Monthly Archives: September 2024

STONED STONES IN WEST WITTERING, 1967

      At the end the 1200-strong crowd explodes to join a final roar of “Satisfaction” with the cast – lawyers, police, fans, three generatons of the  Havers family – leaping and bopping to the acid twang of reborn Rolling Stones.  Brenock O’Connor’s uncanny Keith Richards lookalike snarls from one high platform, Jasper Talbot channels Mick’s unruly lip-and-hip work from the other.  Charlotte Jones’ finale feels like the end-of-term party for the Chichester Festival Theatre: no booking could more appropriately reimagine Sussex’s finest rock ‘n roll hour. And the Chichester magistrates’ court’s, too..

      That  was in winter 1967, when Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were holed up in Keith’s moated mansion at West Wittering with friends , including Marianne Faithfull emerging from her bath wearing only a fur rug. The  police were tipped off, probably by the News of the World , to raid it. There certainly had been acid present – here an American dealer has turned up with his “psychedelicatessen” box of tricks,  and Richards consequently became convinced that the helmeted policemen were dwarf elves  come to “navigate the cosmos” with him, and invited them in to warm themselves by the fire.  A slightly soberer Mick says sorrowfully “Keith, I don’t think they’re fairies”, and  we’re off, with a freespirited reimagining of the famous case when the ‘sixties breakout versus shocked establishment morality.  

   It made the name of Michael Havers QC, later Attorney-General, who was persuaded to defend the pair on charges of possessing a tiny amount of benzedrine and allowing smoking of cannabis.  His son of course is Nigel Havers,  and Jones’ play has great fun with the family dynamic: Louis Landau (a fine professional debut). plaintively playing the schoolboy longing  to avoid being  a corporate lawyer and go to drama school,  his father disapproving, Olivia Poulet as the mother likeably holding the ring and supporting him.  

       That conflict is I suspect upscaled in ferocity – it’s the origin-story of so many actors emerging from establishment families in the 60s – and provides  fun in a warmhearted sitcom way:  Anthony Calf is magnificent as the patriarch, a traditionalist prone to explaining his horsehair wigs but who must , we know from the start, learn new ways.  He is wonderful flinching away at first from the rock stars’ manager – Ben Caplan’s Allen Klein – and from the lads themselves,  just as he flinches from his son Nigel’s terrible new flowered shirts and awkward drainpipe pants.  The lad is defended, of course, by Clive Francis as the grandfather, the once-eminent hanging judge Sir Cecil Havers. Francis, as always given half a chance,  is slam-dunk hilarious and almost gets cheered at every line. 

      But the core story itself is too good not to tell: the raid, the plea hearing where Richards is asked why the men were not shocked by a young lady’s rug-clad nudity and politely replied “because we’re not old men..”  Emer McDaid, fragile graceful blonde,  is a wonderful Marianne, and her strand of the story –  a woman supposedly protected by being called Miss X in court but not allowed to speak, and left to be widely sniggered about because of the made-up Mars Bar story (it rang through my late teens, I remember it well). She sings like a bird, too: three of Marianne’s gentle breathy numbers,  most notably When Tears Go By  in a smoky dream for the exhausted, combative Havers asleep in his chair.   

     There are times in the first half of Justin Audibert’s production  when I could have done with fewer surreal explosions of Stones rock,  good as it is under Alan Berry’s musical direction.   There is a bit too much whimsy as police and lawyers join in,  though I have to admire the way that the 2024 choreographer has allowed stage and disco dancing to be as authentically dreadful as it was back then.   

      But the second half is great, with the real trial,  sentence and appeal backed by the late William Rees-Mogg’s famous Times leader “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?”. And of course young Nigel’s RADA audition,  the appeal victory,  and a fine imagined scene in the Garrick Club where Mick and Keef confront Judge Block.  And then we all go nuts to the final triumphant blast of Satisfaction.  Especially those of us (always plenty  in the Chichester audience) who were actually there first time round. And even more pleased than Rees-Mogg about the outcome. 

Cft.org.uk. To 18 october 

VICTORIAN MISCHIEF WELL IN TUNE FOR TODAY

.  Do you want to see a senior Government minister entangled with a socially climbing financier and a fashion-greedy wife,  playing the flute to calm himself? Will  you, in these troubled times,   feel the better for seeing  Dillie Keane having more fun than is decent in black bombazine and lace cap, quavering ferociously about lochs in an  extreme cod Scottish accent while her kilted giant of a son strikes up on the  accordion?  Have you always wanted to see Nancy Carroll in a bustle wrestling an insider-trading cockney upstart to the ground?  Seek no further, for the Menier will provide.

   It seems that during  the gloom of Covid Nancy Carroll decided to set about trimming and adapting one of Arthur Wing Pinero’s less remembered drawing-room farces from 1890: a knotted social, marital and political tangle whose absurd intricacy makes PG Wodehouse look like Ibsen. With a stroke of theatrical genius (and director Paul Foster and composer Sarah Travis) the cast of 12 is over half  actor-musicians,  who troop in at the start playing together and later keep dropping in the odd few notes to illustrate the action. Thus Rosalind Ford’s  Imogen may impetuously seize her ‘cello and bow when  stricken with inappropriate love for the fiery social rebel Val, or Fanny Lacklustre, the scheming socially ambitious dressmaker,  make her point with a fiddle-based double entendre when the hapless, disillusioned politician – Nicholas Rowe a  frock -coated skinny gangle of gloomy discomfort – picks up his flute.  Brilliant. 

       A painstakingly fringed and tasselled Victorian parlour gives way in the second half,  with much rapid shifting,  to the great hall of Drumdurris  castle. Sir Julian is broke and both he and his lady (Carroll herself) are entangled with Lacklustre’s financier brother, so have been forced  to bring the pair of vulgarians up for a toff August. It’s complicated by the ambition of Lady MacPhail  (that’s Dilly Keane) to marry her speechless son into the political stratosphere : though poor Sir Colin, as she says while he awks beardedly around in a dinner suit, “feels like a caged eagle in the drrresss of the South”.   The embarrassingly low-caste but massively rich houseguest, however, is not only eating the wrong way at breakfast but nursing a corrupt political plot as well as a social one.  The plot thickens.

      It’s a slyly delightful moment to revive it:  some of Pinero’s lines ring out 134 years later to general glee.  Val is a global wanderer seeking freedom from sham and bluster who finds himself disgusted at finding fellow-countrymen even in Bolivia  – “British pomp has spread like mould across the globe”.  Lady Twombley, having herself risen from a humble dairymaid,   lives in dread of her husband having to quit politics and retire to live “in a marsh, growing vegetables”.  The Minister hates politics anyway,  and calls Westminster a lion’s den of dishonesty.   

      Everything is further complicated by the interference of the dowager Drumdurris,  the unmatchable Sara Crowe who darts in and out of the set’s two doors making everyone’s life more difficult, including an invisible daughter-in-law who can’t decide whether to train her baby for politics or the Army.  And Lady MacPhail’s romantic insistence  on the superiority of the heights of Ben Muchtiewhatsit and the kilted North is not, it turns out, shared by her  son,  Matthew Woodyatt a magnificently cowed hunk.   I require their brief unforgettable duet at the opening of the second half to be filmed and provided online in perpetuity, to improve national morale.  Though possibly not the SNP’s.

Menierchocolatefactory.com. To 16 november

Rating 4.

LAURIE LEE, REMEMBERED AND REMEMBERING

       A nine-part orchestra, gilded harp and flute at its apex; behind, monochrome photos of a century past show rural Gloucestershire,  then the plains and forbidding splendours of Spain in its time of suffering.  Downstage two lecterns, an old man and a young one, offer brief vivid memory then return to sit quiet for music. Both are the same man, Laurie Lee: his story is of childhood, youth and wonderment through the eyes and soul of a born poet

      This is a beauriful thing, selling out fast but made to tour, so check the link carefully below. It has a well- thought-through simplicity, honest words and honest sentiment served wkth delicacy by  musical choices. The Orchestra of the Swan,under David lePage,  deals mostly in concerts but storytelling is its forte, and in this labour of love for Laurie Lee’s work and life Judy Reaves and Deirdre Shields offer short excerpts of the writer’s work with the orchestra playing between.   As if , unpretentiously, each time to make space for meditation on what we have heard. It asks us to stand alongside him all the way from rustic infancy , watching close to the ground the teemings of nature,   to teenage wanderings with a fiddle and the  ideals and terrors of the Spanish civil war.  

     The speakers are   Anton Lesser reminiscent in age, Charlie Hamblett the youg man’s voice. They are not overdramatic but each at times briefly becomes some third: a mother or sister, officer or deserter, someone insome moment fixed in memory, pieces in the jigsaw of his growing up, from a baby of the family bundled into his school coat by big brisk sisters to the teenage wanderer with tent and guitar, falling in love with Spain, fighting in the 1930s International Brigade. 

     We breathe it with him,  poet and blundering, hoping, half-understanding volunteer  in the fight against fascism. To see it in Wilton’s, just off Cable Street and once the dressing-station for casualties in our own domestic fight, is sobering. And fresh from news bulletins advising Britons to flee Lebanon, there was an extra frisson at the passage where young Laurie – busking, careless, unaware of the unrest but suddenly evacuated as a British subject to safety and home on a Royal Navy destroyer.  But of course he goes back to help, unskilled at life and war, is imprisoned as a spy then released into hapless soldiering and invalided home.

        It is extraordinary how complete Lee’s story and character  feels, in such short moments. But each is amplified by the music between: deepening feeling without obviousness (though goodness, Mark Ashford’s Spanish guitar solos, falling into rapt silence, unforgettably evoke the land).  The orchestral arrangements by lePage – from Vaughan Williams to Rossini and Britten –  are careful, fitting every moment,  beautiful use made of the flute in particular.  The rendering of the Internationale, a lonely solo gathering every other voice around it, is thrilling.  Altogether, it’s a lovely thing.   If you can catch it, do.  

Orchestraoftheswan.org. rating 5

POLITICAL ECHOES, CLASS ARROGANCE, THRILLS

       The award for ExIt  of the Year goes to the magnificent David Oyelowo, tearing up the central aisle  of the Olivier in a fury as the first half closes,   with the timelessly furious shout of the unappreciated :   “Thus I turn my back – there is a world elsewhere!” .  

       If I had a problem with this vigorous, elegantly staged production it is being drawn irrationally to the hothead warrior’s side from the start.  For all the clarity and dramatic arc of his arrogance and fall,  I risked turning into his Mum Volumnia myself,  albeit without the mad raving about how lovely his wounds are.  After swaggering on in a plum velvet suit,  disdaining the plebeian rioters,  our hero hopped into uniform for some spectacularly athletic savagery in battle against the Volscii leader (“A lion I am proud to hunt”) , achieving wounds all over,  about which everyone concerned talks a great deal.  

        Then he got  nagged by his pushy mother (Pamela Nomvete, splendid)   into becoming a Consul.  Politics and public affairs are not his thing at all,  grubby business compared to banging Volscii on the head with shields,   but the terrifying Volumnia wants her man-child to be king of the world.  He goes through the ceremony of presenting himself humbly to the proles, with “a humble spirit, a beggar’s tongue”  but hates it,  still doesn’t think much of them because he has no wish to be their ‘harlot”and they know it.  He’s the ultimate anti-populist, refreshing in a strange way at this time of creepy populism :  “You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate as reek o’ the rotten fens-  whose loves I prize as the dead carcasses of unburied men!”.  Calling your electorate smelly didn’t work even in Rome, so the Tribunes of the people (especially Stephanie Street’s Sicinius,  a real angry-leftie-lady with an unforgiving bob) point out his “soaring insolence” .  He just snarls that he did it all for them, ungrateful sods – “For your voices I have fought!” . 

          Through all this,  the energy of Oyelowo’s magnificent physical expressiveness mesmerized me,  so that for all the speeches (huge projections) and rackety riots,  I only wanted to watch him rather than the democratic plotters.  And that’s despite his unsettlingly modern insistence on the validity  of “mine own truth” and his conviction “I will be loved when I am lack’d”. Very Prince-Harry. 

          The political speeches are sharply done and fine,  especially by Menenius (Peter Forbes) eloquently making the case that, like bits of a human body,  in a nation you’re all in it together,  well-fed belly and skinny extremities alike.  Altogether,  it’s a great booking for a party conference season after a big election.  But all the way,   it’s Oyelowo who draws the eye and ear: that spectacular high-speed run defectiing  to the Volscii  did actuallyu raise a cheer  at the preview I saw.  

         It’s grippingly presented: no togas in Lyndsey Turner’s production, just Es Devlin filling the Olivier stage with Roman sculptures at the start ,  so it looks like a special exhibition at the Barbican because it lies among immense descending square concrete pillars. The period is nicely unfixed, with both loud bangs and flashes in battle but plenty of swords and shields to keep the savagery of ancient Rome respected.  All the cast have immense energy, Nomvete is a tremendous presence and Kemi-Bo Jacobs as Coriolanus’ ever-anxious wife is, in her brief scnes, properly touching.    

nationaltheatre.org.uk   to  9 November

FIRST CLASS FROM CHRISTIE, LUDWIG AND BAILEY 

This could have been a bit of a groan, like the overcomplex Rebus Game Called Malice , also on tour .  But actually it’s a class act in every sense.   Michael Maloney is a wonderful Poirot: almost my favourite so far,  except perhaps John Moffatt on the old Radio 4 productions (a secret  podcast vice on my dog-walks) .   Maloney gives us a Poirot only gently moustachiod,   prim,  gently  authoritative, his Belgian accent likeable,  his Continental man-hugs with M. Bouc of the Wagons-Lits very endearing.  Around him the  multinational passengers,  smartly dressed and befurred,   from Sweden and Hungary and America and England but each with their own quirk and secret,  gather  round a bloodstained corpse at dawn, shuddering in horror  (or are they??)    

        No villages or vicars here, not a Manor House or Marple in sight  : this is the most glamorous of Agatha Christie stories, starring the  Orient Express in its 1930’s glory.   Mike Britton’s set and costumes  revel in that: gorgeous panelled compartments swivel  to be cabins and dining-car , sometimes opening out the stage, sometimes tiny claustrophobic scenes in its centre.  Overhad a great white  Balkan snowdrift traps them in their griefs and secrets.      It’s one of Christie’s  most familiar plots ( though  at the interval some in my matinee row still couldn’t remember whodunnit).  But without spoilers  I can approve the fact that that while the corpse in the sleeper-car  is not, it turns out,  a figure to grieve for,  Lucy Bailey’s production revolves vividly around another victim from years before. A child;   it was the Lindbergh case which inspired Christie to this imagined aftermath.  And  there is  something excellently respectful about the way this production evokes an  old tragedy: a little girl\s  imagined face ghostly overhead at the start, her voice heard.   

     There is also a shiver of proper respect in Poirot’s famous dilemma about what to do with the solution of the case.  Mentioning an old murder at the start he reiterates his steely belief in letting justice run its course, bring a deserved punishment,   whatever the provocation has been .   And when he makes his final judgement we are reminded that this story lies  between the wars: he’s a Belgian whose country was illegally invaded in 1914.  Without laws, the old policeman says,  we are all lost.   For all the fun and thrills, that  gives the production a thoughtful, sober edge. As you’d expect from Bailey as director. 

        All beautifully done, even if you know the plot.   And as for Debbie Chazen,  never mind her Calendar Girls Olivier nomination, I insist she should now play far more stroppy old Russian princesses.  She’s priceless.  

rating 4 

https://www.murderontheorientexpressplay.com Touring to 25 april 2024 – Plymouth now!

FRIENDSHIP HITS  THE ROCKS OF TASTE : MISCHIEVOUS, SAD AND FUNNY

        Not everything that tours the country is Agatha Christie or star-fed froth: sometimes a serious emotional and intellectual treat turns up just down the road from where you live,  probably around twenty quid a ticket.  Isn’t theatre wonderful?    This certainly is:  thirty years after its opening,  Yasmina Reza’s ART is still a favourite, its sly wise originality caught wonderfully from the French by Christopher Hampton’s translation. 

       Forget the usual dramatic themes of  romance and family angst (though heaven knows that’s referred to).  This,  in 90 minutes,  deals with another kind of bond, the pitfalls and bonds of friendship  – especially, dare I say it, male friendship.  Iqbal Khan directs,  enchantedly coming brand-new to it,  he fell in love, and in the programme draws his own thoughts about the comedy’s painful undercurrent (Reza, when it was referred to as comedy, famously said she thought she had written a tragedy; though I find the ending rather soothingly redemptive) .  

    Anyway, it’s simple enough:  Serge, a wealthy consultant dermatologist,  has bought a contemporary painting from £ 200,000,  and his friend Marc – former mentor in some sense , we will learn – drops in and is shown it. It is just a huge white square.  Serge, who likes to talk of contemporary and fashionable  ‘deconstruction” , is affronted when Marc, an engineer, laughs at it and its mad price. “It’s shit”.   Physically, they are an interesting contrast: Chris Harper’s Serge slim and smooth in blue,  Aden Gillett’s Marc a big bluff scoffer, scruffier and contemptuous.    

          That Serge is wounded, snubbed,  is obvious. The third of the friends is different again – Seann Walsh,  curly-haired and amiable,  is Yvan, who  tries with each of them to heal the misunderstanding and the wounded pride.   He is far less successful in life,  embroiled in a complicated row about his coming wedding, rival mothers-in-law, and the horror of working for his bride’s father’s stationery company “Does any man wake up every morning looking forward to selling expandable document wallets?”  he cries in misery late on.    His attempts at  mediation, offering to join in the art-crit nonsense about monochromatic resonances with Serge and acting tactful with Marc, is doomed. 

        Each of them criticizes the other to him :”Marc is moody”  says Serge,  and Serge says Marc “doesn’t have the training or instinct”  to appreciate the white square and is stuck with boring “Flemish” landscapes (I daresay in France this was an awful insult).  But he also insults  the picture in Yvan’s house (Ciaran Bagnall creates a nice simple moving set, lined with light,  no fuss) . Says it’s a “daub”, forgetting that Yvan’s Dad painted it.   Serge’s artistic claims are satirically brilliant,  skewering the language,  like the claim that the white blank  “stakes its claim as part of a trajectory”.  

      Seann Walsh, better known as a standup and new to the “legit” stage, treats the play with delicate honesty and – in the moment Yvan gets a proper raging collapse –  is wickedly, wickedly funny. And sad.   For the dazzlingly written, horribly credible text leads the three deeper and deeper and, since they’re men, to a moment of ridiculous but painful violence and beyond.   It all moves fast, deceptively simple, a few piano notes by Max Pappenheim between the scenes. Altogether, it  strikes every note right.  A tiny masterpiece, delicately done, is coming your way soon.  

Touring,  Mercury Colchester from tonight

 then  Malvern, Eastbourne, Nottingham ,  Coventry Sheffield

 originaltheatre.com  to 20 Oct

rating five

REACH FOR THE STARS: IT TAKES HARD GRAFT AND VODKA

Any week now at the Gielgud we shall hear the famous drunken cry in Juno and the Paycock   “what is the stars?”.    At the heart of Stella  Feehily’s  exhilarating play is the answer, as historically discovered by 25-year-old Cecilia Payne Gaspochkin  in her PhD thesis, delivered when she had fled the ban on women taking degrees in Cambridge, UK for the slightly less patriarchal Harvard. Where they could.   The young astrophysicist’s calculations  massively upset the received belief, by working out that stars are made of hydrogen and helium,  not solid like earth.  She was told by her supervisor Henry Norris Russell to re- submit with changes, and did so, guardedly, for pragmatism’s sake. She needed to go on in research .    Four years later Russell and the rest changed their minds and – with only minimal mention of her work – agreed with her theory.  After similar histories of woman scientists in DNA and penicillin,  it’s a tale worth telling. 

     But it’s not only that which makes this play a humdinger, with the redoubtable Maureen Beattie as Cecilia  at its heart. It is bracing for several reasons – not least her bravura lady-academic performance, redolent of all the clever women who have stamped their way into male redoubts, been told to shut up and failed to (Nice that it comes hot on the heels of cinema’s  celebration of Lee Miller in Ww2).   But Feehily and director Alice Hamiltom have artfully framed it – after the lordly Russell putdown – mostly in Cecilia’s academic heyday in the 1950s, with her supporter Whipple  trying to convince his Harvard colleagues that despite being both female  and married, shock horror, to a Russian (it’s the cold war) , she should follow him as chair of Astronomy. It made her the first woman to achieve such a height at Harvard, after being several times passed over.

  Meanwhile a student (history not science) is interviewing  her for the campus paper.   Annie Kingsnorth is a very demure 21-year-old (Cecilia’s assistant Rona  snarks that no woman over 7 should wear a hair-ribbon).   She is being courted by Budd,  a  dashing Korean War vet, who fixed the the interview gig for her but  gradually reveals  an agenda, which he’s even happy to enforce by blackmail.  McCarthyite, obsessed with the red menace, he wants her artful questions to “smoke out” the Prof as a Commie.

     Will she? When Cecilia necks some  Polish vodka and recklessly speaks her mind about both Russell and Mc Carthy, will the girl stitch up the scientist for her political indiscretion?  Or will she see she’s being played by Bud?

    It’s grippingly done, twisty, all beneath a lovely diorama screen  either with  blackboard scribbles or glorious constellations: science and wonder together.  Cecilia is  tough and sweary, but Beattie catches her  passion in fine moments like her thrill at novas, stars that die in an immense flare of glory. She also expresses a dry, decent humanity in dealing with the younger women, Sally and her sharp devoted assistant (Rina Mahoney, another strong presence). There  is a fascinating moment when Sally is indignant that Cecilia did not stand her ground in 1925 over modifying her PhD, and the older woman explains about pragmatism: you deal with your  own time. It’s a familiar example of the way every stage of feminism has challenged the generation before for compromising, taking it step by step.  And there’s a gloriously comic,cruelly enraging sequence where Whipple tries to get  dinosaur colleagues to see sense and appoint Cecilia to the Chair.  

      A double ending: the 1959 solar eclipse is beautifully evoked as the three women watch through smoked glass and the hairs rise on our necks. That would do. But in the spirit of unromantic science, we then see a moment of her emeritus prize  lecture in 1977, naming female astronomers all the way to our own Jocelyn Bell Burnell.  Some theatrical romantics will find that a bit anticlimactic. I think that Cecilia, as a scientist with no nonsense about her, would have  preferred it that way. Good. 

Hampsteadtheatre.com to 12 October

Rating. Four

PS appalling journey specially for this: awkward day, 35 minutes traffic gridlock, then train delay,  no time for food, Jubilee line breakdown homeward so, missed only good train, drove home in fog, bed god knows ehen, we’re still at Colchester.   I never record this sort of thing because it’s unprofessional even for little humble theatrecat.com, but wish you to know that the 90 mins was well worth the trouble, so you should go too

DATING FOR A CONFUSED AGE 

      I have written before of the particular glee I feel when a brand-new and original show emerges , not from anxious corporate calculations but from young and gifted friends who lark about with ideas and then putting in the grunt-work to make something  real:  the Goes Wrong lot, the Operation Mincemeat group, lately Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder.   And at the Broadway peak of this stand Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the friends who invented SIX: smart and sharp and mocking   and –  pleasingly – a bit heartless.

       Now they present a new show,  with more personal heart and artfullly larded with meta-theatre,  as the protagonists Oliver and Nancy (pseudonymously naming themselves after Lionel Bart’s old banger) explain that they have been commissioned to write “a big fancy musical” and have to work out a story.   Which, of course, is pretty much what happened to Marlow and Moss.  In the show these real-but-fictional  writers  are played with brilliant energy by Jo Foster and Leesa Tulley.  They’re epresented as Marlow ‘n Moss  pretty much are:  university friends,  she a young woman and he (ok, ok, ‘they’) male ,gay self-defined as non-binary.  

         Together they realize that the story they need to tell is their own, wanderers in the modern forest of dating who encounter and are both disappointed in men (there’s a great MEN ARE TRASH number).  They’re hoping for love but in the process realize that actually the platonic friendship between them was there all the time, important and glorious. 

          Comradeship between single women in their thirties and gay men has been around in romcom land forever; as Bridget Jones observed, both being resignedly used to disappointing their parents .  But rarely has the gay-best-friend relationship been more determinedly, and indeed seriously, examined than here.  It is of its time, in a rather good way.

        Shouldn’t have said seriously, might have put you off. It need not.    This is a riot, Oliver in bare legs and a short red kilt (“It’s not a skirt!”)  and Nancy in likeable grungy big-shirt and sweats,  well aware of their various absurdities. They are hanging out in his flat,  in which a 13-strong ensemble and swing gamely represent most of the furnishings, lamps, bathroom and houseplants, capering around as necessary and constantly repurposed.  First they are  disco denizens of the dating world,  as she mourns her ex , an older man in finance, and he takes every delay or cancellation of an online meet-up as his personal failure even if it really is appendicities.     THen in in a wonderful number they watch FRIENDS (they’re millennials who grew up on it)  and get overwhelmed by a crowd of clambering, dancing Rachels and Rosses in the “I got off the plane” climax. So the pair curse all Friends, di-Caprio-Winslet and other screen lovers,   for being “so retro,  so hetero”“But so f—-ing good!”. Schlock romance reinforces their own sense of failure, as it always has from time to time in all our lives. 

         That’s fabulous: and so is a glorious sequence in a brunch cafe where all the patrons are hunched, texting “Hang soon?” and vainly hoping for replies, until Noah Thomas as Artie, representative of their only sane and happily coupled friend,  shouts at the pathetic lone brunchers  to just text “C U Never!”at the absent swains,  and leads them storming into a defiant tap-dance routine. 

    On it goes, cleverly pastiching several musical-theatre styles .  There’s  a less successful online-dating number, though  the staging, under Lucy Moss’ direction with  Ellen Kane’s as choreographer and co-director , is always wittily inventive.  And  there is sweet genius in the profile-planning  lyric “a picture of me working out to show me at my best / a picture of me laughing,  so they don’t know I’m depressed”.

           Foster and Tulley are both tremendous stage personalities, he camply exuberant, she more openly vulnerable.   Sometimes there are moments of real depth of feeling – notably in Nancy’s heartfelt number about her ex  – “I would abandon it all, go when you call”,  but wisely that moment  is skewered instantly by Oliver’s thoughtful:  “I don’t buy it.  It’s just not possible to feel that much about somone who has a LinkedIn profile”.

           But if Nancy is sometims taken seriously in her yearning, his (theirs, if you must)  as a queer nonbinary seeker is taken even more so,  with an extraordinary big  number late on where he compares himself to a disco ball: nobody wants to see the broken bits of glass as long as it goes on sparkling for the rest of the room to enjoy.   

         And that’s the seriousness of it,  vulerable humanity shimmering beyond the self-indulgence of a date-crazed generation. And that is what  earns it as many hoots and cheers at the curtain as SIX ever had. It’s a step onward for Marlow and Moss.  I cannot wait for their next adventure.  

nimaxtheatres.com to 13. Feb

Rating. 4 

WORTH ANOTHER VISIT? O YES

It’s a gig, it’s a party, it’s as  glorious as ever. Down on the floor the promenaders surge between changing stages as they rise and fall to create old Manhattan:  part of the show, New Yorkers themselves,  teased by gangsters, bombarded by strippers’ pompoms or appealed to by emotional lovers. Up in the galleries meanwhile we pause fascinated for a moment as we look down to see the stage crew, dressed as cops,  smoothly ushering these braver, cheaper audience members to new vantage points – once a small crowd momentarily surrounded by wild Cuban dancers. Then like them we are caught up again in the tensions and hilarity of Damon Runyon’s glamorous lowlife 1920s.  On it goes, joyful, until Nicely Nicely barracks the conductor for another chorus of Siddown and as the tumult of applause ebbs up from nowhere come Miss Adelaide and Sarah Brown, drinking furiously on barstools as they  work out that if you want to change a rascal you gotta pin him down.

        There’s nothing like this innovative, physically exciting and musically gorgeous revival, a whole new life for a classic.  It raised spirits and esprit de corps after the pandemic , has run for nearly 18 months and storms  on until early January.   Casts have been refreshed: now we have Michael Simkins  as  a sweet solemn Abernathy and Gina Beck as Sarah : she unmatchable in voice, poise and – importantly – wild discarding of that poise.  Some shows sort of wear out, and the latter days of CATS felt frankly exhausted; but so far here  there is no fatigue, either in the show or the multiple returning audiences.  Who will probably need therapy on January 5th.

      I revisited it on its birthday  and have bought tickets with friends twice more.  Here for more detail are the old reviews if tou want them: 

GUYS AND DOLLS Bridge, SE1

GUYS AND DOLLS …reprise & birthday!

       But this time I just thought I’d record new affections for Hytner’s direction and Bunny Christie’s complex engineered design , and as a veteran of those galleries here are some moments you really don’t, want to miss. 

       Like the moment when suddenly it’s Havana – how did that happen so fast?  How did Sky Masterson and Sarah fly five hours in two seconds?  What happened to the promenaders?  And where the hell did those lamp-posts come from, strong enough for Sarah to swing around them in drunken glee singing “If I were a bell I’d be ringing”?

   Or perhaps it’s a small thing, like the arrival of Miss Adelaide’s kitchen-shower mob, barely there for two minutes but unforgettable down to the last banged saucepan.   Or the boxing-match that pops up and disappears again.  It might be the deliciously vulgar Hot Box bushel-and-a-peck routine, or the more suave one with the mink and pearls.  Maybe the tap routine in the interval makes you hurry back from your drink so as not to miss anything. It could be anything. But you’ll love it.

         But maybe it is just the way that when the big cast and crew assemble at last to salute one another and the band,  and melt amiably to dance with the prommers – gratitude makes you fall in love with the whole lot of them, and with every technical, lighting, musical, choreographic, design and directorial hand that assembled to make us happy, together, as a show is meant to. 

     One other note of gratitude, by the way. When someone, a virtual stranger,  asks a critic, socially “What’s good to see in London now? Where shall we book?”  It is usually awkward .  You don’t know them,  and can’t judge instantly whether they’re Ibsen-and-David-Hare sort of people or the Mamma Mia ’n Wicked crowd.  Send them the wrong way and they’ll curse you.  But you can send them all to this particular, particularely special,  production of Guys and Dolls.  If they’re not happy , they don’t deserve to be.  

bridgetheatre.co.uk. to 4 January

Note that under the usual G & D 5 there’s a Director Mouse for Sir Nicholas Hytner.

And no, I can’t make it bigger or add a design-mouse for Bunny Christie because my fine IT guru ,who set all this up 10 years ago, is recovering from a near-lethal snakebite in Mozambique (which sounds like the best dog-ate-my-homework excuse but is dramatically true.). So let the director for once stand alone, modest in nature though he is.

UPMARKET EDINBURGH ROCK, SORT OF

    Sir Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus accounts for a tenth of all crime  bestsellers in the UK:  the ancient mazes around Edinburgh Castle, set against te 18c dignity of the New Town,  symbolize the tangled mysteries which his policeman’s mind must solve.  A novelist can evoke such a city,  play with time and space and live in the detective’s head;  screen adaptations of Rebus reflect that. So it was brave for Rankin, bored in lockdown, to write this for the stage (the previous stage Rebus used Rona Munro as writer).   His lockdown imprisonment also, he has said, meant confining it to one room, one set.

        It’s a grand dining-room,  with a startlingly crowded set of paintings under picture-lights (as it’s a touring set, my former theatre-electrician companion mused a bit about possible difficulties of folding and unfolding the flats with all that fiddly wiring).     The pictures are Scottish 20c colourists, important in the plot:  Harriet’s first  husband collected them, but  Paul prefers whisky and gambling. Their guests on the momentous evening are Jack the local Casino owner (Billy Hartman,  bonhomously shady) and his slinky, elegantly braided i girlfriend Candida who is an “influencer” and (one senses RAnkin’s revulsion at the trade) frequently explains her life of being comped and given freebies. Rebus is the plus-one for lawyer Stephanie  – played by Abigail Thaw, a figure cool enough to make you wonder if she’s the killer or, even more exciting,  a proper love interest for Rebus). 

  There’s a menacing thump of music as the lights drop, but then comes a long period of  worryingly un-tense banter and chat.  It’s mostly  about a murder-mystery game – all butlers and wine-cellars – plus remarks about Jack’s dodgy past.   In  an aside Rebus (an agreeably dry, spry Gray O’Brien)  explains that he hopes to nail Casino Jack.  Meanwhile an offstage chef,  Brendan,  seems to have left the kitchen in a mess.  He may by the interval be reported dead. 

       Oh dear.  A murder game with a real corpse?  It starts to feel  like an Agatha Christie tribute act,  only set in Scotland and with mobile phones (Jade Kennedy’s Candida,  a serpentine Instagram dream in a body-con frock),  does a lot of Googling to assist Rebus’ cerebral detective work).   The whole thing is frankly  clunky, in a relaxing Sunday-night-telly sort of way.    Despite director Loveday Ingram’s  valiant efforts to keep the cast moving  it just wastes too long explaining back-stories:   Rankine remaining in novelist-mode even while co-writing, as he is here,  with Ian Reade. 

        I was a bit despondent about it by the interval – its two forty-minute acts, pretty brisk –  but luckily the second half livens up a bit.  Hostilities and lies and the fracture of the hosts’ marriage are exposed,  with revelations about everything from a photo of a Dubai freebie to a possibly bloodstained vase and the personal history of an offstage former detective.   And is the missing Brendan really dead?   If so whodunnit?   Wait and see.  It’ll all be explained.  A bit too lengthily, and through the fourth wall as Rebus returns to address us.  But O’Brien is perfect in the role, so keen readers won’t, I think,  be disappointed.  

cambridgeartstheatre.com    to 7 September

then touring UK  to 30 Nov

rating 3 

A MOMENT FOR REMEMBERING

   A desk, leather chairs, a heap of file boxes, a single sunflower in a pot.   The century has turned, and it’s the last day in the office for Simon Wiesenthal,  holocaust survivor and for half a century the most famous and redoubtable hunter of Nazi war -criminals. Christopher C Gibbs plays him, in Tom Dugan’s measured, thoughtful monologue 75-minute  play,  back after ten years and landing in this theatre at a horribly apposite moment.  

        The old man, well over 90,  has things to tell us. But he keeps checking on the phone to confirm the whereabouts of one last target thought to be in the Meridian Hotel.  His wife Cyla calls to remind him about bringing home the fish.  She, we will learn as his autobiographical lecture goes on, has sometimes wanted him to give up the relentless pursuit and go and live in peace in Israel .     But Wiesenthal has stayed on in Vienna,  working, collecting, finding, and seeing dozens  of officials and guards brought to justice. 

       It has not been everything he expected in his early days of trauma and relief.  In a startling spotlit moment he re-lives one early capture, in which he played a small part: the trial of  Eichmann,  architect of the “Final Solution” .  He expresses his personal shock and confusion.  “A little bookkeeper..tiny…where was my monster? I wanted a monster!”   Other trials fill the same awareness that monsters are humans no different from us, apart from their terrible choices. When he was rescued from his final camp, starving and close to death,  the SS guards had seemed huge and powerful , almsot another species.  Through the decades of finding and seeing war criminals,  he learned the terrible truth that  they could be almost any of us.    “It does not need to be a criminal to commit mass murder.  Just someone obeying authority….”. 

       And again later  he reflects that every mass killer from Hitler to Bin Laden “is part of us. All we can do is contain him”.  He acknowledges firmly those – notably two SS men –  who did not obey terrible orders so readily:  to him it is proof that the containment, personal and social,  “is always a choice”. He also muses with some compassion on how it was to be German after the great defeat of  WW1:  ‘they were hungry and ashamed..Hitler lifted up the German people’s shame”.  And as shamed people do, they found someone to blame. Jews.  

       The personal memories, drawn from Wiesenthal’s several memoirs,  are inevitably stark,  though enlivened by moments like the extraordinary discovery that Cyla had survived, and reflections on the birth of their  grandchildren and great-grandchildren since.   His message is the simplest:  remember and acknowledge that this terrible thing happened , a dark moment when “barbarism met techology”  to create industrial-scale murder, not only of  six million jews but five million others, homosexuals ,gipsies , black and disabled people who did not fit the Nazi template.  

           He remembers the cemetery alongside Dachau, where every grave had a sunflower, and mourns the millions who will never have a graceful grave:  his own office sunflower remains, under a single light,  when he finally leaves the stage, because he is enjoining us all to remember, because he is old and has not much longer.   And  we have to remember, because it is the business of us all :   not revenge,  but remembering. Acknowledging where human choices have led, and could again.   Immaculately done: go see it.  

kingsheadtheatre.com  to 15 Sept

On this day of the report, a reminder of those two excellent verbatim plays from two stages of the inquiry. How theatre, with Nicholas Kent, reacted . There have been other plays about the experience of survivors: this is about engineering, technical and systems failures, vital to note. Links below.

GRENFELL – VALUE ENGINEERING Tabernacle Theatre, W11

GRENFELL: SYSTEM FAILURE. Tabernacle & Marylebone