully putting on full make-up and costume as a clown.   

       Indeed apart from the crazy diversity of plays and themes INK is also a rare chance to watch tiny masterclasses in acting. Four or five plays within an hour can vary from dark themes to dementia or absurd comedy.   I particularly enjoyed  Joe McArdle in Pod 6,  moving between a crisp NASA spaceship commander, tough Scottish mental nurse and overconfident middle-manager while Charlotte Parry moves from lovesick co-pilot to doctor to outraged wife brandishing muffins.

             There are a few star guest writers,  and  Pat Whymark of Common Ground has a commissioned full-scale play about addiction and sexting,  which will  go round schools  like INK’s tour  last year about County Lines . Some authors have had fringe or radio work before, but many are first-timers seeing their ideas come to life. So it’s      

a feast of imagination serious and quirky,  emotional and oddball,  set from Bungay to Bosnia and painful cocktail parties to  NASA.  One of this year’s innovations is a brand-new partnership with the University of East Anglia , which runs an MA in script writing:  five of the students’ plays were chosen, and three of the five cast in “Pod 7” are students.  Those,  I must say,  have absolutely nailed an ability to play teenagers at their most endearingly  annoying (top wriggling from Theresa Jane Knight as a lovestruck girl gazing at a lad’s window, and brilliant gawkiness from the lads).   The writers’ topics ranage from school-bus dating to a Filipino fisherman’s life and perils, and finally explode in a  chaotically grumpy  family seaside scene (all too recognizable round here).  That one made me reckon that in young Grace Bartle we are nurturing the next Alan Ayckbourn.  So we should be.  INK is doing its bit.  

www.inkfestival.org 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/weareinkfestival

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ink.festival

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@inkfestival9235

X (Twitter):https://twitter.com/INK_festival

HOLINESS IN THE WHALE

        It pretty much had me harpooned at the words  “Call me Ishmael”.   As Mark Arends’ earnestly naive schoolteacher speaks the opening lines and begins to pack his carpet-bag,  it is clear that this production of Herman Melville”s classic is properly in  love with the novel’s strange, harsh nobility.   

          Fleet though it is – two hours including interval,  and shorn of 19c orotundity – adaptor Sebastian Armesto of Simple8  and director Jesse Jones respect it in every way:  in language and attitude, its sense of the ocean’s rootless people and their rough lives of threat and beauty,  and the manic obsession of Captain Ahab.    By the time Ishmael has bedded down nervously with Queequeg the Polynesian “savage’  (Tom Swale),  and been made a fool of with his patronizing preconceptions,  I’m sold,  five minutes in.  It wouild have taken a lot for this beautifully created show to lose me. 

        It never does. With rare delicacy the scenes aboard blend with shanties, hymns, and ballads, always perfectly judged:   the loss of Franklin, the Greenland Whale,  Will your Anchor Hold.  A final hymn after the disaster sets your hairs on edge.   Nine  actor-musicians are casually expert with accordion, fiddle and guitar.  The ship is created with stark economy  but its scaffolding and planks are  more than capable of evoking a square-rigger’s  world  (I have sailed as crew on several: it feels right, understated and businesslike,  as the crew clamber, haul and hasten, positioning planks as decks and lowering  rowing-whalers).  

        You are drawn deep into a world twenty thousand miles from home  by Rachel Nanyanjo’s carefully choreographed movement and , not least,  Johanna Town’s remarkably created lighting: a man-overboard moment is shockingly arresting, suddenly and profoundly expressing the emptiness of any comrade’s death.    When the watch below turn uneasily , woken from sleep by the thump of Ahab’s ivory leg, you’re with them.    At  the terrible red rain of bloody victory falls from their first whale and the crew settle to the horrid routine of flaying and boiling you shudder with the wondering newcomer Ishmael:  “Fear,  joy,  guilt..what does it mean?  

       And then, turning schoolmaster, he  explains in another  beautifully economical piece of staging the marvel of the precious, terrifying head.  As the oldest crewman says, reproving the gung-ho hostility of a young harpooner,   “there’s a holiness to a whale”.  

             We are haunted by unseen whales as much as they are;  the great creature that took his leg obsesses Ahab,  the veteran with his charts  who “knows their hidden journeys as I know the veins in my hands” .Guy Rhys, in his impossible ivory leg,  plays it quietly terrifying in his steadfast quest for vengeance.   Hannah Emanuel’s decently sensible, homesick Starbuck protests at his  crazy extension of the journey, risking the loss of the cargo  – “what we came twenty thousnd miles to get is worth saving!” .  Tension builds.  The  men  josh and argue,  but when one harpooner makes claim to “my whale” a wiser says angrily “A whale is his own beast!”. 

        Armesto’s skill is in picking, from the huge book, these shiveringly sacred moments. Ishmael himself sees the grandeur of the whale as alongside “Elizabeth the first, Shakespeare..”  The tight, versatile, skilled ensemble play out the fearful tale; you can’t take your eyes off it.  Melville drew no trite moral and nor does this rendering:  humans  have always survived by hunting wild creatures and  felt that shiver of kinship, mystery and terror.   Two hundred years ago whale oil  lit most of the world’s lamps and oiled its machinery, whale blubber made soaps, ointments and food and   the world in return hunted them almost to extinction.  But even the most savage hunters of every century have tasted the grievous mystery, wonder  and sorrow which Melville found long ago, as a green-hand in a forecastle.  It is a deep eternal sense to share, and this  beautiful production achieves it.

royalandderngate.co.uk   to  13 April

rating   5  

Then touring to 22 June:  Perth, Wiltons, Ipswich, Northern Stage, St Mary’s, Blackpool, York, Malvern,  Oxford Playhouse.

WUTHERING SIBLINGS

     Grace Smart the designer sets the scene as we settle in with a sweet miniature moor, all harebells and heather and cloddy bits of earth.  But it rises in the air as soon as Gemma Whelan’s cheerful, swaggering Charlotte Bronte has toured the auditorium demanding to know what our favourite novel is.  The overhead grassland stays up there throughout, just occasionally throwing down sheets of paper or a microphone. 

         Charlotte opens the family scene with her two sisters – Rhiannon Clements as gentle Anne and Adele James as the tougher middle-sister Emily,  whose first enterprise is throwing a bucket of water over the drunken brother Bramwell.   Charlotte already longs to express herself publicly, to be “forever known” and the poet laureate Southey has written a letter back to her.  It repressively tells her that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life” because women have other jobs to get on with, and should do so. And off we go, in a revue-style but heartfeltly indignant feminist take on the struggle of all three to break into the 1840s literary world from an impecunious Yorkshire parsonage.  

       Reimagining the Brontes of Haworth is a perennial temptation: in an am-dram imagination by the gipsy artist Vernon Parker Rose I once played an imaginary extra sister called Shirley who did all the work while real Heathcliffs, Rochesters  and Lintons lounged around the house drinking with Bramwell (one cast member kept forgetting his lines, and I can tell you there is quite a skill in prompting someone out of the side of your mouth away from the audience).  And then there is the more famous appropriation, when in   Comfort Farm the intellectual Mybug is convinced that brother Branwell wrote all the books.

    This version,  by Sarah Gordon,  directed by Natalie Ibu of Northern Stage, has a more serious purpose. But it executes it with plenty of jokes, a lot of thoroughly modern “dickhead-and-fuckwit”  language,  and on a neat outer revolve a lot of quickfire visual jokes and sound effects (when Anne goes off to be a governess, the obliging ensemble of five nip out with a portable gale,  and the second act obliges with a genuine coconut-clopping carriage). 

      Sarah Gordon has usefully picked up on something I had not quite grasped before; that the three sisters’ novels were all , in 1947,  published within three months:  Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (a rapid hit), then Anne’s Agnes Grey and Emily’s Wuthering Heights.  The relationships between the sisters – collaborative, pseudonymous as three “Bell” brothers, and sometimes envious – are the core of the story. Certainly it is not improbable that Anne would be irritated by Charlotte borrowing the governess-figure and getting her version published  before the gentler satire and romance of Agnes Grey;   nor that Charlotte’s disappointment about the initially rejected one about her Belgian professor was keen. And we know that Anne’s far more powerful , shocking and angry Tenant of Wildfell Hall was – after her  death – blocked from reprinting by Charlotte. The drunken violent husband was too close to Branwell, by then also dead.  The truth of it was too painful, or discreditable. 

       All this rolls out between them, and between various more or less hilarious male figures – snotty publishers, a chorus of admiring or shocked critics, condemnatory moralists.   As Charlotte observes, they had to write because the normal life of a Victorian woman left an awful lot of spare time for “putting dead people’s hair in lockets”  and as to private life”you wonder why we didn’t smile in photographs – we were horny and terrified”.  The moment when at last, outing themselves as females, she and Anne go to London and are invited to a private male club is evoked as a sort of  blokey Groucho rave.  It drives Anne to hide and afflicts Charlotte with unwonted loss of personal confidence.   Being “in the room” with the Dickenses and Thackerays was both thrilling and dismaying.  

       And from the fine and funny Ensemble Nick Blakeley appears at the end as Elizabeth Gaskell,  politely-mannered biographer of Charlotte, to put her in a glass display case.  So we can reflect on how and why the reinventions of the Brontes have always been necessary, and salutary.  Some of the stuff about literary “gatekeepers” may strike a useful note with female playwrights too: the NT hasn’t done entirely badly in recent years, but 74% of successful dramatists in the UK are still chaps…

Nationaltheatre.org.uk.   To 25 may 

Rating three. 

THE GAME’S AFOOT. EVENTUALLY.

Nick Lane’s adaptation of Conan Doyle’s late, broodingly complicated novel has met many huzzahs from Sherlock Holmes fans, previously here, on tour and  streaming. So as a Southwark supporter I thought I should at last have a look now it’s back.   Lane’s take on the 221b household is certainly refreshing: both Bobby Bradley’s lanky arrogant Sherlock and the tweedily amiable Watson of Joseph Derrington are more youthful than usual, and Alice Osmanski’s Mrs Hudson un-Victorian in her laid-back confident impertinence. So far, so modern. They double – everyone does, often tripling  – and Victoria Spearing’s set, rearranged with choreographic elegance by the cast, admirably serves a three- sided house.

      It has to , since the scene changes from Baker St to a Kentish murder scene and repeatedly  to 1875 Pennsylvania, on a train and in the headquarters of a freemasonic gangster set, based apparently on the Molly Maguires and their pursuit by a Pinkerton agent. 

  But there’s the trouble,  not really the fault of the adaptor – though he does draw out the Pennsylvania scenes – and certainly not the nimble cast. The Victorian obsession with retro American gansterism can rapidly pall on us today.   The first half drags, intricacies getting downright dull sometimes despite spirited performances from Gavin Molloy as a snarling mafioso and – not  least – from Osmanski in two of her many quick-change  frocks, plus a gun.  Blake Kubena in a ponytail is another villain – or is he?  How deeply do we care?

    The second half picks up, especially when Molloy returns, heavily Brylcreemed, in a flashback as an Irish-accented Moriarty taunting Sherlock in an art gallery (that’s a very good bit) and triggering a temporary breach in his bromance with Watson . So on it winds, with Pennsylvania kicking off with shots and knives while back home  Holmes discovers the devilishly cunning solution to the mystery of the missing dumbell, the bicycle in the moat, the yellow overcoat…

   Well, it runs at 2 hours 45 minutes,  heavy for this material,  but those who know the Conan Doyle canon will love it for its faithfulness, and indeed its expansion of the American scenes.   And the cast are fine, especially Molloy and Osmanski. Tristan Parkes’ music is perfect,  using echoes of old America and thriller moments with a rare sensitive skill.   Perhaps it’s just that simpler souls like me ruefully prefer our Sherlock in his more strictly UK adventures:   hounds, speckled bands, disguises, rascally lascars in opium dens and the occasional scandalous diamond necklace.  

Southwarkplayhouse.co.uk.     To. 13 April

DOSTOYEVSKY IN DALTON

      “These days” says the man on the empty stage,  “people are precious to me, even when they insult me.  I have woken up”.  His stark features do not smile as he says it, because he has an urgent stoey  to tell.   Greg Hicks, restlessly prowling with a suitcase, making himself shabby, explains how he made a career, made friends, lost both as it dawned on him that ‘human existence is an unhappy accident in a malign universe”, and that there is no reason for anything.   He evokes a Dalston pub where people are drunk,  quarrel,  laugh at him and one another;  the streets he crosses uncaring amid lights and horns (brief skilful projections, flashes, sounds off).  He tells of meeting a desperate child  asking for help, and ignoring her because nothing matters. He evokes the bedsit where around him other desperate people wait hopelessly for ambulances, and prepares to shoot himself in the head.  Pausing, horrifyingly, to take the gun from his mouth and a memory of lovelier things, the plaintive Irish “She moved through the fair”.  And he falls asleep, and dreams.  

        This theatre has, in its launching months, developed a deliberate feel for the Eastern European soul:  a remarkable Russian/Ukrainian story of the Polish WW2 ghetto in The White Factory,  another tale of a wartime Polish forest in The Most Precious of Gifts;  in a few weeks comes Gogol’s Government Inspector.  And now, hauntingly extraordinary,  this short story by Fyodor Dostoyefsky. It’s  adapted , and moved from old Petersburg to modern East London by Laurence Boswell.  He also directs it,  grippingly, with Loren Elstein’s starkly arresting design and absolutely the best-chosen solo actor..  

       For Greg Hicks is a phenomenon,  an RSC and national theatre veteran but exotically un-English in expression :  he has a kind of menacing grace, not quite balletic (closer indeed to the Brazilian fight-dance of capoeira, in which he is adept) .  To every role he has  brought that unsettling difference,  to good effect whether as Lear or the terrifying newspaper editor in Clarion .  Here, he becomes the wandering witness narrator of the deepest truth.  HIs dream takes him to a paradise, an island where simple people live without fear , lust or deceit.  It is evoked with subtle lights and projections, all still before the curtain which has not lifted.  His gravity, barely smiling even in wonder but intense, expressive in every limb,  holds it clear of romantic absurdity though it is the oldest trope of religious philosophers:  the sinless Eden. But the second oldest is of course corruption – the serpent, Pandora’s Box opened.  

         Awakening – the whole stage behind him suddenly broader, revelling in his happiness at this discovery that human beings are born pure and good – he pauses, the gun forgotten, but has painfully to tell the rest of the dream:  that   it was he who spoilt the Paradise.  Lightly flirting,  he taught them to deceive and enjoy  deceiving. From that flowered lust,  then jealousy, cruelty, fear, the forming of groups, suspicion, blame, shame, denunciation , patriotism, war.    Remembering, he becomes a tyrant rallying all these evils with glee (very Trump, Stalin, Putin).  And startlingly concludes, as Dostoyevsky did,   not that mankind is evil but that it doesn’t need to be.  So his task is to say so..

      Hicks holds us for 75 minutes;  every light-change or brief projection judged to the second.  It’s hard sometimes to work out what a “five-star” review is for ,  but sometimes all it means is that here is a thing of great simplicity, portrayed with perfect judgement to become subtle and unforgettable. 

marylebonetheatre.com to 20 April

Rating five