Author Archives: Libby Purves and friends

August 31, 2015 · 9:54 pm

MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS Theatre Royal, Bath

GETTING ‘EM OFF FOR VICTORY
Never in the field of TR Bath’s excellent endeavours has so much flesh been displayed with such nerve to so many. Some were, in the interval queue for the Ladies, a bit gobsmacked. “Didn’t expect them to go all the way, dear!”. But it was happy surprise. This is a newborn musical incarnation of the true story made famous in the film with Judi Dench: how a doughty widow bought the Windmill Theatre to put on “Revuedeville” , with the legendary Vivian Van Damme as her manager, and decided to improve its failing fortunes by persuading the showgirls to get naked. She used her formidable respectability to persuade the Lord Chamberlain that it was going to be art not stripping, because once naked the girls wouldn’t move, but represent classical paintings under filmy light (“subtle lighting and a conscientious hairdresser” on the pubes).
So there had to be nudity. The first, longer and more frivolous act, taking us from the mid-30s to the war years, offers plenty, including a few male backstage backsides when the girls taunt manager and staff to go first. That first act ends with a particularly courageous and surprisingly moving moment as Emma Williams as Maureen, tea-girl turned star, breaks the rule and steps forward starkers as the bombs fall to finish the defiant anti-Hitler number “He’s got another think coming” after the male singer falters.
It is the warmest and most engaging of shows, the book deftly managed by director Terry Johnson to take in the comedy,the bleakness and the camaraderie as a leg-show turned into a kind of mission. Sharp dialogue helps dilute any tendency to the saccharine: when van Damm says “We must fortify London in a way that sandbags cannot” Mrs Henderson snaps “Mr Churchill will be so glad you’re on his side”. The lyrics are by Don Black, always a safe pair of rhymes (the moment Mrs H. sings to her gloomy Jewish partner that she is “Au fait with Oy Vay” this connoisseur sits back contented.)
There is great fun in the vaudeville auditions, even greater in Graham Hoadly as the Lord Chamberlain, very Gilbert-and-Sullivan beneath the Victoria Memorial. And some of the songs (composed by George Fenton and Simon Chamberlain) are properly notable: plaintive or roistering but always neat, sharp and pushing the emotional line of the piece forward as they should. Mrs Henderson herself is the peerless Tracie Bennett: lately a memorable Judy Garland but here deploying a sharp, acid wit, convincingly aged as a patron saint for all women determined to get a bit of fun out of their latter years . “I can be anything I want – except young”. That’s an song which could last.
She is beautifully counterpointed by Ian Bartholomew as Van Damm, who has the difficult transition to make from cynical impresario to shock and depression at the invasion of his native Holland. But the balance of sweet-sour sentiment is always kept neatly: when up on the roof, firewatching in the Blitz, our heroine is told “You’ll catch your death” she replies “Oh, I think Death’s busy enough elsewhere”. Nice. This one’ll live on.

box office 01225 448844 / theatreroyal.org.uk to 5 September
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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August 28, 2015 · 8:15 am

OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD Olivier, SE1

DRAMA AS REDEMPTION 
From the first moments Nadia Fall’s production sets brutal, bullying humanity against a hot, strange, majestic Australian dawn. A lone aborigine watches, silent on a great dark bare plain , as the land heaves beneath him and becomes the deck of a prison-ship of half-starved, flogged inmates and resentful red-coated marines. Up comes the light, and we and the prisoners blink, half-afraid, as Peter McKintosh’s great red-and-gold diorama blazes at us.
I fell in love a few years ago with Timberlake Wertenbaker’s marvellous, passionate play (based on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, about a real event of 1788 when a colony of deported British prisoners put on a play – George Farquar’s arch comedy The Recruiting Officer, under the direction of a theatre-loving lieutenant of Marines. That was Alistair Whatley’s shorter, less richly cast version at the Rose, with some deft cast-doubling (ten players, 23 onstage here). Love all over again, last night. The only thing I missed – as Gary Wood’s nimble, mysterious Aborigine speaks only once – was the plaintive questioning line on his first seeing the ship and its brutalized inmates “Is it a dream that has lost its way?” .

Which question encapsulates the whole theme: that a highly evolved, theatrically cultured 18c society still deported thousands for trifling thefts, some pitifully old or young, often girls sold in childhood.
Wertenbaker makes the creation of the Farqhar comedy a symbol of the possibility that well-ordered language and imagination can free and transform the most brutalized. ‘Theatre is an expression of civilization” is a fancy of the idealistic governor: Cyril Nri, nicely combining thoughtful liberalism with an arms-length detachment from the chaotic directorial and personal struggles of the ambitious, lonely Lieut. Ralph (Jason Hughes). At one point, insisting on the casting of the terrifyingly farouche Liz (Jodie McNee, spikily ginger, her whole body always seething with anger) he says that they must “make an example” of her. “By hanging?” asks Ralph, since there has been a lot of this for thefts of food since they arrived. “No. By redemption” says Nri.

Cerys Matthews’ music, drawing on folk, blues and aboriginal instruments, frames the action with yearning emotional power; the nobility of the text strikes with additional power when set, tightly, against fragments of harsh back-story and the horrible brutalities and humiliations meted out by the contemptuous Major Ross (Peter Forbes). But there is saving comedy in the rehearsals and the ensemble of prisoners is tremendous: notably AshleyMcGuire a memorable stroppy Devon wench as Dabby, and Matthew Cottle beautifully judged as Wisehammer, branded a criminal for his Jewishness. Small beautiful moments reaffirm the redemptive theme: the savage Liz suddenly quieting when the Lieutenant apologizes for interrupting her; the huge angry Arscott (Jonathan Dryden Taylor) clinging to his part because of the liberation it brings “I’m not myself, I don’t hate, I’m Kite and I’m in Shrewsbury”.

Prison arts, prison theatre, are forever under attack even today by panicking Home Secretaries. The timelessness of this play’s insistence on the value of “refined literate language,well balanced lines expressing sentiments they are not used to” is striking. From the pioneering days of the London Shakespeare Workout in Brixton and Pentonville to Inside Out and Clean Break today, the truth and the need for that go on.
box office 020 7452 3000 to 17 Oct
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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August 21, 2015 · 10:13 am

FOR SERVICES RENDERED Minerva, Chichester

THE BARBED SHADOW OF AN OLD WAR

I’m late on the curve with this one – but it runs into September and for me, In n these WW1 anniversary years, fascinatedly collecting plays which reflect – better than any prosier or more historical media – the sense and effects of that long tragedy. Last year’s crop I wrote about here for the Telegraph – an account which may remind some regular theatregoers of how good it’s been . Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/11314343/Theatre-can-make-the-dead-walk-before-you.html .

 

 

 

 

 
It is the 1930’s plays, as well as earlier ones, which make unsparing points about the hard backwash of even a victorious war; and few are more devastating than Somerset Maugham’s portrait of a family – fourteen years after the armistice – apparently back to pre-war life in a tennis-party world, but scarred both literally and socially. The Ardsleys – Simon Chandler as a prim businessman and Stella Gonet as his wife – have four children. Sydney (Joseph Kloska) is a blinded naval offcer with a DSO and nothing to live for. Of his sisters , Eva lost her man int the war and devotes herself to her blind brother, Lois is still young and has little chance – as was the case for many women – of ever finding a husband or lover. Ethel rashly married a handsome officer who, back in civilian life , reverts to being a boorish, alcoholic tenant-farmer (“The king made me a gentleman but I don’t always want to be, I like a laugh”). Visiting them is the afflluent, twice-married boulevardier Wilfred (Anthony Calf, very suave) who has his eye on seducing Lois; and most poignantly, going quietly bankrupt is Nick Fletcher as Collie, for whom twenty heroic and bemedalled years in the Navy were a poor preparation for business life. “I may have to get a job driving a motorbus” he half-jokes: this a man who commanded a destroyer.

 

 

 

 

 
Fatheaded stupidities, selfish and desperately selfless behaviour, wilful blindness, heroic stiff-upper lips, suppressed passions and bitterness (chiefly from Sydney, whose blind presence is a constant reminder of reality) create a hum of unease and tension. To modern sensibilities, some problems seem crazy: why can’t the girls get jobs, why shouldn’t a woman help a man out financially, why should Eva sacrifice herself for a brother who is so rude to her, and indeed why can’t he play some part at least in the father’s business rather than stay at home all day being told he is useless? But you buy into it, as the the sense of period is strongly evoked and maintained in Howard Davies’ production (the Minerva’s intimate wraparound shape it really helps, we’re there; and William Dudley’s clever, bitter design has a rural backdrop beyond the window with haycocks and the shadow of old barbed wire).

 

 

 

 

 
And in these days of complaints about few good roles for women, note that Maugham has (admittedly in a cast of 11) five absolutely cracking female parts. Justine Mitchell’s Eva is superb- notably in the scene where she begs the over-honourable Collie to accept her help and her love , wrenching herself from convention to heroically humiliating frankness. Gonet’s Charlotte, watchful, maternal,resigned, deals brilliantly with the matriarch’s extraordinary response to a shattering revelation and then a scandalous one; Jo Herbert’s resigned Ethel and Yolanda Kettle’s bright, seductive, scared Lois are perfect; and Matilda Ziegler’s Gwen, aggrieved wife of wolfish Wilfred, gets her storming moment in the second act.

 

 

 

 

 

 
So at last, a shivering snort of laughter meets black irony as the blinkered father says “It’s very nice to be surrounded by one’s family”, impervious to the fact that – this need not be a spoiler – one is blind, one has gone embarrassingly mad, another is about to trigger a major scandal, one is dying, one alcoholic, and another mired in quiet desperation. “We have our health” he fatuously says. It’s a cruel characterization of middle-class obtuseness, even by Maugham’s standards : but Chandler does it beautifully.
box office 01243 781312 to 5 Sept
rating four      4 Meece Rating

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August 17, 2015 · 5:48 pm

WHEN BLAIR HAD BUSH AND BUNGA Pleasance One, Edinburgh

IN WHICH I AM EASILY AMUSED BY QUITE OLD JOKES. AND CLIVE MANTLE.

We are all urged by manically cheerful Bajan waitresses to sing “`We’re all going on a Summer Holiday” before the show. It’s winter 2001, Tony Blair’s in his second-term pre-Iraq heaven enjoying a freebie by Sir Cliff Richard’s guitar-shaped Barbados pool with Cherie, Carole, Carole’s boyfriend, and a sour-faced Alistair Campbell. Cherie has farmed out the kids to Sandy Lane courtesy of Michael Winner, and invited her fellow-Catholic rich mate Silvio Berlusconi. Tony and Alistair want them out of the way because of a top secret guest: POTUS himself, George W.Bush, whose helicopter may darken the sky any minute…
Had to see this: if you want the complete theatrecat-friendly sampler-set of Edfringe theatre you need at least one big starry one, a couple of tiny hopeful ones nobody much else will bother with, some edgy Traverse stuff and one like this: politically scurrilous, real-name, sue-me-if-you-dare stuff. Its a first play by the TV director Patrick Ryecart, and though woefully dated provides some good laughs. Despising the popinjay Blair will never entirely date, will it?

And Christopher Staines is a perfect Blair: the light-tenor voice , the hairline , the theatrical gestures and intermittent flicks of panic behind the eyes. He has borrowed Cliff’s guitar to sing ,rather badly, a number called Kosovo Dreams because Carole Caplin’s Aussie boyfriend (Douglas Hansell in tight budgie-smugglers) is encouraging him to write a musical about himself . His story would “fit like a bum in a bucket!”. Alistair is taking calls from Max Clifford about Robin Cook’s mistress (dated? archaeological!). Carole is blessing stones for some kumbaya-trocious tantric ritual with Cherie. Who is scoring free stuff at the Sandy Lane boutique.
Tony’s ghastly entourage of blingy shallow greed has been lampooned before, and I did despair for a while. But what heats it up into proper farce is a surreal nightmare involving Berlusconi and Bush – surrealism which, should the victims protest, be a defence: it was all a dream, m’lud, brought on by heatstroke and Red Stripe beer. For Silvio turns up in leopardprint trunks, beaming through facelift bandages, and Cherie makes him ring Pope Ratzinger (“I appointed heem! Is Nazi but long ago!”). She gets Tony converted – in German, by speakerphone – while Silvio blows kisses and Cherie crows “Now we can get the kids into the Oratory!”.

There’s an apparent corpse under a towel, and Silvio doing Benny-Hill chases upstage, but the real star is Clive Mantle as George W.Bush. It’s a wonderful , fully realized comic turn , making the most of Ryecart’s best bits of writing – an airy dismissiveness of Yo-Blair, malapropisms, bland ignorances, diversions about Mitt Romney and the Morons and some apple-pie-picket-fence people in Wisconsin who told him for sure that that Saddam zapped the twin towers as revenge on his Daddy, who used to play cro-kay with Maggie , remember, she knocked his balls over the place, where was I? Who is this Al Kida, never heard of him, we’ll just go in, blam blam, who cares about this Coffee Kebab guy and the United Nothin’…”
His looming dominance over an ever weedier Blair reaches the point that when Bush says “Tony, you gotta deal with my dick” while fumbling (for his phone) in his shorts, the PM very nearly agrees to…but phew, he means Dick Cheney.  Crude but enjoyable. So I forgave it its datedness. And the local Bajans – especially David Webber as a Poirot-loving cop – are very good fun.
http://www.edfringe.com to 31 August
rating three     3 Meece Rating

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August 16, 2015 · 5:37 pm

THE MAN CALLED MONKHOUSE Assembly Hall, Edinburgh

THE MAN WITH THE TAN 
When Simon Cartwright came onstage, what with the bright orange tan and smooth hair and that nervy little mannerism of smiling at the punchline, I briefly panicked. Because this show , written by Alex Lowe, is directed by Bob Golding who himself performed as Eric Morecambe, I must have been half-consciously expecting to feel warm affection. I clean forgot that I never took to Bob Monkhouse. Of whom Cartwright is, voice and all, a horribly believable doppelganger.

But that’s the point of this unnervingly interesting 50-minute show, drawn from the comedian’s autobiography and using a few clips of the real man in interviews. It catches the period, especially the 80’s: the shiny-floor TV shows and smiley quips, long before Merton and Dee and the deadpan satire and surrealism of modern standup. Monkhouse always felt like a throwback, even then, though he had triumphed in the 60s at the Palladium, the Man with a Thousand Gags. But even then he was awkward: a southern middle class bloke lacking the warm working-class solidarity of Morecambe or Ken Dodd. Cartwright catches the nervy determination, the scribbling down of every idea and the crippling insecurity born both of his chilly relationship with his mother (she wore black to his wedding) and of cruel tabloid exposure. Migraines, stomach, the pallid vilitigo which meant the sunlamp hours and fake-tan, and always a fear of losing it. And of losing touch with mankind in general – “Ive learnt to pretend to feel…”
Lowe sets this session in the comedian’s study at one moment in 1975: two of his precious joke-books have been stolen and the police are on the phone, and he is preparing a funeral speech for his old collaborator Denis Goodwin. He roams about, talks to himself, thinks of his friend (quoting C.S.Lewis on friendship from The Four Loves, indeed.). He breaks into prepared routines, remembers his prolific affairs, his disabled son and the calumnies in the Sunday Mirror which made him cry. He mentions assorted showbiz figures including Larry Adler, who threatened to kill him. (“He said to me, I should read his book on how to tell Jewish jokes. I said, you should read mine in how to stick a harmonica up your arse”. And he does a quick turn as Dabber Davis the veteran agent, which thrilled me since I too have briefly worked for him. He shudders at an old Lynn Barbour interview, which like all thin-skinned comedians he has kept a copy of . It begins “You’ve got to like him, he wants you too so much…it’s like having margarine rubbed in your hair”.
The dramatic turn comes with a shocking moment when the police sergeant on the phone has not turned out to be an adoring, unquestioning fan. The cop’s casual remark about preferring a different cheesy TV show hurls Monkhouse into a surreal torment as a TV gameshow screen seems to flash up “words associated with Bob Monkhouse” and he sees SMARMY – OLEAGINOUS – INFIDELITY – INSINCERITY. He collapses, knowing that many of us thought exactly that. Which is where I came in….Oh dear.
So yes, there are the Monkhouse jokes. But we get inside the man who grafted to write them, too. Fair enough.
http://www.edfringe.com to 31 August

rating four   4 Meece Rating

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August 15, 2015 · 1:06 pm

THE FRIDA KAHLO OF PENGE WEST C Nova, Edinburgh

A VICIOUS AND GLEEFUL PLEASURE…
There is a particular kind of modern feminist who fixates on the Mexican painter and free-loving socialist and her endless self-portraits: two other plays in this very Fringe have superscriptions from Kahlo sayings, like “I was born a painter and born a bitch”. But Zoe, a quiet, cerebral, apologetic publishing assistant scared of life, explains Kahlo as “Interesting, if you like that kind of thing and don’t mind being a bit annoyed…like being hit with a sledgehammer of schoolgirl solipsism” . Her cuckoo flatmate, Ruth, is an unsuccessful actress, gripped by the idea of stuffing the patriarchy by doing a one-woman show. Once she disentangles Frida Kahlo in her mind from Frida from Abba, she sees her story – lame, boho genius, fiery lover – as a dream subject. “She shagged that Lenny Trotsky! When she wasn’t painting she was shagging, and when she wasn’t shagging she was limping! Take away the ‘ting’ and you have “pain!”. AND she was a cripple, and hornier than a dwarf on a stag night!”

In this achingly funny, now well-honed and successful comedy by Chris Larner, Kahlophilia is only one of the targets skewered, in sharp lines and wonderful body-language, by the two players, Olivia Scott-Taylor as the eternal mouse in awkward blouse and pleated skirt, and Cecily Nash as the appalling Ruth: toxically self-confident with chaps (“red lipstick, show him your tits, mean are eaaaaasy!”) and raging endlessly at the weaknesses of theatre. Oh, we do love in-jokes, and these are good ones. She turns people away from the RSC Box Office where she works disadvising them from a 500-year-old Croatian epic revival described in the Indy as visceral. “£20 seats you can’t see, £ 70 you see too much and pay later in booze and therapy…Angry people walking up and down shouting. And where are the WOMEN?”.
It’s wicked, contemptuous, striking with rattlesnake accuracy at ambition and pretension in theatre (“I will do the bus crash in dance”). But is also painfully accurate about the way one young woman persecutes another. And there’s a rom-com plot running under it, predictable but enjoyable.
They even give us some of the finished show – “My womb is a paintbrush” , including a remarkable turn as Trotsky by Scott-Taylor. It world-premieres (one always says that, even if it’s going to be a derriere after two nights) in a pub theatre so new that the compere announces no talking at the bar downstairs in the interval, because the regulars are watching the Chelsea match. Given the play’s wild success at the Rosemary Branch in London, there’s a nice ingratitude about that.
So it’s a gleeful thing, and should sell out, and launch Nash and Scott-Taylor as rising stars on their Edinburgh debut. As to the writing, in sharpness of script it knocks spots of most flatmate (and flattened)  TV comedies of recent years.

http://www.edfringe.com to 30 August

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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August 14, 2015 · 1:18 pm

THE CHRISTIANS Traverse, Edinburgh

A TAINTED HALLELUJAH

Hail a bracingly, triumphantly, intelligently unfashionable play, and Christopher Haydon of the Gate Theatre for directing and premiering it here. Lucas Hnath’s subject is religion: true believers, theologically agonized, submitting personal happiness and relationships to a deeper philosophical argument. Not in the 17th century, not in militant jihadism, but right now in modern America.

We are in one of those immense Pentecostalist churches, where a choir of 25 in purple cassocks sways to a boppy gospel opener, happy-faced, urging us to catch our soul on fire. It’s a community, a certainty, a shared life. Having grown from a storefront assembly to a vast thousands-strong church, they have just paid off the building debt.But Pastor Paul (William Gaminara) is a charismatic, commanding figure with a new message. Agonized by a colleague’s bland assurance that everyone who doesn’t accept Jesus goes to hell (even, notably, a heroic Muslim lad who gave his life to save his sister) he asked God for guidance and was told that there is no Hell. No Satan: it is the wickedness in humanity which must be challenged, with love and a promise of salvation. He says that the judgmental assumptions of his church only draws them apart from the love of their sinful neighbours.
To a sophisticate in religion, no problem: the concept of the virtuous pagan, and of damnation as a willed, determined self-separation from God, is common enough (read C.S.Lewis’ The Great Divorce). But to this simple-hearted faithful congregation it is dynamite, just as even thinner theological arguments ripped apart Europe five centuries ago. The associate Pastor (Stefan Adegbola) challenges the heresy and walks out; others follow. The rebel’s “You are not my brother” shatters like a falling icicle on the cheerful bright-lit podium where the protagonists debate on microphones. Out of church, an Elder casts doubt on the pastor’s wisdom in allowing the schism, not least for financial reasons; but he stands firm, rejecting the church’s old culture of “contempt” for non-members.
Is he a saint in his impracticality? Or is he something else? A congregant rises to ‘testify’ with a painfully personal speech. She is Lucy Ellinson, who astonished in the Gate’s GROUNDED: once again this remarkable actor demonstrates her ability to stand still and yet emit electrical pulses of emotion and meaning so violent that the world tilts around her. Sister Jenny is just a poor single mother, living on food stamps but still paying her tithes, needing her church community but agonized with sincerity over this frightening new concept that “even Hitler”, even a child murderer, might be saved from hell.

She has another accusation too, still more damning. A confrontation with his wife shakes the pastor even more, with her flung accusation that “you’re saying that absolute tolerance involves intolerance of the intolerant‘. Breezy modern atheists may scratch their heads at religious absurdity. I have no idea where the author himself stands. But the sincerity and intelligence of the production opens a window into a world too often mocked, too little understood.

http://www.edfringe.com to 30 August
rating four     4 Meece Rating

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August 13, 2015 · 8:22 am

OF MICE AND MEN Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh

It breaks your heart, an epic tragedy in miniature: two men, a couple of sacks and a crate, but their plight and their dreams rise before us in pathetic grandeur. Drilling into the heart of the famous John Steinbeck novella, Nigel Miles-Thomas’ simple staging fully evokes its bleak compassion and harsh unsparing humanity. The story of the itinerant farmworkers, clever thwarted George and big, dumb Lennie, is conjured up, a fleck of individual love and pain in the Dustbowl America in the ‘30s. It’s as strong and rough-edged as a Woodie Guthrie song.
Miles-Thomas himself, who adapts and directs, plays the huge, looming,battered Lennie: an amiable Frankenstein-monster of a man, with the intellect of a small child and the strength of a giant. Alongside him Michael Roy Andrew is a small, neat brisk figure: bright impatient, George, who has looked after him and travelled alongside him after his aunt Clara dies, comforting and pacifying the over and over again like a patient parent with the dream of one day them getting their own farm. Every time he is made to re-tell it, the picture rises more solid, more beautiful. The promise is that Lennie can help out and “tend the rabbits”, because of his childlike fixation with petting anything soft and furry.
But not understanding his own huge strength, he kills every mouse he handles, and his tendency to panic has had them thrown out of one farm for clutching a woman’s soft dress and not knowing how to let go. “God, you’re a lot o’trouble!” says the exasperated George, but resignedly. “You cain’t get rid of him cos he ain’t mean”. Lennie, dependent and willing, just fears the punishment of not being allowed to tend the rabbits on the imaginary future farm.
If you know the book you know what happens, and how the great soft dangerous man’s sweet proclivity will bring them to disaster. But what grips in this spare, perfectly judged production is the honest evocation of the characters and their relationship. Alarmed, appalled, we watch Lennie’s half-sly, half-confused grin and moments of panic, his clutching of a newborn puppy whose fate you wincingly apprehend long before he can (“why’d ya go get killed? I never bounced you hard, you ain’t so little as mice, I didn’t know you get killed so easy”.) Michael Roy Andrew’s George, carer and almost parent, perfectly evokes the daily fear and awareness of Lennie’s innocent dangerousness – “It ain’t bad people that raises hell, it’s dumb ones”. Other characters, the few needed, are sparingly evoked: a fight, a death, narrated in brief physicality. Nothing gets in the way of our contemplation of the central relationship, and the immensity of small tragedies. It shakes you, as it should

http://www.edfringe.com    to 31 August

rating  four4 Meece Rating

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August 12, 2015 · 9:28 am

THE TITANIC ORCHESTRA Pleasance One, Edinburgh

DARK COMEDY FROM A FRACTURED EUROPE. BUT WHERE’S THE BEAR?
Only in Edinburgh’s August are you likely to find an immense, patient queue snaking round the block for half an hour, unable to get to the bar, in order to see a Bulgarian playwright channelling Beckett, Pinter and Kafka in intense, wrist-slitting Mittel-European gloom about the human condition. Even if it does star John Hannah as a time-travelling, undead Harry Houdini, have the catnip word “Titanic” in the title, and be improbably acclaimed as “a madcap comedy of illusion”.
But Hristo Boytchev is a much renowned Bulgarian playwright and political satirist, and attention must be paid to this UK premiere. So what we have here is a group of tramps at a derelict railway station, living on rubbish that trains throw out as they go past, and dreaming of escape along the rails which link and envelop the world from which they are social exiles. Meto (Jonathan Rhodes) tries to organize them, as a theatrical director yelling “I can’t work in these conditions!”. Louko (Stuart Crowther) is solidly sullen, Finnish Heidi Niemi, the only woman, is depressed . Doko (played by Ivan Barnev from Sofia) is a heartfelt if rather overdone imbecile, mourning for his one love, a bear called Katya . She died, probably as the others unkindly say because he sold the last of her food for vodka. They all booze a lot, whenever someone throws a half-finished bottle from the train.
But what is this? Out of a crate emerges the dapper tail-coated figure of John Hannah, who is no sooner murdered for his yellow patent shoes than he returns to life and starts creating illusions, because he is Harry Houdini. Who, being Hungarian-American, presumably returns to this dour 21c Europe to sort it out. He magics up the illusion that Doko’s bear is alive, selling tickets and driving the train (no, we don’t see the bear, dammit). He conjures up more beer. and gets drunk. He explains that all life is an illusion because men need “bread and circuses, all the world’s a stage’.

In the one moment of the 80-odd minutes which is really emotionally engaging, the group sing the European anthem from Beethoven’s 9th and pick up old buckets and rubbish which become violins, to play through disaster like the orchestra of the title. To hammer the point home and flatten the nailhead, Houdini declares that “The whole world is the Titanic and we’re along for the ride. The only escape is through illusion…the seventh dimension of the world is inside you..dream of a world beyond that we carry within us”. When he does magic up a train, it all gets grimmer until Doko adds the further moral that we are each alone, the whole world being just “the dream of a sleepwalker”.
Hannah gives it all he’s got, which is a lot; Russell Bolam directs with some wit, Anthony Lamble and Giles Thomas set it physically with excellent sound and light illusions of passing trains. Mark Bell, one of our best LeCoq-trained physical experts, gets them all falling over a lot. But it feels derivative of too many similar strands, its absurdism tires, and it hammers home its messages too sententiously. If you love such plays, it’s for you. the gloomy Niemi says it all: “Harry, you be weird. We all like to get pissed, but you taking it too far”.
http://www.edfringe.com to 30 Aug

rating  three   3 Meece Rating

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August 12, 2015 · 8:10 am

THE MAIDS The Space at Surgeon’s Hall, Edinburgh

GENET GENIUS? Hmmmm

From time to time, the seeker for cultural enlightenment must deliberately book in to the works of some author he or she can’t see the point of. For some its Beckett, for others Sarah Kane, for many the excitement faded (forty years ago actually) for the knottier French existentialists.  For me it’s Jean Genet , ragamuffin darling of the 1960s intellectual left and subversive prophet of the “beauty of evil”. So, in a spirit of hopeful generosity, I staggered off the Caledonian Sleeper for my first Fringe outing to see what All Bare theatre made of this, described once as “a poisoned pearl”, and revived a few years ago in New York with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, no less. It’s that sort of play: the kind actors challenge themselves with for intellectual credibility.
Genet took inspiration from a 1940s case where two maidservants brutally murdered and mutilated their employers. His black-stockinged maids – who clearly don’t have much housework to get on with – spend 75 gruelling minutes in role-play, switching names (one is Claire and one is Solange) and they each take random turns at impersonating the employer, who also briefly appears.
In eloquently contemptuous speeches – Martin Crimp translates -they play and taunt, one forcing the other to crouch spitting and polishing her patent shoes and then despising her very spittle. Sometimes Claire, or possibly Solange, gets overwrought about the rise and fall of the mistresses “ivory” breasts. Often they boast of being capable of murder. Bizarre statements of stoned poetic import are made –  that the image in the mirror has a ‘stench’ , that objects accuse them. Neither seems fond of the other , or sounds much like a real woman, and both hate and revere the mistress. She despises them. Its socialist-capitaIst resentment of the servant relationship: none of your Downton Abbey stuff.

Crowdfunded, played with dedication by the three young cast, it is a waste: one of those determinedly academic exercises which never quite gets within striking distance of any truth or pleasure.   Even as a curiosity of theatre history it is pretty dated: its appeal (Think Blanchett and Huppert) is faile social indignation and candy for the male gaze – French maids outfits, breasts, say no more . Si no, I still don’t get the point. But I did try. Honest.
to 22 aug. http://www.edfringe.com.
Rating: two  2 meece rating

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August 11, 2015 · 12:29 pm

SWALLOW Traverse, Edinburgh

ENJOY BEING A GIRL? UM, NOT REALLY…
Stef Smith’s new play – after her acclaimed debut with ROADKILL – is  skilfully written, elegantly performed, and curiously annoying.  It is a portmanteau compendium of young urban 21c female angst and self-harm .   There are three mainly soliloquizing, often antiphonal, occasionally interacting characters and a lighted panel which is sometimes a door. Director Orla O’Loughlin correctly describes it as “fragmentary, poetic, tonally diverse” and Smith herself cheerfully says that all of us wrestle with the “the chaos of deep dark hard things, behave badly, drink too much, sleep too little, punch walls”.

The risk she takes (and sometimes does temporarily evade) is that watching strangers have 85-minute nervous breakdowns, however beautifully scripted, can pall. The most determinedly loopy of the three, and mercifully the funniest, is Emily Wachter as Anna.   She has spent over a year shut in her top flat in her pants, starving herself to the point of death, making bird-feeders out of tampons and granola. She is now destroying mirrors , clothing and furniture (“God bless hammers!”) before moving on to rip up the floorboards. She actually is quite entertaining, her demented gung-ho busyness about her flat not unlike a dark version of the character Miranda Hart plays.   Or perhaps Bridget Jones gone tonto.

Wachter is  as usual, superb. But as it darkens into a somewhat tiresome intensity, Smith gives Anna one long self-absorbed riff about her guilt for everything from 9/11 to Auschwitz, whereon my compassion-fatigue went nuclear, provoking a reprehensible urge to slap the spoilt tilde kid for grandstanding on real misery. The author does at least feed in a line to indicate that someone is paying the rent for her solipsistic suicidal lifestyle, though the landlord is going to put in a stiff bill one day for those floorboards.

Downstairs – we learn – is where Rebecca lives (Anita Vettesse). Her husband has left her, provoking her to cut her own face open with broken glass, shout “Fuck off!” at the doctors treating it, and smash the telly (more hammer work, though the set is starkly bare and we must imagine it) . She gets repeatedly drunk, though in a passing moment of realism we learn that she does have a job, as “a paralegal”, which may explain why conveyancing always takes so long these days.
The third, most sympathetic and fully rounded character, is Samantha (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) who works in a care home and wants to change sex and live as Sam. Her/his gender dysphoria is the most convincing of the three problems; a disguised brief fling with Rebecca is properly affecting. So, in another interaction, is Rebecca’s attempt to find out through the letterbox what is wrong with her invisible neighbour . That it has taken her over a year to wonder about the crashing and smashing is, I suppose, part of the urban-alienation theme.

Anyway, Smith does allow us a redemptive ending,  thanks to the kind of visitation which only happens in this kind of play:   a possibly imaginary injured pelican who can fly through closed windows. Oh, and it snows, and something else sentimental happens in the ceiling too.

2 meece rating
http://www.edfringe.com to 30th August
rating two

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August 10, 2015 · 6:15 pm

ADA Bedlam, Edinburgh

THE COMPUTER COUNTESS 

It’s a topical, Tim-Hunt-tastic moment to celebrate one of the forgotten women of science, and the Edinburgh University Theatre companyhave hit on a cracking good story. Ada Lovelace (her married name, she was a Countess) was Lord Byron’s daughter, his only legitimate child, by the clever and mathematically gifted Anne Milbanke. Who, understandably, left him, what with the sibling-incest and the philandering. She raised Ada to be a femme serieuse: the child’s daring imagination may have come from the absent Dad, and she fought her mother over the idea of “poetical science”, but her hard gift for mathematics led her to collaborate with Charles Babbage, first father of computing. He was working on his huge clattering cog and wheel “Engine” (nicely evoked here in huge noisy projections) and dreamed of a still bigger Analytical Engine .

Ada brought her skill to his work, but also that poetical imagination about its possibilities: she is credited with creating the first algorithm, and with pushing the idea that in the future, computers might be able to work with things beyond mere numerical calculation.   He called her “ a fairy who cast a magical spell over the most abstract of sciences’. She said “My intellect will keep me alive!”. What Lady Lovelace would make of the age of Instagram yoga selfies and click-porn doesn’t bear thinking of.

But it was a hell of a life, cut short at 36, and there is gold in her writings, from childhood dreams of flight to a fiery correspondence with Babbage (“I cannot stand another person to meddle in my sentences!” – yep Ada, I know the feeling.)  He and she apparently started a horserading syndicate late on, victims of the common delusion that there is a System, and lost money at it. In this production’s rareish moments of clarity – either biographical or computer science lecturettes – it becomes fascinating. The six- strong student group, however, unfortunately opt for a sour, pretentiously ‘devised’, black-clad, mimetic- symbolic interpertation, full of showy lifts and fallings to the ground. It is a theatrical idiom which only works at the very top of its game. Not here, alas. The show claims itself to take the form of an algorithm, but …no. . So while I am immensely grateful to have learned of the lady, and have looked her up like mad ever since, the show barely gets off the starting block.  But what a cerebrally adventurous story, what a feminist pioneer yarn! I was going to say, bring on a Frayn or Stoppard to do a less drama-schooly version; but hey, the old boys have done their time. Give the story to James Graham. Or Lucy Prebble. Use more of the contemporary letters. Shine a light on Ada the Algorithm lady, not on outworn theories of theatrical form. http://www.edfringe.com to 30 aug rating two    2 meece rating

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August 10, 2015 · 9:41 am

AN OAK TREE Traverse, Edinburgh

GRIEF, ILLUSION, PLAY…
You can’t label this extraordinary two-hander by Tim Crouch as “experimental” theatre, even though it uses a different – wholly unprepared – second actor every time, involves secret audio and audible muttere briefings and a handing over of scripts by the author-performer to his colleague; even though it drops in and out of levels of reality including moments when Crouch asks solicitously whether the second actor is OK, and that it plays recklessly with time, probability, meaning, the concept of hypnosis, and the philosophical idea that all of us perform our lives perilously unscripted.
But it’s not experimental any more, given that Crouch has been doing it for ten years with multiple awards. Whatever it proved, the piece continues to prove it to seat-edge audiences far wider than the cognoscenti who rejoice in novelty and metatheatre. So stand by: this is the moment to bring along a friend whose wariness of tricksy modern theatre usually makes him or her swerve to the bar for an hour, pleading headaches.
This imagined friend will be converted, though shaken. Crouch has humour, sincerity, belief and gentle humanity, and his topic is grief. He plays (when he is not being the writer-director leading the other actor) a scuzzy showbiz hypnotist who, three months before, was driving a car in the dusk and killed a girl of twelve on her way to a music lesson. He is stuck in trauma, blocked, hesitant, losing his grip on his act and his life. The other actor (in the show I saw, Aoife Duffin, young and slight and female) plays the middle-aged father of that child, himself stuck in grief, who improbably volunteers from a pub audience to go onstage.
And that’s it. The rest is their interaction, both during the show before the hypnotist realizes who the father is, and after it when the supposed pub audience have left, shocked. Beyond that, description will not help or enlighten you: just say it is one of the strongest, strangest, truest evocations of grief I have ever seen. The grief that traps, that deludes, that leads you in circles, fuels desperate magical thinking and can estrange one mourning parent from the other and rip families apart. There is guilt, too: a guilt transferred helplessly between the driver and the father, united in the narrowing trap of a fact neither can get past. It is the grief, brilliantly written, which can become a kind of synaesthesia so that words from a policeman fall “like concrete blocks in black” and lodge under your ribs, and in which your lost child seems to lurk in every space and crack in every object in the house and the world.
It is shocking, grippingly moving in moments but momentarily funny: it is held together by the sincerity of Crouch and the acceptance ,and unease, of the other actor. When, near the shining end, the creator drops out of character and turns conversationally to his colleague he asks “Don’t you think it’s a bit contrived?” . We laugh. It is that cathartic moment of theatre when, having been shaken into a community of pain, we breathe and realize that it was all in play.
Take that sceptical friend, do. But probably not if his or her own grief is recent. It’s strong stuff.

http://www.edfringe.com to 16 August

rating five      5 Meece Rating

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August 9, 2015 · 6:01 pm

JURASSIC PARK Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh

DINOSAUR-TING OUT FAMILY LIFE..

A school backpack suddenly yawns like the jaws if a Tyrannosaurus Rex, devouring an actor’s head. A toy helicopter overflies three herding brontosauri. Human velociraptors hop and hiss: a sudden umbrella is the menacing crest of a Spinosaur. And as an unseen patient lies heaving laboured breaths, a ukelele and xylophone lament gently murmurs “Bye bye ceratops, dont cry cry ceratops, i will try, triceratops to get byee…” And at that moment, a show of whimsy and masterly, LeCoq-trained mimetic physical daftness slides into something with real heart.  Eccentric, oblique, but  real.
Superbolt Theatre – Maria Askew, Frode Gjerlow and Simon Maeder – play a Dorset family of three – Dad Terry, geeky son Noah and splendidly stroppy teenage Jade. They are preparing, in a community centre in Lyme Regis on the Jurassic coast, to show us an old VHS of the first Spielberg film in memory of their late Mum, who was a palaeontologist, and after separating from Terry has died. This leaves him an incompetent fulltime custodial Dad who buys time with takeout curries and the toy helicopter.  The teenagers flash back at times to their childhood and the confusion of that early separation, but – someone having lost the video cassette – Noah draws the others in to re-enacting highlights of  the film, right down to the trembling glass of water and the electric fence.
It is adept –  the sight of Maeder playing both parts as a velociraptor chasing himself is remarkable – and amiable in tone, as when the three storm the auditorium trying, confusedly, to explain chaos theory to individual audience members in a babbling hurry. And, of course, it has good physical jokes as when the men appear as DNA strings, or one becomes Richard Attenborough in seconds, courtesy of a glob of shaving foam.
But its chief appeal is in simple heart: a slanting portrait of a family in the confusion of grief, holding itself together with a takeaway curry and the consoling memory of a film they used to watch together, raptly obsessive. That strikes a chord, in a sweet and funny hour.
http://www.edfringe.com to 30 Aug
rating three     3 Meece Rating

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August 8, 2015 · 10:49 pm

TINA C: HERSTORY Underbelly Potterow Topside , Edinburgh

THE RHINESTONE COWGIRL RIDES AGAIN
I first saw this cabaret-theatre character here in 2002, drawn by curiosity because the theme was “Tina C’s Twin Towers Tribute”. Under a year on, it could have been the car-crash acme of Fringe tastelessness. I stayed to admire.  The occasional metamorphosis of writer-performer Christopher Green into a glitzy Nashville diva is up there with Dame Edna for calculated, needle-sharp humour and party-time rapport with an audience. Born on the gay-cabaret scene and honed in many a pub, marquee, inflatable cow and festival, it even flowers intermittently on Radio 4 – no mean feat for cross-dressed satire in a rhinestone miniskirt, and proof that Tina doesn’t depend only on her (not inconsiderable) physical glamour .

It’s sharp, that’s the thing. The swipe at American showbiz grandstanding after 9/11 was if not exactly harmless, pretty well deserved.   The idea was that this steely, self obsessed C& W star woke from anaesthetic after cosmetic surgery to find everyone emotional, distressingly learning that for once, everything wasn’t about her.  So while every other country star was lucratively emoting patriotism and revenge, she was helpless in hospital with a face like a baboon’s bum.
Over a decade since I have kept up with Tina’s shows: the lifestyle guru insulting the audience with elegant patronage, the claims of entertaining troops in Eye-rack, her explanation of the banking crisis, her Presidential candidacy. Like Edna’s the legend grew: “First I was a girl, then a woman, then a brand, and now – (chokes with emotion) I’m an ideology”. In this show, disguised as a book launch event with songs (“Does Margaret Atwood do that? Does Jane Austen?”) the story told, with several new songs and lines and some beloved old ones. The spoof country lyrics grow ever more delicately filthy ” It aint easy being easy” and ” No dick is as hard as my life” – as he skewers the glitzy feminism, blingy lifestyle, early years poverty tales bulging into marble-and-onyx consumerism , and the soupy religiosity (“Make it pretty for Jesus!). And, of course, the country pain,: Tina explains that the deal between beautiful famous people and us oiks is that you must pretend to suffer.

To parody so well you have to be half in love with the genre and its people, and Green is: the music itself (he plays guitar well and keyboards superbly) disgracefully carries you away. Tina’s “I am America, my body is this land” is both rude and strangely inspiring, and there’s an awful stir in her Iraq war anthem (“Shock and Awe! Sexier than internnational law! I am America, hear me roar”) . Even in the inaptly arid lecture-room environment to which Underbelly have daftly moved her, the whole audience succumbed to Tina’s iron control, and not only did a brief line-dance but sang along to her hyper-Republican campaign song Tick My Box (she makes Sarah Palin sound mild).
Green has other strings of work – Ida Barr, a coming book on stage hypnosis, theatre events – but it seems that Tina is not yet being pushed over the Reichenbach Falls with her cowgirl silk fringes flying behind her. She may not be an ideology, but she’s still an event. Hell Yeah!
http://www.edfringe.com to 17 August

rating:  four 4 Meece Rating

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August 8, 2015 · 1:42 pm

IMPOSSIBLE Pleasance QueenDome, Edinburgh

HOLMES AND HOKUM, FRIENDSHIP AND GRIEF
Good to start the Fringe-blitz with a winner . (Not that it was the first one that hit me as I lurched off the Caledonian Sleeper, but more of that later). I would rather rejoice in a fabulous return to form by writers Tom Salinsky and Robert Khan, whose COALITION I loved, but whose KINGMAKER last year, a Boris-fable, didn’t quite ring the bell.
This one abandons modern politics to dive back into the 1920s, with such thematic sharpness, entertaining brio and artfully strong production values – all neatly contained within an hour – that it gets my first Edinburgh-Five. Hurrah. From the moment when we all settled down to a backdrop of archive film – magic-tricks, muttonchop whiskers, old Sherlock Holmes clips of Basil Rathbone – the mood was set; in the opening scene a séance promised a pleasing ghostly Edinburgh creepiness, which is then neatly subverted by the actual story, which is not without seriousness.

It draws on the real friendship of the American Harry Houdini, great magician and escapologist, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Houdini, realized by Alan Cox with gorgeous energetic suavity, is a showman to his fingertips, seen doing one of his own fake seances with his wife Bess (Milly Thomas), talking of “beyond the morbid veil” etc. But Houdini knew it was hokum, and that there was nothing supernatural in his magic tricks and escapes either: only graft, practice and skill. But he hugely admired Conan Doyle for the rationality of his Sherlock stories; and when the great man comes backstage – Phill Jupitus gloriously auld-Scottish and orotundly admiring – they become friends.

But Doyle, who has lost a son, believes in spiritualism, frequents mediums including his own wife (Deborah Frances-White) , and lectures about it . He also of course was taken in by the “Cottingley Fairies”, also dramatized here a couple of years back.
Houdini is horrified, stops doing his fake seances onstage, and artfully exposes one of his friend’s pet mediums , beginning a mission to expose others as mere conjurers like himself. But Doyle is muttonheadedly convinced of communication with the netherworld, even believing that Houdini himself has a secret supernatural gift and dematerializes in his water-tank performance. The friendship starts to crumble. A deeper question slants through, relevant to eccentrically religious people and sceptics today: is it right, asks Bess Houdini, to try and disabuse someone of a comforting belief? Should grief outrank rationality? In a painful scene Doyle sets up a seance for Houdini to talk to his late mother, and the showman angrily debunks it; opening the other question of the morality of faking conversations with people’s dead relatives at all.

It’s neat, sharp, brief, entertaining and full of well imagined lines, especially as Houdini gets aggravated by Doyle’s stubbornness (“And half of his Holmes stories he cribbed from Edgar Allan Poe!”). A shocking (real) event changes the mood, no spoilers for those who haven’t read about Houdini’s life. It opens the way for Khan and Salinsky to create a really spooky shock ending. A temptation which, praise them to the skies, they utterly reject. They end on a very, very good joke. I’d love to see this play grow longer, and live on.

to 31 August   http://www.edfringe.com

rating  five  5 Meece Rating

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August 7, 2015 · 3:16 pm

LETTER TO LARRY Jermyn Street Theatre , SW1

A LOST LADY RETURNS, SAD AND BEGUILING

Theatre loves to eat its own history, and fair enough: if you want intensity, volatile emotion, hope and heartbreak and impossible yet irresistible characters, there are few richer diets. Especially looking back at the age of star-cursed star marriages and a pre-permissive intensity of scandal. Only lately Southwark gave us ORSON’S SHADOW, with Adrian Lukis as Laurence Olivier, taking up with his third-wife-to-be Joan Plowright during an ill-fated collaboration with Orson Welles. In that play Vivien Leigh (Gina Bellman) was mentally disintegrating gradually, but in the background to the clash of Titans.

Now that divorce moment of 1960 is examined from another angle, and this time it is the full Vivien: the remarkable Susie Lindeman sits, roams, clambers, collapses, emotes and flirts, alone onstage for 75 minutes in Donald MacDonald’s play fresh from Paris. It chimes with a BFI season and exhibition at the V&A, marking fifty years since her final performances; and in its own right does much to remind us that there was more to poor Vivien than being Scarlett O’Hara and a discarded Lady Olivier.

Lindeman is physically perfect in the role: birdlike, fragile, a wayward waif, eagerly intense in profile. Her voice is deceptively wispy until it hardens into sudden determination, her studied actressy flirtatiousness suddenly falling away as the rages and despairs of her bipolar mental instability take hold. Her plaint that the ‘condition’ has condemned her to a life of apologizing for behaviour she can barely remember is unbearably touching. “Suddenly I seem to be standing outside myself and I can’t get back in”.
The title indicates that the monologue, in direct speech or recreated flashbacks over twenty years, is addressed to her lost husband, during the divorce and his remarriage to Plowright. At first , and in flashes thereafter, it is the kind of imaginary conversation anyone jilted in love can recognize: appealing, pleading, insulting, claiming. But as she remembers, she carries us back into their key moments: courtship (when both were married to other people), her convent childhood, a beauty’s steely conviction that she could always get what she wanted – “but then of course, you have to keep it..”. She remembers the misery of her ECT treatments, her miscarriages, the affair with Peter Finch, how Olivier’s look of love turned over years to intolerable pity. She flashes out the suddenly steely realization after Gone with the Wind that ‘I was better on film than you!”.
Every gesture and line is immaculate, thought-through, elegant and telling, and it becomes mesmerizing. Cal McCrystal directs – away from his normal comedy beat, but taking pains to keep it moving and surprising, not least with some brilliantly simple but effective video projections by Mic Gruchy : sea-waves, clouds, Notley Abbey’s ancient windows , and Sardi’s where the nervous Olivier agreed to meet her, his new woman at his side to guard him. It transports you to a lost time, and a lost individual’s rare, sad, starry career.
Box office 0207 287 2875 to 22 august
rating four     4 Meece Rating

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August 6, 2015 · 5:44 pm

THREE LITTLE PIGS Palace Theatre, W1

A PIG TALE TROTS ITS STUFF       

Strike day in a hot pedestrian London, and a surreal opening matinee for Stiles and Drew’s new family musical (fresh from the Singapore Rep’s Little Theatre and knocking out a couple of shows a day before The Commitments takes over with moodier night music). Pop meets nursery, as squads of excitable children and toddlers are ushered with difficulty through crowding paparazzi: for these are bankable pigs, with Saturday TV and boy-band credibility.
Simon Webbe of Blue (and Strictly) is a Big Bad Wolf in Elvis quiff and lamé biker-jacket, Leanne Jones from Hairspray is one bouncy piglet, the ripped and street-cool Taofique Folarin from the Lion King another, and Daniel Buckley of Loserville racks up his second Piggy-related role after a Lord of the Flies tour. As for Mummy Pig, it’s Alison Jiear, Olivier nominee fro Jerry Springer the Opera (never, never forget her “I just wanna dance!”). She spiritedly throws the trio out to make their way in the world, in a fine belting aria which might catch on in the age of boomerang kids. Especially as the ousted offspring respond with cheerful optimism and a chorus of “Big Wide World – perfect for a pig!”

There was talk of Gareth Gates playing pig 3, the sensible one with the bricks, but vocal problems we are told prevented it. I must say that he is missing a fair bit of fun in not climbing into the rather fine fat-suit dungarees and curly tail and oinking along. For a 55-minute children’s show, this packs in all the musical-theatre elements in miniature: a short but ferociously jolly overture, genuinely witty choreography, a little bit of recitative, the necessary jeopardy, a basic but effective set reveal when the three houses appear, and a few big numbers causing adults in the stalls to go “whoooop!”, to the puzzlement of their more decorous young companions. Very educational.

Anthony Drewe has respected the famous tale (even giving us the exchange with “Not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin” but made the straw-building pig (Jones) worry about ecologically sustainable materials, the stick one (Folarin) a nicely feckless and games-mad badboy, and Buckley a thoughtful bookish nerd whose particularly lovely voice soars in his dream of building a brick house where they could all live together. Including Mum. The Wolf does his huffing to good effect, with visible string-tugging effects to bring the roofs off : visible is good, children like to feel they could do the show again at home after tea, and Webbe the Wolf’s resort to an asthma inhaler when his huffing fails will also strike a chord in the modern primary classroom. He gets his comeuppance in the cooking-pot, despite the more earnest piglet’s attempt to save him and “hand him over to the police” and the eco-sow’s fret about wolf culls not being environmentally sustainable.

But such asides are for the parents, and for all its good heart this is not one of those cloyingly responsible middle-class educational shows. Just a good lark: jolly theatre with an arful twist of street cred to keep the older brothers and sisters onside as well as the small, wondering theatre newcomers. Clever.
box office 0844 482 9677 to 6 sept
rating three   3 Meece Rating  (think of them as pigs, OK?)

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August 4, 2015 · 10:19 pm

SPLENDOUR Donmar WC2

BEHIND THE PALACE WALLS:  A CHILLING MODERNITY
Peter McKintosh designs cold, skilful dictator chic: above a shining marble floor, the majestic Mittel-Europa chandelier dims to a blood-red aurora or to surveillance-camera pinpoints. A wide dark window looms beyond two silver-gilt audience chairs. We are in a Presidential Palace anywhere on the grim modern globe. The Leader himself is never seen; we watch, in fragmented, fugal snap-scenes, four women waiting for him through a long afternoon and evening. Outside, a denied revolution is brewing beyond the river as the despised “Northerners” take revenge.
Trapped in the arid magnificence of the great room, the women do not invariably understand one another’s language and often speak their thoughts and memories to us, or to themselves. At first Abi Morgan’s jerky structure, repeated lines and flashback variations of dialogue jarred, but I should have trusted the Donmar and director Robert Hastie. Because that early discomfort rapidly becomes part of the necessary experience, echoing and amplifying the dreadfulness of such a milieu. It makes an intense 95-minutes into one of the creepiest and most accomplished new plays of the year.
A smooth, scornful Western photojournalist (Genevieve O’Reilly), has come to take a picture of the dictator. His wife Micheleine or Misha plays hostess: a Pradafied figure in zebraskin stilettos and piled coiffure . With her over the chilli-vodka shots — we eventually learn why – is a drab depressed friend Genevieve (Michelle Fairley). Her late husband painted a picture on the wall, described by the various viewers looking at us through its imaginary expanse in terms which become ever more significant.

The fourth woman, the journalist’s interpreter , is Zawe Ashton, shabby in ankle-boots and market-stall skirt, mistranslating, beadily observing, and artfully pinching glassware and videos at every opportunity. With her dark quirky look like an elf gone to the bad, Ashton creates a frighteningly recognizable evocation of what can happen to denizens of a crushed land: a creature sly, desperate, ignoble, mendacious, denying her own tribal roots, enviously hating and desiring both the splendour of Micheleine’s world and the chill sophisticated freedom of the journalist’s.

But at the heart of it, in a performance which should whisk her straight onto a Best Actress shortlist, is Cusack as the wife: an Imelda, Asma, Elena Ceaucescu or Mirjana Milosevic. All brittle poise from eyebrows and aubergine nails to marble-clattering heels, Madame moves between smalltalk and sentiment, dry observation (not least of the interpreter’s light fingers) to brief naked despair and a final strange nobility of resignation as to what will happen when rougher boots mount the Palace stairs. O’Reilly, impatient and dismissive in her neat trousers-and-waistcoat, gives the sarcastic, brittle professionalism of the journalist; and Fairley rises from quiet mousy beginnings to evoke exactly how it is when you live smilingly alongside lies. “Thirty-five years is a long time to despise your best friend”.

The gradual unpeeling of who they are, what they have seen and betrayed, holds you tense and scared. Outside are hints of fleeing and firestorms, gunfire and looting; inside dark histories and rotting compromises. And who is not a parasite? The wife, once a lovelorn girl, who forgives her master all horrors? The needy greedy interpreter? The best-friend who learned to ignore the fate of her husband and court power? Or the journalist heading back to her clean white sheets and contact-sheets of award-winning atrocity shots? Nobody is clean. All, in moments of spoken honesty, are to be pitied.

box office 0844 871 7624 to 26 September
Rating: four    4 Meece Rating
Principal Sponsor: Barclays

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August 4, 2015 · 12:12 am

DEAR LUPIN Apollo, W1

A FATHER AND A SON,  WHEN THE TIMES WERE A-CHANGING…

Old army jokes get readopted by every generation. I suspect that one of the most slyly placed laughs in this ultimately charming evening falls into that category. The Sergeant-Major thunders “Recruit Mortimer! I didn’t see you at camouflage practice!” “Thank you very much sir..”. Pause, a gale of mirth as the audience gets it. Nice.

But beyond such punchline moments, the play’s strength is elsewhere, born of personality, affection and an acknowledgement which gradually grows on you: of wider truths about parental love and the deep, alarming generational change (my own generation…) when a 20th century cut itself rudely adrift from postwar austerity.
A portentous reaction? Well, better that than the irritability which marked my first half-hour watching this two-hander: frankly repelled by the cocky self-absorbed delinquency of the younger protagonist and narrator. Jack Fox is Charlie Mortimer, plays alongside his real-life father, the veteran James Fox as Roger Mortimer – ex-Coldstream Guard, racing correspondent, wit, and longsuffering parent. He was nicknamed Lupin in honour of Pooter’s awful son in Diary of a Nobody. The real Charlie kept his father’s letters spanning thirty years: letters to Eton, to various hippyish foreign retreats, to his brief spell in army training and his sadder time in rehab after long abuse of alcohol and drugs. In middle age he published them as Dear Lupin; the late Roger’s voice entranced Radio 4 with its dry, caustic humour and fearless commentary on life with a heavy-drinking wife, neighbours and random racetrack encounters. Not to mention the glorious vituperations (many, I must say, about women: Yoko Ono described as being “as erotic as a sack of dead ferrets” ). The book took off, and now Michael Simkins deftly shapes it into this two-hander, directed by Philip Franks in a nice cluttered Adrian Linford set.

It adds a lot more narrative from Charlie about his own life, which is what caused my early irritability. Jack Fox is not yet charismatic enough on stage to create an emotional hinterland and sympathy: when his father calls him “an unrepentant spiv”, he is not far off, even when Lupin is still only bunking off from Eton and being rescued from expulsion by his friend’s godfather, Montgomery of Alamein. As he spirals into idle random jobs, boozing, overspending, showing-off and every kind of drug, sympathy drains away. But not from his father, whose exasperated love breathes in every line, offering advice on foreign visas and shady hats and French police, enclosing cheques and relating his own life – a hardworking one in contrast to Lupin’s – without complaint or comparison right through into his declining years. By which time Lupin has HIV and a damaged liver, and hardly notices his father’s growing weakness.

It’s a toughly unsympathetic role, and young Fox does his best. But the glory of the night is his father James: whether being Roger in mulberry cords and tweed jacket, or slipping deftly into character parts – headmaster, elderly tart, Montgomery, Jobcentre official, assorted army officers, a wide-boy dealer boss and, best of all, an utterly perfect Brian-Sewellesque fine art auctioneer. That keeps audience affection flowing; and when Lupin after the interval is getting his comeuppance and realizing what a mess he made of thirty years, the relationship becomes a touching tribute to the rock-solid and wise affection of a funny, perhaps sometimes lonely, maverick father for his classically ‘hopeless’ son.

So yes, it chokes you up in the end. In his last days Mortimer said he wanted no memorial service “just a quick fry-up”; and asked only for Lupin to remember some of his jokes. The play serves that cause magnificently; and by the end becomes a memorial any parent could be proud of.

4 Meece Rating
Box Office: 0844 482 9671 http://www.nimaxtheatres.com
to 19 sept

rating: four

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August 1, 2015 · 1:11 pm

BAKKHAI, Almeida, N1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI GOES HAPPILY DEMENTED AT THE ALMEIDA

“Cleverness is not wisdom,” warn the Maenad chorus, as king Pentheus determinedly resists the rise of new god Dionysos’ cult in Thebes. Euripides’ Bacchae tells how the young god returns to his mother Semele’s home city to visit her grave, only to wreak terrible vengeance on Thebes’ young and arrogant king Pentheus, who refuses to respect his godhead. The Greek term for divine power, daimon, becomes a touchstone of Anne Carson’s new version for the Almeida: even the spelling of Carson’s title, Bakkhai, proclaims her intention to stay closer to the original texture of Greek. Euripides’ formal structure remains intact, lyrical choral odes alternating with intense scenes, and while Carson’s clear, crisp language (which retains ancient Greek cries of Euoe! Euoe!) mainly inhabits a timeless poetic world, she touches the contemporary from time to time: “Shall we call a cab?” elderly patriarch Cadmos asks the blind seer Teiresias as they set off in Bacchic regalia to join the revels. “It doesn’t sound very Dionysian,” Teiresias ruefully replies.

Carson’s commitment to authenticity is echoed in the Almeida’s classically-driven production, directed by James Macdonald. Our three leading actors double (and even triple) the principal roles, just as they might have done in ancient Athens, and we have a superb Chorus whose strong, graceful sense of movement and burnished singing tone regularly infuse a sense of the sacred on stage. Composer Orlando Gough mixes tribal, almost Native American sounds with soaringly Medieval harmonies and contemporary dissonance to give each Choral ode a wild, beautiful air. Consonants become percussion: describing how the god “has stung (Cadmos’s daughters) out of their minds”, the Chorus hold a nasalised “ng” until it sounds like a bee trapped in music. Elsewhere, the Chorus yelp, whisper, sigh and scream, or chant speech in unison with mesmerising slowness and clarity. While their choreography isn’t so original, the discipline of their group movement constantly impresses, rapping their thyrsi on the ground with gunshot-sharp timing to add a primal beat. Having changed their contemporary clothes on arrival for soft and ragged fawnskins, the Chorus steadily become more enraptured as the play progresses, rocking and shaking when possessed, smearing their faces with warpaint before Pentheus’ gruesome downfall: Dionysiac frenzy is certainly fun, but it’s also definitely frightening.

Antony McDonald’s design takes our contemporary world (Pentheus in suit and tie, Cadmos in dressing-gown and slippers) into the ancient, played on a flat dark stage surrounded by low hillocks of black soil. The sense of time and place is pleasingly mellow, though Pentheus does get a classic Chanel suit for his fatal Mount Cithaeron adventure. Ben Whishaw plays Dionysos as a whimsically gentle, long-haired cult leader whose many parallels with Jesus are enjoyably obvious: but Whishaw’s menace is very much hidden behind serene confidence, and sometimes this god does need more rage, more viciousness. Bertie Carvel is a nicely uptight, prurient Pentheus, but entirely outshone by his excellent, demented Agave to close. Kevin Harvey’s Cadmos quavers delightfully but lacks the gravitas, the sense of spent fire that would make him finally tragic.

– CHARLOTTE VALORI

Rating: four 4 Meece Rating

At the Almeida Theatre until 19 September. Box office 020 7359 4404

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July 29, 2015 · 10:17 am

THREE DAYS IN THE COUNTRY, National Theatre, SE1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI GLIMPSES A RUSSIAN SUMMER WITH PATRICK MARBER

Patrick Marber has taken Turgenev’s A Month in the Country and strengthened it in all directions, rather like an enthusiast restoring an aged, leaky old boat into a seaworthy thing of beauty. In Marber’s hands, these characters become more assertive, and considerably more interesting: their actions produce a plot with rather more fire in the belly than Turgenev’s original. The result is a sharply witty costume drama, echoing George Bernard Shaw both in its urbane comic bite (“He’s a dullard: meeting him is the same as not meeting him,”) and tragic emotional fierceness: “I’ve decided I can live with my unhappiness; I won’t live with yours.” Mark Thompson’s design uses the whole Lyttleton stage, a huge landscape painting providing the backdrop which pours across the stage floor, with windows and doors suspended on wires. Edwardian furniture is placed in distant groups, emphasising both spacious luxury and a lack of privacy, of closeness. The steady absence of freedom – of choice, of love – becomes an obsession for all.

The plot is essentially two intersecting love triangles – perhaps even squares or pentagons, so many people are hopelessly attracted to each other – which build into a perfect storm of tortured emotions for all concerned. We have the expected mix of delusional passion, idealism, lust and pain: despite its darker moments, it’s never quite profound, but it’s deeply watchable, well acted, and often extremely amusing.

Marber presides as director over a skilful cast. John Simm has a lovely freshness and clarity of delivery as Rakitin, his life laid waste by his useless passion for his best friend’s wife: Simm conveys a sophisticated, intelligent man at once making the best of life, bitterly aware that true happiness has passed him by. Rakitin’s magnificent soliloquy on the agonies of unrequited love is one of the play’s most powerful moments. While Rakitin is at the heart of this play throughout, Mark Gatiss constantly captures our attention with his brilliantly comic portrayal of the local doctor Shpigelsky, “the maestro of misdiagnosis” who is furthering the suit of boring farmer Bolshintsov (an adorably anxious and shy Nigel Betts) with pretty, brittle young Vera (Lily Sacofsky). Shpigelsky, meanwhile, has matrimonial ambitions of his own: cue the single funniest proposal scene I have ever witnessed, frankly unromantic in style, yet gradually exposing a vulnerability which tears at the heart.

Royce Pierreson’s luxuriously soft voice and restrained physicality make for a magnetic Belyaev, the handsome young tutor with whom nearly everyone is in love. Belyaev’s character benefits considerably from Marber’s touch, becoming a much stronger and more attractive man, conveying inner certainty and charisma despite being socially at odds with those around him. Pierreson conjures appropriately awkward chemistry with gauche little Vera, sensual passion with maidservant Katya (Cherrelle Skeete), and breathless adoration for his domineering, yet tragically vulnerable employer Natalya (a highly wrought, sassy Amanda Drew). John Light is deeply moving as Natalya’s burly, practical husband Arkady, long estranged from his wife (to his great sadness) and immersed in his estate, hectored over by his elegant mother Anna (Lynn Farleigh). The next day, it is Light’s tense, near-explosive pathos that lingers in the mind.

– CHARLOTTE VALORI

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating

At the National Theatre until 21 October. Box office: 020 7452 3000

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July 24, 2015 · 1:32 am

SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park W1

GLORIOUS BRIDES AND BROTHERS…  LP NIPS BACK  MID-HOL TO CATCH THEM ALL

Innocent virgins abducted from their family hearth, carried off  to wild territory by lawless bearded gunmen as domestic slaves and bedmates!  Men callously singing about the rape of Sabine Women, gleefully anticipating their victims. “Sobbin, sobbin, sobbin, fit to be tied”!  Shocking. But none of your Royal Opera House rape filth here. This sunny, witty, melodious show is wholesome as hominy grits, the crowning treat of the Regents Park season.  A slight and fairytale book indeed, but threaded with great tunes and heart and sense and mischief and tough 50s feminism.

Rarely has the stage version – devised in 1978 from the  famous 1954 film – been more fun than under Rachel Kavanaugh’s deft direction, beneath the trees which. (with Peter McKintosh’s neat sliding barn set) readily represent the mountain pines of old Oregon, where a pioneer backwoodsman might sing of himself as a lonesome polecat yearning for a mate. As the feral pioneer men, furious townsfolk and shrieksome girls roar around the auditorium in a gingham-and-buckslin tornado, and the avalanche (clever trick,Mr McK!) overwhelms the whole rake, we’re right there, believing the raucous romcom tale.  Such a surrender is facilitated by the way that each of Mercer’s and Hirschorn’s songs does genuinely move the emotional story forward.  And at two moments the music takes you, suddenly, beyond mere rollicking entertainment into real beauty: one a twelve-strong harmony of separated  men and girls yearning for the end of winter: the other a heartbreakingly simple welcome to a newborn child.

Everything works. Laura Pitt-Pulford as  Millie, the first and voluntary bride, sings like a bird, fiercely enchanting in her refusal to quit after being duped by the wily, arrogant Adam (a strong, swaggering Alex Gaumond).  The sequence where she gives courtship advice to the six brawling, Top-Gearish louts – still in long underwear and socks  – is glorious. Not least when within minutes their discordant lumbering becomes Nureyevesque balletry, frankly as camp as Christmas.

Indeed the movement and dance throughout is athletically, crazily witty and expressive (axe-dancing could become a disco craze, lock up your woodshed now).  Movie folklore from 1954 relates that the film’s choreographer  tried to turn down the job, saying : “Here are these slobs living off in the woods. They have no schooling, they are uncouth, there’s manure on the floor, the cows come in and out – and they’re gonna get up and dance? We’d be laughed out of the house.”   But he triumphed, and modern choreographers like nothing more than a bit of challenging character work. So before Alistair David sets them free here into balletic brilliance, and again during the dance-off at the Social, character and rivalry between the prim urbanites and the wild brothers are expressed with  consummate wit. So is the orchestration – some lovely discords as Caleb first takes the floor. Anyway,  top marks to anyone who can dance at all after being, as several brothers are, hurled with bruising violence across the floor and over tables.
Joyful moments, then, link a chain of easeful satisfaction: relish Millie’s  polite dismay as ever more unexpected siblings-in-law in law crash out if the Regents Park bushes, or wait for the mournful chorus as banished lads with “cupid’s cramp” clutch pillows to their frustrate groins in the barn. Sigh happily as that joke blends into sweetness and longing for real love as the chorus melds. Look forward, even to the abrupt economical brilliance of the quickfire conclusion.  And, as ever, enjoy the dusk falling over us all on the park, as the light filters through the trees  and the same bats swoop over both W1 and the Old West…

box office 0844 826 4242 to 29 Aug

rating four   4 Meece Rating
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box office 0844 826 4242 to 29 Aug

rating four
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July 22, 2015 · 10:36 am

MACK AND MABEL, Chichester Festival Theatre

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FINDS PLENTY OF TALENT BUT LITTLE REWARD IN CHICHESTER

This is a tale of romance and of the lure of cinema: tricky on the stage. Mack Sennet, a clownish film director, is losing his beloved star, Mabel Normand, to the dreaded, meatier features. He leaves the emotion and the drama to the other directors, he says: D.W. Griffiths and the like. The issue is that, as Sennet would have wanted, Mack and Mabel is all performance and little gut. Extremely talented people are behind this production, but the material they chose does them little favours.

The musical elements are near perfection. Jerry Herman’s score is a gently bluesy and aggressively memorable delight. But Michael Stewart’s book has the charm of a self-assessment tax return.

Despite this, Jonathan Church has brought a large cast and this shaky material into something moderate, occasionally good. Tight choreography, thumping band, a seductively jazzy score and some of the clearest and accomplished vocal performances out there. It’s just after every triumph of a number, it is a lazy book which picks up where it left off.

As Mack and Mabel, Michael Ball and Rebecca LaChance are on fine form; Ball with his boomy voice, imposing frame, but emotional delicacy, LaChance with her outstanding vocals, innocent eyes but later ambitious swag. But the text gives them nothing meaty to play with. At best, it’s the serious bits of Panto. The romance is gently introduced and quickly forgotten, the dialogue is trite, incredibly few jokes land and the rosy adoration for ‘the mooovies’ never really gets beyond people sighing, “Oh, has everything got to do with the movies?”

But despite being gutted of a vital organ, the show stands. Even though no one with any lines can explain the central fascination with cinema, Robert Jones’ set has the sweaty sheen of creative industry with cranes, cameras and projections wheeling around. This workmanlike aesthetic is relieved when the band strike up, with the glitzy glamour daubed on by the rather brilliant lighting of Howard Harrison. The stage is set alight, led from the front by the absolute machine that is Anna-James Casey. Each ensemble piece has her at the heart – a slice of vocal and physical perfection.

This poor cast then. Alive with the heft of talent in the room, with the piece itself gentle sapping it away from them. They sweat terrific number after terrific number but it’s never cemented emotionally by the threadbare story.

– LUKE JONES

3 mice 3 Meece Rating

UNTIL 5th September at Chichester Festival Theatre; Box office: 01243 781312

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July 17, 2015 · 9:58 am

THE GATHERED LEAVES, Park Theatre, N4

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FINDS AN EMPTY FAMILY DRAMA WITH GOOD GAGS TO KEEP IT AFLOAT

After 17 years away, the grown-up daughter returns with the illegitimate child which got her thrown out. One of her brothers is having marital problems, whilst also being a doctor. Her other brother is autistic. Her mother is a basic, frustrated housewife and her father doesn’t understand anything but definitely has affairs. The grandchildren also don’t get on.

If you’re starting to think that all sounds a little Sunday mid-morning on Radio 4, it’s because it is. Playwright Andrew Keatley has delivered The Archers and every other soap you could imagine. It is amusing but absolutely nothing more. The acting is entirely conversational and anything overly dramatic falls flat. All of this over Easter weekend with the ’97 election looming – for no reason whatsoever.

It is baggy, for 2 hours, and needed hefty trimming. The only relief was a decent joke every 4-5 minutes.

The play calls open season on all issues. Tracey Letts’ Orange: Osage County got stuck in with vividly entertaining relationships and acute deconstruction of each misfits’ dilemma. This play kicks the problems around with simplistic language and zero poetry, pumped with gags which almost never suit the character they come from. Wherever this dies, another random problem is added into the mix. Textbook family woes for Playmobil characters.

The best plays put issues under the knife, dig a little depth. There is no dramatic use to ambling around, airing them.

Despite much of the cast being related (Jane Asher/Katie Scarfe, Alexander Hanson/Tom Hanson), none gel. Huffy delivery of over-explained lines gives them little to work with. Basic emotions are handed to them and nothing is left to drama, atmosphere or the audience. Every little thing has to be over-explained in the dialogue for fear of someone 20 miles away missing it.

The only decent performances are from Clive Francis as the grandfather – a painfully conflicted character he makes sense of – and Nick Sampson as the autistic uncle. Although delicately and almost movingly played, he is the butt of every joke. A room of 200 laughing at someone pretending to be autistic is frankly not my cup of tea – no matter how much it tries to make moral conversation of it.

This is a basic play, with no direction from Antony Eden, but had some laughs.

– LUKE JONES

2 Mice 2 meece rating

Until 15th August at Park Theatre: Box Office: 020 7870 6876

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July 14, 2015 · 10:09 am

THE MENTALISTS, Wyndham’s Theatre, WC2H

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FINDS THINGS GET MUCH BETTER AFTER THE INTERVAL

The jokes bought this play some time. Richard Bean, a former standup, is hot property at the moment after a slew of critical acclaim. One Man Two Guvnors, Great Britain and Made in Dagenham have all built to this crafty delve into the archives.

Bean wrote The Mentalists in 2002 – his two strange protagonists are based on two strange acquaintances. But in the glow of his late triumphs, this play cowers, its juvenile flaws exposed.

Ted and Morrie are in a hotel room in Finsbury Park. Ted has discovered the “Holy Grail of how to live”. His plan is a new society, based on “benevolent control” and “cleanliness”. Morrie, who usually makes dirty films, is there to help produce Ted’s idealistic and mental party political broadcast.

The entire first half is anecdotes, wistful tangents and the set-ups for later gags. It doesn’t bore, but there’s no hook. If the show had suddenly ended due to some emergency in the first act, I’m not sure anyone would have minded.

Steffan Rhodri – as the neatly camp but defiantly heterosexual Morrie – comfortably inhabits all these quirky stories and brings a gently enjoyable performance. Stephen Merchant as the uptight yet unfinished Ted struggles. His entire first half is spent cueing up the second. The real drama frustratingly tunes in after the interval and both rise to it well. For me, the good stuff came just in time. Others I fear may have been left behind.

Post-ice cream /gin and tonic, the play suddenly acquires bite. We’re finally given the punchlines to the ramble we were given earlier and an actual story emerges. We learn of murder, lies and madness.

The director, Abbey Wright, marshals both actors well. There is the right amount of physical comedy and the gags finally land with the kind of satisfaction you only get when you’ve had 45 minutes of build-up. Although Stephen Merchant has sizeable comedy chops, and the face of a cherished family pet, his solid performance is still some way behind the engaging Steffan Rhrodri. But Merchant handles the gear change from gentle standup to tragic comedy well and plays the vacant madness hilariously.

It is not the storming two-hander you might expect; it is too slow for that. But from almost nothing this play grows into something funny, shocking and unsettlingly tragic.

– LUKE JONES

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating

UNTIL 26th September at Wyndham’s Theatre: BOX OFFICE 0844 482 5120

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July 9, 2015 · 12:49 am

THE INVISIBLE, Bush Theatre W12

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI LEARNS ABOUT LASPO*…

“When I was growing up the poor were seen as unfortunates. Now they’re seen as manipulative. Grasping. Scroungers. It’s very sad.” So reflects Shaun (Niall Buggy), a charming, penniless old Irishman with more than a touch of the blarney, facing yet another Kafka-esque nightmare negotiating with the sullen, unyielding bosom of our Housing and Benefits systems in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s The Invisible. On the day of the Budget, when the latest plans for supposedly solving society’s biggest problems have been touted across every media channel, it’s always tempting for pub philosophers and armchair politicians to make sweeping judgements and dangerously inhumane generalisations; we all have our private theories of blame and retribution for the taxpayer’s burden. The Invisible reminds us that, inside those synthetic statistics, thousands of real individuals – vulnerable, defenceless and alone – uniquely suffer the consequences of each government’s so-called solutions. If the problems they encounter are legal ones, recourse to free help is now dwindling fast, thanks to swingeing cuts to our Justice sector meted out by Grayling and Gove. Hence, these victims become The Invisible: the poorest and weakest in our society, whose voice can quietly stopped by lack of representation or, simply, despair.

However, on the front line of social justice, our heroine Gail (a fabulous Alexandra Gilbreath) is struggling on an ever-fraying shoestring to keep her legal advice service open, ably supported by her neurotic, passionate assistant Laura (Sirine Saba). Beside Shaun, Gail meets Ken (Nicholas Bailey), an estranged father who asks her on a date only to solicit free legal advice, and Aisha, suffering domestic violence in her arranged marriage. The extreme frustration and stress of Gail’s clients becomes a constant theme, along with their fundamental human need to talk: but time is always running out, just like the money. Ken’s disastrous court appearance as a Litigant in Person sees him tragically lose his cool – and, we suspect, his children.

Director Michael Oakley oversees a dynamic, minimalist production almost in the round. Ruth Sutcliffe’s design includes a ceiling of floating legal documents hung in serried ranks, suggesting death by a thousand paper cuts, each one a sword of Damocles hung over our protagonists, whose cases may fall on deaf ears or get lost in our latest Circumlocution Office. Lenkiewicz gives us much to ponder, though there’s a significant missed opportunity to draw important parallels between the Legal Aid system and the NHS by making her doctor a middle-aged, white, male, misogynistic snob; this tired trope gets an easy left-wing laugh, but only detracts from the overall debate. Bursts of song punctuate the piece, sometimes unsuccessfully disjointed, occasionally aptly matched to the mood.

Lenkiewicz’s language is refreshingly natural: she depicts the insidious rhetoric of the abusive husband Riz (Scott Karim) with particularly chilling brilliance. The finale, for me, crosses the borders of melodrama into plain emotional blackmail, but despite its heavy-handed ending, The Invisible is provocative, edgy and dark enough to take the sheen off this Budget’s claptrap – or any other. Grab your nearest armchair politician and propel them forthwith.

– CHARLOTTE VALORI

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating

At the Bush Theatre, W12 until 15 August: 020 8743 5050

* The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012

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July 6, 2015 · 11:12 pm

ORSON’S SHADOW Southwark Playhouse, SE1

WHEN LARRY MET ORSON AND KEN AND IT DIDN’T GO WELL…
Sir Larry spreads his arms wide in the rehearsal room and moans “I am a giant in chains!” His director rolls his eyes. The critic-dramaturge in the corner cringes. The leading lady is impassive, decorous, restrained. In the round, encircling these hapless players the audience enjoys a sort of sympathetic schadenfreude. It is 1960.
On the face of it, this is mainly one for dedicated theatre enthusiasts and historians of its 20c evolution . Anoraks, if you like. And critics. It is an imagined passage in the lives of five crucial figures. Kenneth Tynan – wanting a job with Olivier at the new National Theatre – brings him together with his hero Orson Welles, whose film career is in fragile decline and who is gripped by a passion to direct Chimes at Midnight with himself as Falstaff – ideally doing it first at the National. so as to attract movie funding.  So now, through Tynan’s well-meant interference, Welles is set up to direct Olivier in the absurdist Ionesco play RHINOCEROS, alongside his mistress – later wife – Joan Plowright. For Olivier is in the process of leaving the troubled, manic depressive Vivien Leigh.

You see what I mean? If you don’t care about historic backstage travails, don’t bother. But if you do there are rewards in the spectacle of mid-life male egos and artistic frustrations breaking out in a rash of irritable despair, during a time when theatre itself was in transition, as the Royal Court blazed a new trail.  The author Austin Pendleton is a veteran of that era himself, worked with Orson and met Vivien Leigh. And it is true that Welles tried to direct that play, that it became spiky, and that he was indeed struggling to produce Chimes at Midnight and never got either proper funding or a NT slot.  But the detail is imagined, and Plowright – still alive – sees it apparently as purest fiction.

As entertainment, it partly works.  Edward Bennett’s Tynan looks right in manner and physique – looselipped, aquiline, slightly camp. Adrian Lukis’ Olivier is at first disconcertingly bankerly – but as it goes on we are reminded that he was in transition between his high heroic mode in velvet jackets, and his modernization – he had just done Osborne’s The Entertainer. The rolling r’s, the insecurity, the actorly fear all grow gradually more credible.  Welles (John Hodgkinson) is pure magic though: orotund, dryly despairing or lit by creative vehemence, he holds the floor even when sitting in exasperated silence amid nervy gadflies. Louise Ford’s Plowright’s calm dignity stands in contrast to Gina Bellman as an increasingly crazy, ultimately genuinely sad Vivien.

The first act , as Tynan delivers some cleverly mocking setup, feels definitely anoraky: after the interval, though, there is l sharp comedy in a magnificent display of rehearsal behaviour from hell. Olivier sabotages the sour nonentity of the part by playing it as his standard romantic hero, and redirecting Plowright in opposition to both Welles and the author. The director cracks and throws a stool at him, Tynan succumbs to a nervous emphysema attack, Leigh arrives half mad. So it warms up.  But not quite universally enough, I suspect, to convert those without a taste for the day before yesterday’s dramas.
box office 020 7407 0234
rating: three    3 Meece Rating

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July 4, 2015 · 9:17 pm

THE GRUFFALO Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue

THE BIG HAIRY ONE RIDES AGAIN…
Stage Hero of the week is Owen Guerin, aka The Gruffalo in the larky children’s play based on Julia Donaldson’s immortal book. On the hottest West End day for decades there he was, even more overdressed for the weather than David Suchet in his Lady Bracknell rig across town. In an immense tatter-tag suit and hood, he roared and chased and danced and, in the culminating moments when Mouse (Ellie Bell) has outwitted him, abandons the stage to dive through the shrieking audience and leap over seatbacks in manic panic.   Respect!
The third cast member has the lightning changes – Timothy Richey as all the predators is a birdwatching owl, an extremely vain snake and a bouncing fox. And all of it is set, beautifully by Isla Shaw in Tall Stories’ well-loved production which looks like the familiar Axel Scheffler illustrations , but offers sly playful surprises in the creatures’ look.
I say “shrieking” but a great merit of this stage Gruffalo-show is that unlike some drama for slightly older children (the youngest here are only three) it doesn’t channel the childrens-telly-presenter manic vapidity, demanding cheers and screams from the start. It builds properly, like a storybook, letting the Mouse’s journey through the wood draw the attentive audience with it and not unveiling the actual Gruffalo until quite late on (I like to think of him in hot matinee mornings, probably sitting backstage in his pants with a fan on until the last moment, but that may be kindly wishful thinking). So when he appears there is a real frisson, and indeed in the physical work a real sense of danger. And the children near me clapped with glee at the moment when Mouse has persuaded the poor dim tusky monolith that she – not he – is the reason all the other animals flee.

Having raved before about Donaldson’s STICK MAN on stage, this now joins it in the pantheon of shows I want to keep on running until I get my hands on some grandchildren – or great-nephews and nieces obliging enough to live nearby. Keep it up.

box office 0844 482 9674 to 6 Sept      4 Meece Rating
rating four (very young) mice
box office 0844 482 9674 to 6 Sept
rating four (very young) mice

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July 2, 2015 · 11:14 pm

WONDER.LAND Palace, Manchester

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE 

Fifty minutes in, we got a 30ft yodelling falsetto caterpillar with flashing saucer eyes, and I cheered up. It also, as it happens, sang the central message of Damon Albarn’s musical, centrepiece of the Manchester International Festival in partnership with the National Theatre ( Rufus Norris himself directs). The message is “Who are you?”, ‘cos it’s all about teenage self-realisation in the age of broken homes and feral schools under the cosh of Goveian superheads. This necessitates a girl’s escape down the rabbit-hole of the smartphone, to become a braver avatar of herself.

So Albarn, with book-and-lyrics by Moira Buffini, dodges around Dodgson. Troubled Aly – Lois Chimimba – chooses to be a blonde Alice in the wonder.land virtual-reality game . It comes to life as Rosalie Craig, interacting with assorted Carroll characters who are fellow-players’ avatars: including a magnificent Dodo, a 12ft high sacking mouse, and a gluttonous Dum and Dee. The White Rabbit, in a gas-mask and huge balloon ears, is plain terrifying; Humpty is a battered infant with a balloon.
Aly is addicted to the game, doesn’t like her Mum and is jealous of a baby brother; her Dad (Luke Fetherston, one of the merrier characters) has moved out after losing everything to online gambling addiction. So she’s bullied at school.

A pretty standard High-School movie plot, then, including a Dahl-style demon headmistress: Anna Francolini on spiffing form, banning phones with “These little portals will lead you astray, the danger is mortal, your brain will decay”. When she confiscates Aly’s for using it in school (a disciplinary measure we are encouraged to consider mean and evil, cos Rufus ’n Damien are determinedly down wid da kidz) she pirates the avatar and turns Alice to the dark side. So there is a big denouement, heroic rescue, partnership with a bullied gay boy, etc. No, that’s not a spoiler: it’s the most basic Grange-Hill of plots, and this unsubtle internet tale is not The Nether…
What it depends on is design. Vast projections overhang and steal the monochrome “real world” scenes; Rae Smith’s set, 59 Productions projections, Paule Constable’s lighting and Katrina Lindsay’s mad fanciful costumes just about carry it, with help from occasional glints of Buffini wit in the script (I like Aly’s doomy teenage wail of “How can you say I’m wasting my life online – online IS my life”). And Albarn, who has said that modern musicals are mainly “garbage”, remembers enough about them to have a dancing first-half closer and a rousing fight at the climax.
The curious thing, though, is how dull and derivative nearly all the music is. The one good song is the Caterpillar’s Frank-Ifieldish yodelling of “Who are youuuuu?”. Otherwise plonking choruses, hesitant sub-Sondheim recitatives and some direct steals from music-hall: Dad’s Act 1mad-tea-party finale is more or less “My Old Man’s a Dustman” and the opening row with his wife after the interval owes much to “Any Old Iron”. And I cannot be alone, during Francolini’s staccato patter about always being right, in remembering Rex Harrison doing “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”. The Albarn apple hasn’t fallen that far from the tree. But for all the spectacle and earnest topicality, it all ends up feeling a bit like – well, a grin without a cat.

box office 0844 871 7654 to 12 July
To NT in November.
rating three

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July 1, 2015 · 11:14 pm

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Vaudeville, WC2

A HANDBAG?  A WHOLE TRUNKFUL OF TREATS
The heart sinks beforehand: Oscar Wilde’s sunny comedy melodrama is too familiar: skipping from one well-worn epigram to the next, from handbag to muffin, butler to Bracknell until a theatregoing audience can be tempted to join in. Directors have tried every resuscitation technique – play-within-a-play, high-speed cutting, star casting, unexpected crooked sets – with no guarantee that it’ll work. But this time, Adrian Noble and his cast pull it off, and the old dear comes up fresh as a daisy, in sets of such traditionally gorgeous Edwardiana that they get their own round of applause, and without any gimmicks at all. Unless you count casting David Suchet as Lady Bracknell: and that is not a gimmick, but a welcome extension of the great man’s ability to rule a stage with one twitch of his black, black brows.
And Suchet – we’ll come to him in a moment – is not carrying the burden alone. The whole production is marked by a nimble comic delicacy, smart body language and thoughtful line-by-line work on emphasis which often brings up the old jokes scrubbed clean, jerking us into surprised laughter. Algernon and Jack – Philip Cumbus and Michael Benz – handle the banter of the opening scene without either stylized “I’m doing Wilde” crispness or undue modernization, just as naturally as a brace of Top Gear mates whose natural communication is only in jokes. Imogen Doel’s Cecily is priceless, cooing and scampering with a steely girlish feyness and spot-on physical timing, Emily Barber’s Gwendolen stiffly fashionable in contrast: every inch her mother’s daughter, so that one trembles for poor Jack’s marital future.
And at the heart of that central garden scene is the best comedy courtship of the year (possibly the decade) as Michele Dotrice’s unmatchable Miss Prism yearns and writhes and skips like a lovesick hippo towards the equally fearful Canon Chasuble, an unrecognizably rebarbative Richard O’Callaghan, who from limp grey mullet to skinny gaiters is everything that the satirical Wilde could have desired him to be.
And David Suchet’s Lady Bracknell? Heroically upholstered, threateningly wigged and hatted in the sweltering first night heat, he deploys a masterclass in how to revive too-familiar lines. Everyone was waiting for “A handbag!” so he denied it to us, throwing it away, loosing the explosive moment instead on the earlier word “Found???”. Other moments of cherishable Suchet-stress lie scrawled on my pad as -“What?’ “Parcel!” “Prism!”. The calculating gimlet eyes and overdone hauteur – suddenly melted by mention of money – place the character, without any pretentious actorly deepening, precisely where the laughing clear-eyed Irishman wanted it. This is what he saw around him: a socially defensive society parvenue in a carapace of confidence. When she speaks of “social outrage” and the French Revolution, her gloved hand flutters momentarily to her neck. Perfect.
box office 0844 412 4663
rating four     4 Meece Rating

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June 27, 2015 · 8:11 am

ALL THE ANGELS Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

COMFORT YE! HANDEL AND THE FIRST MESSIAH

Handel’s Messiah is a phenomenon: written in three weeks in the composer’s most disappointed phase, to this day it plays as sublimely as a chamber piece with eight singers as with the four thousand of us who annually sing it at the Royal Albert Hall in The Really Big Chorus (I operate as a semi-competent alto). It gets treated with high professionalism or as a parish singalong, truncated at the Alleluia Chorus or recorded as a “best-of” with some of the most beautiful moments missing, is done with heavy Victorian pomposity or bright original instruments, speeded up and slowed down. Nothing dents its shine.
The story Nick Drake tells in this simple three-hander by candlelight, is the story of its first performance in Dublin in 1742. Illustrated with fragments by the Portrait Choir it brings the story to musical life. Sean Campion is a scuttling, busy scene-setting narrator. Sometimes he is a ragged Irish music-porter and nocturnal bodysnatcher Crazy Crow, who merrily throws a horrid sack-wrapped corpse into the pit at one point. Sometimes he is the affable Lord Cavendish who invited Handel to try it out in the Fishambles music hall, so crowded that “the fleas went to the ceiling for a bit of air”, which was a bit of a comedown for the composer who decades earlier had ushered the King up-Thames with the Water Music. Sometimes he is the grieving, religiously anxious librettist Jennen who commissioned it and chose the Biblical verses.

David Horovich provides a gruff , demanding, perfectionist Georg Frederic Handel, and Kelly Price his contralto soloist Susannah Cibber, Who was not an oratorio singer, but an actress in low melodrama, on the run from an abusive marriage and a scandalously intimate adultery trial. Plenty of drama there, and despite a few early clunks (the Jennen moments tend to the portentous) Drake and director Jonathan Munby gradually raise it to something genuinely affecting, sometimes funny, and with pin-sharp significant interludes of aria and moments of chorus (“You are the people, all the angels, the chorus drives the music forward”).

The emotional heart of the play, one not historically incredible, is the interplay between the old composer and Mrs Cibber. At first it is about style – her actress gestures infuriate him when she fruitily attempts “But who shall abide the day of His coming”, and he berates singers who “bark, or whisper, or bellow, or puff themselves up”. He’d hate the X Factor. At one point he threatens to bury her in a barrel of sand to keep her still. He also scorns her vain terrors about “competing” with the Italian soprano whose showy high arias echo from backstage (even in the chorus we altos always slightly regard the sopranos with suspicion, even when blending with and needing them. It’s human nature).

But as their conversations – Handel often grumpily bathetic – reveal her suffering, working towards the great aria “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” it deepens and relates to other tragedies in Jennen’s and Handel’s life. The redemptiveness, the great “Comfort Ye” and promise of salvation for lost sheep, grows in meaning. And though the effect on the cynical Crow fels a touch overwritten, a touch Blarney, you’d need a nasty heart of stone not to feel it too. Particularly if the Messiah has meant anything to you in the darker times of life.
So yes, let the trumpet sound for this curious, short-running, honourable candlelit curiosity. It deserves an afterlife.

box office Box office 0)20 7401 9919 Showing tonight, 27th June, and 3-6 July
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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June 27, 2015 · 12:09 am

THE TRIAL Young Vic SE1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS CONVEYED BY A DYSTOPIAN INJUSTICE
The auditorium is a coliseum, with a tremendous conveyor belt slicing it in half, flappy black curtains at either end. K wakes with strange agents at his door. He’s arrested. But what on earth are his crimes? Shrugs and evasion are the reply. It’s a frustrating, but gripping , pencil pushers, forms, magistrates, hookers and lawyers curdling into madness. Scenery, furniture and people are flung down the wooden and Guantanamo-orange stage with fine precision. Trials “build up” K is told early on. The only time the conveyer reverses is to take him to his death.

This adaptation, by Nick Gill (who all of a sudden makes sense when you realise he is also a composer), is frantic, funny, strange and incredibly difficult to settle with early on. The dialogue is fine, although K’s asides and monologues are written almost in fragments. “Am almost woke ee up one morn -like baby”, are his first lines. It’s hard to tune to, you’re hardly tapping your feet along either. But this aside, the rest of the dialogue is incredibly engaging with good jokes and juicy lines.

It drifts on, we pick fragments – things he might have done wrong, solutions to his crisis, idle conversation – usually with another layer of people speaking on top of this. But it clicks. It has a strange frustrating rhythm which winds you and K up as heaps of court forms rise, unbelievable injustice is done and little sense is made. The story is clear but neatly obfuscates the legality. Richard Jones has thankfully staged this to perfection: somehow my attention was drawn to exactly the right snippets, and as people whizzed on and off it all mushed into meaning in the middle. Miriam Buether’s set is a workhorse which deserves lashings of oats for mechanically driving all this.
“We can only hope that information of tangential relevance slithers its way down to us”. Sian Thomas’s gloriously vague lawyer tells K. Rory Kinnear is excellent at the frustration, but the monologues don’t sit in his mouth properly. He has to engage all his training to enunciate, giving us clipped when what we need is panic. The rest is powerful rage, neatly drawn.

It is Kate O’Flynn, however, who steals the show as a host of characters. In this straight laced, authoritarian world, her brand of wild giver-of-no-shits perks things up brilliantly. Where many have to remain almost robotic and scenic, her, Rory’s and Sian’s performances fill in with beautiful colour.
It is maddeningly strange, but it still clings to me and haunts me.

Box Office: 020 7922 2922 22nd August.
Rating: four    4 Meece Rating

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June 26, 2015 · 11:59 am

THE SEAGULL OPEN AIR THEATRE Regent’s Park W1

CHEKHOV UNDER THE TREES
Fortune favours the brave, and the meteorological riskiness of outdoor theatre sometimes pays handsomely. A great heron flew over, squawking doom, just as Irina screamed her frantic possession of the appalling Trigorin and Chekhov’s tragicomic household moved towards disaster. The moon rose over the card-players as beyond the window under a darkening sky Konstantin found a deranged, ruined Nina. The thunderstorm and sluicing rain from behind Jon Bausor’s strange mirrored canopy were false, but the intensity and brooding darkness of old Sorin’s struggling estate were no more or less real than the rustling trees of the real park. Perfect.

Its the first Chekhov play to be done here, and the most obvious: its first act in a garden as Konstantin attempts his ambitious philosophical play and (very avant- garde) rips up the painted scenery. The greensward, chairs, parasols and nicely surly servants pushing a mower or morosely clipping shrubs relate nicely to the real family picnics out in the audience. Though one hopes that the characters’ troublesome, bored, self-obsessed angst and ennui do not…

Chekhov’s opening scenes – once the disastrous play is over – always risk the pre-revolutionary bourgeois ennui becoming – well, ennuyeux. But soon his deadly comedy pace quickens, as Janie Dee,vain I-am-an-actress diva mother of Matthew Tennyson’s frail thwarted Konstantin does her bouncing, preening, frightful poses, and her lover Trigorin (Alex Robertson, comedically vile) gets helplessly drunk with Lisa Diveney’s glum lovesick Masha, and leads Nina astray. Nina is given a sweet naivete by Sabrina Bartlett, though does not quite convince in her Ophelia dementia at the end. Colin Hoult is cruelly funny as whining Simon the schoolteacher (one of Chekhovs most malicious portraits), a majestically gloomy Ian Redford is old Peter, and Danny Webb as the doctor is granted his melancholy description of the pleasure of city crowds , a ” mass of souls” bringing a  sense of fellowship. Which is is one of the rare redemptive glimpses in this bleak, witty, knowing portait of a decaying society. (I always remember coming out of a rather dull Cherry Orchard and the woman behind observing, Yorkshire fashion , to her man that “Those people really had that Revolution coming!”)

But even before the majestic tragic dusk, underscored by a perhaps over-menacing musical soundscape, Matthew Dunster’s production is engaging all the way. Dee and Tennyson, mother and son, break your heart: struggling against their bond and their mutual resentment as he hurls rage at her “shallow, shitty plays” and she screams “You’re a failure, a nobody, nothing at all!”.
The free verbal adaptation by Torben Betts is slangy and vivid: overhead, the great slanted mirror lets us look down on them all like seagulls ourselves, and marvel and the struggle and absurdity of human life. And the servants, by the way, deploy the best sullen-serf body language I’ve ever seen: Fraser James as the “whingeing dullard” trying to make the damn farm pay is a gruff delight, and Lisa Palfrey’s pissed-off Paulina, eating the plums Irina can’t be bothered to take away, offers a tiny moment to cherish. And above them the trees rustle, and the night-birds in the distant zoo caw contempt. What fools we mortals be.

box office 0844 826 4242 to 11 july

rating four  4 Meece Rating

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June 24, 2015 · 10:59 pm

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM Phoenix, WC2

BACK OF THE NET!  
Rejoice! In the midst of Fifa’s dismal doings musical theatre makes football beautiful again. Gurinder Chadha’s and Paul Mayeda Berges’ fable, of a British-Asian teenage girl longing to play football rather than cook dhal and live traditionally, was beloved on screen but emerges all the stronger for being driven by Howard Goodall’s music and Charles Hart’s lyrics. It’s a lovely show, with the rare quality in musicals of feeling all-of-a-piece: one solid creation by a team who understand one another and were allowed to get on with it.
It has comfortable specificity – the Sikh community in semis near Heathrow, Southall’s Asian high street, the local park and football ground all swiftly realized by Miriam Buether’s neat arc of revolving panels . Yet it is a universal fable about mothers and daughters, generational anxiety and teenage longings. We meet Jess “dreaming of somewhere where being other / Doesn’t incur the wrath of your mother”; teased for her tracksuit by her preening sister Pinky and her friends, but recruited by the footballing tomboy Jules, whose own mother (a hilarious blonde bombshell) is equally appalled by the athletic brawn of her daughter (“You’ll damage your girlybits!”).
All shine, but at the centre Natalie Dew as Jess is a new star: she has not only a friendly sweetness and lovely shy grin but sings like a bird and – crucially – can boot a ball into the coach’s netting bag from ten feet away, three times running across a West End stage. Lauren Samuels, lean and keen, is a powerful Jules, and Preeya Kalidas slinkily funny as Pinky. Jess’ gay friend Tony (Jamal Andreas) has a glorious number too, about how young people bend the truth to disapproving parents: again Hart’s lyrics hit the spot with “Don’t say your tastes incline to men – just say “have you met my flatmate Sven..?”. And Chadha is a playful director: up pops a token Sven, an instant blink and you miss it gag. Combined with Pinky’s temporarily ruptured engagement to the snobbish neighbours’ son and his surly rebellion (“She’s fit, init?”) it all adds to the lovingly anarchic celebration of teen spirit.
The last time a new musical felt this good was Legally Blonde, for in classic musical style every number pushes the story forwards: nothing ever stops it dead, even the Bollywood-style set-pieces at Pinky’s wedding. Though one moment of peacefulness, the wedding song by Shahid Khan and Rekha Sawhney, is breathtaking. Indeed what could have been a crude tale of teenage victory is fascinatingly balanced, musically and dramatically, between the exuberant footballing ambition and Jess’ parents’ anxiety to protect their girl within the community limits and not risk “shame”. It breathes a rare decency, and that likeable British-Asian willingness to mock itself without belittling. The ensemble of three censorious grey-bunned Aunties nipping up and down the aisle is pure delight, but there is seriousness in Tony Jayawardena as the father, singing baritone memories of his early days fresh in from Nairobi: best spin-bowler back home, but here never allowed to play: “People like us don’t join the clubs, jump the queues, get served in pubs…People here are decent enough. Till you call their bluff”.

Charles Hart’s words have a simple lyrical honesty, clever but never forced; Goodall gives us rising joyful tunes, melancholy conflict, duets and quartets and big choruses blending traditional Punjabi tunes with western familiarity. But oh, best of all is the ensemble dancing when the girl football team are on. It might be tempting to have choreographed them ballet-style, in tribute to those leaping moments when great players do hit a line of grace. But Aletta Collins eschews that to express, rather, the strain and sweat and grimaces of hard training: kicking, stamping, swerving, separating, pointing. Proper footballers, chanting “Girl Perfect! Keep on trying, even when you’re dying!”. It is the the least chorus-girly dancing imaginable: one big number rises to a real haka ferocity before morphing, with quick-change costumes, to a scrubbed-up celebratory disco. It is a hymn to the athletic female body, as the team in their baggy shorts and team shirts exult in effortful joy and great waves of exercise endorphins wash over us from the stage. We grin in delight, not just for Jess and Jules and the accommodation they reach with their parents, but for all girls in all communities who leap and run and laugh and won’t be bound and tethered and primped into submission. Yay..

box office 0843 316 1082  benditlikebeckhamthemusical.co.uk
Booking to 11 July but betcha it goes on and on..

Rating five5 Meece Rating  (see how they run!  Girl mice! Goal!)
box office 0843 316 1082  benditlikebeckhamthemusical.co.uk
Booking to 11 July but betcha it goes on and on..

Rating five

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June 17, 2015 · 11:01 pm

THE MOTHER F**KER WITH THE HAT Lyttelton, SE1

NOW HERE’S THE ONE TO SEE.  DON’T MIND THE LANGUAGE…

If you worry about language, the clue’s in the title. More f’s and assholes than you can shake a reproving finger at. But don’t. Stephen Andy Guirgis’ play is about addiction, infidelity, drugs and a gun; it is also one of the funniest, most touching, most honestly moral things you’ll see all year. Its people are as exasperatingly sympathetic as Tennessee Williams’ characters, without the despair and with a vigorous comic poetry in their very frequent rants. They make disastrous judgements and bad calls, but reach out to us across their grimy, hooting, graffiti-ed New York struggle to demand and win our love.
Within Robert Jones’ elegant, unfussy set of revolving fire-escapes and neat sliding interiors, five flawed people enact a crisis which is neither the first nor last in their lives. Jackie – ex-con, recovering alcoholic – bounds in delightedly to his childhood sweetheart Veronica, full of hope at having seen his probation officer and landed a job. He promises “grownup plans, happiness plans, next step plans!”. But there’s a hat on the table. Some Motherf***er’s hat! He tasks her with infidelity: Veronica, however, is no meek Desdemona but a Puerto-Rican spitfire with a noseful of cocaine. She kicks off and turns the air blue. Scenes slide to posher environs, and Jackie is with his AA sponsor, Ralph, being plied with prayers, 12-step wisdoms and nutritional smoothies while Ralph’s furious wife hurls obscenities offstage and storms in to watch TV. Despite Ralph’s chirpy “No stinkin’ thinkin’, be more like Abe Lincoln!” Jackie does an unwise thing with gun and hat, and – sliding to a more recherché sceneset – throws himself on the mercy of Cousin Julio, a gloriously camp and dignified gym-bunny fiddling with empanadas and trichological advice.
I wouldn’t spoil the denouement: just know that they are all glorious, giving Guirgis’ inspired lines a rare balance of absurdity and poignancy as Indhu Rubasingham directs a US-UK cast with cracking pace. Texan Ricardo Chavira as Jackie is a solid hunk of decency, Yul Vazquez – who originated the part of Cousin Julio on Broadway – is deadpan funny and momentarily touching. Also from the US Flor de Liz Perez is a firecracker Veronica; they mesh perfectly with our own Nathalie Armin (fresh from both Dara and the Beautiful Forevers) and Alec Newman as the deceptively hip, yoga-and-smoothie Ralph.

Mesh, I say: but saying the play is an immaculate polished machine, right down to a risibly incompetent fist-fight, is the least of its. Relish the killer lines, barbed insults and almost accidental wisdoms; the complexities and rows and ambiguities and always beneath them a deep beating heart that accepts flaws and failures and rejects slick cynicism. Poor old Jackie may be a recidivist but he has his code: tempted by his mentor’s wife he pounces then retires with an anguished “What are we, Europeans or some shit?” . We earnestly wish him and barmy Veronica well on some future sunlit upland without drink, coke, or guns. Just maybe some more of cousin Julio’s disgusting green spirulina eggs. We emerge feeling strangely hopeful for the human race. .

box office 020 7452 3000 to 20 aug
rating five   5 Meece Rating

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June 16, 2015 · 9:39 pm

hang Royal Court, SW1

VENGEANCE WITHOUT SATISFACTION

In a bleak neon office (design by Jon Bausor) a much awaited new play by debbie tucker green, always modishly lower-case in titles, takes no prisoners.Except that it is about one, unseen and awaiting a capital punishment decision by his victim in some unspecified but British dystopia. Directed by the author, it is a 75 minute study in unreconciled trauma and the awkward insensitivities of officialdom and protocol. And perhaps (to a sympathetic ear) a good evocation of the perennial inability of non-victims to understand the tearing ,incurable dislocation of personality involved in rape.
Well, we must assume it was violent intruder rape, since all the household members – husband, sister, children – are spoken of as alive, if damaged . The characters, unnamed, are three. Claire Rushbrook and Shane Zaza do rather well as awkward, witteringly nervous bureaucrats, fretting antiphonally about IKEA coat pegs and getting real glasses for the watercooler. Zaza has a particularly fine crass moment as he stamps the final document with ‘love this bit!’   And Rushbrook, slightly senior, a good defensiveness about how long it has taken the system to disgorge the  criminal’s letter to his victim

That victim is a shabby black woman on mid-life, nervous but defiant : Marianne Jean-Baptiste couldn’t be better.  The trio work round awkwardly to the point, the officials prating of decisions and offering time, supporters, literature etc, all by the book. Jean-Baptiste is uncommunicative until she breaks out into passionate testimony to her family’s utter lack of any recovery in three and a half years: the children’s terrors, neighbours’ shunning, marriage damaged.
As it becomes clear that she can choose his death, Tucker  Green goes into ghoulish execution-shed options and descriptions, of a kind tiresomely familiar to frequenters of “brave” theatre. The victim wants him hung, ideally by an incompetent who risks overlong twitching asphyxia or gruesome decapitation. Finally she reads his letter.  In the original playscript there is a moment of potential subtlety at the end as she does this: onstage only telling silence.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste is a great actress, and the author deft and verbally clever.  But not one of the trio is given full credible humanity: the two interviewers are merely symbols of officialdom ,  and the subject an avatar of bleakly ,determinedly pessimistic and vengeful victimhood.  Given any scope at all, Jean-Baptiste could have far better served a better play.
box office 020 7565 5000 to 18 July      Rating  two   2 meece rating

pessimistic and vengeful victimhood.  Given any scope at all, Jean-Baptiste could have far better served a better play.
box office 020 7565 5000 to 18 July

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June 15, 2015 · 11:54 pm

WE WANT YOU TO WATCH NT Temporary Theatre, SE1

PORN AND PHYSICALITY
We’re all on the same page here, right? Online pornography is increasingly violent, graphically displaying real, abusive sexual acts devoid of tenderness. Rapist sex is perversely extreme, anatomically damaging and profoundly corrupting to the angry, the lonely, and – most alarmingly – schoolboys confused into thinking it normal. We despise porn-hounds, know perfectly well that the online stuffings are not the innocent ooh-Mr-Window-cleaner, stuff of old. We wish there was less of a sniggery-liberal, Chandler-from-Friends implication that it’s a harmless boy’s treat. We know how feeds a wider culture of objectifying young women: not least if we fondly remember Nick Payne and Carrie Cracknell’s brilliant BLURRED LINES, an earlier 75-minuter in this red-plank theatre.

This is a different creature altogether, by Alice Birch with the physical theatre genii of RashDash – Helen Goalen and Abbi Greenland, who also star . It pitches itself somewhere between Bouffon clown-theatre and expressive dance, with dashes of crypto- Beckettian dialogue jerking – aptly like porn itself – with interruptions and crossplay. There’s even a tramp Estragon-ing through at the end. At its centre are Goalen and Greeland, neatly bobbed, henna and raven-black respectively: they appear first as jeering police interrogators accusing a young man of a graphically described, disgusting murder because he watches such things online. (Actually, it is kind of awkward to see white police, however symbolic and female, accusing a black man they have just beaten up and providing no evidence beyond his computer record). He gets the first of a few striking counter-speeches, asserting that “Millions of people watch violent porn…and then do a fun run for cancer research and give up their seat on a bus and cry at Tristan and Isolde and kiss their children and make love to their wives”.

The pair then reappear – the design , lined with tins labelled SEX and rejoicing in blackouts, roaring sound, pace and razzmatazz, is engaging (Caroline Steinbeis directs) . This time they are naive persuaders trying to get the Queen (Helena Lymbery in crude parody, crown and all) to sign a law banning all porn. They explain it to her – in wild violent dance moves, Greenland hurling Goalen to the floor and abusing her – whereon HM says that sex isn’t like that, and does a wild dance of her own expressing its joyfulness. This is not going to go down well in some quarters, not at all. And to be honest, I am not sure that the shock-value and the giggles from the audience were entirely worth it. The Queen’s too easy a symbol, a powerless one at that, and the porn industry too global for any such fantasy to bite.
A more effective sequence is also the least contrived, as the pair look down from high above at a small boy, predicting how from the first naughty picture of fellatio on a schoolfriend’s phone he will go on to wreck his own real loves and beget a new generation to suffer the same fate. That works. But the heroines don’t stay still for long (blimey, these girls are gymnastically astonishing) as an orange-suited woman with a megaphone bullies them into crazed dance for demanding that she “stop the Internet” .

Flashes of argument, never carried through, tempt you towards thought; every time though it dissolves into mere spectacle, brilliantly executed but travelling nowhere. The girls’ cry of “end it , and begin again” only underlines the impossibility of doing just that. “We should have built something” they say. But they didn’t, not really, for all the bravura . We’re back round the circle to the bit we all agree about. I hope it starts arguments about porn in society. But they’re unlikely to be new ones.
box office 020 7452 3000 to 11 july
rating three    3 Meece Rating

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June 15, 2015 · 7:36 am

THE HOOK Royal, Northampton

UNDER THE BRIDGE, MEN UNDER PRESSURE

“You gonna have a revolution”: the last words of Arthur Miller’s angry “play for the screen”, echo here with an interrogative lift. But the filmscript was too revolutionary to handle for Elia Kazan and Columbia Studios in 1951: the FBI feared its portrait of a Brooklyn longshoreman, Marty Ferrera, defying crooked union bosses and racketeers. Hollywood unions threatened to pull every projectionist in America off from showing it. Kazan himself – unlike Miller – later caved in and testified to the House Un-American Activities committee. The writers’ withdrawal of the script – never staged until this adaptation by Ron Hutchinson directed with thrilling immediacy by James Dacre – was itself a small revolution.
And yes,t thrilling. Too easy to call it a ranging shot, a five-finger exercise before the masterly A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. The later, greater play focuses more closely on intimate family pain and betrayal among the longshoremen. This one homes in on labour injustice and corruption, despite honest domestic moments as Marty’s wife Terry – Susie Trayling tough, wise, fine-drawn – begs him to go easy :“I don’t wanna run no orphan asylum at home”.

It’s short – two hours including interval- and in the opening scenes I found it hard to get a grip on. It hardly mattered, because Patrick Connellans’ brooding, hazy, watery, iron-industrial set and Dacre’s skilful use of the community ensemble create such a powerful sense of a trapped tough world that you’re right there. In comradeship, anxiety and – with a spectacular accident- grief. Clarity grows as we work out that Marty – after initially walking off the job in disgust at a friend’s death caused by speeding-up of crane work – is going to defy his union chair Louis (Joe Alessi, alternately smooth and panicked by his own pressures) and decide whether to hook up wit the even more threatening mobster Rocky (Sean Murray).

Jamie Sives is a terrific Marty: alpha male, gradually harnessing his innate stubbornness to moral battle, accepting not only his own peril but that of his family and colleagues. “It’s hard to be tough alone”, though, and the other men are not welfare-cushioned, too afraid for their livelihood for serious defiance. It’s a world (with unsettling parallels to ours) which took in the world’s “ huddled masses yearning to breathe free” then kept them huddled on zero-hours work where you can arrive “five thirty in the morning, and get no work that day”.

The second half, as Marty stands for election to oust Louis and finds another kind of betrayal, is electric (one usher observed in passing that she sits at the back and ‘nobody ever moves’, which is as good a criticism as any). And although it hasn’t the heartbreaking lyrical strength of Miller’s greatest work, there are lines you don’t forget. Marty says he was heard of rats on the shore, but “No big rats – little scared human being rats, screwed outa their biscuits..killed on the ships. These is little mouses!” Hauntingly, Ewart James Walters as Darkeyes the blind black pedlar wanders through at times as a sort of chorus, commenting obliquely, telling Marty he’s got to “burn, burn! and one day explode!”.
It’s Miller’s year, with the RSC Death of a Salesman, a marvellous Young Vic’s VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE on its way to Broadway and another fine UK production lately touring. And what Dacre has done is gripping, fascinating, and timely. The final election scene even echoes, though he couldn’t have known it would, the fate of our own Left in May, and some of the reason for it….

box office 01604 624811 to 27 June
Co-production with Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse
rating: four       4 Meece Rating
box office 01604 624811 to 27 June
Co-production with Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse
rating: four

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June 12, 2015 · 7:39 pm

OTHELLO Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford Upon Avon

SPECIAL GUEST REVIEWER DARREN RAYMOND OF INTERMISSION THEATRE COMPANY TAKES ON RSC OTHELLO, SKYPE, RAP, BOXBEAT AND ALL…..

The RSC made a bold statement by casting their first ever black Iago. But would it add another layer to one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies?
The theatre was full to the rafters, the demographic make up – as you’d expect- predominately white middle-aged upper class folk – a conversation for another time. Designer Ciaran Bagnall sets the scene with a stunning yet simple Venetian canal beautifully lit, and a gondola occupied by Iago (Lucian Msamati) and Roderigo (James Corrigan): grappling, threatening to capsize it:, a metaphor perhaps. The first reminder that Iago is black comes very early on. When Roderigo refers to him as “Thick lips” he stops dead in his tracks and gives Roderigo a hard look. Sadly, however this is the end of it: Director Iqbal Khan chooses not exploit the opportunity to add an extra layer.

Msamati deliveres his dialogue in his Zimbabwean accent, which gives Shakespeare’s words new life: he moves through the play effortlessly, landing every punch with precision. At times he sounded like a ‘hype man’ at a hip-hop concert, repeating words like ‘Villain’ ‘Corruption’ or whip’, finishing with ‘Boom’. The gullible Roderigo – played convincingly by Corrigan- wakes up Brabantio (Brian Protheroe) to deliver news that his daughter has been ‘abused’. Protheroe plays the concerned father well and we feel his pain when Desdemona chooses Othello over him.
As for Othello, we meet him first in good spirits; Hugh Quarshie glides onstage ultra cool, laid back, a swagger with authority. Asked by Iago if he is “fast married” he responds by dancing to a Venetian /Calypso guitar beat – nice touch. The following scene however is a little less convincing, partly because the costume worn by the Duke (Nadia Albina) and her company looked like something out of Red Dwarf. Hard to believe these guys could lead a country in war. News of activity from the Turks came by Skype, a ploy to convince us it was taking place today- sadly it didn’t work.
Desdemona (Joanna Vanderham) struts on stage, pleasing on the eye like a young Amanda Holden, but her character is quite irritating, reminding me of one the those pompous women from Chelsea who always get what they want. She seemed in love with the idea of Othello and not the man himself. The celebration after the war, though, was fantastic: soldiers drinking and dancing to Cypriot music. There’s a nice moment when Cassio (Jacob fortune- Lloyd) dances with Desdemona and Othello whispers in Cassio’s ear and takes over- a slight indication of jealousy, we could have done with more of that. Iago breaks out into a solo Zimbabwean folk song and the pay off is wonderful….’for heaven an excellent song’ says Cassio, riposting with a remix of Shaggy’s Mr Bombastic while beatboxing. A rap battle ensues between Cassio and a lively Montano (David Ajoa) which leads to blows, and had the younger generation on the edge of their seats.

But as Iago plants the seed of doubt in Othello, he moves too quickly from calm authority to jealous barbaric wreck: we needed glimpses of fragility earlier. There’s a random torture scene, blowtorches and staplers, I think put there by the Khan to prepare us for the coming violence. But it feels a little misplaced.
Something I always struggle with is why Emilia doesn’t question Iago about the handkerchief earlier- Khan’s interpretation confused me further, as a lot was made over the exchange of the handkerchief between Emilia (Ayesha Dharker) and her husband, to the point of tears from Dharker, giving the impression that she knew what Iago was capable of. Desdemona begins to find her way in the second act as we slowly begin to feel some sympathy; the strangulation was OK, “it is the cause” delivered with honesty though there were random lines missing like “I cannot give it vital growth again” and “they are cruel tears”. I’d be interested to know Khan’s thought behind this.
It didn’t ever feel as if Iago was in control, though. Msamati handles the verse very well but needs to be more sinister, with more gear changes: indeed across the cast the stakes just didn’t seem high. I didn’t care much for the characters and did inclusion of a black Iago add anything new? Not really. We lose the sense of Othello as an outsider.

box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 28 august
rating four     4 Meece Rating

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June 12, 2015 · 7:51 am

AN AUDIENCE WITH JIMMY SAVILE Park Theatre, N4

SHOCKING, SHAMING, MAYBE SALUTARY
It is a cliché to say that over decades of TV fame, showy fundraising and hidden sexual crime Savile ‘groomed the nation”. There were indeed encomia – which Maitland pitilessly uses verbatim – from Prince Charles (“my health adviser, trusted confidant, friend”) Mrs Thatcher calling him a great man, Cardinal Hume praising his faith (the man was a Papal Knight of St Gregory, for God’s sake!) . And, of course, from ministers and NHS managers who gave him, literally, the keys to Stoke Mandeville and Broadmoor, and BBC mandarins who went on celebrating him in death despite clear warnings. What is not said often enough is that all the above were upper-middle professionals or toffs: it was partly inverted snobbery which stopped them suspecting their “token pleb”. Bevin boy, ex-wrestler, Northern DJ – prole box ticked! Beyond those charmed circles plenty of us always found him creepy and turned away shuddering. Yet nobody except his young victims knew the reality. That remains a national disgrace.
Maitland’s tightly researched, gripping 85-minute play alternates the tribute show with the testimony of “Lucy” a disbelieved victim drawn from several accounts, and flashes of the violent bullying threats with which he fended off doubters. There are nice evocations of the feeble police attempts at questioning him in his lifetime , and the even feebler, nervous questions about his dressing-room habits by the BBC man Seed. “Just Jimmy being Jimmy”. Director Brendan O’Hea keeps it moving, preventing us from laughter even at the most absurd praise or horribly telling remarks by the man himself. But I kept inwardly asking “What is this achieving? We know the horror, why dramatize it, even in this unprurient way?”

The answer is simple: because he never came to justice. That shaming truth needs expiation. In the last ten minutes comes the scene which didn’t happen. Lucy – calmly, finely played by Leah Whitaker – delivers the acccusation that when she was twelve, in hospital, he raped her. As he did many, many others. Savile, ever angrier, delivers the half-baked theological theory, from his “God’ll fix it’ book, claiming that his fundraising credit account outweighs “slip-ups” and that it was his body’s fault not his. He blusters, calls her ignorant, boasts of Papal and Royal decorations and even his Friend of Israel award .
Lucy will have none of it, and calls him to his face a “shrivelled, stinking, lonely old man who hurts people”. What happens next sends the whole audience into shock. And, I think, justifies what Maitland has done. Because for all the millions of words since, for all the smashing of his tombstone and the humiliation of his grand apologists, we’ll get no other closure.

box office 0207 870 6876 to 11 July

4 Meece Rating

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June 11, 2015 · 9:42 am

A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS Chichester Festival Theatre

SUNNY SUMMER KICKS AND SOARING SONGS

Here’s a joyful thing: a confection of butterscotch and sunshine, a tale of turrets and twosomes and tap-breaks, friendship and chivalry and secret passages and great legs, with glorious, soaring Gershwin songs to punt it all along. Billed as “a new musical”, the book is crafted by Jeremy Sams and Robert Hudson, but make no mistake: this is Plum. A young P.G. Wodehouse wrote the 1919 novel (later a 1937 film), about his own world daft screwball plots and of high-kicking Broadway hits: in the one half-serious message he was defying the cultural angst of those who think musical theatre rom-com ain’t real art. Even our hero George Bevan the Broadway composer (Richard Fleeshman) is being infected by cultural inferiority as he transfers a show to a London drenched with history. “Are we just skating along the surface?…saying things in a pretty way?”. Cutting the underwater ballet in “Kitty in the City” he moans“ I’ve something else to try – quite dark and edgy, I haven’t slept..”.
It’s a good joke, because we know that Wodehouse’s edgeless, immortal, puff-light merriment will win the day. .

So off it goes: young Lady Maud (Summer Strallen, displaying a sharp wit as well as the legendary legs) thinks she loves a dull pretentious poet, but her tyrannical aunt is forcing her to marry the rich twit Reggie. Reggie (Richard Dempsey, a divinely silly mover in bright red tights as he joins in the ‘tourist performance’ at Totleigh Towers) loves Alice the Butler’s niece. George loves Maud from the moment she flees into his stage door and disguises herself as a dancing fish. Billie the fading Broadway starlet (brassily glorious Sally Ann Triplett) bonds romantically with Maud’s father the pig-loving Earl, a proto-Emsworth (who knew that Nicholas Farrell could sing like that? Adorable). There’s revolution in the kitchen against the tyranny of Aunt Caroline , a whole new aspect of Isla Blair as Grand Old Boot; and all must be resolved at a medieval costume ball.

Rob Ashford’s direction – and matchlessly witty choreography – gather speed and impetus, from an opening trad-Broadway kickline to movement used as deftly as Wodehouse jokes to build character. All the characters get their moment, which supplies not only constant surprises but that rare, gleeful sense that everyone in the cast is enjoying themselves too. The six romantic principals have plenty of numbers and adventures, but there’s something for everyone on the stage: a one-liner here, a wild up-ended fandango from Pierre the chef and Dorcas the sturdy undercook, a rumbling orotund quotation from Keggs the Butler (Desmond Barritt, a proto-Jeeves). It might be a passing physical gag in a chorus line, an inspiredly absurd medieval hat in the costume-ball, or just the fact that Matt Wilman is always addressed by his full title of “McInnes the Burly Gardener”. Everyone matters, everyone’s on form. Even Austen the awful poet gets to recite, and Blair’s Lady Caroline (another splendid shock) caterwauls a mezzo number about spring still reverberating in my head next morning.
It’s all about happiness, overthrow of tyranny, true love, jokes about quinces, and dances daring to incorporate dishes of jelly and a giant croquembouche. Even Aunt Dahlia’s Anatole in the later novels is foreshadowed as Pierre the French chef , depressed at the banning of his snail-grater and lark-press.
And of course lovely Gershwin music: love sextets melt together from every corner and height of Christopher Oram’s adventurously revolving Totleigh Towers set, wistful or delighted solos tumble along. The very essence of 1920’s romance is distilled in Reggie’s immortal “I’m a poached egg”.
box office 01243 781312 to 27 June
Rating five  5 Meece Rating

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June 11, 2015 · 9:18 am

THE RED LION NT Dorfman, SE1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES SAYS “BACK OF THE NET, MARBER!”

“This isn’t a church, it’s a ‘business!” What a sentiment for a theatre crowd to hear – or indeed anyone with an art, talent or craft within fifty paces of a cash register.
Back after nearly a decade in the dark, the writer Patrick Marber has mustered a slick three-hander. I am someone who actively takes against football. It’s a bloated beast which long trained its eye on the dosh, and has legions of devotees to do the explaining and the covering up for it. This play movingly demonstrates the dedication, and the devastation. All-consuming fandom and those riding it for every penny.

This is a desperate group of lonely men, just wanting to belong. Kidd (Daniel Mays) is the manager of a low-level but quietly well-performing team. He sees himself on the rise. “I’ll kick a puppy” if it will get him his way. Yates (Peter Wright), a former player – old, beaten and washed up – is washing kits.  His devotion for the club runs upsettingly deep. Stirring passions in the latter, and dollar signs in the former, is Jordan (Calvin Demba), a young player with skills too good to be true.

Above all this is a crisp piece of work: a freshly sanded, neatly varnished piece of craft. The set is nicely detailed, the lighting is warm and rose tinted . Director Ian Rickson has marshalled a punchy and funny winner.
With the crushing wit and bouncily intelligent dialogue of Marber in his mouth Daniel Mays scores yet another triumph. As Kidd he masters a confluence of sheer panic and fuck ’em nonchalance , cocky swagger and depressed paranoia. As the play moves, you feel the terrifying precipice this desperate man stands on as deals collapse and plans fail.
Peter Wright is peacefully simple but quietly brilliant at the other end of the spectrum. Where Mays’ character gives us a running rage, Wright is given only one outrage. The rest is calm tragic loyalty, Mays is struggling on the first rung of the ladder out of the club, Wright clinging on stoically as it sinks.
Their hopes and overdrafts are on Demba, as Jordan. Despite only 2 previous theatre credits he holds his own, painting confusion, principle, and the crushing weight of all their hopes.

Marber’s dialogue has a toe-tapping, thigh-slapping, lyrical majesty; the plot, slow at first, is crushingly tragic. Football – “It’s the Wild West out here”.
Box Office: 020 7452 3000 to 30 Sept
rating: five     5 Meece Rating

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June 9, 2015 · 11:03 pm

THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD Brunel Tunnel Shaft, SE16

FROCK-COATS AND FLOODS, TUNNELS AND THE THAMES 
In the week that Crossrail tunnellers broke through beneath London, a city and river now criss-crossed with subterranean thoroughfares, how better to celebrate than to creep through a low, narrow bricky shaft , and climb fifty feet below Shoreditch into an echoing Victorian vault?
Especially if down there you find the year 1827, union jack bunting, candlelight warming leprous bricky walls, two pacing men in frock-coats lighting cigars and worrying, and a voice intoning Thomas Hood’s mocking ode to Marc Brunel, father of Isambard:
“How prospers now thy mighty undertaking, to join by a hollow way the Bankside friends of Rotherhithe, and Wapping?” asks the poet, aware of the recent floods which stopped work. “ Poking, groping, making an archway underneath the Dabs and Gudgeons…to walk under steamboats…”
It’s the ultimate site-specific theatre: for we are sitting in Brunel’s Thames Tunnel Shaft, which began the world’s first ever carriageway tunnel beneath a navigable river. It was sorely needed, the Thames being chock-full of busy shipping under sail; another bridge would have interfered badly with that, and ferry crossings were slow and disruptive on the tideway. So Marc Brunel, French-born refugee from the Revolution, began the project and his son Isambard, who became far greater, came to work as resident engineer.

Before us is young Isambard aged 21, already dreaming of the great bridges and railways and ships he will one day create alone, but dutiful in his painstaking supervision of the clay, the piles, the tunnel-shield and the labouring men, often sleeping below ground. With him his irascible mentor-father : lame, curmudgeonly and short-tempered, veteran of a debtor’s prison (his engineering brilliance not matched by business acumen) and resenting the young man’s confidence. Their tunnel is halfway, 549 feet and a recent flood repaired, but the backers and bankers are nervous, rival engineers“circling like sharks. So tonight there is to be a banquet underground to persuade them to keep on.
Nick Harrison’s play, directed by Martin Parr, is little more than an hour, and broken by an interval; slight enough but magnified by its setting, and the sense of wonder and gratitude which the name Brunel (especially the younger) brings to those of us who travel nightly through Paddington and often to the deep west. Drama is provided by their interaction, and atmosphere by the setting and sound – a distant band, cheering, rumbling (Yvonne Gilbert’s sound design). The two performers are strongly drawn: Peter Harding gives the father an arrogant curmudgeonly foul-mouthed impatience, and the very likeable Ben Eagle makes young Isambard a grave, dutiful, sturdily handsome youth with the edge of youthful unease that first apprehends a revered father’s flaws, and nerves himself to defiance. References surface to his over-studious childhood and the terror of his parents’ three-month imprisonment when he was fifteen; at one point the pair actually grapple physically in their mutual frustration at one another and the flood-ridden, imperilled task before them.

By the second half, there is a kind of reconciliation as the pair work through the seating-plan for the underground banquet: it could be any modern fundraiser, as they calculate where most advantageously to seat the “Iron Duke” of Wellington, who backed them all the way. And at last – though we may know that a year later another flood stops it again and injures the young man – there is hope again. And the brass quartet descend from the scaffolding ladders overhead and play. And speaking as a sucker for engineers, pioneers, Victorians and hope, I have to say that once you give me a tuba reflecting candlelight and blasting out the opening bars of Judas Maccabeus ten feet away from me in an ancient brick tunnel-shaft, I’m generally pretty happy.
8 – 14 June 7.30pm plus 3pm matinees on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday    3 Meece Rating
Tickets: £20
http://www.wegottickets.com/eighthwonderoftheworld

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June 9, 2015 · 8:56 am

BETA TESTING Udderbelly at the South BAnk SE1

THROW IT UP, KEEP IT MOVING,  THAT’S LIFE…

With August looming over the horizon, there comes a time when the critic needs to harden up, sit on some prickly astroturf leaning on a dustbin, eating a falafal wrap and staring up forebodingly at an enormous upturned purple inflatable cow. Just to remember that it’ll soon be time to brace up for the Fringe. Luckily, London has its own Udderbelly season now, with every kind of oddity and adventure and showoff and physical-theatre explosion. So down I went to see the Circus Geeks explain the nature and psychology of juggling.
And so they do. This hour-long session is an oddity, even amid the circus-variety-standup Udderbelly world, because Matt Pang, Aaron Sparks and Jon Udry are accomplished jugglers – of clubs, balls, hoops, chairs, diabolos, top hats, anything life throws at them – but rather than merely dazzling and demonstrating, they want to discuss. And deconstruct. And admit what it’s like when you drop one. A vox pop (bits of sound are fed in, and bits of video, breathtaking, on the screen) says among other things that it is a metaphor for life, and less kindly that “only other jugglers” are really interested: the cruel paradox being that the better a juggler is, the longer he or she can go on, the more likely the audience are to get a bit bored….theatricality demands danger and conflict, and a really sucessful performer makes this art look smooth and easy. Bummer, as the lads would say.

It’s an entertaining hour, and has taught me something of the lexicon of the trade: I now know the difference between oldschool, newschool, Russian, Mexican (very fast) and French (interpretative mimetic lecoq-y stuff). I know how to breathe the word “Gatto!” after a great child prodigy when something is superb. So there you are. Can face the Fringe programme now. Been in my first purple cow. Summer’s begun…

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk to 21 June

rating There’s really no point. Read the above and you’ll see if you fancy it. I did.

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June 6, 2015 · 8:52 am

ORESTEIA Almeida N1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES TACKLES THE ROUGHAGE

The Oresteia is probably one of those stories you don’t know. Until you start watching it again. Only then, piecing together fragments, does it slowly resurface. It’s a muddle of murders. Each one justifying the next, avenging the last.
This is a sleek stage – all glass screens, marble floor and the full sweep of the bricky back wall exposed. But the play is drawn thin. Action is bunched and the pondering spaced out, as if we cannot be trusted with too much entertainment. The reworking by Robert Icke leaves tremendous voids in the interest. Spectacular murders – limbs flailing, blood oozing and lights, walls and eyes flashing – are a sick joy to watch. God Only Knows skips and pulses from the speakers, Luke Thompson’s brilliant Orestes screams and Clytemnestra marches slowly, knife in hand. Brilliant. \
But 6 minutes, tops.  The run-up is dull dialogue and simple flourishes, which pay off late late in the evening, but just confuse and bore at the time. Angus Wright has been slowly bled of any charisma as Agamemnon. His voice is like an audiobook and he moves like a pile of ironing. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. As the spark for all these subsequent crimes he sets the ball rolling at a mighty slow pace.
Lia Williams’ Clytemnestra is much more accomplished, squeezing him out of every scene. She even throws herself fully into a strange TV interview and dreary victory speech – two indulgent moments by Icke. Their only addition was to justify a camera on stage, so the actors’ faces could be seen 4ft behind them but bigger. Stop it, Icke.
As we see more of Jessica Brown Findlay (Electra) or Luke Thompson (Orestes) – the true stars of this play – they mop up all the charisma Angus leaked, and soak up the most passionate scenes. You’re with them and you barely notice the others. Lia Williams, even in the throes of her most emotional scenes, enunciates perfectly. Where she was too crisp, they were nicely rough.
The gems make it hard to hate the rest. It seems unfortunate, but this play only mobilised any merit when there was a knife in hand or an eye brimming with tears. The endless chatter, darting from the meaning of justice and the meaning of words (yes….words!) to the exclamation “why do we do things” does the rest a terrible injustice. In the end some bite comes back but above all it is the masterful set-pieces and the brief chilling, thrilling asides which take hold.  There are treats along the way – but only if you stomach a hefty amount of roughage.

Box Office: 020 7359 4404  to 18th July

Rating:  three    3 Meece Rating

3 Mice
Box Office: 020 7359 4404
Until 18th July

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June 4, 2015 · 12:24 am

STOP! The Play Trafalgar 2, SW1

BANKSY,  SEX,  AND STAGE DIRECTIONS 
In a tatty rehearsal-room, the title reflects the director’s frequent cry, stopping for new stage directions or rewrites from the unseen playwright, “Hildred McCann”. I admit I am a sucker for plays about plays: some are works of genius like Frayn’s NOISES OFF, some physically adept larks like THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG. But on the whole they parody traditional, creaky, Mousetrappy drama: it was time somebody took the mick out of grandiosely ‘edgy’ modern work, and I was glad to see David Spicer having a go.
The first act shows a cast of five, under Ben Starr as an unjustifiably self-confident director, struggling with Hildred’s constant revisions; the shorter second act puts the result on stage. During this process it morphs from an earnest drama about a teacher who wants to be an artist (“How was your day, teaching at that school you teach at?” enquires the wife.) The anxious SM reads out overwritten stage directions involving a fountain, spiral staircase and pet monkey. But rewrite by rewrite the lead becomes a silent cipher, and has to be pacified by directorial flattery about how silence “makes him a stronger presence”. Stage directions alarm the ingenue with instructions to be “pinkly naked”, throwing off clothes like “the peelings of her sexual fruit”. A lesbian subplot causes her to shriek at her script “Holy shit! I’m not doing that!”.
An entirely new character, a millionaire American rapper, is introduced; in the background the veteran Wilfred forgets his lines, demonstrates that he can still orate most of Murder In The Cathedral, and reminisces about doing a Stoppard in Reading in 1982 and not understanding a word. Eventually it becomes a pan-sexual psychodrama about Banksy and the metaphor of “a man with a spray can painting a picture of a man with a spray can painting a picture” . The director in a beret becomes a narrative chorus (“I am Art”) and the male leads resist directions to kiss.

Promising, then, and certainly the first half is stuffed with good jokes, not least about flowery stage-directions (“they laugh like cut glass baubles tinkling on a mountain stream… as soft as an elf on butter…art strikes like a cobra in a babygro” etc). The author writes a lot for stand-ups, and it shows, sometimes in a good way. Adam Riches is fun as the miffed leading man and Hatty Preston as the ingenue; there is a spirited turn by Tosin Cole as the rapper, conveying the mystification of a straight black actor forced into a streetwise stereotype while the others try not to be racist while questioning what the hell he is there for. Like Riches, Cole walks out at one point and has to be lured back: it did the show’s pre-publicity no harm that Peter Bowles really did quit at the start of rehearsals, to be replaced by James Woolley.
Who, it turns out, walks away with all the best laughs. White-haired and amiably vague, Woolley rises above the standuppy jokes to give real heart and humour to the part of Wilfred, who no longer remembers lines but is a fund of long experience (“I stripped off once in Leatherhead, in Equus. I was only an usher, mind, but it got me noticed”).
So far, so good. But there are problems for director John Schwab to tackle before this romp finds its way. The first half is all on one note – shouting – with no calms to give it bite and contrast; we could also do with a line of explanation as to why the hell Hildred gets away with all these rewrites. The second part, the Banksy play itself, is too broadly nuts to hit its target properly. Which is a shame, because the target deserves it: as anyone who has survived a few experimental fringe festivals can tell you.
box office 0844 871 7632 http://www.atgtickets.com to 27 June
rating three (just)    3 Meece Rating

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June 1, 2015 · 11:07 pm

THE ELEPHANT MAN Theatre Royal, Haymarket SW1

BROADWAY VICTORIANA DOESN’T QUITE GET THERE
It was David Lynch’s 1980 film – monochrome, moody, with an unforgettable performance by John Hurt – which brought to modern awareness the story of Joseph, known as John, Merrick: a monstrously deformed young man rescued from a freak-show by Dr Frederick Treves of the London hospital in 1884. The film, drawing on Treves’ memoirs and medical photographs of the day, used horrifying prostheses within which Hurt created the gentle, romantic, intelligent bible-reading character of Merrick. Lynch’s achievement, unveiling the terrible head only late on, was to make us more repelled by the rubbernecking cruelty of the crowds than by the deformity.
But this is the 1970’s play by Bernard Pomerance. Scott Ellis’ production is transplanted whole from a Broadway success, set with bare artistry on hospital floorboards and matchboarding, and done without prostheses. Bradley Cooper is first seen as himself: fit, buff, six-packed: as Alessandro Nivola’s Treves displays archive photographs and reads the medical report – “immense head…sacklike flesh..repulsive cauliflower growths, fungus, stench” etc, Cooper distorts himself limb by limb: his movement discipline throughout is faultless, even managing to look as if his head, like Merrick’s, is too heavy. He remains crooked for the rest of the play.
As a device that is effective enough. ; the sly showman taking money before a fairground screen stresses the humiliation, and in hospital – different screens, in a neat parallel – the reactions of the first outsiders (shrieking “Oh my God in heaven!” or “Indecent” in improbable accents) help too.
Treves recruits an actress, Mrs Kendall (finely and sensitively, if somewhat slowly, played by Patricia Clarkson) since she is trained to hide her feelings. She visits Merrick, and by the end of the interval he is a social lion, visited by Royalty and aristocracy and plied with silver-backed hairbrushes which he clearly cannot use. His physical condition declines to death while Treves, for reasons only sketchily achieved in the clunking script, has a verbose and tedious nervous breakdown.
I wanted very much to like it: a fascinating story, a Hollywood A-lister and Broadway cast, programmes a tenner, stalls tickets up to £ 100 `(cheaper upstairs and just as good a view btw): event theatre, this, and a palpable sincerity in Cooper’s pride in bringing Merrick’s memory back to London.
But it’s not a good play. Sketchy, plodding, and repetitively determined to drive home its point – that he is being whored to the social set as much as to the fairground punters, and that all the characters who praise him just want reassurance of their own goodness-within-metaphoricall-deformity. In two hours including interval, it still dragged. The only credible relationship is between Merrick and Mrs Kendall, notably when he wistfully says he has never seen a lady naked (only pox-ridden fairground doxies) so with a nimbleness barely credible in the age of corsets she shows him her breasts. That is actually touching.

I can’t not mention the awful speech problem: struggling with Pomerance’s cod-1880s phrases most of the cast sound like beta-minus graduates of a crash Berlitz course in Let’s Speak Victorian. They talk slowly, in worryingly improbable accents with unaccountable flat pauses. Cooper himself has to keep up a strong speech impediment, and does it (like the physical work) with admirably sensitive skill and modesty. But for some reason he is given, despite a workhouse upbringing, a posh and orotund English accent. So he does, at times, sound like a rather drunk 1950’s Etonian. Conviction wavers, more than he deserves.

box office 020 7930 8800 to 8 August
rating three (and the third is for Cooper alone)      3 Meece Rating

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May 29, 2015 · 2:38 pm

PETER PAN Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park W1

AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE

We’re in a World War I field hospital with iron beds and the corrugated-iron, battered detritus of trench warfare below. But young men will always leap and lark like the boys they were not long before. The opening moments , as a graceful Mrs Darling sings a lullaby blended with “Keep the Home Fires burning’ , see a blurring of the distinction between the nursery world Wendy, Peter and John and a ward of bandaged, shocked young men in khaki having a story read by a nurse to calm them.

Timothy Sheader’s imagining, part romp and part elegy for a lost generation, is not a conventional Peter Pan. Fair enough: the Llewellyn boys whose childhood inspired J.M. Barrie all saw action in the 1914/18 war: Edwardian children who played battles met real ones, and the eldest Llewellyn died near Ypres. Barrie’s novel – which came seven years after the sweet fantastical play – is full of darkness and loss. The theme of boys needing a mother’s comfort winds throughout: it gives an added edge to Barrie’s Lost Boys’ dredging up dim memories of lost family life as they play house with Wendy. Michael’s “Mother, I’m glad of you” is followed, as in the book, by the words “They were the last words she was to hear from him for a long time”. That, with the WW1 theme, pulls you up short.
So I did worry for a while that Sheader had pitched the production awkwardly, the historical frame too dark and puzzling for children and the larkiness too childish for adults. But its charm, energy and sincerity win the day. A bright child from eight up, especially if they vaguely know the story and are told about the war centenary, will be fine with it; as to adults, my daughter aged thirty grew up with boys, as I did, and identified straight away with the makeshift games. In Jon BAusor’s design the beds become walls and doors and an island, the khaki soldier ensemble are waves in the lagoon or puppeteers manipulating sinisiter gas-mask mermaids with a horrid suggestion of skeleton, and a nurse darts around with an Aldis-lamp-and-junk Tinkerbell. There is also, naturally, stepladder-and-corrugated iron crocodile, and an even better version of its jaws (no set-spoilers from me) to swallow Hook. Who is David Birrell, half Kaiser-Bill officer, half schoolyard bully.

And there’s flying. Oh yes. Peter Pan, at the centre of it all, is more than wonderful. He is Hiran Abeysekera, raggedly macho, gang-leader and rebellious child at once. He flies under the great gantries on lines whose visibility, oddly, makes his flight all the more miraculous – acrobatic, graceful, wild, joyful. The Darling children fly a little too: Kae Alexander’s thoughtful, gentle Wendy and her brothers comically clumsy as they hurtle off the beds. The players, all adult, create their childishness without strain or cuteness: Thomas Pickles’ Slightly is particularly funny and touching. The pirates have marvellously ramshackle dressing-up box outfits, from Viking and Knight to Saracen and D’Artagnan looks ,put together by Jon Morrell with gleeful loopiness. Beverly Rudd’s bespectacled Smee is particularly taking.

And as the game ends, deeper dusk falls under the trees, and the nurses are back in the field hospital folding the blankets towelcome peacetime, we know that Hook is gone, with his love of “the obliteration of youth – something grand in that!” . And though not all the boys come home, Barrie’s odd, plaintive tale ends as ever with the injunction that “The window must always be kept open” in case lost boys return. Gulp.
box office 0844 826 4242 to 15 June
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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May 27, 2015 · 10:58 pm

TEMPLE Donmar, WC1

ALL FIVE MICE REJOICE (CHURCH MICE, CLEARLY)  FOR A MODERN HISTORY-PLAY

Above the table cluttered with  last-night’s paper cups, high windows show St Paul’s dome; the distant chanting is not of choristers but demonstrators, and the black-clad Dean looking out in weary despair is invaded by a dishevelled supply PA with her backpack hanging open – late because of a rail replacement bus. Thus within the first minute Howard Davies’ superb production establishes a clash: orderly ecclesiastical tradition meets the angry muddle of modernity.
Steve Waters’ play recreates an insoluble dilemma, imagining the final deliberations in 2011 when St Paul’s reopened after a fortnight’s closure. Would the Dean and Chapter co-operate with the City Corporation in injuncting against – and forcibly evicting – the Occupy protest camp? Ironically, that inchoate anti-capitalist demonstration was never meant to be there: it was the police who kettled it into Cathedral territory, thus providing Occupy with hot TV pictures and the Cathedral with a massive financial loss, a painful question of conscience, and countless sanctimonious remarks about moneylenders-in-the-temple. To make it harder the Canon Chancellor, Giles Fraser, showily resigned at the idea of the Church seeming to condone violence.
The Dean, already under fire for closing a building which stayed open all through the Blitz, had to rule. For ninety theatrically gripping minutes we watch this lonely man beset from without and within, and played by the greatest actor of the day. For Simon Russell Beale gives him intensity, pain, fragility, fire and twinkles of unexpected wit : it’s a flawless, thrilling performance. Waters’ writing weaves absurdity, sincerity, personality and history into a piece sorrowfully perceptive , thought-provoking and necessary. And dares include some very, very good laughs.

For one after another, forces besiege the Dean as he tries to write his reopening sermon. The resigning Canon Chancellor, Paul Higgins all jeans and anorak and enfant-terrible vanity, prates of how “invigorating” and ‘joyous’ the protest camp is. The Dean’s confused horror at his colleague’s self-aggrandizing Twitter habit all through the agonizing day is cruelly demonstrated, their final reconciliation oddly touching. From the other direction comes a snakelike Corporation lawyer (Shereen Martin) urging brisk injuctions against the “scruffy, illiterate, unsightly” plebs.
Nor is our hero helped one whit by the Bishop of London, wickedly given orotund patriarchal life by Malcolm Sinclair. He refers to the occupation as “a gift” and urges some sort of washy PR campaign to please the vaguely distressed unseen figure of “Rowan”. But as the Dean observes with brief waspishness (Russell Beale managing always to convey the conflict of a man who wishes he wasn’t so provoked to sharpness) the Bishop of London is on easy street. “Without portfolio. No dragging a building around for him. No, he springs up here, there, a royal wedding, glamorous speaking assignment, at liberty to be endlessly visible”. Sinclair’s attempt at a reassuring man-hug of the stolid, appalled Dean is a comic moment to treasure. Though not, I suspect, if you are the Rt Revd. Richard Chartres.

Rebecca Humphries is beguilingly natural as Lizzie the PA (never sat her history degree, but did a thesis on “Witchcraft through the lens of Queer Theory”). She is pivotal both in argument and emotion, reappearing at every juncture. And so it goes: faeces and racket and earnest idealism and disorderliness outside, inside the Virger (a stiffly splendid Anna Calder-Marshall) talking of lacquering candelabras. And all the time, that impossibility of a right decision. For as the Dean says, St Paul’s has been there 1400 years and never asked to be the parish-church to Mammon’s towers. But since it is, it must keep the worship going and the roof on, try to be holy, somehow. The ending is graceful and profound: sad, human, gentle, honest.
box office 0844 871 7624 to 25 July
Rating: five    5 Meece Rating
Sponsors: Barclays / C & S Sherling

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