Author Archives: Libby Purves and friends

April 17, 2014 · 6:32 pm

HANDBAGGED – Vaudeville, WC2

WHO NEEDS JURASSIC PARK? RE-LIVE THE 80s WHEN THATCHER ROAMED THE EARTH
She’s back, the Iron Lady, with a war-cry of “No!” and a warmly patronizing memory of “The men!…I can pin them wrigging with my gaze and release them with a smile”. Baffled but courteous, the Queen creeps up behind her to offer a chair for their weekly meeting. And we’re off: piquantly, the most insightful political comedy to hit the West End for years is not born of the Westminster village or the boys-club standup nexus. It’s written by Moira Buffini, directed by Indhu Rubasingham, and played by women outnumbering men two-to-one.

 

Not that it’s a feminist plea – its twin heroines would never stand for that. Rather – drawing on speeches, memoirs, news reports, Christmas broadcasts and (not least) Buffini’s mischievous imagination – it is a playful and unexpectedly humane treatment of eleven years which Prime Minister Thatcher shared with H.M. the Queen.
Playful because there are two of each: one younger, 1980s version, another as they are or would be today. They argue with one another and with their other selves, as in a four-way melée of differing perceptions as they recall like Zimbabwe, the Falklands, bombings, riots, and the Special Relationship. Joining them, henpecked, are jobbing actors hired to conjure up the other characters from Denis and Philip to Kaunda, Enoch,Kinnock, Reagan, HoweHeseltine. The playfulness lies in the idea that they have met in a theatre (to the Queen’s faint chagrin, though “one saw War Horse”) and that the footmen-actors – Jeff Rawle as the older, Neet Mohan as the younger – occasionally jib at parts they are given or break out with their own opinions. So two generations can identify, and the odd in-joke flourish (“What was a Closed Shop?” asks the youth, and Rawle snarls “The reason actors used to earn proper money!”. Naturally, any male rebellion is futile against the basilisk stare of Thatcher and the amused authority of the monarch. The Queen, by the way, insists on an interval despite the PM’s protest “there’s work to do!”.

 

Likenesses go far beyond wigs and suits: Fenella Woolgar in particular has caught a particular eyebrow-move which took me right back to 1980 with a shiver, and Marion Bailey as the older Queen goes beyond caricature into a degree of identity previously only caught by Helen Mirren. In which context it is worth mentioning The Audience because its weakest scene was the Thatcher one. This more than makes up the deficit.
In my last doomed week as Times Chief Theatre critic this show proved great solace at the Tricycle. My review (£ http://tinyurl.com/nb9el4g) concluded “Pure theatre, doing something only theatre can.”. Glad to return the favour: six months on, the well-deserved transfer has that very quote outside.

 

One of the pleasures of seeing it again is noticing how subtly it accepts the two women not as Spitting Image caricatures but as living, struggling humans. “Journalists and policemen are always so BIG” muses the Queen “One finds them enormous”. And I had forgotten the moment when the Chequers Christmas gathering (with Murdochs and Archers) watches the defiant 1981 Christmas message with horror as HM recklessly uses the word “comradeship”…

 

It’s political, and historical, yet universal in its vision of two people finding one another baffling but occasionally sharing empathy (as when they reflect on the risk of assassination). Lightly, truthfully, it shows how a great public role can only partly define you; how the years go by, and within each of us is a scornful younger self and a thoughtful future one. Don’t miss it. It’s a treat.
box office 0845 505 8500 to 28 June

rating:   even better, so 5  5 Meece Rating

 

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April 17, 2014 · 9:18 am

HENRY IV part 2 – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

AND SO IT GOES ON… (review of part I just below)    The Bard Mouse width fixed

 

 

Such is the traditional, ungimmicky nature of Greg Doran’s productions that it is quite a shock when “Rumour”, the abstract character who introduces the second part of the Henry-Hal-Falstaff saga, comes on in a pop art red-mouth T-shirt in front of a flashing projection of social media gabble. It wakes us up, though, and is only a fleeting moment before the centuries roll us back into the tale. Having seen Part I, we know how much is rumour and how much truth: that Hotspur is dead, the first battle won but the rebels still angry, and that a slight souring has crossed the relationship between Prince Hal and Antony Sher’s Falstaff (who has by now scored a feather in his awful hat and a cheeky, adorable tiny page).

 

This play gives more space for the tavern characters to grow, and to find their own melancholy. Paola Dionisotti as Quickly is a victim of Falstaff’s debts and lies, still fiery but less certain; the fat knight himself is more often obstreperous than amusing, Bardolph remains glumly, beautifully resigned and Pistol (Antony Byrne) is plain barking mad, with a hairstyle that can only be described as deshabillé Jedward.

 

But what Greg Doran finds in this second part is a sense of inexorable change: old Henry is dying, Hal’s return to the tavern set is sourer, more bent on teasing Falstaff than enjoying him. Doll Tearsheet (Nia Gwynne) has an unhappy anger about her. There are moments of great fun, not least Pistol’s crazy chandelier-swinging and trouserwork, but decline and death haunt them all. Falstaff’s “Do not bid me remember mine end” to Doll is amplified later in a peculiarly touching rendering of his scene with the old men Shallow and Silence, set before a hay-cart which reminds you of the simple, suffering rural England across which battle has raged. The limping, shuffling peasant soldiers they recruit are treated with more pathos than humour (congratulations to Leigh Quinn as Wart, bent double: that’s a memorable RSC debut and I hope the physio looks after her).

 

So the serious Matter of England presses hard, beyond the foreground concerns of warlike nobles and tavern revellers. And so does the gradual, inexorable advance of death on all: when the old men giggle about “Jane Nightwork” a former tart of fifty years ago, the shocked realization in the line “She’s old..she cannot help but be old..” hits home with rare force. “We have heard the chimes of midnight, Master Shallow..”
This has never been my favourite of the two parts, and if I were forced to ask which one to book, the first would win. But if you can do both, to see the story out is a great thing, the cross-currents richly rewarding. Jasper Britton makes Henry’s approach to death deeply moving and involving , and Alex Hassell’s self-reinvention as a responsible prince is well taken. Because in a characteristically young-male adolescent switch, the thoughtless irresponsibility of his past becomes an equally thoughtless, posed frigidity as he delivers that most famous snub in literature: “I know thee not, old man”.

 

0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 6 September

Part 3 in participating cinemas 18 June (see below for Pt 1)

rating: four    4 Meece Rating

 

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April 17, 2014 · 8:40 am

HENRY IV PART 1 – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

BOOZE AND BATTLE, GRACE AND HUMANITY          The Bard Mouse width fixed

 

The tale of troubled Henry, threatened by rebellion, haunted by guilt at Richard’s murder and exasperated by the follies of his son Hal, is one of the great Shakespearean chronicles. Wild Hal, warlike Hotspur and the irresistibly disgraceful Falstaff shine vivid down the centuries. The play is rich in magnificent, eloquent insults: bed-presser, bull’s pizzle, stockfish! Mad-headed ape, whoreson greasy tallow patch, vile standing-tuck! Between those and the tremendous battle scenes it has an honourable record of being the route by which a crafty parent introduces a restless boy to the History plays: a comedy, a ripping yarn.

 

Greg Doran directs as ever with a lovely clarity and humour, never flagging but not hurrying either. Just over three hours with the interval, this production gives even the smallest character space and time to breathe and expand. There is of course Antony Sher’s Falstaff : who when he claps on a leather hat above his capacious overcoat, has the air of a large ambulating mushroom sprouting curly grey fungus of beard and hair. Falstaff’s baseness is not dodged or lightened as it sometimes has been. Sher, in a slow rich slur, gives full value to the fat knight’s Just-William talent for fantasy and excuse, and we laugh with him as he fences with the less adept young Prince.

 

But when he boasts of his earnings from frightened citizens with his press-gang protection racket, filling his military company with the dregs of prison and gutter who can’t pay, Doran gives us something startling. Behind Falstaff and his handcart picnic files a dim-lit parade of shuffling and staggering figures. He shrugs that they will fill graves as well as any, shrugs at other deaths with no intention of dying himself, a sociable sociopath – “I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter had – give me life!”. His sermon about the uselessness of honour – which can be done with quiet intelligent horror as Roger Allam did at the Globe – is chucked out by this old bastard as just another canting fantasy. Insouciant selfishness goes too far: when Hal finds, mid-battle, that it’s a bottle in his friend’s holster, not a pistol, the lad’s visible frustration suddenly feels like one of the subtle, important, corners of the play : it foreshadows the rejection he will inflict on the old man in Part II.

 

But there are many such corners and hints in Alex Hassell’s closely built performance as Hal: his head hung in shame at his father’s rebukes, his impatience with idleness – “The land is burning!”‘ and his sudden, boyish plea for peace or single-combat after he has seen the state of Falstaff’s half-dead soldiery. Trevor White’s Hotspur, on the other hand, turns no corners and never changes: he is played white-blond, pale-eyed, a hypermanic Roundhead to Hal’s sensual cavalier. He leaps and punches the air and yells “Yesss!” and in a terrifyingly arranged fight (arranger Terry King surpasses himself) at one stage is belabouring Hal with both swords at once, crazy-manic and fearless. This is not a likeable Hotspur, not least when he hurls around his imploring wife. Some will mourn his lack of heroic seriousness, but it is credible: he’s very young.

 

Doran’s pace and shaping of the play is superb. Great humour shades to seriousness. Hotspur’s baiting of the Druidically solemn self-satisfied Glendower (Joshua Richard, very New Age ) quietens as Nia Gwynne sings in Welsh to a gentle harp. Hotspur scorns and insults the singing, not knowing it will be his dirge. The roll-on tavern scenes are fun, with Paola Dionisotti giving a sharp Dot-Cottonish Quickly, Joshua Richards a pricelessly laconic Bardolph and Elliott Barnes-Worrell haring around beautifully in waiterly panic as Francis. But even as Sher in his slow-spoken querulous pomp weaves Falstaff’s web of fantastic excuses, we cut to King Henry: almost weeping with frustration and remorse, gasping out his longing to atone the murder, the words “Holy Land” snatching his very breath.

 

Clouds scud overhead or hang as smoke over the open fields of England (a tangle of bare branches against blue, glimpsed behind the battered barnlike back wall). The final battles are action-movie stuff, Douglas the crazed Scotsman flailing some sort of murderous Celtic shillelagh, flashes and smoke and crashing across the vast room. Jerks of compassion as Hal kneels by his dead rival and thinks to mourn Falstaff are diffused as the fat one rolls upright and desecrates Hotspur’s corpse (oh yes, this is no jolly Falstaff, not after a while). The whole thing is masterly: with intense, scholarly, humane concern and care Doran teases out spirit and character , finds nuggets of meaning and sorrow. This, and Part II (review follows) will be live in cinemas and streamed into schools. Such permanence is well-earned.
0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 6 September
Part I in participating cinemas 14 May

rating: five  5 Meece Rating

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April 15, 2014 · 11:29 pm

THE NOTORIOUS MRS EBBSMITH – Jermyn St Theatre, WC1

RADICAL FEMINISM – IT’S NOTHING NEW…
Now here’s politics! The mistress of the runaway Tory MP is a revolutionary preacher, previously known as Mad Agnes. She berates her lover with “Accident of birth sent you to the wrong side of the House; influence of family kept you there – supporting the Party that retards, the Party that preserves for the rich, palters with the poor!”. Having converted him to the cause of progressive radical moralities, when the poor sap buys her an evening dress she scorns it with “Would you have me hang this on my bones? Rustle of silk, glare of arms and throat, they belong to a very different order of things from that we have set up!” . Good grief: it is still only 1895, and already we have a prototype 1970’s feminist bra-burner.

 

Arthur Wing Pinero is best known now for The Second Mrs Tanqueray, and his The Magistrate was lately at the National. This one, set in Venice amid expatriate English, hasn’t been revived since 1895 with Mrs Patrick Campbell shocking the bourgeoisie. But it is a fascinating, dramatic, verbose take on the hypocrisies and emerging radicalism of the age – a nice companion-piece, indeed, to Ibsen’s GHOSTS just up the road, another moral cornerstone of the changing century. So credit to Primavera for reviving it in this tiny theatre, tidying away a few minor characters and delivering – with a cast of nine – Abbey Wright’s spirited production. There’s a suitably leprous palazzo backdrop by Cherry Truluck and an intelligent, lead from Rhiannon Sommers as Agnes: open-faced , striding, and confident that womanish emotions can’t weaken her until they suddenly do. As she cries “To be a woman is to be mad”.

 

She is counterpointed by a fine Julia Goulding as Gertrude, the virtuous Yorkshire widow grieving a lost child, who befriends her despite an initial moral shock at the free-love views and bitter conviction that marriage is a “choked-up, seething pit”. Max Hutchinson plays Agnes’ Hugh-Grantish wimp of a lover Lucas, and Christopher Ravenscroft (in gorgeous spats) delivers a very subtle performance as the world-weary silver-haired rake of a Duke, sent by the family to reclaim the runaway MP but finding himself drawn to the vitality of the “dowdy demagogue, a shabby shapeless rebel”. He alone realizes what the evening frock is doing to her. “In your dowdy days you had ambitions..they were of a queer gunpowder-and-faggot sort, but they were ambitions”.

 

The story played out by these layered characters is as if George Bernard Shaw had fallen under the influence of Charlotte Bronte, and the second act rises to a terrific confrontation. Agnes is leaving Lucas, but his wife and brother are horrified to find that without her, he still won’t come home. Shockingly the wife pleads with the mistress to go back and be set up in a quiet suburban lovenest so she can remain his ‘a la mode’ public wife.
It’s rich with ironic contradictions, uncanny modern parallels and one of the cruellest portrayals anywhere of a particular kind of vain male politician. The sort who has “Ambition without confidence” and feeds on applause, praise, and female admiration. Ouch!
box office 0207 287 2875 to 3 may

rating:  four 4 Meece Rating

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April 14, 2014 · 11:29 pm

A SMALL FAMILY BUSINESS – Olivier, SE1

DARK BITTER JOY: A PERFECT CONFECTION

This play is vintage Alan Ayckbourn: elegant, polished dramatic machinery serving a darkly comic and rueful human heart. Perfectly suited to a renewed age of acquisitive moral relativism, it actually dates from a 1987 commission by Sir Peter Hall. He invited Ayckbourn to take a break from Scarborough in-the-round and write for the National. The playwright, never in a proscenium, chose the Olivier’s vast thrust stage and split it into many rooms. Now in Adam Penford’s lovely revival, Tim Hatley’s set is a vast brick dolls-house two floors deep, before a glimpsed arc of other houses. This suits the action perfectly, since it happens in three different family houses (sometimes at the same time in different rooms) and part of the joke is that they are identical affluent suburban-estate clones. Differences (like Anita’s bedroom dungeon) are only implied behind the identical doors.

The plot has a bluff new-broom Jack (Nigel Lindsay in terrific and heartbreakingly credible form) come to take over a faltering furniture business from his aged father-in-law. After a pleasingly hilarious opening – a classic farce moment with an inappropriate surprise party, as Ayckbourn tries to fool us into expecting pure comedy – Jack makes a rousing speech about rebuilding ‘trust’ and honest dealing down to the last office paperclip.

 

They all concur. But the whole tribe has been on the take for years, enmeshed in fraud with five dodgy Italian brothers all sleeping with Jack’s sister-in-law Anita, which leaves her husband Cliff untroubled as long as he has his Porsche and boat. Brother-in-law Des is saving up to run away from his praying-mantis of a wife, who has a terror of food, and become an incompetent chef in Minorca. Jack’s daughter Sam is shoplifting: getting her off the rap leads to the first crack in his integrity, followed by all the other cracks all the way to a startling extreme in which one character (no spoilers) meets a fate piquantly similar , if you swop a trough for a bath, to what happens to Lear’s Fool on this very stage on other nights. Excellent symmetry.

 

Darkening hilarity and angry irony drive the tale, with twists too good to betray. So let me just list a few joys: Niky Wardley as Anita , a suburban Goneril in fetish corsetry; Neal Barry’s Des amid clouds of evil-smelling smoke in his kitchen, Amy Marston’s Harriet with her loudly snoring pet dog and hysterical revulsion at food, and not least Matthew Cottle, sinister and pasty, as the private investigator moving from gloomy righteousnessto thrilling villainy (Cottle saying the words “corporal punishment” is worth the ticket price).

 

And let us not forget Gerard Monaco as all five Italian brothers in wigs of varying horror, who is sportingly credited in the programme as various anagrams of himself (Gordon A.Cream, Don Groamacer, etc). And credit to NT debutante Alice Sykes as Sam, the youngest and most betrayed, alone in a grim final spotlight as the family downstairs completes its transformation from Cheadle-Hume respectability to Cosa Nostra. Excellent.
Being away last week and late on the draw for press night, I bought my own tickets (it happens!!) and regret not a penny of it. There’s an endorsement for you..

Box office 020 7452 3000 to 27 Aug
rating: four.   4 Meece Rating
Plus a special playwright mouse for Sir Alan.  Playwright Mouse resized

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April 14, 2014 · 2:46 pm

PEDDLING – Hightide Festival, Halesworth

A MUGGLE DOES SOME MAGIC

 

This has to be the most explosively determined statement ever that “I am not just the one in those damn Harry Potter films!”. Harry Melling, who from the age of 11 had the unrewarding role of the fat Muggle bully Dudley Dursley, has actually done some very creditable theatre roles: not only at the NT and Chichester (as the Fool) but as a really excellent Christopher Isherwood in Southwark’s I Am A Camera.

 

But this time, though his Muggle history is flagged up in publicity, he gives us an extraordinary 50-minute solo, a debut piece written by himself, which transfers to Brits Off Broadway in a couple of weeks time. He is alone, under Steven Atkinson’s careful direction, and chiefly imprisoned inside a striking gauze box with a tree and some lightbulbs (the set is Lily Arnold’s, because Hightide does not skimp on striking visuals). And the character he creates, which gradually gains focus in a compassionate and remarkable way, is a pedlar boy.

 

In a dystopian future vision, which may give Broadway a curious impression of our penal system, a young offender on a “Boris” scheme has been driven in a van with others to sell his tray of lavatory-paper, dusters etc from door to door. He is lost, and semi-articulate, but from his stream of consciousness come memories of how he came to be there. He was a care leaver, and finds himself in anger knocking on the door of his former ‘Mrs Independent Reviewing Officer” . He begins to cross London from Hampstead to the far south – in fine vivid tumbling prose – carrying a firework, looking for his birth mother and his lost childhood.

 

At first I was unsure about it, but Melling’s vision is strong, the storytelling develops, and his language is always lively: you are drawn into the poor 19-year-old lost boy’s delusions and fantasies and dreams and memories (childhood, church, Lord of the Dance..”). There are moments of savage humour and of pathos. It is a remarkable writing debut and a storming performance, and I shall never, ever, mention Dudley Dursley in the context of Melling again.

http://www.hightide.org     to 19th

 

RATING   4 4 Meece Rating

 

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April 14, 2014 · 2:16 pm

THE GIRL’S GUIDE TO SAVING THE WORLD – Hightide Festival, Halesworth

OH GROW UP, GIRLS!
Maybe this play about “friendship, feminism and what it means to be successful” would be less annoying if the characters – Bella, Jane, and Jane’s boyfriend Toby – were not clearly signalled as being in their thirties. As it is, their self-indulgent kidult carryings-on rapidly alienate. Grow up, you stupid drunken whingers! And for a “feminist” tract, it has to be an own goal to make the man the least infuriating. Poor old Toby may be a disillusioned English teacher who wants to be a househusband (“me and all the other Dads in a pavement cafe with a low-alcohol beer..taking the kids trips to Tate Modern with a sketchpad”). But at least he cooks supper, decorates, takes the cat to the vet and doesn’t blame everything on the opposite sex. And he wants a baby, and to love it, while Jane just moans “Kind of horrible – my vagina will never be the same…imagine me pinned to the sofa by a red slithery otter thing”.

 

It is a crying shame that Elinor Cook’s play, at this fabulous new-writing festival, should misfire. Because the staging (Amelia Sears directs) is ingenious and elegant, especially in a neon railway-line moment, and the performances – notably Jade Williams as Jane – are very good indeed, sucking every rare, available bit of reality from their parts. And Cook does write good one-liners. When Bella – who is doing a feminist blog with Jane – is being wooed by the editor of the hated Grazia magazine, Jane cries “she will force you into a scented room, yank out every one of your pubic hairs and give you a cupcake!”.

 

When she is in this Caitlin-Morannish vein Cook is fun. But too fast it turns into moaning hatred – Bella claiming that she let a boyfriend screw her without a condom because an “Embedded, societal” force enjoins us to worship The Penis. My companion cruelly said the whole thing had clearly been put through a computer programme called GuardianTranslate. Men are either sinister creatures at bus stops, useless drones, or silly fantasies. The women want to be as flaunty as they like, shed inhibition, abort pregnancies they conceived deliberately, get stinking drunk at clubs and fantasise about barmen. Irrelevant feminist as I am, let me confirm that both a nearby 29-year-old and a 21-year-old were just as irritated.

 

There is good stuff here, but it needs trimming by a third, refocusing and humanizing. The most telling moment is when, returning to their querulous feminist blog, they finally give a nod to the rest of the world and speak of “India, Somalia..! the more you scratch the surface of this stuff..” Yes. Right. Keep on scratching, girls, and not just your own itches.
http://www.hightide.org.uk to 19th

RATING:   two   2 meece rating

 

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April 13, 2014 · 10:53 am

INCOGNITO – Hightide Festival Halesworth

HIGHTIDE WINS A DAZZLING PAYNE PREMIERE
O happy conversion! It is awkward and gloomy for a critic to admire and acknowledge a play’s clever originality, yet privately feel nothing. Nick Payne’s much-praised Constellations had had this effect on me: neither the cosmology and beekeeping nor the love story hit home. I liked his Blurred Lines very much though, and admired the more conventional The Same Deep Water As Me at the Donmar, so I settled to this premiere with hope. Even though the set – shining vague scaffolding – was ominously reminiscent of the white balloon ceiling of Constellations.

 

The hope is fulfilled. This is shiningly brilliant, a meditation on neuroscience, memory, deception, heredity and identity: alive with compassion and wonder, streaked with intelligent humour. It interweaves three stories. There is the 1955 obsession of the pathologist Thomas Stolz Harvey who annexes and dissects the brain of the dead Albert Einstein to try and find his genius. There is the story, powerfully affecting, of an early victim of brain surgery, Henry, left with only the shortest-term memory, speaking and understanding in terrible unresolvable circles. And there is a troubled modern-day neuropsychologist, divorced and borderline alcoholic, who falls in love with another woman.

 

Four actors – Alison O’Donnell, Paul Hickey, Amelia Lowdell and Sargon Yelda – play 21 parts over six decades without prop or costume changes, moving between them in seconds with astonishing fludity (superb direction from Joe Murphy.) Payne uses his gift for sharp natural dialogue to drive plot and character forward within the same fragmented, episodic flea-jump style which Constellations exploited, challenging all traditions of chronology and form.

 

If that sounds tough going, astonishingly it is not. You have to concentrate, for the story’s circles are concentric and overlapping, Venn diagrams of ideas and ironies. Again and again Payne circles and returns, breaking and re-forming shapes like the flocks of starlings his Henry character speaks of, sparking ideas and patterns and inspirations like fleeting flashes of electricity across brain-cells. Harvey’s desperation to find the secrets of thought in the dead mush of tissue becomes ever more hopeless; Martha’s daily encounters with amnesiacs – even her envy of them – is counterpointed by her own unwillingness to admit her past memories and encumbrances to her new lover. When the scientist, on the run, enthuses about the brain it is ironically to an audience of self-stupefied young Kansas stoners. Once, a sudden seemingly unconnected violent moment links back to the theme.

 

. All the cast are remarkable, and not only in the speed of change between characters in which two people in conversation barely change posture to leap across decades and personalities. Sargon Yelda’s rendering of Henry’s terrible amnesiac fugue is heartbreaking, its conclusion unexplained but intensely moving. Martha’s cry “We are a blip within a blip in an abyss” is denied by her final moment. It’s a marvellous experience: I felt my own brain expanding and unmooring, chasing hares and moonbeams and mysteries. As Einstein said, knowledge is limited but imagination encircles the world.

 

touring to Newcastle, Oxford North Wall, and Bush London in coming weeks

rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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April 12, 2014 · 12:01 am

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE – Young Vic, SE1

STARK, PURE AND PERVERSE: A TRAGEDY FOR THEN AND NOW
This is the toughest of tragedies: it may be a domestic affair, set among poor Italian immigrants under the Brooklyn Bridge in the ‘40’s, but Arthur Miller’s great play sounds every classical note. Love, honour, death. Eddie Carbone the longshoreman stands with Oedipus and Othello, Lear and Lancelot. His end is violent, sordid and useless yet as the lawyer-narrator Alfieri says, “Something perversely pure calls to me from his memory, and I mourn him”.

 

There is perverse purity too in this production from Amsterdam director Ivo van Hove and designer Jan Versweyveld . We sit around a dark featureless box, which rises – not far, for it lowers overhead like the bridge itself – to show a square white floor with one dark door (shuttered only at one terrible late moment when there’s no way out). Here, without period distractions or props, in two hours family normality becomes a madness of passion and stark revenge.

 

Alfieri the lawyer (Michael Gould) initially roams the aisles outside the square, as he becomes involved he enters the square to become part of the terrible climax. At first I found this bare staging alienating, remembering the detailed domestic significances in Sarah Frankcom’s fine Manchester production. But van Hove’s forceful simplicity pares it down, as if we observed men and women like mere ants in a glass box: trapped, building, warring. And despite some stylized scenes, it is far from coldly forensic.

Its peril rises, as Alfieri says, from “Love – sometimes it’s too much, and it goes where it mustn’t”. Eddie, the powerful, rangy, shaven-headed patriarch (Mark Strong) has raised his dead sister’s child Catherine (Phoebe Fox), who is now seventeen. Miller’s watchful wife Beatrice (Nicola Walker) is keen that she should go to work, spread her wings; Uncle Eddie is fondly overprotective. The artful way Miller eases us from cheerful domestic argument to unease is superbly tracked in every gesture and tone of these three: when Beatrice’s illegal-immigrant cousins arrive, the fuse is lit. Emun Elliott is the dark, broodingly lonely Marco, supporting three faraway children in Sicilian poverty for “if I stay there, they will never grow up”. But his brother Rodolpho is fair, loves to sing and dreams of a motorbike. Catherine falls for him. Eddie resents it, never acknowledging the darkness of his own love, and in the few risible moments Miller allows us, he convinces himself that Rodolpho is gay because he cooks and helps with dressmaking, and therefore is courting the girl just to get citizenship.

 

The only one way to be rid of him is the ultimate betrayal to the authorities , unthinkable in a tight immigrant community. But Eddie’s passion burns out his goodness, so the dark and bloody wave approaches and breaks: literally, in a shockingly staged climax.

Miller built the play round a story from a lawyer who worked with those 1940’s Italian-American longshoremen; late in life – seeing it in a revival – he admitted to finding elements of his own psychological hinterland there. It has that kind of dark half-realized dangerous power, and here the very starkness of direction makes it universal. You shiver at Eddie – “His eyes were like tunnels…a passion had moved into his body like a stranger” . But you can weep too when as Catherine, needing to turn away from her affection for him to a healthier passion, explodes in grief. Phoebe Fox shockingly, brilliantly, discards the ingénue for the wildcat.

 

So, a brilliant production, and startlingly one for today. Not only because dangerous loves are always with us (and indeed in the news) but because all around the Young Vic with its warm, intense local audiences the streets of South and East London teem with such families. They too live on the edge and may shelter illegal arrivals, come from poorer lands to work and send money home. There are no doubt tragedies under our bridges too.

 

box office  www.youngvic.org / 020 7922 2922 to 7 June

rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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April 10, 2014 · 11:41 pm

KING CHARLES III – Almeida, N1

CHARLES, CAMILLA,   WILLIAM, KATE…THEIR FUTURE?  AND OURS?

 

Billed as “a future history”, Mike Bartlett’s new play begins with a chanted Lux Aeterna for the Queen’s funeral. Director Rupert Goold makes the most of it, with the whole cast bearing candles in the gloom beneath Tom Scutt’s dado arc of faint, jumbled historic monarchal portraits. Later the ensemble is briefly hooded and in Guy Fawkes masks. Palace – and Parliament, and Abbey – are unfussily indicated by a pink-carpeted dais. There are stars and garters. Goold knows how to make an impact.

 

At the play’s heart is Tim Pigott Smith, brilliantly capturing the ageing Charles not as impressionist but as essence. The heir’s hand gestures and occasional buzzing consonants are there, but more importantly he catches not only the habitual angst but Charles’ rarer, but authentic, edge of ironic mischief. Just as well that this great actor is cast, since Bartlett seems to see the part as a cross between Richard II and Lear, with a dash of Edward VII. To ramp up the Shakespearian history-play feel he writes most conversations, especially between royals and politicians, in iambic pentameter. If you are no poet this is a big risk. It can chime quite horribly (“he stands his ground as stand his ground he must”). Once or twice it works – as when the anguished King says “Without my voice and spirit, I am dust”. But too often it caused me to scrawl STUPID in capitals on my notebook.

 

This Charles, in his first meeting with a (leftish) Prime Minister, is confronted with a new press and privacy act, which he considers hampers the ancient right of free speech. He refuses to sign the Royal Assent. The PM (a Cleggish Adam James) insists. The smarmy Tory opposition leader (Nicholas Rowe) at first encourages Charles then reneges, realizing that the precedent of royal interference is dangerous. The King remembers that technically he can dissolve Parliament and force an election, and does. In the ensuing mayhem of dissent, riots and military deployment his next heir (Oliver Chris as a spookily lookalike William) is persuaded by a machiavellian Kate (Lydia Wilson) to wade in. Meanwhile Harry – a funny, touching, dishevelled, conflicted evocation by Richard Goulding – falls in love with a stroppy art student in Doc Martens whose past “sexts” come to haunt them.

 
Promising stuff, and Pigott-Smith carries superbly the frustration of a man of strong ideals pitchforked into a role which makes him a puppet for politicians of dubious morality and sense (very topical in Maria-Miller week). The downside is not only the tortured blank verse – which creates a barrier to belief – or even the wincingly unnecessary appearances of Diana’s ghost, forever sticking her oar in. It is also marred by a certain News-Quizzy cartoonishness. The idea that Harry would be awed at being introduced by his girl to “Sainsbury’s! I bought a Scotch Egg!” is just stupid: the young princes have led far more recognizable lives than their predecessors, William as a student making his own beans on toast.

 

Also, the burning issue of the press freedom law is almost forgotten in favour of the Royal Assent row. In the second half there are surges of power, mainly because of Pigott-Smith’s strength, and genuine sparks of emotion from the princes. But the most interesting speech (free from ti-tum-ti-tum iambics) is from a nocturnal kebab-man. He tells Harry that since the Queen died people don’t know where they live any more: too many British things are eroding: army, post office, pubs, monarchy…
Now that is interesting. And prescient. Could have done with more of that.

 

box office 0207 359 4404         http://www.Almeida.co.uk, to 31 May
partner: Aspen
Rating: three   3 Meece Rating

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April 3, 2014 · 11:56 pm

I FOUND MY HORN – Trafalgar 2, SW1

A SUMMONS FROM THE PAST  TO MAKE THE PRESENT BEARABLE..

 

The horn is the most primitive of instruments: a column of air, blown through a cone. Even in the most sophisticated forms, it never quite loses that primitive, magical quality, a summoning command: Queen Susan’s Narnian hunting-horn, something to follow deep into a forest. But the French Horn is, of course, the most sophisticated (and most fiendishly difficult) of instruments, with its baffling golden curlicues and blaring mouth, its demand for powerful embouchure of the player’s poor mouth, its complex fingering…

 

Jasper Rees, some years ago, wrote a book about how, during a difficult mid-life crisis, he found his old school instrument in the attic neglected for 30 years, and resolved to re-learn it: and worse, to do a solo of Mozart’s Horn Concerto K447 in front of a paying audience at the British Horn Society. The book had a success, but the biggest stroke of luck Mr Rees had was that it beguiled another man – of his age, type, and family-man condition – who could play the horn. Rather better. And who was not only an actor but a playwright: Jonathan Guy Lewis, author of the much-praised Our Boys. Between them, they made this one-man play: first as an hour-long piece five years ago, now expanded to 90 minutes with some expansion of the story.

 

It’s a simple enough tale: depressed divorced man wonders what life’s all about, finds horn, remembers pleasures (and a revealed humiliation) from schooldays, and makes the resolution. Lewis is a versatile and engaging actor, and takes us from his glum-divorced-bloke persona, sighing at his half-estranged son’s awful music in the background, into the shy romantic depths of what he once was. He plays all the parts – himself, bluff Dave his mentor from the horn society, his camp old school music-master trilling about “Wolfie”, a number of marvellous enthusiasts and doubters at a “Horn Camp” in the Adirondacks, and at times the voice of the horn itself: a Czech-made Lidl from Brno, reproaching him for neglecting it all these years while even its home country ceased to exist.

 

It’s a virtuoso turn both dramatically and musically, often funny but more than that. Between them Rees and Lewis have drilled down into universal truths and sadnesses: the midlife fret, the need to reclaim your past from the clutter and dust of passing time, the male need to search for the “wild horn-man” within . Lewis plays, sometimes terribly, gradually better and better until the great, panicked triumph of the finale. And learns, as one mentor tells him, to let go the “post-Wagnerian breast-thumping lyricism” and hunt for the levity, the joy, the hunting-horn vigour of it. And of life itself.

 

I fell for it, knew I would from the first moment when he looks down at the battered old case in the attic and the horn shines up at him (clever lighting plot) and in his head, somewhere form the corner in the complex Sara Hillier soundscape, are heard the “horns of Elfland faintly blowing” from the land of youth. Tears in my eye, dammit.

 

And another reflection: when there is work as original, as developed and finely worked and universal and fascinating as this going on in tiny studio theatres, why does the BBC never notice? Why isn’t it on television? It isn’t going to be enough for the new Tony Hall regime to relay the big operas and major plays, grand though that is. They need to get out a bit, and find and adapt things which have grown as this did, not through anxious WIA commissioning-rounds, but organically, with love…

box office 0844 8717632 / http://www.atgtickets.com
to May
rating: four    4 Meece Rating

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April 3, 2014 · 11:22 pm

ANOTHER COUNTRY – Trafalgar Studio 1, SW1

LOVE AND THE TRAITORS:  A 1930 WORLD
There will be voices which hail this revival of Julian Mitchell’s magnificent imagining of the 1930‘s schooldays which bred the Cambridge spies – Burgess, Philby, McLean and Blunt – as yet another opportunity to decry public-schools and establishment toffs, and point fingers quivering with largely irrelevant rage at the present Cabinet. Others, more mildly, will note its importance in the fight for gay acceptance and equality (it is an ‘80s play, and became a groundbreaking film with Rupert Everett in the harsh Section 28 years).
And it certainly does chime powerfully – and now rather joyfully – with the era of gay marriage and equality, as well as saying a lot about a particular clenched , stiff-lipped public school ethos of the “low dishonest decade” still traumatized by the 1914/18 war (another centennial reflection there) as it rolled towards another one. But it would be a pity to nod it through either as a single-issue play or a period piece. Jeremy Herrin’s fine production lets its many layers and subtleties of character breathe into vivid, complex life.

 

This production was conceived at Bath and ran at Chichester’s small Minerva last year: yet in this towering cavernous space it somehow maintains a fly-on-the wall intimacy in Peter McKintosh’s elegantly battered school common-rooms, dormitories and cricket pitch. And the young cast, convincing senior-school prefects and rebels, negotiate its verbal acrobatics and adolescent character confusions beautifully. At Chichester I picked out a brilliant performance by Rob Callender as Bennett, the graceful, languid, mischievous maverick who comes to realize that for him – unlike many of his partners in experimentation – homosexuality is real. Falling in love properly with another boy is not only a joy but a “life sentence” of social exclusion: all the more vivid because he is one of those who sees “Life as a ladder” and looks forward to a lush diplomatic career. Which he won’t get.

 

Bennett is still brilliant, but this time I took in also a strong, clever, nuanced performance by Will Attenborough as the school Communist Judd, some remarkable subtleties from the various prefects and aspirants to the “22” elite, and the fact that Bill Milner as the poor put-upon fag moves with effortless truth between childlike pathos and comic absurdity. I wondered in the opening scenes whether the play – the schoolboy slang, the chatter about the “House Man” and arcane prefectorial politics might be too baffling for a new generation: 1930’s schoolboys are, after all, as distant as the dinosaurs. But the skill of it is in drawing us so close, claustrophobically, into their world so that audience laughter or applause at the interval feels like an intrusion. Even from seats far up.
The interplay between the boys throws up political echoes from every era: not least in odd grace-notes like the moment Judd the Communist consoles the weeping Junior after a school suicide, offering the comfort of political anger: stay furious at the system and you can bear life’s blows better. Mitchell’s wit bites hard both on left and right; Bennett, with his gift for boyish parody, gets the funniest lines but Julian Wadham is wonderful as the visiting Bloomsburyite, all Swinburne and rosy sensuality. And just as you think you are only in a play of ideas and talk, the final emotional hit of Bennett’s “I”ll haunt the whole lot of them” jerks you into history. Terrific.
box office 0844 8717632 / http://www.atgtickets.com     to 21 June
rating: five 5 Meece Rating

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April 2, 2014 · 11:42 pm

DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS – Savoy, SW1

THEY MAY BE DIRTY BUT THEY’RE EVER SO DIOR…

 

The best moment of proper musical-theatre comedy in this slick hard-hearted show comes not from its principals (though they do get a good few) but from a sideshow event from Lizzy Connolly. Stepping forward from the ensemble on her West End debut as “Jolene Oakes”, this splendid gal plays an oil millionairess targeted by Robert Lindsay, the a smooth Riviera con-man posing as a deposed European royal.

 

Jolene abruptly decides they are engaged and will live in “Oklahoma! Where the chief cause of death is melanoma! Not a tree or a Jew to block the lovely view…oh, dontcha love it when the bobcats howl!”. As Lindsay gapes, appalled, she clicks her fingers, pulls out a six-gun and brings up a grim desert oilrig backcloth and a hellish line-dance of cowboys: she leads them in a wild, thunder-thighed, high- kicking dance fit to shrivel the testicles of the smooth Euro-boulevardier. Lovely.
But, in one of the uncomfortably uneven moments of Jerry Mitchell’s production, the two con-men – Lindsay and his apprentice Rufus Hound – decide to put her off by pretending that Rufus is “Ruprecht”, his inbred idiot brother who will live with them. Hound – a crude enough actor at best, and playing the crudest of the characters – performs the idiot role with a gurning, dribbling, jerking, masturbating repulsiveness (not to mention a lyric about KY Jelly on a rubber glove). It is offensive enough to neutralize any pleasure in the show for anybody remotely acquainted with mental impairment.
Which is a surprise, given that Hound is a politically minded comedian so righteous about NHS changes that he lately blogged “David (Cameron) and Jeremy (Hunt) want your kids to die unless you’re rich… Why can’t they take that big pot of money ear-marked for medicine and just start sharing it out amongst themselves?

 

Given that sequence, and the prolonged wheelchair-jokes in the second half when he pretends to be a soldier with traumatic paralysis, one does tend to keep an uneasy eyebrow up throughout Hound’s reasonably competent comic performance. Can’t love him. Luckily, however, you absolutely can love Robert Lindsay, who not only swings an elegant leg and preens beautifully as the leading con-man, but handles his faint dawning of conscience with proper rounded humanity. The same goes for Samantha Bond, a comedienne who knows precisely the weight to give both to the rich Muriel Eubank’s absurdities and to her needy wistfulness. To see her playing against John Marquez’ crooked police-chief in the second act is a treat. And Katherine Kingsley, as the kingpin of the twisty plot, deploys all the joyful vigour which made her Helena for Michael Grandage’s Midsummer Night’s Dream a delight. And wow, can she belt out the big numbers..

 

Otherwise, director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell (who gave us Legally Blonde the Musical and launched the splendid Sheridan Smith to glory) delivers fine comic dance routines: you can see why he wins Tonys. Yet this show, (music and lyrics by David Yazbek, book by Jeffrey Lane, spun off from a 1988 Michael Caine and Steve Martin film) is haunted by that peculiar Broadway quality of uncertain heart. Legally Blonde was heart all the way; this, and not only because of its double-sting plot, misses too many beats for comfort.

 

Still, there’s a kind of genius in some of the sillier lyrics: not least Hound singing “I’m alone and cold and damp..you lit the light to my exit ramp”. And Lindsay does get to sum up his fellow-conman (and co-star) in the line “What you lack in grace you make up for in vulgarity”. Yess…..
box office http://www.atgtickets.com to 29 Nov

Rating: 3   3 Meece Rating

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April 2, 2014 · 11:33 pm

SPRING AWAKENING – Nuffield, Southampton and TOURING

YEARNING, FUMBLING, PHILOSOPHIZING:  BEING FOURTEEN

 
In 1891 Franz Wedekind rattled the cages of German propriety with this – subtitled “A children’s tragedy”. Its themes of 14-year-old masturbation, pornography, parental abuse, sexual fantasy, homosexuality, suicide, and the rape of one child by another make it unsurprising that it never got performed till 1906, and its 1917 appearance in New York lasted one night only. It was never seen uncut in the UK until Peter Hall’s National Theatre in 1974. Now Headlong, with the Nuffield and the West Yorkshire Playhouse, offers a modern cut-down adaptation by Anya Reiss, directed by Ben Kidd: Wedekind’s repressed, strictly controlled and sexually ignorant 1890’s teenagers become our own young, enmeshed in the opposite world of universal online porn and ‘sexting’.

 

The update works up to a point. The cast convince utterly as teenagers, often in school uniform, and modernizing the details is fine. The hayloft where Melchior rapes Wendla becomes a wobbly bunk-bed, the essay on sex which he sends to the ignorant Moritz becomes a series of emails sharing links to hard porn sites. Moritz’s suicide is now by hanging from a tree – horribly reminiscent of the recent outbreak of ‘copycat’ teen suicides – and he videos it on his laptop. The adolescent nihilism of Wedekind’s text is strikingly accented too by current pop lyrics which punctuate its jagged, bleak performance: and of course the teenage conversations about parents, exams, the non-existence of God, bodies, sex, and adult hypocrisy are perennial.

 

So is the unformed yearning, fumbling angry philosophizing and reckless need to experiment. When Aoife Duffin’s superb Wendla strays into masochistic confusion, asking Melchior (an impressive, many-layered portrayal by Oliver Johnstone) to hit her, her naive arousal and sidling body language are shudderingly real. And Bradley Hall as Moritz brilliantly evokes the doomed boy’s erotic overload and faltering, stressed-out illogic as he approaches his end.

 

Odd moments, though, jolt you into remembering that Wedekind lived in another age. The programme notes work hard to persuade us that the pressures (not least of exams) are harsh enough now to compare with the “Gymnasium” educational system of 19c Germany, and that the extreme sexual ignorance of Moritz and Wendla – who believes pregnancy can’t happen without “love” – resonates today when “Michael Gove’s free schools are instructed to teach their pupils that sex only happens between people who are married and in love, and heterosexual people at that’. Which simply is not true: no girl today with a pair of ears, however silent her parents on the subject, could reach 14 years old without hearing repetitive lectures on sperm and ova and knowing perfectly well that you can get pregnant without any declarations of love. And it was obviously necessary to convert the “essay” on sex which had Melchior sent to a reformatory by Wedekind into a more modern accusation: “cyber-bullying” . Which rings not quite true.
But the children’s emotions are right and recognizable, and Reiss’ adaptation rises to Wedekind’s strange ending with great power. When the dead Moritz seems to tell his guilty friend that “All the dead watch the living, and laugh”, it still brings a shiver.

box office 023 8067 1771 http://www.nuffieldtheatre.co.uk to 5 APril

Touring to 31 May see http://www.headlong.co.uk    Touring Mouse wide

Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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March 31, 2014 · 9:34 am

MISS NIGHTINGALE – New Wolsey, Ipswich and TOURING

NIGHTCLUBS AND NIGHTINGALES –  BLACKMAIL IN THE BLITZ

 

It is endearing that this musical’s tour should coincide with the first same-sex marriages: it is built round a gay love affair in the dark pre-Wolfenden days, the wartime years when homosexual men were prosecuted and called “The enemy within”, potential blackmail victims and spies. The creation of Matthew Bugg, directed by Peter Rowe of the New Wolsey, it is set in 1942 and follows the tangled lives of George – a Polish-Jewish pianist and composer – and his friend Maggie, a Lancashire nurse and singer trying to break in to London clubs.

 

George (Harry Waller) wants to recreate the pre-war Berlin cabaret scene he loved; Maggie (Jill Cardo) has a gift for comedy and character songs: Bugg pastiches these rather brilliantly as she changes costume from Dietrich to Rosie the Riveter, a drag Noel Coward or airman. Or, in a particularly “naughty” number a headscarfed wife sneaking off with the butcher because “You’ve gotta get your sausage where you can!”. They are backed by Sir Frank, an affluent invalided war-hero, to perform at his club; he and George fall in love and are threatened by blackmail. Panicked, Sir Frank proposes to Maggie. In that complex, conflicted part Tomm Coles is particularly fine.

I went in a spirit of curiosity: three years ago at the King’s Head I hailed Bugg’s 90-minute musical as a blend of “The Kander/Ebb Cabaret and new burlesque, with a dash of Design for Living, touches of Rattigan angst and echoes of many a nightclubby, Blitzy, wartime-blackout romance of gin, gents and garter belts.” I concluded, in that patronizing criticky way to which we sometimes succumb, “This show could grow”. Now, after bouncing off the small Leicester Square theatre last year it turns up recast, full-length and re-plotted as a touring co-production from Mr Bugg Presents and the New Wolsey (with backing and a nice programme note from the Naional Fairground Archive).

 

The cast are all actor-musicians, picking up saxophone, trumpet and clarinet with admirable insouciance and breath control even in the middle of a dance; Bugg’s pastiche songs are wonderful, and some of the dramatic numbers effective – notably the sad secret cruising of the gay men in the blackout, and the trios and duets of lovers at cross-purposes. It has grown well – though the first act could do with a trim: there are rather too many musical numbers before the plot begins to darken satisfactorily.

 

And there is real force in the fact, too easily forgotten, that while fighting Nazi persecution, Britain was still oppressing gay men. George’s position as a Jewish refugee, hearing of atrocities in Berlin and reading of suicides of men arrested in England, is particularly bitter. And from me it wins its fourth mouse by a whisker for sheer energy, great lyrics and good heart.
01473 295 900   to 5 April   then touring to 3 may –   http://www.missnightingale.co.uk   Touring Mouse wide

rating: four 4 Meece Rating

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March 28, 2014 · 11:29 pm

THERESE RAQUIN – Finborough, SW10

PITY AND TERROR: A PUB PREMIERE OF RARE QUALITY

 

The Finborough has done it again: produced the most remarkable new musical of the year, shudderingly emotional, harsh and passionate, fit to make your hair stand on end. Pulsing recitative, dissonant screams, lyrical yearnings and bitter wit mark a tale set in sombre chiaroscuro, a nightmare made visible. Nona Shepphard, who writes and directs with Craig Adams’ Kurt-Weillish score, describes her newest work as “A radical adaptation”, and so it is.

 

But for all its headlong, fractured form it is also truer to the original than a more ploddingly traditional version. Emile Zola’s 1867 novel is one of the most terrifying tales of conscience and comeuppance in world literature: I remember how the 1980 BBC dramatization scared the bejasus out of us in our first married flat (it seems to have been considered too alarmingly morbid to repeat.) The story is uncomplicated: a domineering mother marries her orphan niece off to her own sickly, selfish son Camille, keeping her pent up, bored and silent, in a cramped shop in the Pont-Neuf. Therese falls in love with Camille’s old schoolfriend Laurent, and they contrive to drown Camille on a boating trip. Persuaded to marry – pretending reluctance – they hallucinate that their marriage-bed is occupied by the corpse, and are driven to madness, hatred and suicide.

 

The tale’s power is in the explosive passion of Therese’s escape from the clawing claustrophobia of her life, to the worse imprisonment of remorse. It breathes he dank clamminess of the dark Seine beyond, Zola’s pitiless view of humans as struggling animals and his obsession with cadavers, humans as bags of bones, blood and tortured nerves. Its deeper horror comes with the fearful detail of the domineering old mother succumbing to paralysis, hearing the truth of Camille’s death and sitting helpless with her murderous eyes fixed on the guilty couple’s endgame.

 

All this power is gathered up by Sheppard’s vigorous lyrics, concentrated and flung at us in two breathless hours. The language is terrific, whether mockingly witty, flickering with passion or steaming with disgust as Therese recoils from her cousin-husband “smelling as stale as an invalid child”. A chorus of “river-women” murmur Therese’s inner thoughts as she stays silent and impassive until her first crazed scream of desire. The mother’s Thursday-night dominoes sessions with dullard friends become a jerking zombie Totentanz of pinched, shrunken faces. Laura Cordery’s design of beams and shelves evokes the claustrophobic world of the shop; Laurent’s search of the morgue is staged with the terrible power of simplicity.
Pity and terror! And if I am slow to mention the cast it is only because they are, rightly, so integral to the overall piece. Julie Atherton is Therese, equally expressive in silent passivity and crazed passion; Jeremy Legat the prating Camille who gains power only as an inescapable corpse, and Ben Lewis a magnificent, alpha-male Laurent. But above all Tara Hugo as Mme Raquin is unforgettable: a pair of dangerous eyes in a gaunt pale face beneath vain elderly curls, a patter of complacency and scream of harsh song. An exposed nerve.

 

box office 844 847 1652   or http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk to 19 April

Rating: five    5 Meece Rating

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March 28, 2014 · 2:17 pm

PYGMALION – Theatre Royal, Bath & TOURING

NO SQUASHED CABBAGE LEAVES:  A FAIR TRIUMPH

 

Rarely have I seen George Bernard Shaw’s tumbling torrent of ideas and indignations delivered with such joyful, entertaining panache, or been happier to forget its artificially-sweetened version, My Fair Lady. David Grindley’s production is a firecracker. Even the wordier passages about class and culture spin exhilaratingly along, and it is good to be reminded that one of the funniest scenes in theatre is the tea-party moment, where Eliza’s painfully posh accent utters sentences of Cockney vigour (“It’s my belief they done the old woman in” ). The Lerner & Loewe musical makes too little of that: in the original it’s a riot.

 

Much of the credit must go to Alistair McGowan as Professor Higgins. I had not known what a fine stage actor he was, such is the ubiquity of his TV comedy and impressionism. His Henry Higgins is tremendous: funny, but also catching and making real all the vanity, breezy professional self-confidence and alpha-male callousness of Shaw’s creation. He rattles, explodes, commands, insults Eliza’s “depressing and disgusting sounds…kerbstone English that will keep her forever in the gutter!” He says appalling things, but his reckless unselfawareness makes even that oddly endearing: when the newly elegant, angry Eliza finally turns on him he expostulates “I created – this – out of the squashed cabbage-leaves of Covent Garden!”. He is the ultimate unforgiveable. But when his mother upbraids him and he sprawls and hunches like a schoolboy, you forgive.

 

The other brilliant surprise is Rula Lenska, not seen often enough onstage. She is no mean comedienne (have a look at http://tinyurl.com/owhhfyz) and here makes the most of her capacity for sharp timing and queenly, statuesque stillness. But she also radiates a lovely exasperated matriarchal warmth: for Mrs Higgins is the first character apart from the housekeeper (Charlotte Page) to see that Eliza is a human being and that giving her the appearance of a counterfeit “lady” will cause her painful alienation. And as Eliza herself, Rachel Barry is endearing, but equally importantly manages the technical accent-switches required: from Cockney “neeeoooooow I’m a good girl I am”, to terrible zombie over-carefulness at tea, and finally to natural RP. That’s never an easy gig, and she handles it well.
The class politics are fascinating too; prescient for 1914, Shaw has little patience with his upper-class characters, the Eynsford-Hills, and worries away amusingly at the character of Alfred (Jamie Foreman) who prefers to stay among “the undeserving poor”, prefers a fiver to a tenner because “£10 makes a man prudent”. HIs horror of being elevated, “intimidated, bought up!” into the boring anxieties of middle-class morality is a direct ancestor of our TV series SHAMELESS.
So for two and a half hours you think, you laugh, you feel, you admire. Shaw can be a struggle for modern audiences, but this is a corker.

RATING:  four   4 Meece Rating
box office 01225 448844 to 29 March
touring to 21 June http://www.pygmalionuktour.co.uk/  Touring Mouse wide

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March 27, 2014 · 3:15 pm

THIS MAY HURT A BIT – Octagon, Bolton and touring

POLEMIC, COMIC, FURIOUS     
 (note: theatrecat saw this a fortnight ago in the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds, where it premiered, but respects tonight’s embargo)

You might do well, before watching this, to read up both sides of the NHS argument. Stella Feehily’s play for Out of Joint and the Octagon, directed by her husband Max Stafford-Clark, was born of their experience during his treatment for stroke, and of political indignation: it owes its central statistics and argument to Jacky Davis’ polemic NHS SOS. On its way from Bury (where I saw it) to Bolton it had a performance at Westminster hosted by Lord Kinnock, who in early workshops played Aneurin Bevan. Bevan’s score-settling 1948 speech begins it, and he pops up throughout, in modern scenes. So it’s a show about indignation, not ambiguity: a cryof fear that we will copy the US insurance model and betray the Spirit of ’45. The most inspiring line comes from the 1647 Leveller MP Thomas Rainsborough: “The poorest he that is in england, hath a life to live as the greatest he”.

Having said that, it is a refreshing and often informative couple of hours, with some good theatre moments (the Grim Reaper gets the best laugh). There are some lines designed more to infuriate the Coalition than to enlighten anyone, though: the present PM, weirdly, is portrayed as an grey-haired senatorial posho (Brian Protheroe) and is tended by a cynical civil servant and an Australian PR thug. Their dialogue is like a very poor imitation of The Thick Of It.
But there are livelier illustrations: the first half introduces Nicholas, a retired teacher with prostate issues (Protheroe again), struggling with a suave consultant and chaotic computer booking. Sketchy, surreal, choral and polemic moments finally solidify into Nicholas’ family gathering with his snobbish sister and her American consultant husband. They argue about the NHS with his 90-year-old mother who remembers the Spirit of ’45. She is the treasurable Stephanie Cole, whose drop-dead comic timing and fierce stage presence pretty well steal the show.
Of course – being central-casting elderly – she has a fall, a confused episode, and the second act is set in hospital. Here Cole has competition from Natalie Klamar’s fabulous performance as an busy East European geriatric nurse, ricocheting willingly between laying out an offstage corpse, feeding cornflakes to a groping vicar with a stroke, dealing with the family and fielding a demented Caribbean lady shouting “Sexy bitch! (one of Frances Ashman’s four roles).

Their story is interrupted by statistical lectures and surrealism: Bevan argues with Churchill, and Jane Whymark as “The NHS” sits up on a trolley and reminisces on her dating history (“Clem was the best…then rather indifferent liaisons, Winston, Anthony, Harold, Alec, little Harold..Margaret cut me to the bone… Tony was the most tremendous disappointment, fell in love with city boys..”. The present one “Says I must heal myself, so why won’t he let me alone? What a shit!”
It is right that a theatrical vehicle should tackle current issues, but there are incurable steering troubles here because the vehicle is loaded unevenly. It is fixedly cynical about politicians’ motives, and equally fixedly sentimental about nurses, paramedics, comely young female consultants and lovable Geordie porters (Hywel Morgan, who also plays Nye Bevan). When an opposing point of view is briefly expressed it is given to the selfish, Americanized daughter. And Klamar’s rushed nurse is so heroic that there is no reflection of the complex human problems of the service, or of cases like Stafford. Even in my own extended family we have seen night nursing so lazily uncaring that a sick old man struggled , choking, and another wandered lost until a passing visitor helped him. The nurses sat chattering over teacups at the desk. Nor is there any mention of revolving-door bureaucrats or irrationally demanding patients. Still, everyone will find swipes to applaud: mine were PFI and outsourced cleaning.

 

box office   01204 520661  to 5 April or http://www.octagonbolton.co.uk

tourdates to  21 June including St James, London:   http://www.outofjoint.co.uk      Touring Mouse wide

Rating:  three  3 Meece Rating

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March 26, 2014 · 11:56 pm

I CAN’T SING – Palladium, W1

HOWL, HOWL, HOWL! IT’S COWELL MOST FOUL…

 

Only gossip-writers should review the audience, but seeing this was the gala premiere of Harry Hill’s X-factor musical , and that most of the national critics wussily sneaked into previews to write it up nice and early, I may as well supplement the critical consensus. So know that on this real opening night Simon Cowell himself preeened through a curtain call next to Nigel Harman who plays him, that the audience was chock-full of showbizzy figures being spoofed onstage, from Sinitta to Louis Walsh; and that my companion had the interval pleasure of seeing half of the boy-band Union J confusedly blundering into the Ladies’.

 

And so to the show. Its eccentric brio owes more than a little to Jerry Springer The Opera, and demonstrates also, alas, how much better that other TV-talent musical -Viva Forever – would have been if with some proper work and wit in it. It is built round auditions and backstage manoeuvres on The X Factor, so if you know nothing of ITV’s monolithic, hideously successful, exploitative and terminally naff rhinestone-in-the-crown, don’t bother. Equally, if the football-related backstory of Cheryl Cole and the lovelife and health regimes of Cowell himself are beyond your range of interests, do some homework. But if you are a fan or the parent of one, or one of the viewers neatly guyed in a chorus sung on flying sofas (“It’s all a con, I don’t really watch it , there’s nothing else on..”) then Sean Foley’s production is the spectacular, larking, hoofing, happily silly springtime panto for you. Especially if you love the knowingly parastic mockery of TV which is Harry Hill’s trademark.

 
I love Hill, and my notebook is peppered with “HH” symbols to identify jokes which reminded me of him. Like the aria about the importance of loving yourself if you’re in showbiz, or the hopeful trio with T shirts of their name SOUL STAR who stand in the wrong order and read ARS OUL ST. Or the compere Liam O’Dearie (plainly Dermot O’Leary) who sings that how he never feels secure unless he is hugging someone he doesn’t know. Ouch. Another lovely Harry-Hillism is having the wind which blows away vital entry forms played by an ensemble member flapping his rags and snarling “three years at RADA!”.

 

There are some proper musical-theatre treats. Cynthia Erivo, last seen taking the roof off the Menier in The Color Purple, is the heroine Chenice, who thinks she can’t sing but brilliantly can: she has an ideal X-factor harrowing backstory which Hill treats with cheerful callousness. Grandad’s iron lung has to be unplugged to watch telly in their caravan, and he gets electrocuted by an incompetent plumber who is himself a contestant (“I’m going to change the world with my ukelele, and I’m doing it for my little brother!”). There’s a cynical puppet dog snarling “I know it’s not exactly War Horse but I’m doing my best”, a Dickensian undertaker, a hunchback rapper with breakdancing monks, leprechauns, Brunnhildes, and Harman a superbly horrible Cowell.

 

That’s it, really. There is potential savagery in a few lyrics, like Cowell’s “I will search the land for every buffoon / mentally ill people who murder a tune..”. The Cole character (a glorious Victoria Elliott) is mercilessly made a clumsy exhibitionist colluding in the cynical manipulation of innocents, and the conclusion is a song made entirely of clichés “Dream of a journey, journey to the dream..”. But hell, Cowell himself is the show’s backer, for Syco. And like Have I Got News or American comedy “roastings” it is all basically self-congratulatory – a sort of triumphalist “if you’re ghastly and you know it, clap your hands!” But God help me, I enjoyed it a lot.
box office 0844 412 4655 http://www.icantsingthemusical.com
Rating: four. Oh dear.  4 Meece Rating

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March 25, 2014 · 10:56 pm

FATAL ATTRACTION – Theatre Royal, Haymarket W1

McELHONE –   BUTTERFLY OR  BUNNY-BOILER? 

It is 27 years since James Dearden saw his film script explode into public consciousness, deify Michael Douglas as a hapless adulterer and Glenn Close as first holder of the now classic epithet “bunny-boiler”. He admits that from draft to draft the role of villain slid gradually towards Close, making Douglas the victim, and indeed the end got re-shot to blow her away. He fancied levelling things up now with this play, directed by Trevor Nunn.

 

So here as Dan is Mark Bazeley, fresh from Nunn’s last matrimonial doomfest Scenes from a Marriage. Kristin Davis is the smiley wife Beth who wants to move to the countryside, and the peerlessly foxy Natascha McElhone swirls a great blonde mane and killer red ciré heels as Alex, the psychotically needy urban-chic woman he picks up in a bar . And later wishes to God he could put down again.

 

It is updated to the new century in more ways than the obvious – and very helpful – fact that Alex can now persecute Dan not only by landline and turning up in his office and home but with mobile calls, texts, email and messaging. Bunny-boilers of today are well-armed indeed. The real update, though, is an attempted feminist consciousness, making more of the familiar complaints that selfish men take what they want, won’t commit, lie, never ring, abdicate responsibility and think abortion is easy. Sometimes this works, sometimes not.

 

Bazeley is great casting as Dan, lithe and narrow-headed as a particularly handsome stoat, and McElhone mostly manages the difficult task of jerking Alex – at one point in less than four minutes – from charm to violence, back to charm, then via self-harm to more aggression and finally pathos. Sometimes the script defeats her, as it would any actor. It is in less obvious moments that she flares into reality: her sudden glare of rage at being left asleep, and an electric shock of fury when Dan shouts “You poor, sad, twisted, lonely -” and she explodes on the word “lonely”. Her Madam Butterfly obsession is ramped up, the music swelling repeatedly. For Dearden, rather obviously, wants us to ask ourselves whether she is victim or vampire, nutter or Nemesis, bunny-boiler or Butterfly. And the endgame is different, more in tune with the feminist-Butterfly theme: some tellyish NYPD clichés get defused by a final tableau artfully designed to flatter our cultural sensibilities.

 

In style it owes much to film: Dan becomes a retrospective narrator, scenes are short. The setting is elegant: Robert Jones’ design of blue neon bars , projections and cool decor creates a restless Manhattan feeling, expertly enhanced by Nunn’s use of a wandering urban ensemble of barflies, straight and gay couples, stragglers, workers, passers-by who make the guilty Dan pause mid-sentence. There is a properly funny, Ayckbournish scene when Alex turns up pretending to be a buyer for the apartment and Kristin Davis deploys those happy-smiley-wholesome-trusting expressions we fondly remember as prologues to every romantic disaster when she was Charlotte in Sex and the City.

 

The rabbit gets it – of course it does, with decently brief and inexplicit horror and not before the entire audience (O, Britain! Britain!) has gone aaaaaah! at its sweet lop-ears. Rabbit and her understudy are interviewed in the programme, boasting of “nibbling on Sir Trevor’s denim”, which one hopes is not a euphemism.

box office 020 7930 8800 to 21 June

 

rating: three  3 Meece Rating

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March 24, 2014 · 11:28 pm

OTHER DESERT CITIES – Old Vic, SE1

PALM TREES ,POLITICS, LITERATURE , LOYALTIES..

 

With a fine dramatic flourish the Old Vic is again a theatre-in-the-round, as it was six years ago for the Norman Conquests. The refit (they kept the kit in storage) works astonishingly well, perhaps best for seats in the northern arc, and suits the breathless, concentrated living-room intimacy of Jon Robin Baitz‘ clever play. It’s set (great palm-trees) in an affluent Republican home in Palm Springs, California. And there’s too grand a twist, too melodramatic a reveal, for spoilers to be forgivable.

 

But I can mention that in a brief flash-forward coda, Martha Plimpton as the daughter Brooke (a performance of marvellous intensity, alternately pitful and loathsome) stands at a lectern reading at some literary festival. Describing her father’s deathbed she makes ironic observations about his dementia and the “ochre and umber” sunset outside. Ah yes: we’ve all read these overwritten, hypersensitive ich-bin-zo memoirs. And that final moment underlines the important theme running all through Baitz’ depiction of a combative family Christmas Eve. Sharp and witty himself, he understands the temptations of authorly self-regard and the creeping novelization of memory. When her family plead with her not to publish a memoir, Brooke utters lines like “You’re asking me to shut down something that makes me possible…the only obligation I have is to myself”.

 

We meet them all first in tennis kit: Peter Egan and Sinéad Cusack as well-groomed parents in shining whites, the lounging son Trip (Daniel Lapaine) laughing about the ironic mock-trial TV show he produces. Brooke, in scruffy T-shirt and leggings, is full of East Coast political correctness and horrified at her mother’s breezy recommendation of the “Chinky” food they do at the Country Club. It is all beautifully drawn, Lindsay Posner’s cast immaculate: loose-limbed Trip keeping the peace, Egan affably senatorial as a former Hollywood gunslinger who became a George Bush Snr ambassador, and above all Sinéad Cusak superlatively watchful, poised, suggesting depths of difficult self-control beneath a facade brittle and often hilarious as a wife who learned “order, precision and discipline” from Nancy Reagan. No fool she, but a Vassar girl who used to write for Hollywood: though “once it became all about drugs and lefties whining, I was out”.

 

They are joined by the alcoholic aunt Silda – Clare Higgins in assorted knock-off garish prints – who unlike her sister has not smoothed over her roots. “You’re not a Texan, you’re a Jew. This Pucci is more real than your Barbara Bush shtick”. Brooke is the catalyst for chaos: veteran of one literary novel, a nervous breakdown, and divorce from what her brother calls “a sad wet Brit, like Lord Byron’s faggy cousin”. The author’s note calls her “an artist in despair, a dangerous creature”, but wisely lets Trip burst that bubble with “Depression doesn’t make you special, it makes you banal”. The disputed memoir concerns her elder brother who joined an anti-war hippie cult, was complicit in a murderous firebombing and drowned himself. In Brooke’s world view her parents are right-wing sociopaths who destroyed him. But hey, maybe even Republicans love their children, and truth is elusive and writers can be dishonest too. As Trip says in a marvellous, Salingeresque inter-sibling scene, “You turn Henry into a saint of the ‘70s, all patchouli and innocent questioning. But…”

 

That’s the setup. It’s too good a thriller, too subtle and shifting in its sympathies, to tell you more.

 

box office 0844 871 7628 to 24 may Sponsor: Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Rating Four4 Meece Rating

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Rating Four
4 Meece Rating

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March 20, 2014 · 10:34 pm

THE DEAD DOGS Print Room, W2

FJORDS, FATALITY, FRAGMENTATION

The young man lies on the settle thinking about his dog.  It’s run off. His mother, stiffly repetitive between pauses, tells him he’s a grown man and should go and look for it.  He doesn’t.  She also wishes he’d go to the shop for some coffee because his sister and husband are coming.  He doesn’t do that either.  So she goes.  There’s white empty sky over the fjord.  and a lot of silence and no dog.  It’s a Beckettian silence.   Waiting for Doggo….

Perish the thought: there  is no place for such frivolous inward mutterings.   Jon Fosse is a very celebrated contemporary Norwegian writer, performed worldwide and  tipped for a Nobel Prize.  This is a British premiere in the enterprising little Print Room,  rendered by May-Brit Akerholt, a distinguished Ibsen scholar and Fosse translator.   The cast are good: Valerie Gogan as the mother trapped in unexpressed anxiety,  and Danny Horn glaring,  surly, depressed and mainly silent as the failure-to-launch son whose only interest is his dog,  even if he won’t go out and look for it.    A boyhood friend drops in and tries to get him to come to the city to work,  or at least go fishing;  the Sister (Jennie Gruner) is the only other character to be allowed to behave remotely naturally.

Simon Usher’s direction allows the 90-minute piece all the painfully pregnant pauses required, and the cast do a remarkable job remembering and rendering the broken, rarely finished,  awkwardly repetitive sentences of  what is dubbed an  “abstract theatre-poem” or “existential suspense story”.   The lines often feel more like subtitles than speech. And maybe if it had stayed as gnomically obscure as Beckett’s Endgame it would work better.  Because curiously, the problem lies in its having an actual plot:  the brother-in-law finds the dog dead, the neighbour having shot it for bothering his children.  Next morning the taciturn son has taken up a station at the window staring at the grave for hours,  and we learn that the neighbour was murdered in his bed.   No prizes for guessing whodunnit.

The difficulty is that while Jennie Gruner as the sister remains naturalistic,  and Valerie Gogan gallantly gives the jerky script a miasma of maternal dread,  the oddly rendered text creates a sense of slightly absurd unreality, and psychologically it becomes plain irritating.  Here’s a family with a clearly disturbed son,  so patently in mental trouble  that he lies for hours staring at the wall and has got rid of the guitar which was his main talent.  His beloved dog, the one emotional outlet, is lying dead in a plastic bag offstage.  But when he  goes out to look at it, not one of them follows him.  Not even the anxious mother.  They just stand around speaking half-sentences like broken robots.  It doesn’t wash, either as realism or poetry.   Nor does the fact that the seemingly normal brother-in-law talks in exactly the same jerky unfinished way as everyone else.   Fosse builds atmosphere, but at the expense of credibility.  He has said that Britain has “a fear of what is different”.   But there are some kinds of bafflement which make you care. Not this.

box office http://www.the-print-room.org   to 12 April

rating:  three   3 Meece Rating

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March 20, 2014 · 12:30 am

TWO INTO ONE – Menier, SE1

SPIRIT OF ’84 IN  A BUDGET-DAY FARCE

“Why is a civil servant from the Home Office posing as a Dr Christmas from Norwich auditioning an actor from Kingston?”.  Why is a hotel corridor alive with panicking establishment figures in towels? And can that ginger wig really be explained as part of a Tory revue skit on Neil Kinnock?    We are in the Westminster Hotel and the world of Whitehall farce, of which the author Ray Cooney is graduate and heir.  This one dates from 1984, which is both its interest and its weaknesss.

Plays with timeless emotional content, however period-fixed,  are safer revivals than farce,  where character is a cartoonish plot-driving device.  You might wonder whether this revival does more than memorialize an interesting point in the evolution of the British Sex Farce: the year when embarrassing bedroom misunderstandings suddenly dared to include male-on-male liaisons as well as the trad pajamas-meet-negligeé variety.

It is set during the Thatcher government,  the hero a Home Office minister about to present an anti-porn bill:  but the political setting is only a device to make the potential disgrace credible. After Yes Minister and The Thick Of it we tend to expect sharper lines about ministerial hypocrisy,  and door-slam bedroom farce itself has been growing mould ever since Frayn spoofed it back-to-front in Noises Off.   But if this is as much archaeology as entertainment, it is classily executed.

Ray Cooney himself directs,  and plays the doddering hotel waiter with a taste for Kung Fu moves  and tips. Michael Praed has a senatorial enough air as the Home Office minister (tiresomely called Willey)  attempting adultery with the PM’s secretary and ending up overdosed on benzedrine and hectic lies. Josefina Gabrielle makes a nicely lustful Knightsbridge-matron as his wife Pamela with needs of her own.  But the heart of the play is Nick Wilton as Pigden: the shy, tubby civil servant charged with booking the guilty pair a hotel room.   Wilton plays it shudderingly but  gallantly terrified, making increasingly crazy attempts to smooth things over and fend off Pamela.   A fine physical clown, he combines absurdity with  brief  but precious moments  of real poignant desperation.

But I did have irritable moments,  even while appreciating the deft engineering of an eight-door farce and the sideways-sliding set by Julie Godfrey. Cooney  knows his stuff, follows the First Farce Law Of Non-Consummation, and sparkily introduces a new character halfway through the second act to drive a fresh set of complications.   But the best  TV sitcom has become smarter and sharper in the last three decades, so   and jokes like ‘When it comes to porn, everyone wants to take up a position”   or “Send up sandwiches and champagne” “Vintage?” “No, fresh ones”  ring tiresome on modern ears.   I suspect from the cackling around me that it works best after a couple of drinks,  so this is one of those situations where sobersides critics are not reliable guides to a jolly mid-priced night out.

But I did appreciate some excellent trapped-in-a-trolley work from Kelly Adams  as the panicked girlfriend.  And Pigden’s loyalto to his minister is a shining  example to all Sir Humphreys: perhaps they’ll have a post-Budget stress Whitehall staff outing.

box office 020 7378 1713  to 26 April
Rating:  three    3 Meece Rating
But my first newly invented set-design mouse is awarded to Julie Godfrey…  Set Design Mouse resized

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March 18, 2014 · 11:28 pm

BLITHE SPIRIT – Gielgud, SW1

ANGELA LANSBURY BACK ON THE BOARDS, IN VERY GOOD COMPANY

It is Angela Lansbury’s hour and ovation, back on the West End stage at 88 after forty years away.  We’d be on our feet out of mere sentiment even if she was just OK:  as it happens she gives a performance of shimmering, seemingly effortless balance, brilliance and comic timing.    Her Madame Arcati won her a Tony on Broadway in 2009 and has clearly not lost impetus.  Probably gained a bit, since you need a proper British heart to understand that a tricky exorcism is best approached by swinging a string of garlic round your head and chirping  “Let’s put our shoulders into it this time, and give it a real rouser!” .

Her strength is that of the finest comic actors who – like all this cast –  understand that you must believe in the utter rationality of your chararacter, as the centre of her own universe and unaware of any absurdity.  The village medium Arcati is too often played as a dotty old bat, obsessed with psychical nonsense, by people with no real idea of what being one would feel like. Lansbury, far from dotty, nonetheless puts herself firmly inside the character:  every offended glare, nod, caper and professional exultation 100% credible and all the funnier for it.   To see her sand-dancing round the room in velvet droopwear covered in cabbalistic gold scrolls and sneakily pausing to adjust her henna hairdo is, on its own well worth the ticket price.

As for Noel Coward’s play, written in 1941 when our heroine was already at drama school,  it wears every bit as well as she does.  Like Private Lives and Design for Living it is brittle on the surface, molten beneath with dangerous emotional truths.  It may seem tiresome to find gay-conflict themes in Coward but it is hard to avoid:   there’s too often a man torn between a passionate, squabbling, morally doomed but irresistible affair and the deep, deep, boring peace of a conventional,  permitted, but sexually dull marriage.  Too open a code to ignore.  Even the secondary characters, the  visiting Bradmans, in a fleeting scene  illustrate the dulling tendency of sensible wives to shut up their husbands and hustle them briskly off.   Here, Charles Edwards’ Condomine,  alternately  fascinated and panicked by the accidental ghostly materialization of his foxy first wife Elvira,   allows glimpses of why married Ruth (Janie Dee).  He needed a Mum.   Dee herself ,  quelling her own innate foxiness,  demonstrates her fitness for the role by even folding a tablecloth with a certain menacing precision.  And when her fury at his flirting with Elvira’s ghost turns into solicitude, she’s Matron all the way.

Elvira is Jemima Rooper,  swishing around in white ghostly eveningwear and a smooth sharp pale bob,  and inhabiting the character’s amoral guttersnipe mischief without any of the irritating little-me cooing which can mar the role.  Costume has nicely distinguished the two women: Janie Dee’s natural foxiness is quelled by an unforgiving Princess Elizabeth perm, her bosom trussed up forbiddingly  in mauve crossover evening dress sans cleavage (even reappearing whitely as a ghost she’s not filmy and drapey like Elvira but in a buttoned-up Burberry and royal headscarf).  Patsy Ferran, getting a dream of a professional debut,  gives the part of Edith the clumsy maid all the mojo it requires;  and Michael Blakemore’s direction – with Coward’s  scene directions projected and the Master’s portrait shone at the end,   gives an old-fashioned air of hommage to the production in the best possible way.

But a last word about Charles Edwards:  always subtler, funnier, more human than you expect,  whether as Andrew Aguecheek, Edward VII or a Tory Chief Whip .  His Condomine is all he should be: smooth but easily put-upon, posturing, petulant, worriedly uncertain of his own feelings (terrified he might really have called up Elvira out of his ‘subconscious’),  easily panicked. A man adrift, a worm fit for the turning.   As he escapes the set’s final satisfying collapse, one wishes him well, poor sap…

box office     0844 482 5130  to  7 June

rating:  five  4 Meece Rating  BUT  the fifth is the first theatrecat award of Costume Design Mouse, to Bill Butler  and Martin Pakledinaz. – Costume design mouse resized

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March 17, 2014 · 11:53 pm

THE TWO WORLDS OF CHARLIE F Richmond Theatre & Touring

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY: INSPIRING, INTIMIDATING, INVALUABLE

The lad in the Army Recruiting Office listens enthusiastically to the Para behind the desk speaking of comradeship and adventure.  But as he shifts his chair  the startled recruit blurts “You’ve got no legs!”.  “At least” says the soldier “you passed your observation test” .   God help us: in this searingly memorable evocation of military attrition it isn’t the wrecked young bodies or the drugged night-terrors which bring on tears; not even the anxious lovers and mothers.   It’s the military deadpan,  the ancient dry courage which will quip  in the face of disaster and only then turn inward to contemplate the future in bleak and lonely privacy.

The play brilliantly captures both that deadpan black humour and the soft desperate  inward reality of the seriously injured.  It had to, because most of its cast are real veterans telling real stories: they were recruited at the Headley Court rehabilitation centre  by the producer Alice Driver as a therapeutic recovery project . Still struggling with pain and powerful medication,  they began by telling their stories to writer Owen Sheers and director Stephen Rayne.   A BBC documentary followed the process towards  last year’s gala performances at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with a thirty-strong cast  –  soldiers male and female,  plus a few professional performers and dancers.  So overwhelming was the impact that the Royal British Legion is supporting a nationwide tour with a trimmed-down cast of fifteen.

Quite apart from its documentary and personal reality it has become a striking and effective piece of theatre.  Simple but shattering use of shadow-play, chorus, soliloquy and movement meld scraps of memory and progress into a powerful whole.  In one sequence a balletic rehab-gym sequence explodes and collapses into a remembered image of civilian carnage,  then as the broken bodies move they become night-victims, suffering “high-def hallucinations” and afraid to sleep.   Shafts of rough soldierly humour cut through sentimentality:  one beautiful song sequence as the soldiers read loving, hopeful “blueys” ends with one getting a “Dear John” letter and the others – for the safety of the platoon – mocking and sending him up, forcing  it not to matter.

Nothing is overstated or milked,  Jason Carr’s  songs are low-key and beautiful in their truthfulness:   a chanted list of medications, from oromorph to antidepressants,  chills the blood, and Sheers’  skill picks up and makes poetry of documentary reminiscence.   We believe in  the heat and sand,  the unseen Taleban “like fighting ghosts”,  the frightened villagers,  the misery of trying not to shoot back at children.  A straightforward military lecture illustrates how IED injuries happen,  eyelets from your very boots ripping through your groin:  within modern military kit  still lies the same soft human flesh which wars have always shredded.

To speak of stars feels crass but “Charlie F” (also military slang for a complex disaster or “clusterf–k”)  is the nickname of the protagonist, played by Royal Marine  Cassidy Little:  a natural star who lost half a leg to an IED in Helmand and woke in Selly Oak hospital convinced he was a captive being tortured.   Maurillia Simpson from Trinidad sings with a lovely gospel voice and remembers how as a child she saw the Queen’s visit and vowed to be one of her soldiers. Stewart Hill terrifyingly, flatly,   relates the brain damage which torpedoed his career as an officer.  A wife remembers at the hospital seeing women in burqas, and hating them but then hearing them praying for her husband by name.

But they all shine, in wheelchairs and on crutches, criticizing one another’s stumps or confessing with raw sad courage the emotional and sexual chaos of recovery.   For it is about recovery:  in the final speech Charlie F salutes the oldest regiment in the world,  the regiment of the injured.  Their daily victories of body and mind are being fought all around us, if we would just look.

rating:  five   5 Meece Rating
box office 0844 871 7651  to 22 March        TOURING  to 7 June  http://www.charlie-f.com/‎   Touring Mouse wide

 

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March 17, 2014 · 9:57 pm

SATAN SINGS MOSTLY SONDHEIM Jermyn St Theatre, SW1

DEVILISHLY SILLY,  BUT NOT STUPID

Satan (Adam Long  in plastic horns) came up to earth in human form in 1964 because he was “excited with what was going on in musical theatre”, notably West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof.   His human mother remembers him always singing and dancing, though he did get bullied about his tail.  Now fifty,  he is hanging around in the office of his equally camp manager, Schifrin  (Mark Caven), breaking into the odd soft-shoe (well, cloven-hoof) shuffle and pestering him about a one-night Sondheim songbook gig at the Palladium.  Only Sondheim won’t give permission.

That’s the conceit of this hour-long amusement: together they
plead down the phone, bicker, reconcile,  and make a ridiculous lifetime-achievement video,  including  Satan’s X-Factor-style sob story about a blighted childhood and how badly God treated him.   They sing the Public Domain Medley, all they’re allowed (like Daisy Daisy) but Satan keeps trying to break into Send in the Clowns  on the grounds that the Jermyn is licensed for cabaret and incidental music.  A panicking Schifrin points out that  if he’s in costume it counts as theatre, which is a different licence.    Satan says they’re his own horns not a costume,  but Schifrin cites a Performing Rights Society ruling that  in a landmark case Nosferatu the Vampire’s teeth were deemed costume…

Well, I relate that gag so that you get the idea.  Adam Long – one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and  lately reator of one of its best spinoffs, the Complete Dickens,  has put together this parodic tribute to the yearnings, splendours and hissy-fits of musical theatre pros:  toe-tapping neurosis, pleasure, absurdity and dodgy rhymes.  Schifrin mourns his sole client’s unreasonable ambition – “I coulda got him loads of regional work” –  and finally drops his affable optimism to snarl “You’re fifty years old with horns and hooves – no, you can’t play Tony in West Side Story!”.

The show is, as they sing, not “Something too rational / on the main stage of the National”.     Yet there is a moment of real feeling – as the old Reduced Shakespeare used to drop in –  when thwarted Satan grieves for the Sondheim numbers he must never sing.  “He’s special. You know he is.  It’s like leaves in the sunsine…like he knows something about you – you wanna cling to it because it’s perfect, but it keeps changing…music like water, music like light”.

I like that. And there’s a happy ending, sort of.  Well, a compromise.   That’s showbiz.  It runs as a separate show after AWAY FROM HOME (see above) which  makes not a bad evening. Silly,  but not stupid.

box office 020 7287 2875  to 29 march
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk
Rating: three  3 Meece Rating

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March 14, 2014 · 12:09 am

AWAY FROM HOME Jermyn St Theatre SW1 and touring

PREJUDICE AND THE PREMIERSHIP:   A GAY FOOTBALL STORY

As gay shame and secrecy gradually fade from British life,  one of the last frontiers is professional football.  We know from tragedies like Justin Fashanu’s and from the mixed reception to the courage of Hitzlsperger that there are still minds to be won. Theatre does well to weigh in:  Rob Ward and Martin Jameson’s solo play (Jameson directs, Ward performs)   actually predated THE PASS on the same topic at the Royal Court,  having run in Manchester.  Yet they were told by marketeers that it was only fit for a “niche, difficult-to-access audience”.   Since young men in incalculable numbers  – here and abroad – adore Premiership  players and take a cue from their public face,  it seems to me not niche at all but something more like urgent.

So Ward,  all fit, crop-haired macho ferocity, tells his story as  gay Kyle: an ardent fan , out to his family and straight friends but also, unbeknownst to any of them,  working as an escort – a rent boy –  for a shadowy unseen pimp called Vince.   His grumpy, pragmatic defiance about this is nicely drawn: maybe if his Dad was less hostile (“You can’t be happy, being what you are”) he would  have accepted the proffered job in the family business.   But he’s doing fine, repelled at times but resigned to it, taking eighty quid for an hour.   But a real relationship threatens to develop:   the client who wants him exclusively is a Premiership star from the hated rival team.   There is a scabrously funny moment in their first encounter when Kyle is asked to have sex with him wearing the enemy shirt.  “I’ve got to f— the fellow whose goal robs my team of two points??”

But the two passions are reconciled for a time,  as Kyle falls in love and becomes a secret “mistress”, kept in a flat with a big telly and a posh coffee machine,  The secrecy remains corrosive:  “socialite” blondes are hired to massage a hetero image for the unseen footballer.    Kyle’s friends find out that he’s a “WAG”  but stick with him: a splendid exchange has him admitting the escort work.   “I .. I don’t fix shops for me uncle”.  It meets the resigned reply :  “I suppose I should be surprised. But you always were shit at woodwork.”

There is rudeness,  laddish machismo and tenderness:  Jameson,  who writes for Holby City and knows how to push the buttons,  offers alternative endings to the affair, one happy and one less so.  But the curious parallel that sticks in my mind is with the story of Dickens and his mistress Ellen Tiernan in The Invisible Woman.   When they were in a train crash, the celebrity author would not be seen tending her or admit they were travelling together.   Here it’s a car crash, and exactly the same thing happens. Unacknowledged love:  timeless and terrible.

Box office 0207 287 2875 to 28 March

Touring to June:   awayfromhometheplay.com    Touring Mouse wide

Rating:  three    3 Meece Rating

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March 12, 2014 · 9:49 pm

EMILY Ruskin College and Touring

THE MAKING OF A MILITANT SUFFRAGETTE
Emily Wilding Davison died 101 years ago at the Derby, under the thundering hooves of the King’s horse.  Nobody knows for sure whether she intended martyrdom: she has a return ticket and may simply have meant to disrupt the race in a typically  risky stunt.  Fearless inventiveness had  for years marked her increasing frustration with the Liberal government’s refusal to enfranchise women.

It is her death which makes her famous and which ends this 70-minute solo show, but that is not its main focus.   Written by Ros Connelly of Cambridge Devised Theatre, directed by  Kath Burlinson and performed with engaging energy by Elizabeth Crarer,  rather it traces the development and desperation of the militant condition itself.  Davison was an educated university woman,  determined and energetic,   who worked her way to a first class degree after her father died and left the family poorer.  We see her as a lover of Walt Whitman’s poems,  a dreamer of independence, a sea-bathing romp of a girl.

Crarer gives her a fearless tomboyish physicality and a clear-eyed  rather head-prefectish persona:  after a brief sour desperate prison moment we meet her in flashback as she sees  Mrs Pankhurst in Hyde Park,  reads newspapers and the famous Almroth Wright tract  about “A world rendered unwholesome by feminism” where “individual man showers upon individual woman…every good thing which, suffrage or no suffrage, she never could have procured for herself.”

She was, in short, radicalized.  And thus became a victim of that age’s scandal:  repeated arrest and hideous force-feeding which knocks out teeth and makes the subject retch in pain.  Light and sound on the bare stage elegantly meet Crarer’s violent fall to the ground each time she is jailed.  First for obstruction, then breaking windows, arson and at finally for accosting a Baptist MInister she mistook for David Lloyd George (she did apologize).    We see her in prison,  angry and intense,  praying  and muttering “righteousness is not shame”  and “rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God!”.  Between prison sentences she strides around  addressing her invisible confreres or (more tenderly) her mother,  chucking bricks through windows with satisfying crashes,  and rather splendidly hiding in a heating duct and a cupboard inside the Palace of Westminster in the hope of accosting  Prime Minister Asquith.  Piquantly, she managed to stay hidden till after midnight on Census night so she could declare Parliament as her place of residence.

But what is most striking is that all this does gradually turn Emily a little mad.  Her very murmur “I am not mad!” and her pacing of her cell with a bitter cry of “We cannot stop now!”  indicates how long disillusion and official cruelty  breeds nihilistic despair.    We cannot quite know how true this was: but dramatically it convinces.

I saw it at Ruskin College Oxford,   home of labour history serving adults from hard backgrounds with a thirst for learning: a place so inspiring that Gandhi made a point of visiting it.  It fitted well.  The tour of 18 theatres is a whistle-stop affair, but worth catching.

touring to 9th april:  details, http://www.theproductionexchange.com    Touring Mouse wide

rating:  four   4 Meece Rating

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March 11, 2014 · 9:59 pm

URINETOWN St James’ Theatre, SW1

MAKING A SPLASH:  URINE SHOWBIZ NOW!

Are they taking the piss?  This extraordinary 2001 American musical by Mark Hollman  and Greg Kotis ran three years  on Broadway after a fringe debut,  landing three Tonys despite the studiedly unpromising title,  downbeat ending and a plot which, baldly described, sounds as jejune as a rag-week demo.

But by God, it works!   It took a while to convince me, but halfway through the first half of Jamie Lloyd’s storming, crowding, rackety production I  forgave a certain incomprehensibity in the chorus lyrics (it was the last preview, it’ll settle) and rolled along with the oddball smash hit of the season.  Even stood up for the gore-spattere curtain-call:   filthily clad revolutionaries, bad cops, revolutionaries and a corrupt politician in a bloodstained bra.

Soutra Gilmour’s atmospheric set has two levels,  around a revolving urinal block and giant sewerpipes:  Blade Runnerish with  retro-future detail.   It represents a city so blighted by drought that private lavatories are banned: the suffering populace queues to pay at squalid public ones,  controlled by brutal cops  under a giant corporation run by Cladwell (Simon Paisley Day in a villainous moustache).  The penalty for peeinng in the street is exile to “Urinetown” . Which, it becomes clear, is  a euphemism for execution.  “Urinetown’s a tool / To enforce my iron rule…” sings Cladwell happily.  He is paying off a greedy senator  –  topical utility-jokes about how the money is supposed to solve the eco-problem,  but is really spent on fun in Rio .  The satire, which is heavy,  targets the corporate and tyrannical desire to exploit and police basic human needs –  food and love, so why not bladder and bowels?    Bog attendant Bobby (Richard Fleeshman) starts a revolution by letting the poor in (“Free the Pee-ple”) but falls in  love with Cladwell’s naive daughter Hope (Rosanna Hyland).  They flee to the sewers , she is made hostage and tied up but not too tightly to prevent her reprising a mock-schlock “Follow your heart” number.  O she’s untied she rocks a great gospel-blues “I see a River”. Jenna Russell is a stunner as Penelope Pennywise, a ginger virago  undergoing a Nancy-style remorse

Lloyd, who lately froze our blood with his McAvoy Macbeth,  makes much of the brutalities, riot-shields banged to Hollmann’s rorty score;  enough to make us uneasy at times if it wasn’t distanced by a knowing meta-theatre device in which the chief policeman , an unusually sinister-looking Jonathan Slinger,  discusses and mocks  the progress of the show with Li’l Sal (a terrific Karis Jak).   There are great numbers like Cladwell’s “Don’t be the bunny, don’t be the stew!” with a chorus of rabbit-headed victims on the revolve and a barmy glove-puppet,   and we cheered as the revolutionaries were led in gospel chorus conducted by a fiercely ludicrous Bobby.

That sums up the strength and weakness of the piece: a laddish desire to make its points while sliding – as lads will – embarrassedly away from emotion: everything’s a parody.  It made me nostalgic for the way another transgressive musical, Jerry Springer the Opera, had the courage to offer moments of poignancy.   But never mind: this one is spot-on for the Hunger-Games-And-Zombie generation:   its studied cynicism very student-friendly.  But my inner student joined in,  seduced  by its exuberant absurdity.   And aficionados of musical parody may spot hommages to Les Mis, Chicago, Guys and Dolls, Sondheim and a hint of Phantom in the sewers.

And never have I seen such a lemming rush for the lavatories in the interval…

box office 0844 264 2140  to 3 May

rating:  four  4 Meece Rating

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March 5, 2014 · 11:21 pm

GOOD PEOPLE Hampstead Theatre, NW3

CLASS, RACE, LUCK AND LIES:  AMERICAN AND UNIVERSAL

In tough South Boston they approvingly say someone is “Good People”.  It carries a sense not only of individual value but neighbourhood repute: decent family, not hoodlums.   Another expression (used once of the uppity Kennedys) is “lace-curtain Irish”.   Upward mobility can happen, with effort and luck,  but  as in any country not least here,   it does need both.  Not for nothing is our heroine’s only recreation the bingo table, twice staged:   small chances change a life.  Missing school,  a disabled baby,  an uninsured toothache turning bad so you miss work and get sacked and behind with the rent –  and the next stop is the pavement.  Whereas given a good brain, a father who gets you out of trouble and a community homework club, and you might make it to college, upward marriage and middle-class prosperity.

Mike (Lloyd Owen) got out and is now a smart fertility doctor.  Margie, his high-school girlfriend,  didn’t.  As we first meet her, against Hildegard Bechtler’s startlingly realistic back-lot set,  she is a tiny middle-aged firecracker mouthily resisting the sack from the Dollar Store checkout , deploying a mixture of rage, humour and desperation which summons us irrevocably to her side.  For it’s Imelda Staunton,  in one of her finest performances.

Among her friends – an irresistible June Watson as Dottie the landlady with a sideline in appalling craft novelty rabbits,  and Lorraine Ashbourne with a fine slaggy grumpiness –  Margie is a pillar of sensible decency.  When her hope for a job takes her to the doctor’s smart office and then his living-room,   she is combatively, humorously and at last furiously out of place.   “I wouldn’t fit in here…I’m not fancy enough”.     In a week when a British government adviser urged poor kids to learn ease in middle-class environments, it strikes home.  And so in reverse (and in Hampstead!)   does Mike’s discomfort at her view that he has gone lace-curtain and forgotten his roots.  He has certainly edited them:  once Margie discomfitingly reminisces with his  curious graduate wife,   it turns out that selective memory has made his family life tougher and himself holier.

The author, a Pulitzer winner,  says his fellow-American playwrights don’t “tackle class the way Brits do”.  But I can’t think of any recent British work treating it with as much honesty, energy, humour and perceptiveness as David Lindsay-Abaire,  himself a scholarship boy from a “Southie” childhood.  Directed by Jonathan Kent,  this is neither bleeding-heart patronizing nor mired in despair.  The awkwardness, defiance, and shifting power play between Margie, Mike, and his wife  – Angel Coulby, tousled and friendly in palazzo pants – makes the play’s two hours zing, eliciting from us “Ouch!-es”  “Aaahs” and rueful “Oh yes…” moments.

Passages in the second act  are reminiscent of Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park in their mischievous use of social shock – about race, sex, poverty and lies.  As Margie torments Mike (Lloyd Owen)  sometimes deservedly, sometimes not,  he writhes and withers and finally turns nasty.

There are some fine jokes:  about the middle-class word “comfortable”,  the cheeseboard (“Creamy-dippy, body odour, or mouldy basement?”)And as the temperature rises,  an elegantly crafted series of twists and revelations.  It deserves a transfer, and Imelda Staunton another Olivier.

Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com  to 5 April

rating:  five   5 Meece Rating

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March 4, 2014 · 11:55 pm

A TALE OF TWO CITIES Royal & Derngate, Northampton

TWO CITIES,  FIVE STARS, ONE THRILLING EVENING

With an elegance which bodes well for James Dacre’s captaincy of  this lovely theatre,  its filmhouse programmed  The Invisible Woman  just as Dacre opened this masterly version  of a novel Dickens wrote during his affair with the woman on whom he may have based its Lucie Manette.  Nice co-ordination, and a chance to reflect on the personal confusions which prevent Dickens from ever giving any of his young women the ripe strong character he bestows on men, and on ladies too old to trouble his desires.

But thrilling to the book at ten years old,  I knew that the real female role was Madame Defarge:  knitting under the guillotine, drunk on death, snarling  “Old debts must be paid”.  With glancing but unmistakeable significance,  Mairead McKinley plays her Irish.  I also knew that my hero was not the stiff idealistic Charles Darnay but his double: ramshackle, boozy self-hating Sydney Carton.  Not just because of his final act,  but because for all the romance and danger the story stands or falls with this  “disappointed drudge…dissolute, cold, reckless”.  Here, played by the magnetic Oliver Dimsdale against Joshua Silver’s buttoned-up Darnay ,  Carton not only stands but strides.

The two men are convincingly near-doubles:  clear handsome features, black brows, one ruffled and one smooth.  Indeed despite much doubling all the casting is sharp: Christopher Hunter disdainfully OTT as the old Marquis, Sean Murray wonderfully seedy as Barsad,  Ignatius Anthony an unusually rounded Defarge, and Michael Mears unexpectedly moving as Mr Lorry the anxious, benign banker.   Dacre’s direction is vigorous,   integrated with a lovely score by Rachel Portman: the community cast make a  flaming, murderous Paris mob and Mike Britton’s set frames the action in leprous ancient walls, as if ghosts from the “best of times, worst of times” were haunting them,remembering.   Once the calm backcloth of London’s rural edges parts suddenly to show the Paris gallows. And the first and last sight of the guillotine is memorable.

So, wonderful theatre: and worth saying how much we owe to Mike Poulton’s skill as adaptor.   Once again (as with Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, not to mention Morte d’Arthur)  he refines dense fiction into clear drama; he knows which lines and moments must be preserved intact, while firmly nudging others into cleaner dramatic shape.  So he omits the flashback dissolution of old Manette,  but makes space for sudden quietnesses:  Lorry  remembering childhood,  a dreamlike wedding song,  and Carton telling Lucie “I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul”.   Time passes smooth and neatly, without undue exposition but always with clarity.

And by pointing up the politics, the fantaticism, the ambiguous loyalties and the benign blackmail of Barsad, he made me notice for the first time that in this novel at least Dickens is a direct ancestor of John le Carré.  Darnay’s London trial as a spy, tense beneath the clerk Carton’s dry ironic gaze,  is contrasted with the ranting brutality of the Paris tribunal.  Which evokes, even better than the novel,  the way that fanatical revolutions blend street savagery with jargon-heavy legalistic bureaucracy.    “It is forbidden to weep for an enemy of the people” snarls Madame Defarge.  There are countries where it still is.

box office  01604 624811 to 15  March

rating;  five5 Meece Rating

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March 3, 2014 · 11:34 pm

NEVER TRY THIS AT HOME Birmingham Rep & touring

PIES, PRATFALLS AND POLE-DANCING:  SATURDAYS AND THE SEVENTIES

(NOT A CHILDREN’S SHOW…BEWARE..)

  Oh, the wicked 1970’s!    Sexist, racist, rapist:  gropey DJs in the Beeb,  paedophile apologists in the NCCL,  bad hair and worse flares.  Retrospective headshaking is everywhere, so with oblique mischief  Carl Grose and Told By An Idiot target another  ‘70s phenomenon:  TISWAS and Swap Shop. Mercifully too late for me and too early for my children,  this was the time when the new wave of exhausted two-job parents slept in on Saturday morning while children’s TV found a fresh style: anarchic,  larky, improvised, exuberant, messy, calculatedly irresponsible.    An essay in the programme speaks of countercultural social currents; Grose and director Paul Hunter just remember the custard pies, japes and grown-up pseudo-toddlers (“Now it’s time to RUN ABOUT! yaaay”)

    We are supposed to be a modern studio audience at a show called “Looking Back  – together” : like Radio 4’s The Reunion,  only with Niall Ashdown  as a sweatily pompous host instead of  Sue MacGregor.   He interviews former presenters and producer of a fictional show called SHUSHI,   famous for its “Kick a Vicar”  and “Look Out It’s The Pie-R-A”  gags.   We learn that it was taken off air after a disastrous edition in which the token female presenter snapped, stripped, rubbed baked beans on her body and promised onscreen suicide “Right after we’ve heard – Phil Collins!”.

       The interviews are interspersed with re-enactments of bygone rows inside the cast  and  “archive video” of SHUSHI  performed live by Stephen Harper, Dudley Rees, Ged Simmons and that most peerless of clowns, Petra Massey of Spymonkey.    In the flashbacks she is the show’s token totty,  introduced with a leering “something for the Dads”,  landed with duff segments like Make Your Own Dog,  and fed unspeakable things blindfold.   Harper  protests,  “If it was illegal in the 70s for a man repeatedly to hit a woman with a rubber mallet against her will, half the men in England would be in prison”.   Good gag.

          Okorie Chukwu plays an obsessed ex-child-fan, persistently humiliated,  until he and his barmy pole-dancing mother (also Massey, always up for an upside-down slither)  attempt an armed kidnap of Harper to demand that he be let to sing.   And there’s a nice Noel Edmonds parody (“Exchangeathon”),  as the team deride their rival Saturday show.  Edmonds is Massey again,  sitting at a desk in a fine black beard wittering “It’s going nuts in here!” while desultory phone calls trickle in. 

       So a lot of laughs:  sharp digs at 70‘s male stars keen to drive a status-y “Sunflower Yellow Testarossa”,   and lovely physical gags like the ultimate chaotic  pie-fight being repeated in slo-mo.  But it needs a better climax,  since the disastrous edition is the first thing we see.  It isn’t as fine-tuned as most of Hunter’s work (or indeed Spymonkey’s).     Nor do we need the Korean Butler gag.  But maybe that’s a fiendishly cunning internal joke: not unlike TISWAS  this gang can’t resist a diversionary lark.   And nobody with a heart and eyes can resist Petra Massey.

box office  0121 236 4455   birmingham-rep.co.uk   to 15 March  
then TOURING  Sheffield, Edinburgh, Soho   –  to 26 April     Touring Mouse wide

Rating:  three   3 Meece Rating

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March 2, 2014 · 12:23 pm

BRASSED OFF Theatre Royal, York – now touring

LET THE BAND PLAY ON

Billy Elliott, The Full Monty, now Brassed Off –   thirty years on from the loss of pits and steelworks,  we seem to need a national rite of mourning and expiation, acknowledgement of  the social violence which dismantled old  industrial Britain and its communities. All three shows, now onstage, began as films:  but rituals, after all, are best performed live.

Mark Herman’s tale (adapted for the stage by Paul Allen)  tells of a colliery set to close,  its mining families living in anxiety and uneasy dispute (for there is £ 20,000  a head compensation offered, and some will vote for it).  Grimley’s pride is its brass band, and in that too there are some who want to finish and others – especiallly bandleader Danny (John McArdle)  who demand that it play on , just as in real life, Grimethorpe did.  In a hundred years, says Danny, it survived “seven strikes, two disasters, two world wars and a bloody great Depression”. It must endure.

Perched on a set of towering pithead machinery  young Shane – eight years old when it all happened – tells the story and sometimes descends to act his eight-year-old self,   the son of Phil and grandson of Danny. Luke Adamson is a pleasing Shane at both ages; his mother Sandra (Rebecca Clay) expresses the weariness of the women.   Indeed the wives help to make the story real:  campaigning for the men’s jobs yet impatient with their band pastime   (“..but at least you know what they’re up to when they’ve got their ands full of tuba”).

The heart of it is Phil:  Andrew Dunn  is  always a dryly beguiling actor, espcially brilliant (as in his superb Dinnerladies character)  as an essentially comic figure moving through a tragic situation.   He is part of that big, shining, defiantly manly band onstage:  great credit to the splendid players of the real  York Brass, under Nicholas Eastwood.  But his trombone keeps breaking, and he wrecks his marriage when he spends money he doesn’t have to buy a new one out of loyalty.
The script is not always as strong as the plot line itself:  Clara Darcy’s  Gloria arrives with her flugelhorn to join the band  (very good she is too) and is revealed as a Coal Board statistician;  her romance with the conflicted Andy nicely demonstrates the class gulf that yawns when one kid gets educated and the other stays down the pit (“Why couldn’t you have come back as a hairdresser?” asks Andy sadly.)    There are some wonderful set pieces, not least the band’s increasingly drunk march through a competition and its  heartbreaking distant “Danny Boy” as the bandmaster lies ill and the pit is closing.   And it would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the final coup de théatre in Land of Hope and Glory.  It’s  one to catch, a proper taste of a vanished England.

But I can’t not mention one inexplicable directorial decision by the otherwise surefooted Damien Cruden,   which dents its shine.    A play about the power of live music and harmonious collaboration does not need to mark its (perfectly smooth) scene changes with blasts of canned pop.  It’s not a film: that surely is the point?    Bad enough to have Pulp’s patronizing “Common People”,  but why mark a romantic moment with a few bars of Moon River,   pipe in a semi-audible outbreak of “The Lost Chord” during the ballot scene, and (aaagh!)  even after the perfectly apt brass-band mourning of “Jerusalem” during Phil’s attempted suicide,  some half-remembered pop tune?

One duff decision can’t mar the ritual – and bracingly polemic – splendour of the evening, or the impact of the live band.  There’s a long tour (details below) and it deserves to be seen. But I hope someone bravely pulls the plug on the canned link-music, and lets the brass mouths thunder out their message unhindered.

TOURING  :   Nottingham TR this week, 4-8 March (0115 989 5555)
tour continues nationwide to 10 May – details  http://theatrecloud.com/brassed-off/tour-info

rating:  three    3 Meece Rating

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February 28, 2014 · 12:33 am

VERSAILLES Donmar WC2

1919: A GENERATION CAST ADRIFT BY WAR

After the Armistice, in spring 1919 the Treaty of Versailles drew lines on the map and enforced reparations.  Its decisions cast long shadows even today,  and its peace lasted only twenty years,.  Peter Gill’s ambitious, chewy,  eloquent play is built around that conference. But with fascinating obliquity it observes it in the first and third acts from an affluent drawing-room in Kent,  and between them from a civil service anteroom in Paris.  It often feels more like a wordy novel – perhaps by E.M.Forster – yet its very seriousness finally captures the heart.  Gill shows us people adrift in a newly incomprehensible world:  stunned by grief or confused by change, needing to  understand that as the hero Leonard says despairingly  “The war  was greater than our capacity to deal with the results.”

The Kentish drawing-room is home to Edith  (Francesca Annis) her daughter Mabel (Tamla Kari)  and son Leonard (Gwilym Lee) , a young civil servant off to help at Versailles.  They have houseguests:  soldier Hugh,  home on leave and loosely affianced to Mabel, and Constance (Helen Bradbury)  who works in a leftish bookshop and knew Leonard at University.  He is an authority on the Saar Valley coalmines,  which belong to Germany but which Versailles may cede to France.  His anxiety about impoverishing Germany too greatly is met with contempt by Mrs Chater (a sharp performance by Barbara Flynn) a neighbour who is mourning both her soldier son and the new world of Jews and foreigners and class fluidity (“My niece is married to an Irishman, but that’s as far as it goes”.)

Another neighbour contemptuous of  Leonard’s qualms is Geoffrey,  a wonderfully sinister creation whose two sides are conveyed perfectly by Adrian Lukis. There’s the kindly prosperous village neighbour  “I’m an old country Tory – will it work, and what’s best for me?”  he says joshingly,  but as the evening goes on his self-satisfied pragmatism reveals a heart of granite:  democracy is a figleaf,  all we need is  “a robust market and a wise élite”.    Tellingly, he likes the opera because its emotion and idealism are “confined by art and open to interpretation” –  ouch!  He is organizing a war memorial but cares little that the tormented Hugh can’t even look at the drawings;  he has a mistress in London but an eye for Constance.

Gill cannot resist sly moments of prediction:  Geoffrey observes that  “the greengrocer class” has no class loyalties and hence makes harsh decisions (work that  out!).   Simon Williams, perfect as the senior diplomat at Versailles, harrumphs about the new need for  “clever middle class boys, neurotic though they may be”   who read novels, don’t hunt, and make preposterous suggestions like nationalizing coal –  “As if that would ever happen!”.  But the play’s heart is Leonard, struggling with  the moral ambiguity of all parties in war  and the danger of crippling Germany  (he was right:  Hitler owed much to its years of panic and poverty).  He deplores “the hurried nation-making, partitioning up Africa as if we owned it” , looks towards the East and fears a future “Mohammedan Cromwell” will exploit the resentments of arrogant border-making.    His emotional life is torment too:  the dead Chater son was his friend and lover, who in a less successful device appears as a recurrent ghost, arguing and reproaching.

Ideas are sometimes piled too high, but when Gill (who also directs) remembers that this is theatre he scores moments of shaking emotion:  The Chaters, for instance, are each ambushed out of their civilized chattiness into sudden sobs for their dead son.  As in life, it’s moments kindness that do it:  Mrs Chater breaks suddenly at the gift of a piece of cake, and in the last act her husband (a brief but powerful Christopher Godwin) defies the general disapproval of Leonard’s resigning to work in the East End.  The old man walks up and shakes his hand saying “You are a pilgrim!”,  and weeps.

In that moment,  the pity and the puzzle of war come very close.

Box Office 0844 871 7624  to 5 April        Supported by: Barclays  / American Airlines

rating:  four     4 Meece Rating
A series of talks accompanies VERSAILLES to mark the centenary of WW1: details and booking:  donmarwarehouse.com

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February 27, 2014 · 9:21 am

THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE Wanamaker, SE1

FIGHTS, FLIGHTS, PANTALOONS AND PRENTICES:  BUT THE GROCER’S WIFE IS THE STAR.

Imagine three hours on a bench watching a cross between Spamalot and The Real Inspector Hound,  performed in flickering candlelight by a talented but overwrought gang of mummers who can’t agree which bits to cut.  You’re nearly there, but not quite.    After launching itself with the tenebrous, brilliantly morbid Duchess of Malfi  the Globe’s pretty candlelit playhouse stays reverently in-period,  but veers  to the opposite extreme.  Francis Beaumont’s 1607 romp shows a parody of a typical  romantic comedy-drama  of the day  – “The London Merchant” being hijacked by a couple in the audience.  They are an  affluent grocer and his wife (Phil Daniels and Pauline McLynn)  who object to the plot where a humble ‘prentice seeks to marry his master’s daughter. She  is destined for a chap called Sir Humphrey:  deathlessly portrayed by Dickon Tyrrell in a Barbie-pink slashed ‘n puffed pantaloon suit and what looks like Grayson Perry’s wig.

So they crash up out of the pit and insist on the star role going to their gormless apprentice Rafe (Matthew Needham). Incredibly, Noel Coward once played the part.  Anyway, they demand that Rafe celebrate ordinary people as  a heroic  “grocer errant – a knight of the Burning Pestle” and that the arty poseurs on the stage give him the best scenes.    It is as if Alan Sugar climbed on stage during Romeo and Juliet demanding a bigger part for the apothecary.

There are some fine moments, high and wild and marvellously ridiculous,  and real comedy gold every time  the fabulous Pauline McLynn chats loudly, rustles her bag of nuts or leaps onto the low stage to demand that her protegé kill a giant or sort out one of the hapless real actors‘ plots.   Her rounded and wonderful portrait of overconfident prosperous matronliness steals the show.

It is salutary to be reminded that there’s  nothing new about  “breaking down the fourth wall”  and having characters crash around in the auditorium.  Nor about theatrical in-jokes,  deliberate overacting,  offended stars dropping furiously out of character,  spoofy love scenes and gleeful parodies of overused 17c plots (knights errant,   an irrational test of love, faked deaths , a vengeful ghost,  and a rotund loon with a ginger beard (Paul Rider in another full-blown nutty performance) who can’t stop  singing.

Some fights, flights and  lines stick in the mind (“Is not all the world Mile End, mother?”) and anyone who rhymes “I”ll never clasp her” with “Jasper” can only be a pal.     But for an archaeological froth-fest, it’s too long.   Director Adele Thomas  does give us three brief musical entr’actes as well as the  interval  in which to uncurl our aching bodies,  and we need them,  while we did not in the  Duchess of Malfi.  Physical restlessness in theatres relates strongly to lack of absorption.

But the cast are heroes all, especially Needham who has already torn a ligament and wears a leg- brace but still dives into the pit with a knightly hobbyhorse round his waist.  Now my brain has stopped spinning, I’m quite glad I know what our ancestors got up to.

box office 0844 871 7628  to to 30 March

rating  three   3 Meece Rating

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February 25, 2014 · 11:25 pm

THE FULL MONTY Noel Coward Theatre, WC2

MORE THAN A MOVIE:  SOMETHING SPECIAL FROM SHEFFIELD

The opening is dramatic: a  small gap in the rusty corrugated curtain reveals showers of sparks, a glimpse of steelworks magnificence. It closes, to the soundbite  “The lady’s not for turning”, and the whole frame reopens to reveal the gloomy  magnificence of industrial dereliction,  as Gaz and Dave and the child Nathan make their way into the old mill to nick a girder.   And to create more instant drama by getting their old friend the giant crane (“Margaret the Blue Bitch”)  working, with spectacular unreliability. And we’re hooked too.

That single mill set, fabulously realized by Robert Jones,  looms over every scene – jobcentre, Conservative club, working men’s club, street – as if to affirm the overarching trauma of steel towns in the ‘80s, when the works wound down and stranded men who thought their skilled jobs were for life.     Sometimes, poignantly,  you glimpse the lights of Sheffield beyond and below the far door.

There are always qualms about the West End adapting hit films: wavering confidence drives producers towards  easy ‘bankers’, and in the process can weaken or coarsen them (I can’t be alone in having shuddered at the crass Billy Elliott curtain-call with policemen and miners in tutus).   Here, though, the reverse is true.  Simon Beaufoy rewrites his screenplay for the stage with careful delicacy, and Daniel Evans’ production (down from Sheffield Lyceum)  creates something even  funnier, truer and sadder than the film: as sharp and shining as the city’s steel itself.

Kenny Doughty is a terrific lead as Gaz, amiable jack-the-lad driven by a desperation to keep contact with his son (a splendid,  shared, child role culminating in a bracing bit of ten-year-old sweariness).  Roger Morlidge as fat Dave is intensely touching,  and Craig Gazey ideal as the suicidal, closeted Lomper (he’s champion at  eccentric realism: he was Most Promising Newcomer as Graeme the window-cleaner in Coronation Street).  But all of them are finely, sharply real:  notably Sidney Cole a great mover as Horse, and Simon Rouse a senatorially exasperated Gerald.  Among the smaller but significant women’s roles, Rachel Lumberg is a joy as Dave’s frustrated wife Jean.

The marvel of Beaufoy’s script and Evans’ pacing is the extraordinary surefootedness with which it moves – often within half a line – from dry or hilarious comedy to wrenching pathos.   As a tale of jobless  men putting on a strip show (“All that twizzling-about bollocks” grumps Dave),  it has superb set-pieces and jokes.  Yet without flippancy it embraces the grief of bewildered manhood,  body-shame,  loneliness alleviated by ill-assorted comradeship, and male terror of impotence either sexual, financial or parental.  That it ends in a one-night triumph for “The Bums Of Steel” makes it a fairytale of sorts, but one rooted deep in the reality of survival and wholly recognizable Yorkshire cussedness (I married one..).

And ironically, as the vests fly out across the hooting, clapping stalls, thongs are waved aloft for the full Monty and assorted buttocks gleam under the lights,  I had a sense of having seen something with a spirit unusually and beautifully decent.

box office 0844 482 5141  to 14 June

rating:  five  5 Meece Rating

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February 25, 2014 · 12:11 am

THE A to Z of Mrs P Southwark Playhouse, SE1

WALKING THE STREETS, A FAR FROM LOST SOUL

Phyllis Pearsall became one of London’s great urban legends, through her own barnstorming memories and a fictionalized biography.  A young wife, a painter,  walks out on her husband in Venice in 1936, arrives in London,  gets lost once too often,  and resolves to create an indexed street-map of every borough. She walks 3000  miles of 23,000 streets and produces the A to Z street atlas we all love.    Here, in a love song to the teeming city,  she is  “Drawing the line, every road, every sign, The streets flow like wine, for this is our time!”.

It’s a grand romance. We have all in youth walked city streets, broke and adventurous, with a kind of love.   Over the years there have been weary reiterations of duller truths:  it wasn’t quite the first indexed atlas  (Bartholomew’s existed),  walking every street was unnecessary, what with Council maps and plans available,  and her father was a street-map maker (albeit a failing businessman) so it wasn’t quite a maverick idea.   Oh, and the actual drawing was done by an unsung draughtsman, Mr Fountain.

He does, in fact, appear here, endearingly played by Sidney Livingstone.  For this curious new musical by Diane Samuels and /Gwyneth Herbert draws from both the romantic legend of the lone steps and the factual conflicts of Phyllis’ life:  her bombastic Hungarian father Sandor who registered the company,  her runaway mother who died in an insane asylum, the plane crash from which Phyllis survived seriously injured, and her final determination to leave the company in Trust for its employees.

If that sounds a weak and confusing storyline for a musical,   so it proves.  It is wonderfully set beneath a multitude of dangling books, postcards, suitcases, street-signs, old telephones and newspapers;  Issy Suttie with her likeable clown looks is a beguiling lead, and  Sam Buntrock’s direction gives the ensemble a bustling, jostling city vigour to keep things rolling. But Samuels’ book falters: the narrative begins brightly with Phyllis’ arrival and a lovely song about London, but then  leaps crazily to and fro with flashbacks to her childhood, her parents’ first meeting well before that, and the end of their stormy marriage. You need to have looked up her life story or you could be lost, unsure what time-frame you’re in from minute to minute.

It is frustrating because Gwyneth Herbert’s lyrics are often excellent, almost Sondheimish, using tongue-twisting alphabetical lists of roads, streets, lanes and avenues and occasionally  a bitter gem like “A child needs a family like a pussy needs a well”.   The live music is pleasant enough, again Sondheimish though without his  hypnotic dash.  There are some good funny moments in the second half as she struggles to sell into shops, and one fine dramatic confrontation with her appalling father.  He is Michael Matus, a strong singer but wholly unable – who would be? – to make the choleric, noisy and overbearing Sandor even remotely likeable.   But there’s a grand bravura performance, often in lingerie,  by Frances Ruffelle as the troubled runaway mother.

box office 020 7407 0234  to   29 March             Sponsor: Sandfords

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating/

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February 23, 2014 · 12:56 am

JANE EYRE – in two parts – Bristol Old Vic

PASSIONATE,  INTENSE AND WILD:  JANE EYRE REBORN  

“I am no bird, and no net ensnares me!”.    As if in answer to Jane’s cry of defiance Sally Cookson’s  spare, thrilling, physically expressive production frees Charlotte Bronte from the fusty old netting of Mills-and-Boonery which marks even the best screen adaptations.   Madeleine Worrall has a tough striding attractiveness, not misty glamour:   the skeletal ladders and frames where the cast run and climb and gallop free the emotion of the story from period chintziness.  Empty windowframes high aloft, or held up by the cast to fling open or close in on Jane are a powerful economical metaphor: her inward thoughts are sometimes spoken by a protean ensemble.  Pure theatre, passionate not pretentious, sweeps aside cobwebs and uncovers the hot smouldering core of the story.

There are two parts (see both!),  a brave decision rooted in determination to convey the early part, the orphan at Mrs Reed’s mercy and the hollow pieties of Lowood school  (imaginative chanting use is made of the Penny Catechism, enjoining the child at bedtime to “thoughts of death”. I remember that, brrr.).    It gives proper weight to incidentals like the trammelled kindness of the maid Bessie,  and above all it respects the plight of poor mad Bertha Rochester.   Brilliantly, she is played by that tremendous mezzo Melanie Marshall,  wandering around singing at key moments all through.  She has a recurring, haunting folksong of orphanhood, a tremendous Kyrie,  and a moody “Mad about the Boy” speaking for both Bertha and Jane.   Sly, that: indeed there always was more than a touch of cad-about-the-boy in Rochester’s masterful insolence.   And Bertha’s unforgettable rendering of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” at the fiery climax is overwhelming in its pity and savagery.

The doubling and trebling of parts by the ensemble weaves new meanings and ambiguities into the well-worn tale:  dialogue is sparse and finely judged with an extraordinary amount being conveyed by movement  and by Benji Bowers’  haunting score, from folk to cabaret to echoes of Elgar and Britten .  But when Bronte’s words are spoken they find fresh power:  the scene in the second part when Rochester (Felix Hayes)  declares himself to a sceptical Jane is as stroppy and defiant as it should be.   There is some humour – not least Craig Edwards’ occasional metamorphoses into Pilot the dog,  Laura Elphinstone’s careering dangerously around on the set’s walkways as Adela,  and Rochester’s petulant “I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative tonight”.

But mostly it is intense storytelling, movement blurringly fast or dreamlike in slowness.  It calls up  the older, darker folktale awareness which always underlies the Brontes‘ work:  a touch of Bluebeard, of faery,  a pre-Christian passion and danger.  The quality which makes Jane so pleasingly resistant to the missionary earnestness of St John Rivers and his immortal “You were framed for labour, not for love, I claim you for the Lord’s service”.   Altogether, this extraordinary interpretation arouses feelings long forgotten:  the impact of first reading the book,  a childlike resentment of injustice and inchoate sense of romance, the terror of madness and nightmare and the secret conviction that the individual must and will endure.   It is a wonderful production.  Reader, I’d marry it.

box office  0117 987 7877   to  29 March

Rating:  five  5 Meece Rating

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February 20, 2014 · 3:30 pm

TRANSLATIONS Crucible, Sheffield

OLD IRELAND: PLAYFUL, POWERFUL, INTENSE AND TRAGIC

A hot summer at harvest’s end,  1836.  Outside a stone barn in County Donegal   old Jimmy-Jack is chortling naughtily over the Iliad.   “Isn’t she the tight one! The flashing-eyed Athene…if you had a woman like that about the house it’s not stripping a turf bog you’d be about!”.   Lame-legged Manus,  waiting for his Dad Hugh to sober up and take over the Ballybeg hedge-school,  helps with the hard words, clutching the precious Aeschylus and Virgil volumes he bought with the money from a hand-raised lamb.  The cheerful dunce Doalty struggles with times tables, and  young women weary and blistered from the fields vie with one another to construe and dig out word-roots.

They’re all, we understand, talking and learning in the Irish language,  any change to English indicated with skilful brilliance by Brian Friel’s phraseology.   For  times are changing,  and under British rule the new National Schools must teach in English.  And the redcoats  – needing interpreters – are out mapping the land and giving familiar landmarks new names.  Friel’s modern classic is based on a reality which now seems startling: village teachers did teach the Classics,  and the colonial masters did – as they always do – fear and mistrust local language.

The story unfolds – at first playful and humorous, later darkening – as  a young soldier (James Northcote) falls for the pretty Maire with disastrous results.  It leads us  on an emotional and phlosophical journey into an unfamiliar world, yet one touching great epic themes:  the politics of language and of power,  misapprehension and mistranslation,  the need for fantasy and legend and the danger of confining something ancient and organic in a tight new linguistic and cultural straitjacket (ask any aboriginal Australian).

James Grieve’s production has sly delights: the barn dance where the soldier can’t follow the ancient skipping pattern of the villagers,  the distant fiddles and chirping birds,  the great battered barn itself (Lucy Osborne’s design).   His cast is full of treasures too:  Niall Buggy as the old teacher and John Conroy as JImmy-Jack, scruffy under his straw hat, chuckling over Mediterranean texts which feel closer than the strictnesses of the cold Victorian island next door.    Beth Cooke is a touchingly  tough rustic Maire, longing for a wider world,  Ciaran O”Brien a gallant hopeful Manus.   And as his more sophisticated brother Owen,  Cian Barry shows the conflicts of a man who collaborates with the soldiers and the new era until their power is seen as not just maps and words,  but cold threats to shoot livestock and flatten homes if nobody betrays the rebels on the mountain.

In a haunting late moment Bridget, who fears the strange sweet smell of potato blight, confuses it with another ominous smell, foretelling a century of conflict:  the burning canvas tents of the military.   Friel’s tremendous play,  this well served, haunts you long after you get home.

box office  0114 249 6000    to 8 March.
TOURING  to 3 May:  tour details http://www.ett.org.uk

rating:  five 5 Meece Rating

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February 19, 2014 · 9:51 pm

AFTERPLAY – Crucible, Sheffield

SONYA AND ANDREY:  A BRIEF ENCOUNTER BY FRIEL

Two lonely middle-aged people meet in a cheap Moscow café in 1920:  she frowning over accounts and mortgages,  he in frayed evening clothes toting a walnut violin case.  It is the second night they have coincided,  strangers in town, and with awkward bourgeois politeness they share a table and resume their chat.  He is a violinist at the Opera (“Do you always rehearse in evening dress?” “German conductor! Stickler for formality!”).  She is puzzling over how to keep a distant estate afloat after the death of her male relatives, not that they were ever much use with an account-book.   These are Chekhov characters twenty years on:   Brian Friel, a fine translator of the master,  revives them and imagines their futures.  In fifty minutes he makes it an  exquisite, touching miniature.

We last saw Sonya consoling Uncle Vanya with that marvellous affirmation of justice in an afterlife:  “We shall hear the angels…we shall see how all earthly sufferings are drowned in mercy, and life will grow peaceful, tender…we shall rest”.  As for Andrey, he is the brother in Three Sisters, last recorded as ineffective, mocked as a failure and cuckolded by his wife.  But life goes on,  and there is comfort to be found by confiding in strangers in an empty café.  Even if, at first,  you fib a lot.

Niamh Cusack is Sonya, Sean Gallagher Andrey: their interplay  over cabbage soup and surreptitious nips of vodka from her handbag  is drawn with delicate precision. Roisin McBrinn’s direction is unobtrusive,  Friel’s truthful humorous sadness caught absolutely.  Cusack gives Sonya a spirited , stubborn dignity and flashes of wit;  Gallagher deploys a slightly clownish amiability.  We learn  how three weeks watching over the dying, demented Vanya with Dr Astrov at her side was the most “serene and fulfilled” moment of Sonya’s life,  how the estate’s agriculture faded and the bank (lunatically) wants it forested over.  Andrey speaks admiringly of his two surviving sisters,  still at forty waiting for life to begin. He reveals Masha’s end and his own wife’s defection.  He is a champion fibber, and only gradually admits his self-aggrandizing legends.   Sonya,  on the other hand,  tells only one central lie but is herself trapped in a fictional narrative of her connection with Astrov, “A man of vision, close to saintliness and not always sober.”   Both of these gentle disappointed people face an “endless tundra of aloneness”.   Sonya embraces it in the name of virtuous fortitude,   Andrey has a healthy if incompetent impetus to escape it,  and behind his fictions eventually reveals a simple, loving nobility of life.

It is very beautiful,  often painfully funny: a tiny jewel adorning the Crucible’s fine Friel season, definitely one to catch.  Possibly before going out in the Sheffield drizzle to sit in a café  hoping for a mournful new friendship.  I’m off out.

box office 0114 249 6000   to 1 March

rating:  four    4 Meece Rating

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February 18, 2014 · 11:47 pm

A TASTE OF HONEY Lyttelton, SE1

A BLAST OF FRESH AIR FROM THE FIFTIES 

“Cinema is as bad as the theatre these days”  says  Jo’s mother Helen disdainfully. “All mauling and muttering”.   Written in 1958 by the teenage  Shelagh Delaney,  it’s one of many great lines in this gritty, exuberant shout of a play.   The story is told  of how the 18-year-old author saw  Rattigan’s Variation on a Theme  (piquantly, it’s on next week at the Finborough, first outing in 50 years).   Exasperated by its limp-wristed Riviera setting,  Delaney wrote this,  set in the backstreets of Salford and concerning  a teenager deserted by her slattern of a mother in a slum room, pregnant by a black sailor and cared for by a gay art student.    Joan Littlewood –  equally piquantly, her centenary is this year – relished its vigour and put it on.   The homosexual implication meant that it only narrowly avoided a ban from the Lord Chamberlain (censorship was to limp on for ten years more).

The famous film is better known than the play now, and Bijan Sheibani’s lively new production demonstrates what a pity that is.  Films telescope dialogue, simplify and glamourize:  what we get here is leaping, vivid, complicated,  full-blooded life.  It centres on the dancing optimism of youth which rejects pathos and the clichés of romance,  and the brilliant ambiguity of a neglectful mother who cannot be entirely monstrous.  It is  funny, affectionate and shocking , and for a play which dived headfirst into dangerous waters – teenage pregnancy, inter-racial sex, homosexuality –  it is utterly free from that poker-faced tone of modern issue-plays.    Indeed it makes the Angry Young Men of Delaney’s own time seem dogmatic, whiney and misogynist.   With the clear eyes of youth she takes people as she finds them,  warts and all.   The detail is a delight: in the brief courtship of Jo and sailor Jimmie (Eric Kofi Abrefa)  the toy car in his pocket is a grace-note few playwrights would  add. Her characters are too real to represent anything but themselves.  So kitchen-sink all right, but an ancestor of Coronation Street rather than the dour EastEnders.   As the tarty old fox Helen  (Lesley Sharp)  observes “We’re all at the steering wheel of our own destiny, careering like drunk drivers”.

When pain fizzes through it is deeply real,  but the quality of larky realism  is brilliantly enhanced by brief jazzy brass entr’actes when the cast spin and dance in the bricky, sooty street for a few moments:  Jo with her lover Jimmie,  or  later coming back from a fair  pregnant but unbowed with a handful of balloons and her gay pal Geoffrey;  later Geoffrey himself dances with his mop, tidying the squalid room.  Kate O’Flynn is a superb Josephine,  stroppy and combative with an edge of desperate need for the love Helen can’t be bothered to offer her:  her sudden cry “I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t want to be a woman” comes like an electric shock.    Lesley Sharp  (“Look at my face, every line tells a dirty story)  is alternately hilarious,  horrible and needy:  stunning in her unwonted desperate quietness when her drunken new husband kicks off.     Harry Hepple gives a perfect, restrained dignity to Geoffrey.   And the end is as ambiguously open to wishful thinking  as life itself.

Box office  020 7452 3000  to  11 May

rating:   four  4 Meece Rating

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February 18, 2014 · 11:37 am

ARTHUR SMITH SINGS LEONARD COHEN vol 2 Soho Theatre, W1

SINGING ALL THE WAY DOWNHILL

“Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
and I ache in the places where I used to play..”

Ah, Leonard Cohen! Nothing like it when you need it.   Which isn’t always.   But Arthur Smith,  his unlikely doppelganger and lifelong fan,  has built a  reflective, funny, wise hour out of that necessary mood.  “Part One”, a few years ago,  majored on Cohen’s attitude to excess and addiction, something Arthur himself knows a good deal about.  This one is focused more on  “Depression, decline, diminishment, darkness and death”.   And by the strange alchemy of music and art,  the moment our battered host pronounces these words, everyone feels better.  Happier.  Cheerfully committed to “that little touch of madness that makes stability perfect”,  the acceptance of human chaos from which wisdom springs.

It is partly a tribute show – and Smith has the musicality and the growl and the soul to perform the great songs like Tower of Song and Take This Waltz –  partly an account of his own fandom , of Cohen’s despair  (a lovely grumpy rendering of Alleluia)   and subsequent revival of fortunes.  There’s a brief exchange of letters too  (Cohen concludes “Stay alive Arthur, and I’ll find you”).  But it veers off in other directions:  he annexes Christopher Reid’s marvellous poem about elephants throwing bones around in a strange ritual of grief,  and Philip Larkin’s dead hedgehog;  he speaks of his mother Hazel , her growing dementia and her unconquerable heart (clearly, in temperament, this splendid woman is the opposite of Cohen, except for the drinking).

He amuses himself reading out (with assistance from his backing-group girls)  some terrible poems by Leonard Nimoy, to contrast with the gloomy majesty of Cohen’s lyrics.  A couple of times he decides to behave like other standup comedians, attempting “enthusiasm” and giving up in disgust,  then trying the pointless ranting style, and shrugging that off too.

Because he can.  Because Arthur Smith,  never willingly enrolled in the vile monkey-vain ranks of comedy celebriteees, never buys into any legend, including his own.  It’s a uniquely consoling voice,  expressing the wreckage we must all cling to.   If Cohen’s songs are,  “a manual for living with defeat”,  this show sprung from them is a way to learn to love it.
box office 020 7478 0100   to 2 March

Rating:  four  4 Meece Rating

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February 17, 2014 · 9:49 am

NOT A PLAY BUT AN ARTWORK…

Quite a few people have asked about the theatre cat logo for theatrecat.  Even more are curious about the mice.

They are all created by Roger Hardy.  Who is really a painter and creator of strange sculptures made of things he finds.

His website is http://www.rogerhardy.co.uk

And it seems impossible to stop him inventing new mice.

Here is the Dead Rat (not needed so far) for truly awful productions:

Dead Ratand here are his Shakespearian mice, which I am saving up…

The Bard Mouse width fixedHamlet Mouse width fixed

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February 15, 2014 · 9:48 pm

HMS PINAFORE – Hackney Empire & touring

O  RAPTURE UNFORESEEN.   A G & S REFUSENIK RECANTS

Right.  Shoot your cuffs, hammer that piano,  rum-ti-tum and off we go:

When I was young I must confess
I’d run a mile from seeing any G & S:
The rumti-tumty racket and the style so ham
Seemed to bring out every horror of the worst am-dram.
(Chorus:  It was all about the horrors of her first am-dram)

Tom Lehrer said of the Savoy operas  “Full of words and music, signifying nothing”,  and I associated Gilbert and Sullivan with over-decorated, safe fat-bottomed smugness.  I forgot  (or didn’t notice, in banal productions)  that in their Victorian day they were pretty satirical.   A particularly painful Mikado (“Mikado About Nothing”,  snarled my companion, leaving at the interval)  and a desperate “singalong” at Snape put the lid on it.

So despite the rhymes that riddle and the tunes that dance,
And the keenness of the critics (and their cousins and their aunts)
I kept away and shuddered saying “Not for me!
No, not even if the tickets in the stalls came free!”

But then I saw the Regan de Wynter all-male Iolanthe:  rollickingly silly,  beautifully sung and casually framed as if a group of teenage boys had crept into an attic, found an old score and extemporized props and costumes from junk.  Adding this extra layer of absurdity somehow neutralized the weak plots and psychological improbability, to reveal the real merriment and neo-music-hall quality of the best bits.

So here I am again, happy as Larry, cheering for their even more imaginatively reframed HMS Pinafore:  Sasha Regan discards stagey galleon romance and sets it below decks in a WW2 warship,  with men amusing themselves in the naval tradition of a “Sod’s Opera”.  The set is their metal-framed bunks: as the pianist in the pit strums the overture they lounge, bored, reading letters from home.  Then one man takes out a tin whistle and gives the opening bars of  “We sail the ocean blue…”  and they’re off.   Athletic, laddish,  leaping and singing.  As the Captain (Neil Moors) joins them they all manage a fast chorus while he leads an equally fast PE lesson, singing through press-ups and somersaults, fake medals flapping.

Aidan Crowley stuffs a hunchback pillow in his vest as evil Dick Deadye. The stout ship’s cook becomes Little Buttercup (Alex Weatherhill),  deploying a fierce falsetto.   Josephine arrives (more of a true counter-tenor, I’d say, and immense on the high notes).  But she – and the “female relatives” chorus accompanying Sir Joseph Porter  – are not in elaborate drag.   To indicate laydeez attire they just customize cork lifejackets, trailing straps, canvas headbands, socks hauled to stocking height.   So you never forget that this is a lark, a release from manliness:  that in itself is oddly touching.  Especially as sounds of the sea beyond the hull are often just audible behind the romantic farrago,  the gaily-tripping-lightly-skipping parody of womanhood and the exaggerated machismo of manhood.

But mainly it’s funny, a distillation of high spirits:  the nocturne “carefully on tiptoe stealing”  is lit with  mischievously dramatic effect by hand-held torches.  And the bureaucratic monster Sir Joseph Porter KCB  (David McKechnie)  makes the most of bowler-hat, pompous pipesucking and excellent comedy legs. So in conclusion –

I went tripping through the foyer very cheerfull-ee
Saying:  “Book your ticket quickly for this Queens’ navee!”

box office  0208 985 2424   to 23 Feb

tour to 5 May   http://www.hmspinaforetour.com     Touring Mouse wide

rating:  four   4 Meece Rating

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February 14, 2014 · 6:40 pm

RED VELVET: REPRISE Tricycle Theatre NW6

IN WHICH A GOOD PLAY MOVES TOWARDS SOMETHING GREATER

Sometimes, memories need to be revisited.   It was in autumn 2012 that I reviewed Lolita Chakrabarti’s play starring her husband Adrian Lester  (my Times review, paywalled, is on http://tinyurl.com/nbfj6dl).   I liked it, as everyone else did;   was please to be one of those who voted both Chakrabarti and Lester their awards at the Critics’ Circle.   I called it “sharp and entertaining”, and was delighted by the tribute to a largely forgotten theatre hero:  Ira Aldridge,  a black American actor who in the 1830’s,  even before slavery was anned ,replaced the ailing Edmund Kean as  Othello at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden.  For two nights the “negro” strangled the milk-white Desdemona onstage before shocked, racist Victorian opinion stopped him.

I loved Lester’s performance – who wouldn’t? –  and enjoyed the secondary theme – amusingly illustrated –  of how acting was moving from Kean’s declamatory,  stylized style towards more naturalistic and passionate performances.  Thinking back,  I remembered those things, and also moment when an embarrassed cast suddenly realize that the manager has bravely cast a replacement who is – gasp! – black.    I appreciated, too, the slyly feminist device of book-ending of the play with a scene in Poland as a young woman reporter,  herself underrated and patronized,  inveigles herself in to interview the aged actor  whose successes across Europe never quite wiped out the memory of humiliation in London.    I remembered the final scene when we see with a jolt that even this victory has required him, nightly,  to “white-up” grotesquely with panstick to play King Lear,  and the apposite rage of his final  “I’ll not weep!” and threat of “the terrors of the earth”.

But I sneaked back to see it again this week,  wondering how it feels on the far side of Adrian Lester’s stunning and thoroughly modern Othello at the National Theatre.    And I found that as sometimes happens  the play has grown bigger: stronger, more remarkable, finding deeper feeling in the deep red velvet folds of bygone theatricalia.    There is now a more shocking magic in Aldridge’s deep, dark dignity and bitter banked-down rage; more charm and mischief of his lighter moments and the edgy intelligence of his discussions with his co-star,   as Desdemona moves towards his physical style and embraces a freer transatlantic school  of acting. There’s real  brilliance as the two meld stylized  1830s mannerisms with real emotion in the terrifying handkerchief scene which closes  the first half.  And there’s fascination – for us theatre anoraks – in comparing it with Lester’s interaction last year with his modern Desdemona, Olivia Vinall…

I had also quite forgotten the power and misery of Aldridge’s row with the manager , LaPorte, and the author’s generosity in letting LaPorte express the frustration of those who, faced with a moral choice,   want to keep their job rather than be Spartacus.  Indhu Rubasingham’s production is heading for New York. I hope it comes back.  Meanwhile, friends, look out for returns and note that as I write there are three matinees not quite sold out yet…

http://www.tricycle.co.uk   to 15 March
rating: five 5 Meece Rating

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February 13, 2014 · 11:06 pm

1984 Almeida, N1

A TERRIFYING, TRIUMPHANT HEADLONG   TAKE ON ORWELL

I think George Orwell would be sourly pleased at the way Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan of Headlong and Nottingham Playhouse  have treated his great cry of despair.  They riff on it, and in its very structure ironize Newspeak and Doublethink until, pinned to the seat, we too enter the dark terror of Thoughtcrime.   There are even spookily calm scenes fore and aft in which a reading group of 2084 analyzes the book and believes that everything is fine since The Party fell in 2050.  Unless that too is a thought-control illusion.  Orwell would appreciate that.

Unlike the film or Nick Lane’s strong, but more conventional,  adaptation a few years ago,  Icke and Macmillan create a jerky dislocated structure .  From the start Mark Arends’ gaunt Winston Smith is losing his mind with the stress of being forbidden to believe his own senses.  Familiar elements are there –  telescreens, Julia  (Hara Yannas, perfectly the rebel below the waist and pragmatist above) ,  Charrington’s junk shop room and snow-globe, Oranges and Lemons, children denouncing parents, Victory Gin, the apparent Goldstein conspiracy and Winston’s day job deleting ‘unpersons’.   The Two Minutes’ Hate is staged with terrifying vigour, and  there is a deeply affecting moment as Winston watches the maternal singing woman in the street and nurses the hope that salvation lies in the universal humanity of the proles.

So it’s all there:  but as in a dream lines and scenes recur, projections confuse time and place, and crashes, flashes and blackouts force us to into Winston’s understanding  that love and privacy are a chimera:   “We are the dead”.   Chloe Lamford’s design is surreally alarming in itself: the arrest and torture  at the Ministry of Love sees the familiar stage grow huge, white,empty of all but power and pain.  Even there the most frightening element is Tim Dutton’s O’Brien.  Senatorial, civilized, confident, likeable, he is  the ultimate headmasterly or clerical figurehead whose revealed allegiance is both shocking and credible.  This is the eternal Inquisitor:  “We do not tolerate rebellion, even in a brain awaiting a bullet.  We make it perfect before we blow it out”.

Wisely,  there is no updating (though the programme is stuffed with right-on contemporary soundbites)  but plenty does resonate: as the readers say, every age finds itself in this book.  The Snowden surveillance controversy is prefigured in the complacent, tubby loyalist Parsons saying he’s glad of the telescreens because   “There are people out there who hate us and want to destroy our way of life.   And if we’re being watched, so are they!”  And terrorism of all ages echoes in O’Brien’s early demand that  Winston Smith be prepared, in the Cause,  to  “commit murder, betray, kill, throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face…”

A stunning, terrifying hundred minutes.  And a relief to step out into the street,  with evening papers blowing untidily around and glimmering smartphone screens full of raucous contention,  disrespect and unpunished satire. Thirty years on from 1984, we’re not there.    Yet.

Almeida box office 0207 359 4404      to  23 March     Almeida partner: Aspen
rating:  five5 Meece Rating

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February 12, 2014 · 11:58 pm

DONKEYS’ YEARS Rose, Kingston

GAUDEAMUS IGITUR!  A FAVE FRAYN FARCE RETURNS

Those who love a good farce – lost trousers, sock-suspenders,  nifty door-work, ridiculous fights and punctured dignity –  sometimes feel a bit sheepish, guiltily lowbrow. The answer is Michael Frayn:  philosopher, scholar,  intellectually dazzling yet by a great mercy of fate able to bring his gifts, and a certain devastating insider knowledge,   to pure mischief.  In Noises Off  he skewered the world of theatre;  here it is the rareified golden stone world of  an Cambridge college.  Thus the wildest moments of trouserless chaos can be dignified with lines like “I can’t just hand out Mature Studentships, on Sunday, in my pyjamas!”.   And drunken slurrings can include superbly cod-philosophical pronouncements like “We ought to be free of that kind of freedom”.  Discuss, on one side of the paper only.

Nicely realized by Polly Sullivan’s elegant inside-outside design,  this college is hosting a reunion of undergraduates from 25 years earlier.   Director Lisa Spirling plays ‘70s pop hits beforehand to remind us that it is a 1976 play, and justify a flare in the trousers and – critically – a confusedly excitable attitude to women.  There is just one: Jemma Redgrave as  the Master’s wife, hostess of the weekend and former party girl back when there were ten male students to every girl.  She deploys a lovely middle-aged yearning keenness, hoping her old flame Roddy will be among the returning men.

He isn’t.  Instead there is a  pompous junior minister (Jamie Glover),  a sour civil servant (Jason Durr),  John Hodgkinson in a clerical collar  whinnying “I’m a late vocation. I baptise babies, I church women”,  Simon Coates as a buttery-blond gossip writer  and Nicholas Rowe a willowy doctor.  After some uneasy middle-aged joviality  they disperse to dinner (cleverly staged in sound-effects  from the foyer as they ramble through the audience pretending to hail old friends).  They reassemble, flown with insolence and wine,  in a room they suppose to be that of the missing Roddy.  Whose analyst has banned him from attending;  so the room is occupied by Snell.

Shell is the unexpected star:  a shy, runty Welsh intestine expert with a ginger beard and a low-key mental crisis:“Am I going to spend the rest of my life between the duodenum and the ileum?”  he asks plaintively,   and realizes that he wasted his student years.  “I never wore a fancy waistcoat! I never wrote blasphemous poem!…I wasn’t old enough to be young!” .  That cry is the heart of Frayn’s play, and the evidence that it does, in the other sense, have a real heart.  Dammit, a lot of us feel like that sometimes, as youth recedes and shrinks away from our mundane middle-age.

As the plot intensifies, so does Snell’s crazed determination to live at last :   Ian Hughes, given this wonderful role,  takes it and runs with it.  Up over the top and down the other side, with all his RSC timing and an irresistible edge of mania. It’s cathartic.  And so, obviously, is the humiliation of the education minister.  Some things never date.

box office 08444 821 556 to  22 Feb     Supported by: Russell-Cooke

Rating:   four  4 Meece Rating

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February 11, 2014 · 11:57 pm

O WHAT A LOVELY WAR Theatre Royal Stratford East

A THEATRE LEGEND RECREATED:  AND RIPE FOR RE-EVALUATION

Sometime in the first hour,   while far from unhappy,  I realized that there are two things to keep in mind about Terry Johnson’s reprise of Joan Littlewood’s most famous production.  One is that here in her theatre it is as much an act of reverence for Littlewood’s own centenary as for the Great War.   The other is that it tells us as much about 1963 as about 1914-1918.

Its origins are well-known:  at a time when World War II was fresh in memory and the Holocaust made it hard to criticize that fight,  the radio producer Charles Chilton, whose father died at Arras the year he was born, made a documentary using half-forgotten soldiers’ songs interspersed with the history of the “pushes” and desperate strategies which left ten million dead and far more maimed.   Littlewood, who hated officer-class  accounts like RC Sheriff’s Journey’s End,  adopted the material to tell the story,  agitprop style, of working-class heroes sent to slaughter by posh callous generals, notably Haig.   That class-war influence rolls on down the decades,  in everything from Blackadder to the Michael Gove hissy-fit decrying it.

Littlewood framed it satirically as a Pierrot show, a beach entertainment with the cast doing sketches and songs, some with shocking flippancy, while guns and bombs thundered and newslines detailed the dreadful statistics of trench warfare,  tens of thousands sacrificed for a few yards’ advance.  Johnson reproduces it faithfully, with a slick and often superb cast of twelve as soldiers, citizens, nurses,  officers, or war profiteers.  Michael Simkins is notably good (he does a mean grizzled-officer these days,  and sharp lightning changes of character).  Caroline Quentin is tremendous as the music-hall singer urging men to the front (“On Friday night I’m willing / if you’ll only take the shilling / to make a man of any man of you!”),  and leads the audience in Sister Susie sewing shirts for soldiers;  she is stirring too as a Hyde Park peace campaigner in 1915.

And despite a rather annoying giant screen bobbing up and down too often,  all the cast flow nimbly through the scenes from early triumphalism to repeated disasters.   They stir some unforced emotion:  the Christmas Truce is beautifully handled, and whenever there are rare snatches of diaries (“we hear the wounded crying from the woods..” ) or when the soldiers’ weary or cheeky songs rise, the sense of  connection with a lost generation is overwhelming.

And that’s the problem, really.   Our hunger now is for subtler understanding of the disaster:  the strategic errors need, and are getting,  a less simplistic perspective.   What we need to remember is not one stroppy 1960’s death-of-deference point of view but simple facts and feelings.  From The Wipers Times and War Horse,  to contemporary diaries and poems and small significant discoveries like Southwark’s What the Women Did,  we need to turn to the basic history, to work out our own beliefs and feel our own pity or rage.  Not Littlewood’s, not even Chilton’s.  It is worth seeing if only to come to that understanding.

box office  020 8534 0310    http://www.stratfordeast.com    to  15 March

Rating: four     4 Meece Rating

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February 11, 2014 · 12:08 am

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Barbican, EC2

A DREAM OF PLANKS AND PUPPETS,  AND  AN UPTURNED ASS…

“Gentles, perhaps you wonder at this show.  But wonder on…”  says Peter Quince, lanky and earnest in a fairisle sweater.  We might well boggle at this production,  created at the Bristol Old Vic by Tom Morris in collaboration again with the Handspring puppeteers.  Last spring it packed the house there, introducing a shape-shifting Puck as a collection of excitable hand-tools, a balletic ensemble of planks manoeuvred by the whole cast to represent  forest, sea, starbursts and love itself, and Oberon and Titania holding great pale carved masks above their heads.   As for the fairies, they became things of weird and terrifying otherness:   broken dolls, a nightmare puppet,  a skeletal giant moth.

I liked it,  with reservations.  Mostly concerned with the first scene, in which the four young people manipulated small puppets of themselves,  distractingly and pointlessly.  After that,  as they became more human and vigorous and the inanimate objects more alive,  I admitted feeling “a direct line to the folkloric, pagan, animist roots of rural Shakespeare”.    Forgive the critical retrospection.  But it is a  treat to see a production as innovative as this growing, shedding the weaker bits , and becoming one of the 21st century’s first real landmark interpretations.

The changes serve  pace and coherence: the opening, without puppetry,  frees the lovers to be themselves.  Alex Felton is an eager public-school blond Lysander (as the show goes on he becomes weepingly funny). The contrast of Akiya Henry’s Hermia and  Naomi Cranston as a skinny disappointed Helena is lovely, and their brawl in the wood fabulously  pure teenage rage.   Ms Henry gets a personal round of applause for her ferocity.   David Ricardo Pierce is a  commanding Oberon/Theseus, and his queen – Saskia Portway – an androgynous striding figure,  vibrant with female anger and mesmeric in that all-too topical speech about the dangerous dislocation of weather,  the “drowned fields”  caused by faery discord.

It is a play which should always make us a little uneasy, unsettled as well as captivated, so Morris’ use of puppetry, not naturalistic but nightmarish and fey, is useful.  Shapes change, objects move, nothing is steady until the towering wood-gods step gently forward at the end, in harmony again over the stolen child.   But it is also the most rousing of comedies and this too he fully exploits.  The Rude Mechanicals even attack the Barbican’s bland atmosphere by invading the auditorium before the start.  I could not work out whether Saikat Ahamed, clambering over the seats and talking gibberish,  was a confused exchange-student or a cast member, and tried to be polite in French.  He is Snug the Joiner, and in this cheerfully free-form interpretation gets portrayed as not speaking much English.   Fair enough, in a modern nation of immigrant manual labourers.  Bottom, of course is Greek: Miltos Yerolemou,  sublime both in his dignified overacting and in the courageous translation into  an upside-down, back-to-front, bare-bum upwards mutant donkey-legged bicycle…Oh, all right, you had to be there.   If you want a different,  beguiling unique Dream,   you should be.

box office 0845 120 7500  to  15 Feb

Rating:  four      4 Meece Rating

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February 8, 2014 · 6:32 pm

ETERNAL LOVE English Touring Theatre

SEX,  STRIFE, AND  HOT THEOLOGY: ABELARD AND HELOISE RISE AGAIN 

“Theology in Paris these days”  says tubby, jocose King Louis VI of France,  “is more interesting than wrestling matches or dancing bears”.   It’s 1115 AD, and  Peter Abelard’s Aristotelian rationalism and rock-star following is enraging fundamentalist  Bible-bashers like Bernard of Clairvaux.  Down south they’re burning heretics, and Abelard’s love affair with his 17-year-old pupil adds a dash of scandal and still more risk.  No dancing bear could possibly compete.

It may seem rareified to offer a slanging-match about Platonic Essentialism and the Trinity to a modern audience, even laced with sex,  persecution and castration.  But few playwrights are more vigorously engaging than Howard Brenton when he gets his teeth into moments in history when ideas drove change.    Only lately he gave us modern Chinese politics in The Arrest of Ai Weiwei,  risky Reformation zeal in  Anne Boleyn, and Charles II versus Parliament in 55 Days.    And it is a good move by English Touring Theatre – in its 21st year –  to revive this 2006 Globe production under John Dove’s direction.  Not least because across the world today we have our own fundamentalists:   Christian, Muslim, atheist.

The story of Abelard and Heloise –  love, scandal , separation and old age as an Abbot and Abbess exchanging letters about love and God  – is vividly played out.  It’s a  spare set with an early-music band overhead, a curtained door and bare birch-trees whose silver branches leap and divide like springing thought itself.   Brenton has no fear of the occasional almost Pythonesque moment as  theologians, chancers and grandees bicker over the Trinity,  with some wonderful exchanges.   Abelard refers to a “stupid Bishop” and  the King asks menacingly “Could there be such a thing?”.  Abelard, deadpan, replies “There are many wonders in this world”.  Gotcha!

Alongside theology and politics runs the personal – as it must, since the core of Abelard’s new thinking was that human love and the body are not ungodly.  Bernard thinks them so,  and leads starveling, self-flagellating monks driven into visionary frenzy by mouldy ergot bread.  David Sturzaker makes a commanding passionate Abelard,   Jo Herbert his thoughtful, intellectual and physically joyful lover. Rejecting the chains of marriage, defying her possessive uncle (Edward Peel), she seems a 21st century feminist trapped in the 12th.  Motherhood does not tame her:   “We are not a family, we are warriors in a war of ideas”.    But the most compellingly odd performance is Sam Crane as the monk Bernard,  his voice vibrating with staccato celibate tension,  averring that “There is nothing to teach or learn, all has been Revealed!” .  His only pleasure is in priestly patriarchal authority, forever calling people “Little one” .

In bright moments and dark,  the play balances comedy, sincerity and brutality (the horrid castrators purr “We’re farmers, come to do farmer’s work..”) .  And after the final catharsis and the ultimate excellent joke,  its Globe origins are honoured in a dancing curtain call.  As if,  indoors on a chilly Cambridge evening,  we were in a summer night in the great wooden O,  happy groundlings enjoying its generosity and glee.   I am glad I caught it on the wing.   It flies on.   Tour dates below

English touring theatre:  www.ett.org.uk      On tour till 12 April      Touring Mouse wide

rating    Four   4 Meece Rating

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