Author Archives: Libby Purves and friends

January 29, 2014 · 12:20 am

WHAT THE WOMEN DID Southwark Playhouse, SE1

SMALL LIVES IN THE GREAT WAR: FORGOTTEN VOICES HEARD AND HONOURED

Get seated ten minutes early. In Alex Marker’s humbly clever set, a bricky terraced house, the cast sing casually round a piano and the long, long trail of the century winds backward: Pack up your Troubles, a soldiers’ jokey “If you were the only Boche in the trench..” and the sinister jollity of “We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go..”. So before any theatre has even taken place, tears spring for the dead boys of long ago. Director Tricia Thorne has craftily primed us.

This triple bill from Two’s Company – first played in 2004 – is of plays from 1917 and 1918 about women in the Great War. So it breathes contemporary raw feeling, not the retrospective anger of Oh What a Lovely War or James Dacre’s recent marvellous revival of the 1981The Accrington Pals. The first, by Gwen John – not the artist – shows a war widow (Victoria Gee, whose strong narrow face and spare frame make her immediately convincing in period). She has remarried a shy local (Matthew Cottle) after the erroneous report of her husband’s death. He, a powerful Simon Darwen, reappears crippled and angry. With two small children, beautifully played supping milk at the tea-table and eyeing their unfamiliar father, the couple negotiate emotion and embarrassment. In a wonderfully truthful line about remarrying rapidly in the shock of widowhood the wife explains “Thinking o’thee, I were softened towards th’whole world”.

The second play by Maude Deuchar shows a gaggle of “canary girls” – munitions workers whose skin turned yellow with TNT poison. On a lunch-break they josh about the fact “husbands are rationed”: they will become that inter-war generation dismissed as “superfluous women”. Some laugh at the frivolous idea of putting signed notes in the shells, as a macabre “present” to Fritz. At which point I thought it was just an interesting slice-of-life piece about the banality and boredom and compromise and loneliness of their lot. I misjudged it.

For the terrifying second scene takes place on the same doorstep in near-darkness, as the girls giggle and flirt with soldiers seen only as shadows and glowing cigarettes. Unease grows: we work out before they do what strange thing is going on, but the fear does not lessen, and there is a real flesh-tingling moment of shock. Significantly, this play was not performed until the war was over. It is ahead of its time in sentiment.
And so to the third, by J.M.Barrie. His typically playful-sentimental notion is of an unmarried Scottish charwoman who feels left out amid her Cockney gossips. They all have sons in uniform and scoff at women with none – “It’s not their war”. So ‘Mrs’ Dowey (Susan Wooldridge) invents a son, taking a real name from news of the Black Watch regiment, and fakes his letters.

I admit to a certain hostility at the start – Barrie does caricature middle-aged women woefully, as competitive and shallow. But the awkward arrival of Darwen as the ‘son’ , an orphan on leave who is initially furious at the deception, heralds a completely delightful and artfully credible two-hander. What Barrie clearly does know is how mothers secretly rather enjoy being barracked and teased by great strapping sons. Wooldridge gives the old lady a wonderful mischievousness, Darwen blossoms from sullenness to affection. And against my will, and across a century, the tears rose again.
box office 020 7407 0234 to 15 Feb

Rating: four

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January 27, 2014 · 6:46 pm

Red Velvet – a note! Tricycle, NW6

Just a note to say that I reviewed this when it first aired at the Tricycle in 2012, and was pleased to be one of those who voted its awards at the Critics’ Circle. My review (Times property still, so paywall I fear) can be read in full on

http://tinyurl.com/nbfj6dl

But I can say here that it is a gripping treatment of the story of Ira Aldridge, an African-American actor who briefly played Othello in the West End in 1833, – the year of the final Abolition of Slavery Act in the UK.
And that Adrian Lester does it perfectly: finding a way to express the over-emphatic (pre-electric lighting) stage manner of the age, and giving Aldridge a great dignity and humour, in the face of terrible panicky racialism and that weird sexual dread which accompanied it (there’s a white Desdemona who – gasp! – he has to manhandle.
Lolita Chakrabarti’s script is great. And there is a terrible moment at the end, when the actor – successful across Europe – is preparing for a role by slowly, carefully, whitening his handsome face to be more acceptable.
Tremendously topical, given this week’s concerns about the poor ethnic mix in modern British stage and TV.

box office 020 7328 1000

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January 25, 2014 · 3:18 pm

A WORLD ELSEWHERE – Theatre 503 SW11

AN ERA RECREATED: THE REAL 1968 IN AN UNREAL WORLD

The opening, in a student room correct down to the battered stack of albums, took me aback. Friends, I was there in 1968: in Oxford rooms heavy with illegal smoke, where skinny lads planned groundbreakingly tedious college productions of Coriolanus and lounged around listening to Bob Dylan protesting half a world away. There was often, as here, an ill-matched roommate: a “Northern Chemist” stumping off to the lab muttering “Never knew such a place for encouraging bullshit”.

My God, how it all comes back! Even the crucial plot detail that offstage, the lounging one’s friend Nick risks suspension for nicking books from Blackwell’s on the half-baked Marxexcuse that “Property is Theft”. The only difference is that in 1968 nobody would say aloud like Nick’s posh sister Pippa (Sophia Sivan) “You’re living in the most amazing old buildings and studying the literature of the greatest language there is. You don’t do a stroke of work and all your cooking and washing is done for you. It doesn’t cost you a penny because the taxpayer is footing the bill. It’s a scandal really.”

Yet Alan Franks’ new play is not a satire but a rueful, layered attempt to pick its way through the innocent hypocrisies and shifting values of the time. It’s more Rattigan than Osborne, mindful of how human relationships drive or impede progress. It may seem a tiny world, but its faithfulness asks awkwardly universal questions about gilded intellectual elites and the harsher world elsewhere. The 1968 setting is pivotal, because into the sweet simplicities of the English undergraduates’ lives (they’re blackmailing a senior tutor for plagiarism to save the book-thief’s bacon) strides a Rhodes Scholar from Minnesota. I remember them too, the Clinton generation: older than us, avoiding the draft, their politics forced into sharper focus by the deaths of Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the ascent of Nixon and the fate of contemporaries in Vietnam.

Sally Knyvette directs a cast whose very physicality is evocative: Steffan Donnelly as a wispy boy-child Toby is dreamily planning to emulate a 1953 Brecht production of Gunther Grass which incorporated real strikers (he finds the Cowley pickets unenthusiastic). Chris the Chemist is Dan Van Garrett, more heavyset and bearded: a decent old-school leftie who scornfully points out that the Dylan numbers drifting through the scenes are nicked from folksongs his uncles sing in pubs. And Elliott the American is Michael Swatton: broad-shouldered, a man among pretty children. He knows economics and politics, and recites Bobby Kennedy’s magnificent Kansas speech on the fallacy of mere GDP (worth a look today – http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4110). He mesmerizes Pippa, who despite a benign nature dislikes “causes”. Though Mummy does do hospital visiting, in Godalming.

Franks weaves themes of integrity, emulation, plagiarism, imitation both straight and crooked: wistful respect for ancient texts meets an uneasy need for progress. I would love to see it grow to a fuller length. As for Mayhew the Middle English tutor, Crispian Cartwright is so horribly convincing in the role that for a moment I wondered if Knyvette had done a Brecht-and-the-strikers, captured and incorporated the real thing…

box office 0207 978 7040 to 15 Feb

rating: four

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January 24, 2014 · 12:54 am

KING LEAR Olivier, SE1

A LEAR TO REMEMBER: SIMON RUSSELL BEALE

We are in a crumbling modern gerontocracy: a conference chamber lined with soldiers, Lear white-bearded and gratingly impatient in dictator militaria, bemedalled grandees. The daughters line up by microphones for the formal delegation of power and statement of adoration. It is an old man’s world: Stephen Boxer’s prim, credulous anxious Gloucester too will prove dangerously ready to believe that a son is plotting against him with “We have seen the best of our times”.

As treacheries and tortures unravel, director Sam Mendes’ vision is all too recognizable in a world where dictators poison, stab and feed rivals to dogs while women in designer frocks can play as corruptly as men. Kate Fleetwood’s Goneril is a tight, dark knot of frustration, Anna Maxwell Martin gives us Regan as a minxily sadistic Knightsbridge nymphomaniac. Their final betrayal takes place beneath a massive Stalinist statue of Lear; we glimpse the ragged wretches of his underclass, and the final battle is of bombs and Kalashnikovs.

So it follows the contemporary National Theatre Shakespeare trope, like Hytner’s military Othello, police-state Macbeth and metropolitan Timon. But like The Winter’s Tale, this play depends heavily on making the tyrant’s initial craziness credible: every actor must find his way through that astonishing opening scene, that intemperate rage at Cordelia’s honesty. Some directors take the easy route of implying an incestuous back-story (the language often suggests it) . Here it is not explicit, and we have only Goneril snapping “never afflict yourself to know the cause”. Lear’s own nature must explain the disaster, and does.

For Simon Russell Beale gives us a tense old autocrat, his need for reassurance stoked by sensing his brain failing. His voice vibrates with tension, released in paroxysms of fury. Stanley Townsend’s shocked Kent offers the only clue to what Lear once was, and when he disguises himself as a rudely ranting Irish tramp, displays equal understanding of what the King is becoming: infantilized, reckless,needing to be amused by rude songs with hsi disruptive soldiery ( roaring “oggi oggi oggi” and hurling a whole dead stag on the table: we need to see why Goneril resents them).

The King must travel from rage to madness before he finds his final angry wisdoms. Not every Lear, however, manages to catch what Russell Beale does: moments of charm and sweetness when he is briefly convincing himself that Regan, at least, will be good to him. Dictators often have – or once had – charm: and the glory of this actor is his ability to switch from Stalin to Santa-Claus within a line. Those few smiling moments are precious, and core to his remarkable interpretation of the character.

The charm sneaks through also in his dealings with the Fool, the other truth-teller to power: played with subtle comic desperation by Adrian Scarborough in a check suit with a feathered trilby, as if he had stepped in from Osborne’s The Entertainer. And Mendes’ one wholly unexpected shock is his death, which I will not spoil but which makes perfect, rare, horrible dramatic sense.

It all does, and that’s the quality of this thrilling production: like all the best ones it brings out ideas and secrets from the text which shock you even after knowing the play for decades. Tom Brooke’s elfin, intially casual Edgar is particularly striking: a Poor Tom naked, scarred, the bare forked animal of Lear’s vision. Richard Clothier’s Albany too brings a rare distressed dignity to the part.

Not everything is perfect: Antony Ward’s design is nicely sparse with a cyclorama of threatening cloud and a bright hayfield for Cordelia’s return, but some quirk persuades Mendes to tolerate a ridiculous hydraulic mini-cliff, with visible mechanism, raising Lear improbably from the believable moor to shout “Blow winds and crack your cheeks” ten feet up as if he was in a musical. Sam Troughton’s Edmund, too is oddly directed: often delivering his threats from an inexplicable spotlight like a Bond villain.

But these are quibbles, cited only because of the miraculous fact that nothing can mar the impact of this great Lear. Or stop you choking in emotional shock at his final slow, quiet “Never, never, never, never, never” and sharp demand that all of us “Look there!” at Cordelia’s body, and contemplate the murdered innocence of truth.

Box office 020 7452 3000 to 28 May

Rating: five

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January 22, 2014 · 11:17 pm

BLURRED LINES NT SHED SE1

FEMINISM? NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE IT!

Eight women, on a great flight of pale stairs which light and flash, introduce themselves politely. “Single Mum, White” “Brittle First Wife” “Broken Down Alcoholic” “Prostitute, black” “Northern blonde, bubbly” “Middle Class Mum, forty but fuckable” “Admiral’s wife, jolly”. “Older Mum, character face”…

The house is joyful, as if suddenly released from the airless stuffiness of a hundred TV casting clichés. There are few better sounds in a theatre than gurgles of delighted recognition, and anyone with an understandable fear of any show promising “a blistering journey through contemporary gender politics” should be assured that in this impressionistic 70-minute piece there are many moments of pure glee. Not least when one of the cast opportunistically leaps down to the front and says that if there’s anyone important in, she looking for work: an MTV girl maybe, or “the black best friend who gets murdered in the opening moments of all American thrillers” . She offers to produce at will a General African Accent, put on weight or relax her hair. Whatever!

There are also several deeply touching passages: distilled tiny playlets whcih feel real despite the neon stairs, with laments and narratives woven by Nick Payne into something close to antiphonal poetry. He (the only man involved) co-created it with director Carrie Cracknell and improvisations with the players: eight brave, clever, funny women bringing their own indignations and hilarities to the process.

It was inspired by Kat Banyard’s book The Equality Illusion with its damning statistics on employment, domestic violence and the unstoppable online tide of pornographic objectification of the female body. The title refers to the strutting popinjay Robin Thicke and his loathsome video where naked women – in tiny flesh-coloured thongs so their genitalia look like Barbie dolls’ – twine around him (and a dog and a bike) as he barks “I’ll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two”. The cast were refused permission to sing it, but do sing fragments of the Crystals‘ “He hit me but it felt like a kiss” and Tammy Wynette’s preposterous “Don‘ liberate me, jus‘ love me”. High culture gets a swipe too, as a fragile blonde starts sobbingly to sing the Willow Song from Othello. The playlets use the cast’s diverse ages and appearance – some dropping into male roles – to express attitudes to relationships, prostitution, and work. Wrenhing is a teenager date-raped after sessions with a boyfriend grew increasingly into “something that he did rather than something they did together”. And there’s a darkly funny workplace interview with Bryony Hannah as a female boss patronizing Claire Skinner as a new mother.

In a surprise coda the show seems finished and three become interviewer, male director and star of a play doing a “Platform”. A spread-thighed, artily tousled “Martin” preens and interrupts while his tiny blonde star burbles nervously of the “trust” and “safety” she felt doing a violent bedroom scene in lingerie and bare bum. A staged question from the floor is met with such accurate patronage that some yelped with glee. Another little jewel in the fine red Shed.

Box office 020 7452 3000 to 22 feb

Rating: four

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January 22, 2014 · 11:15 pm

RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN Hampstead, NW3

WOMEN ARE REVOLTING! BUT AGAINST WHAT???

The world is changing. “Women are standing for President, men are exfoliating” Don, an amiable klutz who used to teach but fell back on a quiet life as an ineffective college dean, lets his bored wife Gwen (Emma Fielding) make lists of tasks for him to forget. But into their world erupts old roommate, the glitzily single academic feminist, Cathy (Emilia Fox). Her mother has had a heart attack, and the terror of losing the only person who adores her sparks a longing for a family of her own. Possibly with Don, who was her boyfriend before Gwen stole him.

The mutual lifestyle envy of the two women – with interpositions from a scornful student babysitter, Avery (Shannon Tarbet) and Cathy’s blissfully unreconstructed mother (an artfully understated Polly Adams) lets Gina Gionfriddo meditate on the pitfalls of feminist theory. It is Adams and Tarbet, the old and the young, who get most of the fun as their sharp lines undermine the angsty fretfulness of the fortysomethings.

The long first half is too talky-talky (or was at the last preview), suffering from theory overload. Indeed much of it is Cathy conducting a cultural studies seminar with Gwen and Avery as pupils. It livens up whenever Avery delivers barbs of scorn or Alice potters past with1950’s wisdom about What Men Want. But it is worth hanging on for the second half when the inevitable fling between Don and Cathy sparks some proper action.

Its questions about female destiny are all, of course, unanswerable. The moral, if any, is that despite technical liberation women can’t win at everything, because nobody does. Stay-home mothers can long for brighter lights, while high-flyers in their forties howl, like Cathy, “I want a flawed tired marriage…I am ready to embrace mediocrity and ambivalence!” As for Avery’s liberated generation (Shannon Tarbet is a jewel) they may give their all only to be dumped for a submissive Mormon virgin. Harsh.

There are credibility problems. One is the decision to dress Emilia Fox as Academe-Barbie in eyewateringly tight shiny leggings and four-inch heels; another is that the literary and media success which Gwen envies and Don is dazzled by is – well, a load of cobblers. Her seminars are pretentious feature-page fillers, droning about the influence of porn on Abu Ghraib and how the internet caused 9/11: she makes Camille Paglia look like Aristotle. And when she urges Don to reignite his academic career, her suggestion is catchpenny parasitism: copy a chap who ran a book-group discussing Moby Dick with army veterans. Gawd!

It is hard to believe that Gionfriddo does not know how vapid an academic her character is, being herself a mistress of the far more demanding art of building a good play (she wrote Becky Shaw). But she probably didn’t mean me to end up siding with unambitious Don, “ “jerking off to a computer while the family watch Toy Story”. Poor devil, deserved his fling. Even with a voracious cultural-studies maven in spray-on trousers.

Box Office: 020 7722 9301 to 22 Feb http://www.hampsteadtheatre.com

rating : three

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January 20, 2014 · 10:48 pm

THE BODY OF AN AMERICAN Gate Theatre, W11

THE PITY, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND FASCINATION OF WAR

A howl of Arctic wind subdues the settling audience, facing one another from benches across a snowy floor. Screens informs us that all the words, photographs and videos were “spoken, heard, written or taken” between 1993 and 2014 by the playwright Dan O’Brien or his subject, the war photographer Paul Watson. Watson won a Pulitzer for the significant photo at the heart of this docudrama: an explicit and horrifying shot of an downed Black Hawk crewman’s body being filthily desecrated in Mogadishu. O’Brien’s play about his developing friendship with the photographer, on email and then in person, won awards in the US.

Through its ninety minutes, Damien Molony plays the youngish writer and William Gaminara the older, life-battered photographer. Each also speaks the parts of others – interpreters, guides, victims, Inuits when they go to the frozen Canadian North together. Sometimes they speak one another’s words, more as gimmick than enlightenment. That is particularly problematic because Gaminara’s Watson is tremendous: so rounded and nuanced and natural that it is hard not to believe he is the real thing. Molony, on the other hand – and one must credit the writer’s modesty – must struggle with a pretty annoying character: self-pityingly pretentious about his writing and his inability to get on with his family, which sounds no worse than most. It is only when he takes on other parts, notably near the end as the briskly patriotic brother of the dead airman, that he can draw sympathy.

At its core is the moment when Watson was took the terrible picture in Mogadishu and the voice of the dead man, Sgt. William David Cleveland, seemed to speak: “If you do this I will own you forever”. Watson struggles with racking honesty to justify the apparent prurience of war photography and to understand war itself. He also expresses complex guilt, fearing that it was such pictures which caused Clinton to pull out of Somalia, keep clear of Rwanda, and maybe thus encourage Al-Qaeda towards 9/11.

The character O’Brien, on the other hand, falls into the depressive’s trap of seizing the emotional and physical agonies of war victims and making them his own, while simultaneously nursing guilt at that feeling and wanting to make the man who really saw the flayings and dead babies his hero-friend. This in turn, tempts Watson to make him his “confessor”. Such uneasy male ambiguities gave me trouble committing entirely to the piece until near the end, after their interlude in the Canadian Arctic. The best moment is when the photographer is calmly told what’s what by the dead man’s clipped, decent brother. He learns that the terrible picture performed more service than dishonour.

James Dacre of the Royal & Derngate directs, moving the pair (and two chairs) deftly along the transverse stage, exploiting their claustrophobic closeness and the screens which show harrowing war photos, Arctic vistas or once- wittily – a picture of O’Brien’s own theatre of action: Princeton library.

box office 020 7229 0706 http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk to 8 Feb
Royal and Derngate Northampton, 01604 624811 27 Feb-8 March

Rating: three

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January 18, 2014 · 10:49 am

CIPHERS Bush Theatre, W12

SPOOKS, SECRETS , SEDUCTIONS

If you are, like me, addicted to Spooks on television and to the deeper-rooted psychologies of John le Carré, Dawn King’s new play feeds the same hunger for ambiguity, dangerous secrets and ethical conflict. Nations need intelligence, intelligence requires spies and secrets, but secrets rot people from the inside.

So you have the ingredients for drama, and for intensity. In Blanche McIntyre’s deft and well-honed production from Out of Joint and Exeter Northcott (reaching the end of a good tour) the set is made of sliding screens , the scenes are short and often momentarily baffling, the time-scale leaps backwards and forwards offering skilful clues. And each of the four cast is – without obvious disguise – playing two different people.

Grainne Keenan is Justine – a quiet, efficient redundant marketing assistant who, thanks to her fluent Russian and Japanese, gets a job with MI5. She doubles as Justine’s sister Kerry, who we meet in flash-forward scenes distraught at Justine’s mysterious death. Shereen Martin, dark and assured as a feared headmistress, is both Justine’s MI5 boss and the rich wife of her artist lover. Ronny Jhutti doubles as the boyfriend and, superbly, as a furious young Pakistani youth worker who Justine is made to recruit as an informer. And Bruce Alexander is a lecherous yet fatherly Russian spook and, briefly, the heroine’s grieving but patriotic old Dad.

Complicated? Bear with me, and be assured that it is a tribute to Blanche McIntyre’s direction that you don’t get lost, and that every time the screens slide you are agog to know what – and who – happens next. So as a two-hour entertainment you can’t fault it; and as it went on I found myself happily reflecting that it combined the interest of a TV drama with an extra theatrical layer of meaning conferred by the doubling of characters: so that rather than just considering the corrupting effect of intelligence agencies you think of wider things: uncompromising youthful innocence and crafty age, subtle bullying both emotional and professional, layers of betrayal.

The problem with a cliffhanger-mystery, though, is that you have to resolve it. Unless you’re some really annoying intellectual ambiguist too arrogant to tell stories properly. The author here acknowledges that we need to know: why DID Justine die? Was it really suicide? Once you work for MI5, is anything in your life real? Echoes here of the real life “spy in the bag” case.

And so she does resolve it. And although there is one chilling, horribly credible resolution, it is followed by an odd coda in which the writer seems to be suggesting yet another layer of deceit, but without making it clear enough to satisfy. And that sort of knocks the shine off it. But whether here or in Salisbury, the skill and entertainment of it all is well worth the ticket, and Dawn King (whose Foxfinder won the Papatango prize) is certainly one to watch.

box office 0208 743 5050 to 8 feb then tour ends Salisbury Playhouse to 16 Feb

Rating: three

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January 16, 2014 · 12:51 am

THE DUCHESS OF MALFI – Wanamaker Playhouse , Shakespeare’s Globe

HORROR , BEAUTY, CANDLELIGHT

It is a tiny jewel-box, this new indoor playhouse: a reproduction of the Jacobean theatres which succeded the wooden O of the Globe. Clean pale wood benches lie beneath a ceiling of gilded stars, and the only light is from a hundred wax candles: tremblng in sconces, carried by actors, or rising and falling on seven great candelabras from the ceiling. It is a beautiful thing, but until this first production we could not know whether it will really serve the plays.

Banish doubt: it’s a triumph. Dominic Dromgoole has wisely chosen to open the Wanamaker with a play whose vision of normality overwhelmed by nightmare is perfectly expressed by its candlelit intimacy. The poetic morbidity of John Webster reanimates after four centuries his obsessions: flesh as frail as curdled milk, stranglings , obscene desires, spider-web intrigue, “Life a mist of error; death a storm of terror”. Yet at the heart of the play is the most playful, wholesome and loving of heroines. More even than a Desdemona or Cordelia, the Duchess shines steady against the blackness: a rounded, sensual, happy and fulfilled woman who even imprisonment only brings to “melancholy fortified with disdain”, who asserts her noble birth but dies saying “Give my little boy some syrup for his cold”.

Gemma Arterton brings a queenly beauty to the role, and on this night steps up into the first rank of classical actors. In the lovely domestic scenes with her secret husband Antonio (Alex Waldmann) she sings and teases, shrugging cheerfully that the “tempest” of her brother’s fury at the marriage will abate. In captivity, tormented with visions of the beloved dead, she can rage and grieve without compromising the still dignity which stands gravely by when bayed by madmen. No grotesqueness can dim her quiet burning candle.

That grotesqueness, meanwhile, is served with equal vigour by David Dawson as Duke Ferdinand, keeping his incestuous weirdness just this side of camp. Writhingly petulant, shivering with inexpressible desire he is the perfect contrast to his sister’s cheerful sensuality. A fine physical contrast too with his pawn, Sean Gilder’s Bosola, playing it as every inch the pragmatic ex-army bruiser moving from a brisk “Whose throat must I cut?” to horrified entanglement in the Duke’s filthy games. And alongside the Duchess is Sarah MacRae’s Cariola: of coarser clay than her mistress but warmly human and, in her own moment of death, inexpressibly touching. All this, remember, is achieved by candlelight: rising and falling, snuffed out and re-lit, the practical magic of a past age rediscovered. With Claire van Kampen’s music on early instruments, it takes your breath away.

After the savage climax of the Duchess’ death, every director faces the problem of the longish final act. A more temperate playwright would head for a faster ending, but Webster revels in detailed dissolution, conspiracy, seduction, a ludicrous poisoned Bible and a jarring comic interlude with mad Ferdinand’s overconfident doctor. For all the Gothic horror of the Duke’s werewolf grave-ripping, progress towards the final heaping of corpses always risks absurdity. Dromgoole does not resort to cuts or underplaying but ramps it up, goes for broke, and allows the absurdities to produce a relieved shake of laughter in the tiny, crammed, beautiful room.

box office: (0) 20 7401 9919 http://www.shakespeares-globe.com
to 16 Feb

rating: five

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January 13, 2014 · 10:46 pm

NOT I, FOOTFALLS, ROCKABY Royal Court, SW1

A VIRTUOSO BECKETT TRIO

It’s a weird hour, this, even for late Samuel Beckett. Three short solos, performed by Lisa Dwan in an impressive feat of memory and mood, meditate on the life, decay and trapped unhappiness of the female condition. Walter Asmus’ production is staged in tenebrous gloom (wonderful chiaroscuro lighting by James Farncombe) and the plays are separated by minutes of sinister rumbling, and darkness so deep that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. So it’s an experience: that disintegrated, unnerving Beckett thing which works once you relinquish intellectual curiosity and let words and rhythms lap around you like a troubling dream.

The first piece, Not I, is the best known: first performed here forty years ago by Billie Whitelaw. Eight feet above the stage the speaker is a disembodied mouth: bright-lit as a single point in deep blackness, a static twinkling star with lips and teeth delivering – at the speed of thought – a tumbling monologue. Sometimes it is a comical gabble, an Irish sparkle of busyness and explanation; sometimes a shout of pain, as if life and sense were dissolving under the torture that is life.

The second, Footfalls, sees the darkness broken by a vision of Dwan in white tatters, pallid as a candle, patrolling and pacing near a mother’s deathbed and answered at intervals by the sepulchral ancient voice of the dying one. It resolves into a sort of fragment of a lost novel, hinting at half-forgotten things, senseless but focused by the hypnotic dualism of Dwan’s marvellous voice. The third piece is Rockaby: again a woman, maybe the bereaved daughter, prematurely old in beaded black on a rocking chair which moves on its own, her face falling in and out of the light. She speaks a poetic, repetitive, beautifully soporific monotone of decline, “At the end of the day, quiet at the window, famished eyes..” etc.. Until the rocking stops with “fuck life, stop her eyes, rock her off…”

All brilliantly done. And yet at this point my ancestral Irishness – which recognized the authentic sparkle and mischief behind the pain in the first piece – suddenly detected that other and more acccursed Hibernian tone: maudlin and mawkish. Up rose in memory all those poems about moribund mothers gripping trapped sons and daughters in permanent sorrowful helplessness. I thought of all those songs which drone out of RTE’s obscurer corners with lines like “O Lord let the winter go quickly, that the flowers may bloom where she lies”. Or, in a wicked parody from disrespectful modern Ireland, “I am digging up me mother from her lonely Leitrim grave…”. And the mood of acceptance broke, and I felt that Sam B was on the edge conning me. Or himself.
But it has been an hour too consummately well done to regret or forget.

Sponsors: Coutts / American Airlines.
This week sold out at the Court (some day tickets)
But it transfers to Duchess, WC2, 3-15 Feb 0844 482 9672
then touring Cambridge, Birmingham, Lowry
Rating: four

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January 12, 2014 · 10:06 pm

DINOSAUR ZOO Phoenix, WC1, now touring

AUSSIE DINOS RULE

There is a good reason why frazzled British parents cherish Australian nannies: and every cheerful, firm, gung-ho, reliable quality we dream of is exemplified in Lindsey Chaplin. Striding onstage through a forest of weird inflatable Aussie trees in her zookeeper kit, with a bright “G’day!” she demands that the audience of restless small children and parents greet her back. “I like to start happy because by the end of this show some of you will be crying. True”.

She has been hosting this tremdendous puppet hour since 2011 and boy, does this sheila know how to handle us. Everything’s a joke, but everything’s serious too: not only the (considerable) battery of facts about wildlife 65 million years ago, but the management of an unpredictable unfledged audience. “Come on up – you – yeah, nice to be part of the London slow-walking festival…Don’t come up unless you’re asked, OK? And parents, if you own a rogue child…”

There were several rogue children among the ones she did summon up to stroke baby Dryosaursi on puppeteers laps, hypnotize a Leaellynasaurus, assist in gruesome dentistry and throw disgusting looking bundles of guts to an apparently escaped – and monstrously enormous – Titanosaur with wobbling wattles and gigantic razor teeth. Every child was fielded with amiable brilliance, whether rogue or helpful: some of them only three years old. One tiny girl flatly refused to put her head in the Titanosaurs vast mouth and insisted her brother come up instead. No problem. Not that the rest of us were left out of the action: at one point giganic primitive dragonfly Meganeuras erupted suddenly around the audience, flapping on long wobbly poles, and we leapt and shrieked in delighted alarm.

I had not quite known what to expect of Erth’s show, except that the famous company’s puppeteering would be classy, subtle in movement and painstaking in accuracy, and that its creatures – deduced from fossil science – are proudly Australian and therefore even bigger and fiercer than the familar Jurassic-Park lot. But it wears its educational credits with pleasant lightness, eschews Disneyish sentimentality, and is paced cunningly from the first cuddly lap-dinos to the fiercer ones and the immense and unexpected Bronto-neck which concludes the show. The Titanosaur is fabulous. If you stay on, you can go on stage to meet ‘n greet it.

I caught the show at the end of its London mornings at the Phoenix, where it delightfully shared the Irish-bar stage set built for shows of ONCE in the evening (hell, theses are Aussie dinosaurs, they’re comfortable a pub). But the reason to alert you now is that it is off on the road again, from Southend to Scunthorpe and beyond.
And any dino-lover over three should not miss it.

Cue a celebratory touring-mouse –

Rating Four
Touring UK: 29 Jan – 24 April Details: http://www.dinosaurzoolive.com

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January 10, 2014 · 11:45 pm

ONLY OUR OWN – Arts Theatre, WC2

ECHOES OF ANGLO-IRISH ANGST: CRITIC STRUGGLES TO SYMPATHIZE
Full personal disclosure: having a longstanding connection with Ireland I am not a natural empath for the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy displaced after eight centuries of colonial rule. Hated the Somerville and Ross chronicles of “The Irish RM” , with that toff sense of entitlement and casually comic portrait of villagers as sly Papist drunkards. So this play about an Anglo-Irish family “struggling for identity” found me hampered by a sense that despite the 800-year occupation, seventy years after Irish independence the dispossessed descendants should bite the bullet and fit in.

That some of them don’t is the theme of this play by Swedish-born Ann Henning Jocelyn, now married to an Irish peer in Connemara and catching the echoes of Protestant resentment with a keen foreign ear. Her director – Lars Harald Garthe – is Norwegian, and the theme of a claustrophobic family trapped within social change echoes both Ibsen and Strindberg. It lacks, though , the eloquent intensity which makes us feel for Julie, Hedda or Nora: the first half in particular is so lugubrious that you just want to shake the lot of them. No Irish sparkle here.

It is set between 1989 and today: Meg and Andrew (Maef Alexander and Cornelius Garrett) run a salmon fishery in Connemara, with the grim matriarch Lady Eliza uttering cut-glass snobberies at the head of the table. She wants to tell the sullen teenage granddaughter Titania (Alex Gilbert) about 1922, when as a child she saw the rebels burn down her family seat, shoot her brother and give them fifteen minutes to grab their treasures and leave their ancestral lands. In a well-crafted monologue she writes a letter, but only later does it find its mark.

For Titania is resents the isolation of her childhood (no school till 11, then Cheltenham) and mocks her parents‘ toxic snobberies: chillingly, they let a local craftsman stand outside in the rain waiting for his fee, claiming “Their Church won’t allow them to enter our houses”. The grandmother’s funeral in their moribund Protestant church is “family only” to prevent Catholic villagers coming. Weirdly, though, in all their explanations of how the locals are “different”not one of them ever mentions what is going on through the 1990’s in the North: bombings, ceasefires, Orange parades. Anyhow, Titania rebels, has two children by a local farmer, and dumps them on the parents to go to London, call herself Tania and hook an investment banker. Whereon the parents find a new role, start a playgroup, make friends in the village and send little Aoife and Cahal to the nun-run village school. The forbidding shade of Lady Eliza and her 70-year-old grudge fades: but Tania comes back, and reverts to genetic type by being vile and snobbish in a different way.

Henning Jocelyn is rather too keen to hammer home a moral about reconciliation and tidy up the end, though, and there’s always an alarm bell when a character starts quoting her therapist and going on about her “fledgling soul” as Titania does: “ I don’t exist…I”m just an empty shell without a place in the world”. Hmmm.

box office 0207 836 8463 to 1 Feb

Rating three

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January 9, 2014 · 11:21 pm

THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS – DUCHESS, WC2

A TOE-TAPPING TOAD AND SLINKY STOATING

With a caper and a thump and a hippety-hop, a flapping of laundry and a riverbank romp, the Royal Opera House has dipped a first (elegantly pointed) toe in the commercial waters of the West End. On and off over ten years, this sweet production by Will Tuckett has been in the Linbury Studio, beloved by the children of the cognoscenti ballet-savvy. It has a dreamy score by Martin Ward based on the composer George Butterworth – a friend of Vaughan Williams. The narration based on Kenneth Grahame’s book is by the former poet laureate Andrew Motion.

Classy stuff: and now the diminutive but dignified Duchess fits it like a glove. Sir Tony Robinson, taking time off from arguing with Michael Gove about Blackadder, is an avuncular narrator, sharing a ramshackle attic set (old wardrobes, a rocking-horse, packing-cases) with the wild creatures the book brings to life: Mole’s first appearance is from a rolled up carpet, blinking in specs and a miner’s lamp; Ratty wears his rowing-boat as a bustle and springy rabbits, ducks and butterflies join the summery dance. A particular delight is the first pas-de-deux between Clemmie Sveaas as a bumbling, gradually enlivening Mole and Will Kemp’s spry Ratty (not for nothing was he Matthew Bourne’s chief Swan).

The animal characters never speak, though three times, gloriously, they sing Grahame’s verses; the story is carried by Robinson. At first I felt Motion’s text a bit over-lush (indeed, the final coda about friendship and memory proves him to be, if possible, an even more soppy Edwardian moralist than Grahame himself). But Cris Penfold’s Toad – a green-haired bounder as hyper as a five-year-old on a sugar rush – cuts through the schmaltz and by the time the paternal Badger (Christopher Akrill) anxiously puts a rabbit’s ears over its eyes to prevent it seeing Toad’s crash, I was hooked. There are slow dreamy passages which are – in the best possible sense – soporific: children need that concentrated gentleness as much as panto larks. Well, by this time of year we all do.
It is also Badger who brings out Motion’s best poetry, evoking his devotion to dark quiet tunnels and “rage against the rush and gaudiness of things”. But it is Grahame’s own carol, sung by fieldmice with lanterns coming down the aisle in snowfall, which brought the first sentimental tear to the eye.

Tuckett’s choreography is terrific, gleefully mashing up ballet, tap, mime and the odd dash of capoeira. Stoats, weasels and an enormous Judge (with paper spills for a wig) are designed by master-puppeteer Toby Olié. The interval is enlivened by a chase through the auditorium and foyer with Toad in his car and policemen with helmets and whistles. And then Ewan Wardrop (formerly otter and weasel) becomes a dragged-up gaoler’s daughter in print dress and loud boots, and goes admirably nuts in a frock-swap with the equally frenzied Toad.
My inner six-year-old loved that.

Box office: http://www.roh.org.uk 020 7304 4000 (no booking fee)  0844 482 9672 (booking fee) To 1 Feb

Rating: four and a spare balletomouse for luck

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January 8, 2014 · 11:52 pm

BRING UP THE BODIES SWAN, STRATFORD

AND SO IT GOES ON…

“Intrigue feeds upon itself” says Thomas Cromwell, in the second part of this magnificent and terrifying chronicle. We find Anne Boleyn restless, fiercely frivolous, sensing the net closing around her, and Henry turning his eyes on Leah Brotherhead’s Jane Seymour: a pale, small, carefully chaste creature whose high sweet enunciation has just enough weirdness in it to make her seem a kind of sybil. More women to the fore now: closet gossip from sour Lady Rochford , wanton Lady Worcester and the camp young lutanist (Joey Batey) who once played for Wolsey and now haunts the rustling chambers of the |Queen. And more street rumours – comic, dangerous, revealing – from Piero Niel Mee as Cromwell’s rascally French servant.

Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More are ghosts now: ironic, strolling across the stage in Cromwell’s troubled memory. The Earls of Suffolk and Norfolk are more crudely bombastic than ever, the Boleyn tribe on the defensive, and Cromwell himself depended on by the King. He is forced into ever twistier manoeuvres to serve that royal terror: indeed there were moments during his interrogation of Boleyn’s supposed lovers when our hero seemed – uneasily, shockingly – to be corrupting like a slow-burning Macbeth.

But then subtle regret, pain and old resentments cross Ben Miles’ expressive face beneath the sober puritan cap, and you ache again for a man too thoughtful, practical and sceptical for a vainglorious court and whimsical dictator. Terrible for any man of conscience to have say flatly to a shocked son: “Once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of your enemy, his destruction must be swift. It must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought…his dog answering your whistle!”.

Despite brief moments when the telescoping of dense narrative threatened to be a touch Blackadderish, it was impossible not to be borne along. One caveat: for non-readers of the novels this seond play might not stand alone with clarity as the first does. Best to arrive clear about the history and narrative of the first part. Tremendous storytelling, though, on any terms: and a vivid evocation of a monarch threatened on all sides: from a Catholic Europe outraged by the exile of Queen Katherine, from arrogant noble families at home jockeying for position. Meanwhile theologians like Cranmer (Giles Taylor) tell him that power descends to the King from God, while pragmatists like Cromwell quietly know that it only rises from the uncertain docility of a hungry populace.

Thus an oversimplified patch of history becomes fresh, and the RSC demonstrates its high worth and staunch values. I am not the only one who left this double day, after six hours and two plays, saying that if Hilary Mantel had yet written the third – and Poulton and Herrin presented it – we would willingly have stayed till dawn.

box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk

rating: four .
Except that if you see both plays, somehow it adds up to a triumphant
five

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January 8, 2014 · 5:26 pm

WOLF HALL – Swan, Stratford upon Avon

THOMAS CROMWELL WALKS AGAIN. A NON-READER IS ENTRANCED.

“Between Christmas Day and Epiphany God permits the dead to walk”. So says Henry VIII, sleepless in the dawn, summoning his watchful fixer Cromwell to steer him through a political and religious quagmire. So, fittingly in this Epiphany week, the long-dead Tudor court too must walk again. Hilary Mantel’s two intensively researched, hugely praised novels reimagined the English Reformation around the figure of the lawyer and adviser Thomas Cromwell; now they are brought to the stage in an adaptation by Mike Poulton, under Jeremy Herrin’s direction.

They will have two audiences: those who loved the books, and those who stalled at Mantel’s stylistic density, gave up, and hope to be sent back to them. I am one such, and can speak only for those coming to it fresh, armed only with bare bones of history. And I was enraptured, from the first moments of bantering impatience between Paul Jesson’s flamboyant Cardinal Wolsey and Ben Miles as his devoted Cromwell. Danger fizzes in the air, evoking a world where an incautious word meant death; Cromwell reads Luther and Tyndale but must hide the books when Thomas More’s men come searching (memories arise of the marvellous Written On The Heart , here two years ago). This play takes us from the decline of Wolsey’s influence and the danger to his follower, through the intricacies of the King’s divorce and defiance of the Pope, to Boleyn’s first – but female – child, her miscarriage and Henry’s convenient doubts of her chastity. It ends with the defiance of Thomas More, previously caricatured as a fanatic but finally an honest stubborn martyr. Which underlines the subtle dramatic strength of this narrative: there are no out-and-out villains.

Snobs and fools, cynical hedonists, an impatient King, but no villains. Ben Miles is superb as Mantel’s rehabilitated vision of Cromwell: no scheming self-seeker but a modern politician stranded in an age of absolute monarchy and superstition, a self-made man of formidable intelligence, beaten child, adventurer across Europe. Poulton’s text is vigorous without anachronism and never archaic; fragments of Cromwell’s back-story which the novel’s readers may regret are filled in with casual skill in conversational asides. Herrin’s stagings, with never a sense of rush, makes pictures speak thousand words: the death of Cromwell’s wife, the downfall of Wolsey, brief simpering appearances of Jane Seymour prefiguring the King’s later marital disasters. Court dances are metaphors for shifting influence; religious moments are balanced between angry politics and thoughtful lines like Cromwell’s shrugging protestation that the Bible makes no mention of “Monks. Or nuns – or purgatory, or fasting – or relics or priests..I’ve never found where it says pope..”

Altogether, it crackles with political, emotional and psychological force. Lydia Leonard’s Boleyn is flirtatious and ferocious, shriller as her danger increases; Lucy Briers’ Katherine chillingly intense, Nathaniel Parker’s Henry bluff, arrogant, persuadable; John Ramm sullenly righeous as More. Mantel’s notes in the playscript are detailed and fascinating, but what is created before us onstage is something fresh: theatre’s miracle of collaboration.

And I would hate you to think there are no jokes. There’s an Ipswich joke, a dead rat joke, a chamberpot, and many dry lines. My favourite is Cromwell’s exasperated private desire to say to the half-separated King “Oh, sort it out, Harry, you’re the scandal of the parish!”
I write this after the first play. Later I will report on the sequel. So far, I am thrilled.
box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk

rating: four

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January 7, 2014 · 10:34 pm

BLOODSHOT – St JAMES’ THEATRE, SW1

LOWLIFE , HIGH DRAMA AND DRINK

The candles on our tables gutter in their glass shades, hands tighten round drinks, spurts of relieved laughter meet dry jokes, stillness respects moments of poignant humanity. Moody monochrome views of a battered 1957 London never distract from the man onstage. It’s good to be transported, and have a world built for you in words.

Douglas Post’s play suits the current theatrical zeitgeist, which seems to be in love with the lowlife glamour of sixty years ago. We have had Butterworth’s rock ‘n roll gangsters in the Mojo revival, Keeler and Stephen Ward chronicling the Profumo scandal, King Lear reimagined as a Kray brother down in Bath. Now, in the St James’ cosy downstairs cabaret space, comes this gorgeous little thriller. It is performed alone by the remarkable Simon Slater (how did this subtle actor get buried in Mamma Mia for four years? Even if he was also busy composing scores like the Olivier-nominated Constellations music?). Patrick Sandford , who first put this on at the Nuffield, directs.

The hero Derek is an emotional casualty of those unsettled postwar years: an ex-police photographer who spent the Blitz recording terrible mutilations, veiled the horrors with drink, blew his promotion, and ended up in peacetime photographing victims of more personal violence, and drinking even more. This is economically and unselfpityingly related, with just enough raw edges of emotion to prevent machismo or prurience. Jobless and broke in a bedsit, he receives a commission to follow and covertly photograph a young black woman, one of the Windrush immigrant generation crowding Notting Hill. From a mere meal-ticket she becomes his muse: when she is killed he plunges with naive indignation into a fetid nightclub underworld to find her persecutors.

In any virtuoso solo show – from Fiona Shaw to Dame Edna – there is double pleasure. You can be happily lost in the narrative itself, but on another level admire – as if in an Olympic arena – the lone performer’s emotional, physical and vocal stamina. Slater not only deploys a likeable, damaged Graham-Greeneish charm as the narrator, but evokes the others: he plays the saxophone with jazzy defiance as the American bandleader Bryant, swallows razor-blades as a Russian conjurer, and delivers a rattling Irish song-and-gag routine as McKinley the comic. In between, faultlessly, he is Derek: wrestling not only with a whodunnit but with his own lonely, bruised longing for beauty.

There are lovely grace-notes: references to Sputnik, the Coronation, the buzzing social and cultural changes. Once the jazzman, bitterly sneers “You wanna know about the future?” and plays a few raucous bars of Rock Around the Clock before spitting ‘My thing is dying!”.

As for the resolution, it is as realistically squalid as any Mickey Spillane fan could wish; yet then it twists, extraordinarily and almost redemptively. A good yarn, superbly told.

box office 0844 264 2140 http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk to 25 Jan Sponsor: Nourish

Rating: four

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January 4, 2014 · 10:59 pm

THE CANTERVILLE GHOST Felixstowe/ Ipswich

CANTERVILLE MEETS VAUDEVILLE – on the road
Here’s a bit of fun to report, the last rich dregs of Christmas before theatrecat puts on a straight face and heads to Stratford. Last year Common Ground – the tiny community theatre company led by Julian Harries and director-composer Pat Whymark – gave us a blissful spoof murder mystery with silly wigs and Round-the-Horneish surrealism. This time they seize on Oscar Wilde’s short story The Canterville Ghost, in which an overconfident American diplomatic family rent a stately home and defy the resident ghost with a scornful “We come from a modern country!”

In the original, ironic comedy is mingled with romantic pathos. The ghost struggles to keep up the traditional bloodstain on the hall floor against the power of Pinkerton’s Patent Stain Remover, and is affronted when his rattling chains are met with a tranquilly helpful offer of Tammany’s Lubricant. But ultimately it is the innocent young daughter, Virginia, who by weeping for his ancient sins achieves him forgiveness and rest in the garden of death. As a child I adored the story: so given the irrepressible larkiness of this team, it was gratifying to hear the cast of six begin, solemnly straight and melodious, by harmonizing Wilde’s “When a golden girl can win / Prayer from out the lips of sin…”

Following this salute to the poignant stuff, however, they revert to their Kenneth-Horne-meets-panto mode, and when the young heroine eventually does shed a tear it is of another kind (blame the most unlikely performance of the Angel of Death you’ll see all winter) So, no Victorian mawkishness but rather an equally Victorian vaudeville treatment. There’s a puppet lapdog, a speaking portrait, a lot of witty props, a depressed posh raven and two barmily inventive unWildean interludes in which the Ghost reminisces about a cruise ship he went on or relates a complicated miniature epic involving the wicked showman Jeremiah Squanderbeef using a severed head as a coconut-shy until the headless highwayman Mad Jack McFlapjack reclaims it.

Its gusto and humour carry the day, even in a damp church-hall matinee where I caught the penultimate tour date. As the Ghost, Harries roams around in a magnificent Tudor outfit enunciating like Donald Sinden, and embroiders on Wilde’s jokes about the ghost’s ability to manifest in any form (“Henry Sawyer the poisoned Lawyer – Robert Rummer the Strangled Plumber” etc). The Americans are played note-perfect by Stefan Atkinson as Hiram, sweet-faced Lorna Garside as Virginia and an irresistibly over-the-top Alice Mottram as the wife prone to invented mid-West slang. Whymark’s songs offer pleasingly groansome lyrics like “He makes our lives unbearable, lucky we ain’t scare-able” . There are low jokes to get the younger audience members snorting, and cleverer ones like the Ghost’s worry about impersonating Satan because “he’s touchy about copyright”. Wilde would like that.

Tour concludes at Wolsey Studio, Ipswich 9-11 Jan
box office 07928 765153 http://www.commongroundtc.co.uk

Rating: three

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December 21, 2013 · 7:42 pm

HAPPY CHRISTMAS and a showy New Year!

…theatrecat.com will be back in the New Year with Wolf Hall and wartime and the new Wanamaker, and Beckett and Cleopatra and maybe even the odd panto. Thank you all, very much, for following this rogue website and giving head-space to a theatre moggy thrown out in the rain without a newspaper to shelter under.
And remember – at least 40 of the plays reviewed here are still running into January, and many are well worth seeing

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December 20, 2013 · 12:58 am

The Apollo Theatre: a tribute

This is not a theatre-news website, but it wishes to extend sympathy to the audience and cast of The Curious Affair of the Dog in the Night-Time, and to Nica Burns and her staff at Nimax Theatres, after tonight’s structural collapse.
And admiration to those who reportedly evacuated without panic, and to the front-of-house team who assisted them. There will be some doomsaying about our old Victorian and Edwardian theatres, but this rare and shocking event will not, I hope, diminish the affection and enjoyment we get from them. And will do for many years to come.

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December 20, 2013 · 12:47 am

STEPHEN WARD – Aldwych, WC1

SLEAZE AND SCANDAL IN THE SIXTIES

There is a painfully beautiful song in the second Act of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s new musical about the 1963 Profumo affair, a potential classic. “Hopeless when it comes to you” is sung by Joanna Riding as Valerie Hobson, the war minister’s loyal wife, when he has admitted the affair with Christine Keeler and his lie to Parliament. It feels inevitable that she should have the best number, because in this fascinating but squalid tale Hobson is the only untainted character.

Everyone else, from the Home Secretary to the press pack and the police, is either lecherous, naive, mendacious, prurient, malicious or vengefully corrupt. The teenage girls at the heart of it, Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies, are merely naive good-time teens; Yevgeny Ivanov, the fleeting lover who added a Cold-war frisson to the scandal, is just an honest-to-god Russian spy with a taste for champagne.

But the rest are a terrible shower. And Stephen Ward, the high-society osteopath and portrait painter who liked introducing teenage beauties to middle-aged married men and hearing reports of the sex, is frankly a sleazebag. Not a villain, not a pimp , but dislikeable. Which is a problem tougher than most musical-theatre creators ever take on: Lord Lloyd-Webber deserved his emotional press night bow among his cast for having a go. If you believe, as I do, that there is nothing the form should not attempt, you must salute him.

His driving force is the belief – substantiated often , most cogently in a new book by Geoffrey Robertson QC – that Ward was stitched up by the establishment. Not only because the affair toppled the Minister for War and the Macmillan government, but because the exposure of his louche lifestyle – cabaret girls, shag-happy aristocrats, Krays and Rachman and drug dealers – forced Britain to look itself in the eye and admit that a certain looseness had taken hold, right at the top. Middle Britain became one vast, horrified twitching curtain. I am just old enough to remember it.

The problem faced by Christopher Hampton’s book (extra lyrics by Don Black) is acknowledging the miscarriage of justice without making Ward an improbable innocent. He is the narrator – emerging piquantly from a Blackpool waxwork chamber-of-horrors between Hitler and Genghis Khan – with a lyric about how he only tried “to be kind”. Alexander Hanson is a beautiful singer and a winning presence, but the character can never be likeable. We see him befriending the vulnerable Keeler without sex – a proxy seducer, a Pandarus promoting her affairs with others. We get lovely‘60s pastiche numbers and interesting musical subtlety (all the orchestrations are Lloyd-Webber’s own); in a character-development I would like to see more, of we see Keeler becoming coarser, more dissonant and cynical (Charlotte Spencer carries that well). There is a good duet with the minxier Mandy (the real one, still glamorous at pensionable age, was in the front rows last night).

Tellingly we see Ward the only clothed one in a funny rum-ti-tum orgy scene, and glimpse his fantasy of himself as a back-channel diplomatic fixer. As the net closes, and with sinister aggressive crashing chords the awful press and worse police make a corrupt case against him, he sits like a reverse image of the Phantom, at the receiving end of the angry music instead of singing it. That works.

Over a year ago the composer told me he was working on this, and I asked how he would handle Ward’s despairing suicide after the hostile summing-up. In the event he does it with a roaringly defiant man still clutching his final fantasy, of himself as a human sacrifice. That works. I can’t predict immortality for this show, but am not sorry to have been there.

box office 0844 847 2379 to March

Rating: four

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December 19, 2013 · 12:24 am

WENDY & PETER PAN Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

NEVERLAND HAS ITS FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS RAISED

You can tick off reasons why this is just what the RSC should do. A fresh commission from a rising playwright, Ella Hickson; an intellectually and morally ambitious reinterpretation of a classic; a family show for the season with flying and sword-fights, superb sets full of surprises by Colin Richmond, and an internationally respected director , Jonathan Munby.

But you can’t win them all. And for all its merits this long, sprawling show doesn’t quite jell. Hickson reframes J.M.Barrie’s tale around Wendy and her mother, gets rid of Nana the dog and offers themes of family grief and feminism. Fair enough: Barrie’s elder brother died leaving an inconsolable mother, and it is not hard to trace the idea of the Lost Boys and the consoling myth of a Neverland of boy-fun which nonetheless yearns for a mother. Also, the Suffragette movement was hot in 1904, so it is playful to challenge the domestic entrapment of Wendy and raise Mrs Darling’s political consciousness in a coda.

It starts in the nursery with a romping family game . The boys are not small children but early adolescents, John (Jolyon Coy) a public-school prefect type and relegating Wendy to being a rescued damsel: “You must be very very sad, very very impressed and very very grateful”. It is not Peter Pan who arrives first, but the consumptive deathbed of brother Tom. The doctor is Arthur Kyeyune, who strikingly doubles later as the silent crocodile in a top-hat and trailing coat reminiscent of a voodoo Baron Samedi. The ticking of his clock is the ticking of time and mortality for us all.

Peter arrives, they all fly on a spectacular circling mobile, and Tinkerbell is a thumping, sarcastic, ginger-haired Waynetta Slob of a fairy with a vast pink tutu and a stroppy EastEnders attitude. There is a refreshing slanginess to Hickson’s dialogue, with plenty of “Bog off!” and “Do one!”. Tiger Lily (a she-macho Michelle Asante) inculcatesWendy with Girl Power. But for all the delight of the underground den and the pirate ship, the whooping boyish larkiness gets tedious, overdone perhaps to contrast with sensible liberated girlhood. And Peter (Sam Swann) is too hyperactive and coldly inhuman for sympathy. It all sits uncomfortably alongside the mournful preoccupation of Wendy (Fiona Button) with finding her lost brother. One minute she’s resisting Captain Hook’s creepy attempts to woo her with a balldress and tiara, the next showing solidarity with Tiger Lily, then back to Barrie whimsy when she finds out (on a flying bed with Peter, hmmm) that dead brothers become stars twinkling with maternal tears, and can’t get to Neverland till their families stop grieving.

Interesting themes, not balanced or woven satisfyingly together. Not a bad family outing, though: Tinkerbell is a rude delight, and I do appreciate a thoroughly camp Captain Hook (Guy Henry) suffering from existential doubts and failing to notice that Pirate Smee is in love with him and hopefully collecting colour swatches for their cottage together. Very modern.

box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 2 March

rating: three

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December 17, 2013 · 11:32 pm

CORIOLANUS – Donmar, WC2

PLEBS AND POLITICS, SAVAGE AND STARK
The plebs are angry, scrawling demands for grain on the bare back wall, modern in hoodies and jeans. They reckon the senators get all the good stuff. Smooth-talking Menenius (Mark Gatiss) elegantly expounds the metaphor of the belly which seems to steal the food but actually supports the limbs and brain. Unimpressed, the Roman mob insist on two of their own as Tribunes, a fledgling democracy.

But there’s a war on with the Volscii, and Caius Martius Coriolanus has come home a bloodstained hero, to be acclaimed Consul. Tom Hiddleston takes centre stage: lean , hawkish, leathered, arrogant: accustomed to urge his troops by taunting them, he promptly demonstrates that soldierly command does not necessarily make a peacetme leader. He insults the “beastly plebeians…crows that peck the eagles..rotten breath of fetid marsh” (many a minister must envy this refreshing frankness) . The people’s tribunes (Helen Schlesinger and Elliot Levey, beautifully smug) banish him.

Retorting “I banish YOU!” he heads to Antium to offer his services or his bared throat to his former enemy Aufidius (Hadley Fraser). Who, in a remarkable homoerotic moment diluted by “Know thou first, I love the maid I married” lavishly embraces and recruits him to sack Rome. Fellow Volscii (who conveniently all talk Yorkshire) look on stunned: for there are merciful moments in Josie Rourke’s thrilling, headlong, tragedy-driven production where she allows us a gust of laughter.

After Phyllida Lloyd’s fine all-woman Julius Caesar, the Donmar once again offers raw, political Shakespeare proving that an intimate space can contain epic savagery and the fate of empires. The staging is simple, fast-moving, the main props chairs, but has dramatically clever moments. Hiddleston in the first act stands beneath a shower of water wincing as his many wounds are struck, an evocation of the reality of pain often missing in gung-ho warrior depictions. Great moments too for Mark Gatiss’ Menenius, watching helpless as his friend and protegé ruins himself, murmuring “He is grown from man to dragon”.

But the tremendous thing about this play, not performed as often as other Shakespeariana, is the powerful role of Coriolanus’ mother, Volumnia: ferocious, devoted, proud of every scar but warning “submit you to the people’s voices!”. Deborah Findlay beautifully plays it, allowing absurdities in her martial enthusiasm but stripping her heart bare in desperation at the final cathartic scene when, with his wife and son, she must beg him not to destroy the city.

The hero, famously enigmatic with barely any soliloquy, sometimes seems just a ruthless hard-bodied column of offended pride and nihilism, snarling “Wife, mother, child, I know not”. Only at last does he move towards a suicidal redemption. Hiddleston carries this strange stark part with a frozen damaged dignity, thawing only with his mother : he and Findlay create thrilling moments of mutuality, the invisible bond crackling between them.

Another triumph, then. But I must murmur that ever since Sam Mendes hung Kevin Spacey’s Richard III up by the ankles at the Old Vic, we are getting tired of up-endings: this season alone chaps dangled head-down in Mojo, Let The Right One In, and now this. Don’t want to go back to the monotony of the classic “RSC Armpit Death” sword thrust, but it is time to suspend suspensions.

box office 0844 871 7624 to 8 feb.
Production sponsors: Radisson Blu Edwardian / C and S Sherling. Ongoing partner: Barclays.

rating: four
box office   0844 871 7624   to 8 feb.
Production sponsors: Radisson Blu Edwardian / C and S Sherling.   Ongoing partner: Barclays.

Production will be on 300 screens nationwide on 30 January http://www.ntlive.com

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December 16, 2013 · 11:25 pm

FORTUNE’S FOOL – Old Vic, SE1

LONELINESS, LONGING, A LINEN CUPBOARD: A HEARTSHAKING REVIVAL

1848 in rural Russia: early morning in the great house, maids opening up. High in the great linen-cupboard a man sleeps, yet a footman brings him his trousers. It’s a neat metaphor Ivan Turgenev offers us for the status of Kuzovkin (Iain Glen) on the 1848 estate. He is chivvied by bustling servants, relegated to a corner with his (as yet inexplicably) anxious friend Ivanov, but is no servant. He was the impoverished, patronized “fool” to the late owner, and seven years on still hangs around. Waiting, as they all are, for the return of the estate’s young heiress (Lucy Briggs-Owen) and her important St Petersburg husband.

Domestic fuss makes for comedy; but this gripping, rarely seen revival (new to the West End, though played in Chichester in 2006 and on Broadway) is tragicomic: profound and angry. The first act sees young Olga’s cheerful recognition of old Kuzovskin and her prim husband’s inspection of accounts, but in the midst of it arrives the neighbour Tropatchov (Richard McCabe), a stout snobbish fop in a gold waistcoat, with black curly hair like an asymmetric Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He is insistent, insolent, overconfident to the point of psychopathy, prone to breaking into pretentious French. He trails an impoverished insulted companion (as essential to a Tsarist grandee, it seems, as a parasol to his lady). The young host has no control: they get Kuzovskin drunk, goad him to explain the tedious intricacies of the court case which made him homeless, and with increasing nastiness force him to sing for his supper, throw drink over him and humiliate him.

For a time I could not see where this was going: the end of Act I is the Bullingdon dinner from hell. But in the last line the “fool” blows complacency to smithereens with a revelation I didn’t read the play before, as there is joy in coming afresh to a classic: I won’t spoil it. But in the second act the household try to resolve it with varying degrees of panic, hypocrisy and tenderness. Which takes us into a wrenching , beautifully told scene of sadness, longing and love. Lucy Briggs-Owen, who so often has lit up RSC evenings of late, rises from her vivid girlish playfulness to heights of truthful emotion. Glen, whose bendy-legged humiliation is still fresh in our memory, becomes a sort of Lear: when he says ‘My heart is broken, that’s all. It wasn’t much of a heart” I shook in my seat.

Director Lucy Bailey has a marvellous cast. McCabe – last seen as Harold Wilson – is an astonishing Tropachov, and it is an astonishing part: ludicrous, buffoonish, yet so horrifying in its dangerous spite that you catch your breath in terror for the victims of his teasing threats. The genius of Turgenev – and of Mike Poulton’s flawlessly convincing adaptation – is that this preening horror comes after we have witnessed the profound pain of the central pair.

By contrast, the role of Pavel the young husband (Alexander Vlahos) is difficult in the opposite way: a well-meaning prig, victim of the stifling fin-de-siecle convention the play kicks against. But towering over them all is Iain Glen as Kuzovkin; a coward afraid of “the world outside – poverty, unkindness, the insolence of life” but clinging to the core of love, and knowing his own folly and weakness so well that he achieves a dignity not far from holiness. A very Russian figure. It is the glory of great theatre, to carry us into other times, other hearts, and make us love them.

box office 0844 8717628 to 22 Feb

rating: five

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December 16, 2013 · 12:03 am

PETER PAN GOES WRONG – Pleasance theatre, Islington N1

JOYFUL DISASTERS FROM COMEDY MASTERS

The director is grandiose as only a student thesp can be; his assistant (“Co-director” he snaps) surly. The actors playing Pan and Wendy are an item, envied by the lovesick crocodile – who only got cast because his uncle’s outboard-motor powers the revolve. Not always at the right moment. The ASM has split 7-up on the sound- board, which keeps interpolating disastrous audition tapes and backstage discussions, and Tinkerbell’s tutu-lights are having to be run off the mains, on a long cable. Ouch.

Welcome back to the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, accident-prone, incompetent and fictional. Mischief Theatre, their creators, are the opposite: precisely disciplined and courageous comedy masters. The only quality they share with their avatars is ambition. I cheered for their last sellout production The Play That Goes Wrong, which showed a spoof murder-mystery dissolving into chaos and recrimination, and ran at a tight 70 minutes. So I wondered anxiously whether they could sustain his two-act, two-hour show with the same central (and elderly) joke about am-dram hitting the rocks. Even with the wily Adam Meggido joining as director.

Shouldn’t have worried. Despite one cancelled preview when a key performer broke her foot (Sophie Whittaker stands in, excellently) they triumph again. Jonathan Sayer and Henries Shields and Lewis are the authors again, but stick close to J.M.Barrie’s feyly magical text, causing an extra layer of incongruity. And it helps that they are all young – a few years out of LAMDA – and playing the part of a student club. So they can’t fall back on the clichés of this genre: fruity old thesps, ageing diva, weary director. The joke is that the Cornley lot are trying really, really hard, without experience: they freeze in horror, repeat lines in vain, panic.

The slapstick is masterly, including tricks performed by the sets (by Martin Thomas), and there’s sharply timed lighting, smoke and sound. The movement is heroic: Nell Mooney is credited as choreographer, and may they forgive her for those terrifying thuds and pratfalls: this must be the physically bravest cast in Britain. The first act in particular is full of shocks – I involuntarily clapped my hand over my mouth more than once – and creates disasters so weepingly funny that people snorted. Critics rarely laugh out loud – what with the notebook – but I heard a mad cackle from myself at the extended joke of Nana The Dog (Lewis) getting jammed in his dog-flap for a whole scene. I cannot reveal the disaster of the children’s bunks, or the scissors gag, or why the Cornleys’ stage manager becomes Peter Pan.

I had assumed they wouldn’t attempt flying: wrong again. I will observe only that there is Olivier-standard skill in placing a hip-harness in such a way that cast members find themselves delivering key lines upside down, and even more skill in the real stage crew – led by Thomas Platt – controlling the wires in such a lethally uncontrolled way. Gorgeous.

box office http://www.pleasance.co.uk 020 7609 1800 to 5 Jan

rating: five

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December 13, 2013 · 4:54 pm

THE ELEPHANTOM – National Theatre Shed SE1

TWERKING INFLATABLE ELEPHANTS! THAT’S MORE LIKE IT!

For all my pleading I was unable to borrow a child for this 4+ production (school hours, bah humbug!) . But I sat next to one who was, his mother admitted, only just three. So the first appearance of the life-size, inflatable-bodied sky-blue ghost elephant produced a nervous murmur and a retreat to the maternal bosom.

To be fair, it appears first by night when the heroine (Audrey Brisson, tiny and indomitable) is tucked up in bed with the lights out. It would unsettle anyone to find the bedclothes suddenly inflating, pushed away by a luminous ballooning interloper who rejoins his solid head (creeping in with two puppetteers in view) and galumphs around chuckling basso-profundo. But by the time she accepts a sucky kiss from the trunk and a cuddle of his crepey, bouncy tummy, the school parties round the stage were firmly on the Elephantom’s side, reaching out to touch his airy backside. And even my smaller companion was staring, uncertain but excited. It is no bad thing to be a bit scared in a theatre and get over it.

I hadn’t known Ross Collins’ book, but in Ben Power’s adaptation the story of the troublesome visitor is told without words, clearly and wittily in physical moves and mutters. A humdrum day with parents, breakfast, school and TV is established, Laura Cubitt and Tim Lewis semi-stylized as the busy unseeing parents, Avye Leventis hilarious as a teacher scuttling about with box-files and a hairdo full of pencils and spare specs. The silent-movie jerkiness of the adults makes the elephant’s bulging, floating absurdity all the more natural.

At first he just pinches food, plays tricks and commandeers the remote control whenever she is alone; but next night he gets above himself and invites friends. Whereon, with whoops and cheers, we see how much havoc a gang of disco-dancing baby elephantoms can wreak in a living room. They twerk the front rows and lead a conga line: my tiny neighbour was humming along enchantedly by now (there’s a live band overhead, alongside a frieze of lighted houses which provide the final unexpected joke).

At last Grandma, who being more mature can see the creature, takes the girl to consult a ghost-removal company. David Emmings (and assorted body parts of others) do vaudeville trick-hands puppetry behind a desk, and there is an exhilarating battle through a warehouse of animated boxes to find a way to de-elephant the home. All this, as I say, is evoked without dialogue but with perfect clarity: direction is split between master-puppetteers Toby Olie and Finn Caldwell , with input from Marianne Elliott and design by Samuel Wyer.

The puppetry is superb, as you’d expect, and full of heart. Older children will love a beautiful short essay in the programme on how to make objects come alive. Younger ones – well, they’ll talk for weeks about big blue flying naughty elephants. So will I.

box office 020 7452 3000 to 11 Jan Shed partner: Neptune

rating: four

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December 12, 2013 · 11:49 pm

AMERICAN PSYCHO – Almeida, N1

STABBING, SHAGGING, SNIGGERING, BUT EVER SO STYLISH

What is this neon box rising from the floor, with Matt Smith inside it? Can it be the Tardis? Nope: a sunbed, and the former Dr Who has a cold unfamiliar stare in his deep-set ferret eyes and nothing on except for bulging white YSL knickers. He enumerates shower products as he shrugs on his immaculate suit. Around us in the auditorium the chorus croons “He is clean. A killing machine, he is so clean”.

It’s definitely a coup for Rupert Goold’s Almeida, co-producers Headlong and Act 4 Entertainment: a world premiere of Duncan Sheik’s musical from Bret Easton Ellis’ cultish novel about a 1980’s Wall Street trader. Suffering from an existential inner void (the author was 26, go figure) the hero Bateman wants to vanish into a crack in the urinal wall but alleviates it instead by murdering people, especially young women, chopping them up, chewing bits of them and pleasuring himself with the remains. The programme reminds us that the book was called “Numbingly boring, deeply and extremely disgusting” by one critic while another cooed “A careful, important novel”. Some deem it feminist, others a wallow of misogyny and homophobia. So the musical could be either a darkly clever (if dated) satire on 80’s materialism, or just a chance to show bloodstained female thighs while integrating cheesy soft-rock tracks nostalgic to people old enough to afford tickets.

It’s a bit of both. And since it stars Matt Smith as the anti-hero Bateman, it has pretty well sold out anyway. Rupert Goold directs in his most extreme flash-Harry mood, with Es Devlin’s designs and the Almeida’s best machinery. There’s pop-up furniture and taxi seats (at one point a pop-up Tom Cruise in aviators rises from the floor). Elegant double revolves bear disco ensemble choreography (by Lynne Page) freezing to jerkiness with Bateman stabbing and shagging in their midst. Brilliant projections evoke the chaos of the hero’s mind and memory, something which Matt Smith – encouraged to narrate and perform with a dead-eyed deadpan demeanour – has little chance to do for himself.

Obscene? Objectionable? Not really: less than the book itself, so jokey is the style. There is plenty of nervous sniggering in the stalls. I was least happy about the necrophiliac moment with the stabbed girl in the disco scene, and the later line “She annoyed me, so I crucified her with a nail-gun”. Whereas a friend who went on Wednesday says that she drew the line at the bit where Bateman sodomizes a giant stuffed pink rabbit with his girlfriend underneath it.

Some of the numbers are genuinely funny, especially the chorus of hair-flicking Carrie-Bradshaw socialites. Trouble is, it’s all style and very little substance. We have been shaking our heads over the Gordon Gekkos of the Wall Street boom for two decades, and fascination with serial killers is taste not all of us have acquired. The only recognizably human character, beautifully played by Cassandra Compton, is the secretary Jean. And most of the music, though beautifully rendered, is monotonous and unengaging.

box office 0207 359 4404 to 1 feb Sponsor: Mr Porter.com Partner: Aspen

rating: two

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December 11, 2013 · 5:18 pm

THAT DAY WE SANG – Royal Exchange, Manchester

A JEWEL FROM THE NORTH, AN ECHO FROM THE PAST

Forget Acorn Antiques, fun though that was. Victoria Wood’s stage musical, written a couple of years ago for the Manchester Festival, has the trademark wit and observation running alongside the other strain of her genius: the ability to show everyday uncomplaining pain, and salute bleak lives as they grope towards late-flowering redemption. Brilliant, simple, beautiful.

Pure Wood, it belies the theory that musicals only emerge from infinite rewrites and much squabbling and switching lyricists. It deals with the real moment in 1929 when a choir of Manchester schoolchildren, many the poorest, recorded Purcell’s “Nymphs and Shepherds” with the Halle Orchestra. Listen, watch, have a weep: it’s on http://tinyurl.com/o4dv4au.

Some were reunited forty years on at Granada TV, and Wood’s four fictional characters begin there, hearing the music again after years. Frank and Dorothy live in a carapace of prosperous 1960’s Mancunian smugness (“Die-stamping doesn’t just happen, you know”) and patronize Tubby and Enid ,who have never met although once they harmonized: girls and boys were separated in the ‘20s). Tubby is a bravely joking, selfconscious middle-aged bachelor with a bit of a gut, who looked after his mother till her death. Only in the flashbacks to 1929 do we glimpse the bitter woman he has been jollying along: abandoned by a feckless band-singer husband, she banned his father’s record and tried to keep him from the children’s choir.

The flashback of his audition, wonderfully sung by one of the rotating young cast, provides a shivery Billy-Elliot moment of recognition: a child of poverty with high art in his bones. We see Enid as repressed and awkward, drab victim of a carelessly controlling boss-lover. “Where is that bright eyed child? When was I reconciled / To seeing the day today in shades of beige and grey?”. In another unforgettable barnstorming solo (rhyming sex-tricks with Scalextrix) Anna Francolini rises from wistfulness into a number with wicked echoes of Chicago. Stops the show.

There are nice retro touches: a Golden Egg cafe and the stellar number when the posher couple “journey in to the Berni Inn” . A revolving table surrounded by gateau-wielding waiters heralds a patronizing chorus of “You’ll have the learn the blarney and fancy words like garni”. But the simple round staging makes it all the more credible when we flash back, and fifty grey-shabby children are having their Lancashire vowels ironed out by the choirmistress because “You don’t wear hobnailed boots to a party”. Sometimes the children’s choir simply sit watching as the adult Tubby and Enid cautiously move towards one another or sorrow alone: there’s a real frisson when adult Tubby duets with his brave child self.

Every role, though, has its glories. The bible-bashing wooden-legged choir supervisor, ten years back from the WW1 trenches, is a lovely creation from the moment when he first snaps “Excuses! The primrose path to hell! When they came for Jesus in Gethsemane he didn’t make excuses, hopped up on the cross and took his punishment!” Yet his one-line redemption too is unutterably moving.

I loved its Festival version, but it shines even brighter in Sarah Frankcom’s intimate production. I hope it will tour, and move south. Good news that BBC2 is televising it next year, though changing the title to “Tubby and Enid”. Which is a decision so muttonheaded that one must sorrowfully assume it came from a TV executive. For this is no mere middle-aged rom-com, but a meditation on life’s attrition, the long slow sad loss of childhood’s glee, and the role of memory and courage in reclaiming it.

box office 0161 8339833 to 18 Jan

rating: five. I mean it.

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December 10, 2013 · 11:29 pm

THE DUCK HOUSE – Vaudeville, WC2

LIGHT AS A FEATHER, FUNNY AS A QUACK

There’s a lovely moment of finesse when Ben Miller, as a defecting New Lab MP in the dying days of the Brown government, is trying to impress on a Tory grandee his fitness for Cabinet. This involves him and his wife (Nancy Carroll) pretending that he is not a fraudulent expenses-milker and home-flipper. At one point the grandee gets a cake splattered on his suit, and Miller bends to blow the icing-sugar off him in desperate little puffs. The “It’s a Nigella recipe” is a sneakier icing-sugar joke, but the puffing is real class.

For all its news-quizzy political jokes this is at heart a Cooneyesque farce, rompingly directed by Terry Johnson: well-engineered, all exits and entrances credible but unexpected. It has no pretensions to depth or insight: this is the comedy of comeuppance, embarrassment and impossible excuses. Sharp but not bitter, joyfully mocking, light as a feather and funny as a quack.

Devilish good luck, of course, that MPs‘ salary increase hit the news this week. For Dan Patterson and Colin Swash went to the 2009 expenses scandal for their first stage play, incorporating its beautifully ludicrous domestic details of claims for “second” homes: a glitter lav seat, moat-cleaning, horse manure , hanging baskets and the infamous duck house itself (which makes a splendid entrance). But anger feels less appropriate than hilarity: this was an unprecedented mass trouser-dropping by the powerful, and you might as well laugh. One pleasure of this play is that it gives precisely the correct weight, no more, to a scandal caused by decades of dishonesty over MPs pay and the Fees Office consequently encouraging them to fill their boots with expenses.

The purely theatrical pleasures are even greater. Miller is perfect as the swaggering MP struggling in a net of panic, Simon Shepherd smoothly patrician as the grandee who despite assaults by cake, milk, manure and an enraged illegal Russian housekeeper (Debbie Chazen) continues his check-up on the new member in the second act by visiting his “London home”. Which is in fact occupied by the goth-leftie student son, (James Musgrave) whose email of course is bombparliament@theyrealltwats.co.uk. He has sold the furniture and let his foxy girlfriend run an illegal business. Worse still, she’s from Burnley, which makes the MP’s wife gag and flinch. Indeed Nancy Carroll is a major delight, haughty and groomed and eager to take her interior decorating flair into the Sam-Cam orbit, yet able to let this ladylike demeanour disintegrate into comedic panic.

You could criticize it as shouty and frenetic (you’ll have no problem hearing from the cheap seats) but small sharp asides do soften that, and good lines keep on coming. Enumerating his claims Miller once cries “The pouffe and the trouser-press – what’s that, a novel by Somerset Maugham?” Good Huhne gag, too. Anyway, it’s farce: without spoilers I reassure you that there are corsets, a wardrobe, lost trousers, glue, a transparent wall and a perfectly logical giant panda suit. If you don’t laugh, I’ll have none of you.

Box Office: 0844 482 9675 to 29 March

rating: five

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December 10, 2013 · 5:24 pm

ALADDIN – New Wimbledon Theatre

BRAND MEETS BEDELLA – BUT IT’S FLAWLESS THAT’S FLAWLESS!

New lamps for old! It’s the motto of the best pantomimes : keep the shape of the old lamp – vaudeville routines, spectacle, low comedy and sweet song, comedy knickers – but fire up the old lamp with something as new as hip-hop and LEDs. Cherish the old solid-brass professionals but rub celebrity agents until they conjure up star names. Thus your improbable lamp will shine.

It surely does in this rip-roaring Aladdin, written by Eric Potts and directed by Ian Talbot. Above the title Jo Brand is Genie of the Ring, in possibly the most ornately blingtastic outfit she has ever worn. Her trademark sarcasm is written in, but the standup career is evident in that she’s happiest when the fourth wall is down and she can berate the audience and tell jokes. The kids loved the one about the French cat.

But alongside her towers Matthew Kelly, a Dame of long experience and many costumes (a giant Pot Noodle, a Scotch airer covered in drying pants as a hooped skirt). And as Abanazar there’s David Bedella, so memorable as Jerry Springer’s Satan, with his marvellous grainy bass and wo-hoa-hoa laugh of evil. But then add groovy Britains-got-talent celebrs: Shaheen Jhafargholi – who sang at Michael Jackson’s memorial – is a bluesy rather beautiful Lamp Genie. And even better, deserving the wildest cheers of all, the, joyfully acrobatic street-dance group Flawless.

Backflips, handstands, head-twirling hip-hop genius, at one point in pitch dark with suits of lights. It’s breathtaking and street-smart, but sewn cheerfully into the old patchwork. Their first appearance indeed is as the Peking Police Force under the leadership of Matthew Rixon as a wholly traditional comic policeman (it could be 1935), and one of the best jokes is Brand being told “you only like hip-hop because it’s only two letters away from chip shop”.

You see what I mean? Modern panto melds together the shock of the new with Victorian staples – daft puns, physical jokes (in the laundry the copper goes brilliantly through the mangle,and shrinks). It has prancing nippers from the Doris Holford School of Dance and a traditionally pretty and melodious pair of leads, Oliver Thornton and Claire-Marie Hall, and dutifully picks up the annual top jokes (last year it was gangnam, this year twerking and the Gravity movie). It dares to flash, briefly, a bare bum, but an entr’acte cross-talk act and a canting song come straight from music-hall. It greatly relishes insults (“I’m pushing forty!” “Dragging it, more like” ).

And it’s beautiful. Wimbledon always goes nuts on costumes, but in backdrops too Old Peking is a sepia-gold dream of parasols and pagodas, the Palace a blue-and-silver elegance, the cave green-and-grey with a living gesticulating carpet. The finale melts all the colours together round a willowpattern plate. For all the larks and jokes, the children will have been taking in that aesthetic, too.

box office 0844 8717 646 to 12 jan

Rating: a panto five!

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December 6, 2013 · 11:57 pm

FROM MORNING TO MIDNIGHT – Lyttelton, SE1

CLERK ON THE RUN FINDS NOTHING WORTH BUYING. NOT SURE I DO EITHER.

An absconding bank-clerk in search of raw primal experience settles on the thrill of a sports stadium. “Feel the life, the roar of the crowd!.. All one, all screaming from all galleries, roaring, yelling… released from the slavery of wages and society!” He’s looking out at us, moustache a-bristle, as he says this. But I cannot report that the Lyttelton audience was roaring. Concentratedly respectful of Georg Kaiser’s 1912 German Expressionist classic (in a new version by Dennis Kelly); trusting it to mean something, occasionally risking a laugh. Not roaring.

Not bored, though, and enjoying Melly Still’s fast-moving direction and Soutra Gilmour’s inventive sets. A whole room rises overhead askew, a giant sheet becomes a blizzard where our hero wrestles a skeleton hand and shouts at a skull-faced imaginary woman. Later we get rudeish Weimar cabaret turns and a Salvationist revival meeting to keep us going. Without such diversions, though, this stylized study of disillusion, the emptiness of money and the tedium of city life could be pretty hideous. It spoke importantly to Kaiser’s period and society, and will fascinate students of that time, but to be honest its message boils down to “Is this all there is?‘ and “money can’t buy happiness”. Neither statement feels either new or, in this style, especially engaging.

Melly Still certainly enjoys the stylization. In that classic of deflation, Cold Comfort Farm, the intellectual Mybug enthuses about a new wave film where “they wear glass clothes and move in time to a metronome” . I confess that this flitted through my head in the opening sequence as a bank counter revolves ever faster like the clock, and scuttling jerky customers and staff speed up, pausing for a cartoonish exchange between a customer and manager in fat-suits (heavy literalists, these Germans). Behind the grille is the expressionless Clerk himself, Adam Godley, with a cruel centre parting and the kind of ‘tache-and-glasses combo usually found fixed together in joke shops. A fur-clad Italian bourgeoise brushes against his hand and provokes a moment of madness. He grabs the cash, rushes out to find her, then onward in terror at what he has done attempts a brief interlude with his family before walking out, causing Grandma to drop dead and his wife to reject her daughters (seems even an idiot male is better than none).

Crying “I want to experience something!” and writhing like a hybrid of Basil Fawlty and Woody Allen, he seeks fulfilment in a graveyard, stadium and nightclub (Pierette has a wooden leg so he never gets his own over). Godley is a bit of a hero, having returned to the rush-and-clamber of this production after an operation on his arm, still bandaged. It ends with revivalist preaching and an electro-crucifixion tableau which annoyed the scholarly German lady next to me, for reasons I failed to grasp completely on the way out. I had a train to catch.

Box Office 020 7452 3000 to 11 Jan

Rating three

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December 5, 2013 · 11:31 pm

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN – Royal Court Jerwood Downstairs

DRIFTING SEETHING POETRY AND HORROR: A VAMPIRE AT THE COURT

Unless you have spent recent years hiding (perhaps wisely) from teenage girls, you know that they have had their white little teeth firmly fixed in assorted novels about the emotional problems of vampires. Some theorists suggest that it feeds a need for forbidden calf-love now that liberal society beams tolerantly on inter-class, inter-racial and same-sex passion. Maybe. But few vampire romances reach the intensity and art of a 2008 Swedish film, and the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist on which it was based.

This stage interpretation of it by Jack Thorne, from the National Theatre of Scotland and Dundee Rep, is directed by John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett who gave us the powerful, balletic Black Watch. Here too movement is used surreally to set the mood or express the more extreme moments of shock; there is an extraordinary soundtrack by Ólafur Arnalds, veering from plangent gentleness to shrieking horror. The magic and terror of the snowy Northern forest towers in silver-birch trunks; the urban starkness of the young hero’s tenement life in a steel climbing-frame or fire-escape. Otherwise, only a bank of changing-room lockers and odd furniture roll by, and a huge ancient wooden chest rises in which – well, I won’t spoil horrible surprises. Take it minute by minute, on its own terms.

Because for all the gory moments it is a love story. Oskar (an impressive debut from Martin Quinn) is a lumpen, bullied boy with a drunken mother. He encounters the pallid and haltingly spoken girl next door, Eli. Her ‘father’ – protector or older lover, we do not quite know, and very nasty that is too – kills hikers in the woods, suspending them like pigs to drain their blood for her so she need not go looking for throats (though she does, terrifyingly). Eli is played with extraordinary power by Rebecca Benson: speaking with the halting questioning strangeness of autism, moving with catlike agility, perching, pouncing, shivering.

Each of them needs something. The boy is trapped by (very nasty and explicit) bullying and by his estranged parents’ uselessness. The “girl” is trapped by her awful destiny and her cold desperate hunger. She does not want to be a vampire. “I am not that. I live on blood but I am not…that. I choose not to be that!”. The play’s power and worth is in using this superstitious, borderline ridiculous metaphor to express and intensify real emotion: huge yearnings, seething hysterias, teenage sorrow at the world’s cruelty and inadequacy. At its best it conveys a drifting poetic sense of nightmare.

I could have done with fewer vicious bullying scenes done with overmuch relish, and the conclusion left me oddly unconvinced. Which is a strange thing to say after a vampire-horror show: but it proves how moved, and convinced, I was earlier.

box office http://www.royalcourttheatre.com 0207 565 5000 to 21 Dec.

rating : four

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December 4, 2013 · 11:18 pm

EMIL AND THE DETECTIVES – Olivier, SE1

CHILDREN STORM THE STAGE IN AN EMIL FOR EVERYONE

Is there no limit to the depravity of the National Theatre? Forging 20-Reichsmark banknotes, a discredited currency, to flood an auditorium with them! Disrespecting bankers! Encouraging grubby children to defy adults, and underage girls to ride bicycles recklessly around the stage with bespectacled urchins balanced on their handlebars! Not to mention disturbing the serenity of the stalls with harum-scarum chases. Whatever happened to those fey little folksy posh-pantos in the old Cottesloe?

Good riddance, I say. This enormously cast adaptation (by Carl Miller) of Erich Kastner’s tale of a smalltown boy’s adventure in 1929 Berlin zings with child-energy. Sixty kids a night chase after the wicked bowler-hatted villain from the train carriage, who stole the money Emil’s widowed Mum was sending to Grandma. Emil enlists Berlin children: his girl cousin Pony, street kids, Hilde the newspaper-seller, Tuesday the posh little boy in a sailor-suit, and others from every corner of a fragile, vibrant urban society at the heart of inter-war Europe.

It reunites director Bijan Sheibani with movement director Aline David, and as in their marvellous The Kitchen it mixes naturalistic and semi-stylized movement, whirling free and thrilling across the big stage. Bunny Christie designs, and brief interiors slide on and retreat, but mainly the city’s people whirl and scuttle, bearing lamp-posts and kiosks to express the baffling streets. Night comes with glimpses of a cabaret chanteuse and a man in suspenders; maps and buildings shine black-and-white on a slanting screen around a great vortex eye which becomes – with ladders, Oliver-magic machinery and gurgling echoes – a chase through the sewers. Echoes of Weimar poverty and prefigurings of Nazi authoritarianism hover in the air, understated but atmospheric: they’ve invented 1930’s film-noir theatre for kids.

The children, whether in respectable shorts-and-braces or rags, are natural and gleeful. In the night-time vigil round a brazier they are briefly poignant, too, as Emil (Ethan Hammer on opening night) speaks of his love and anxiety for his hardworking mother, and from the less cared-for children comes a bat-squeak of sadness. Of his confreres the most hilarious is Toots (Georgie Farmer on press night), a skinny, specky, hyperactive artful-dodger astonished that Emile is still worried about his ‘crime‘ back home, drawing a moustache on Duke Augustus‘ statue. Others fall into character with ease, clarity, good jokes and rousing defiance (“Grownups beat us, threaten us, bribe us – treat us like beasts!”).

And Stuart McQuarrie is the villain of every child’s dream: a black-suited “bigshot” scoffing dumplings, monocle gleaming, evilly moustached, with flick-knife and bowler hat. He even tempts Emil to the dark side: “It’s rare that I find someone who impresses me as much as I do myself…it can be lonely in the Financial Sector”. We boo him at the curtain call, and he beams back. Oh, for heaven’s sake, grab a kid as an excuse to go. Two happy hours await you and your inner (and outer) child.

box office 020 7452 3000 to 18 March

rating four

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December 3, 2013 · 11:16 pm

HENRY V – Noel Coward Theatre, WC2

ROYALTY AND ROGUES, WAR AND WOOING: JUDE LAW JOINS THE GREATS

The moment of conversion came in the starlight, when Jude Law’s Henry wanders hooded and disguised among his weary soldiers, and sits for a while listening silently with firelight playing on his face. The die is cast: they are outnumbered five to one, he has proudly dismissed the French envoy’s offer. If these drowsy men die it will be his doing. That flickering firelit doubt (ah, that Grandage carefulness with lighting – Neil Austin designs it) speaks volumes about the loneliness of leadership.

I speak of conversion, because despite the heady poetry this has never been for me a favourite among Shakespeare’s histories. The narrative Chorus can make it too much like a masque with battle scenes, the final Franglais wooing scene of the French princess seems anticlimactic, and the offstage death of Falstaff and the vanishing of MIstress Quickly make you miss the warm humanity of the earlier plays.

Which is why you need a Hytner or a Grandage to make it zing. It happened ten years ago at the National and praise heaven, it has happened again. Costume in Mchael Grandage’s production is medieval, Christopher Oram’s set a simple wooden curve. But the Chorus is a young modern street-kid in a Union Jack T-shirt (Ashley Zhangazha). His intensity gives a surprised, excited vigour to the narrative; in the interval we find him lounging on the stage, reading, apparently engrossed in that earlier England’s story. It draws you in.

That freshness is equally striking in Jude Law’s virile, sensitively balanced Henry. To make sense of this young King you have to believe that he is not just a combative monarch keen to see off the French, but the roistering old Prince Hal: the lad who loved life and low company – his people, after all . He is slightly bored (Law does this beautifully) by the Archbishops banging on about Salic Law and the need for war. Why would the old Hal want to wake“the sleeping sword of war” and creating “a thousand widows”? He needs convincing.

So in the war scenes he conveys not Olivieresque dramatic heroism but a kind of taut, almost trembling determination to do the thing decently and bravely, since it must be done. The St Crispin’s Day speech, delivered in a morning mist, is rousing but leavened by a laddish jokeyness as he makes them laugh with daft voices evoking of old men’s future bragging. His appalled dignity hearing of ten thousand French dead – “a royal fellowship of death” – feels as real as his sudden kneeling thanks for the astonishing victory. As for that odd wooing scene with the Princess (Jessie Buckley) its gruff laddish charm owes much to the sense of a man relaxing after intense strain.

Lesser joys to note: Ben Lloyd-Hughes full of nervous bravado as the Dauphin praising his horse, James Laurenson an authoritative Exeter, and two beautiful evocations by Noma Dumezweni : as Mistress Quickly describing Falstaff’s death with damped, awkwardly flippant emotion, and as Alice the bilingual maid, keeping her thoughts to herself alongside the young Princess. And since Shakespearian royalty must have rogues alongside, Ron Cook is a disgracefully funny Pistol. But it’s Jude Law’s face in the firelight which will stay with me.

box office 020 7492 1548 to 15 Feb

Rating: five.

and Jennifer-Jane Benjamin came with me, and offers again her terse twentysomething one-word-per-star review:

Bold, Valiant, Elegant, Intense, French

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December 3, 2013 · 1:05 am

CANDIDE – Menier, SE1

HIGH KICKS AND HIGH JINKS: VOLTAIRE WITH VERVE

Voltaire’s story – subtitled Optimisme – gave the world Dr Pangloss and his disabling conviction that “all is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds” because whatever happens has a reason. His innocent pupil Candide holds the faith through decades of lost love, exile, war, slavery, floggings, volcanoes, pirates, corrupt Cardinals, swindlers and shipwrecks. Rambling across a war-torn Europe and its colonies this reverses the Tom-Jonesy picaresque which our own 18c novelists enjoyed. Their heroes come up smiling, Voltaire’s stumbles earnestly from disaster to catastrophe while his companions keep resurrecting and turning up in new guises explaining “Well, it’s a long story…”.

This gorgeously funny, touching, vigorous production by Matthew White of the Bernstein musical should have an afterlife. If, that is, anyone can work out how to transfer it from the Menier’s audience-teasing staging in the round. The ensemble weave around and among us, slapping occasional hats or crowns on the front row, singing from fine distressed wooden balconies overhead. Adam Cooper choreographs, and when dealing with his former Singing in the Rain oppo Scarlett Strallen gives full rein to her agility. As Candide’s stabbed, raped, traded, enslaved and corupted lover, Strallen demonstrates that she is not just a sunshiny-singy-dancey musical theatre lead but a physical comedienne. In “Glitter and be gay” , the fallen woman hurls herself around lamenting her shame while pillaging the very chandelier for diamonds. Gorgeous.

The musical’s history is something of a dog’s breakfast, though with classy ingredients: worth buying the programme to read how Lilian Hellman wanted it to reflect McCarthysim and America’s blindness. She enlisted young Leonard Bernstein: it flopped, but via several mutations found success with a new book by Hugh Wheeler. Lyrics are by Hellman, Sondheim, Dorothy Parker, Bernstein himself and John Latouche – too many cooks, but a tasty broth.

Not least because however daft Candide is, you are drawn to sympathy because Fra Fee from Dungannon is a real find: innocent elfin face but a voice so deep, honeyed and flawless that your heart melts. James Dreyfus as Pangloss (and assorted others) gives a smart, knowing performance, and Jackie Clune hurls herself with limping gusto into the role of an woman who hair-raisingly claims her buttock was eaten by starving Russians.

For Voltaire’s world, like ours , is a troubled one. White cleverly keeps the narration – split between characters as they weave around the weathered balconies – as blandly terrible as a news bulletin: thousands dead in natural disasters, coldly described atrocities. Yet during these enumerations of horror the cast enacts them with romps, red ribbons, and childlike drop-down-deads (one general expired in the lap of the Mail on Sunday critic) . Strallen’s chandelier is suspended on a hangman’s noose, and the Inquisition dances delightedly round a pyre with “What a day, what a day, for an Auto-da-Fe!” Interesting that Hellman, Bernstein and the rest started cooking this up ten years before Joan Littlewood’s O What a Lovely War.

I loved it. Bernstein’s score is lovely, the comedy fun, the energy high and the conclusion touching. Pangloss is banished to preach shiny determinism to the sheep, while the rest sing “We’re neither pure nor wise nor good. We’ll do our best, we’ll chop our wood and make our garden grow….”

box office 0207 378 1713 to 22 Feb

Rating: five happy mice

apology: in an earlier version of this post Adam Cooper appeared as Adam Cork. Which is disgraceful. Adam Cooper is a genius dancer and choreographer and my hero. Adam Cork, of course, composed the marvellous sound design for Grandage’s season, including Henry V . A review of which will be up soon. Which is why he was on my mind. Sorry both.

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December 2, 2013 · 12:31 pm

DEATH SHIP 666 – Jermyn St Theatre, WC1

BEARS! THOUSANDS OF THEM! (well, two paws from the wings)

“You know what they say – if you upset bears theyll kill everyone you love!” cries the demented flop-fringed architect. “Thats not a thing!” scornfully retorts the paranoid female mental patient, locked in the ship’s bilge as it sinks. Its a good line. So is “Bears! thousands of them!” when uttered in panic aboard a sinking ship in mid-Atlantic previously untroubled by ursine invaders.

But in this shouty 75-minute melodrama you have to truffle for the good bits, like a bear yourself. It was a hit at the Edinburgh fringe, and is created with such youthful gusto by twins Michael Patrick and Paul Clarkson , with Gemma Hurley, that you can’t hate it. But it would help to be drunk, or getting that way , and young enough to shriek happily at the broadest of joke situations. There is a discount for Christmas parties, so that will happen.

The idea, nicely set up by jitterbugging cast members in sailor suits at the entrance, is that a doomed voyage sets out with the necessary central-casting passengers – a rich villainous couple on an insurance scam, a troubled architect with a tragic past, a ten year old prodigy, a paranoid woman on psychiatrists orders, a mad one eyed captain and an evil electrician (“John deVille Crapwirer”) and his love-starved bride. The Titanic movie music swells and fades throughout, though in a raucous musical mashup near the end we also get Phantom, Les Mis and Sondheim references. Mattias Penman as The Architect hurls his hilarious quiff around to good effect, and Rachel Parris is particularly funny as the love interest.

Its problem for the post Fringe audience, though, is being too one-note and shouty, never giving a joke a moment to breathe and grow. Holly Hobbie (Carrie Marx) plays the ten-year-old detective with panache but the gag gets plain irritating. Still, there are moments of slapstick courtship and Poseidon-Venture staggering to enjoy. Even if , an hour in, you do rather end up on the side of the bears…

box office 0207 287 2875 to 15 Dec

rating: three

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November 30, 2013 · 10:51 am

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS – Chickenshed, N14

THE BIGGEST WILDEST HAPPIEST SHOW

Never have there been so many Cratchits: 28 of them, all singing their heads off “Who needs the limelight? Who owns the moonlight? We’ve got the life and soul – Life for the living, soul for the giving!”. The stage is crowded: a vast composed picture, every cast member from seven to sixty a pixel in it, a voice.

Among them several are energetically signing, as they have throughout the riotous play. I think I now know the BSL signs for “Ho Ho Ho” , “Here’s your P45”, and “Resistance is futile”. The sign-language moves melt effortlessly into the mass choreography. The cast numbers 800, on any one night 168. At the curtain call I had never seen so many people on one stage, ever. It overwhelms.

For this is Chickenshed, the famous theatre group (and teaching campus for BTec performance diplomas) which excludes nobody willing to join and perform. Physical and mental disabilities or illness are no bar; deeply troubled and excluded children too have their lives changed, many staying for years. Among the adults performing are those who teach the courses. Music, lighting and sets are of professional standard and often grander than most commercial children’s theatre: the entrance of the Snow Queen and the frozen victims trapped above is spectacular).

All of which might make you expect to approve, to admire, to donate to a good cause. But for this 40th anniversary performance, a reprise of one of their classic devised stories, the first thing to do is just applaud. It is seriously good fun: witty, artful, thoughtful and performed with headlong glee. The story is a mischievous seasonal mashup: a family of children who on Christmas Eve find that Santa has delivered the wrong sack, and that it falls to them to deliver presents to the Ugly Sisters, Scrooge, and the Snow Queen. So they ‘imagine‘ their sofa into a sleigh, recruit a couple of divinely silly reindeer (Billy Ashworth and Robin Shillinglaw) and head off to Pantoland, 1842 London, and the frightening Snow Queen’s domain.
There are some fine jokes in Pantoland, as the Ugly Sisters dispatch casts all over the country. A minute girl plays the big bad wolf with a terrifying roar, a disillusioned Buttons sneers “Hello Buttons – not ‘zackly Shakespeare, is it?” and a depressed Aladdin in specs reveals that he has been replaced by David Hassellhoff, or possibly Jedward. Inevitably the Sisters end up dragged to Dickens’ London and Scrooge to the Snow Kingdom, where in one of the most dramatic emotional moments he saves a small child (Serena Ehanire) from going over to the dark side.

There are solos, and some powerful leads (Michael Offei a particularly funny ugly sister) but it’s all about the ensemble: the three rotas of sleigh kids, snowpeople, panto stars and Londoners who take turn throughout the many matinees and evenings, crowding and dancing and singing and ultimately forming a picture far bigger than any one of them. Or us.

box office 0208 292 9222 chickenshed.org.uk to 11 Jan

rating: Who’s competing? Not Chickenshed people. So here’s one big happy Christmouse for them

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November 28, 2013 · 5:10 pm

HORRIBLE HISTORIES : Barmy Britain Part 2 – Garrick, WC1

BLOOD, FILTH, MURDER AND CHILDISH GLEE

A fearful roar, as of surf on rocks, heralds the arrival and settling of school parties: three hundred 6-11 year olds surging and bouncing while ushers look on with maternal pleasure or wincing horror, depending on gender. But they’re game for theatre, even if it risks being a bit educational: it is rare for the mere rising of the safety-curtain to meet deafening cheers. This softened me up, and I needed it: Terry Deary’s “Horrible Histories” books are hugely popular but always put me off. I admit that children love gory fights, beheadings, filth, bums, laughing at authority figures and any kind of noisy cartoonish disgracefulness. I did, once. But why, I grumped, encourage it? So I avoided the books. And the shows, written by Deary with Neal Foster (who also directs).

But when something’s big and beloved, it behoves the solemn critic to turn up, dodge the flying ice-creams and risk the eardrums. And possibly to join in the audience chorus of the Black Death Song, swellings and smelliness culminating in “Time to ring your funeral bell / Then along comes Mr Death, and takes you off to hell”). Not to mention a startling Burke and Hare number to the tune of Postman Pat.

For this is a lively hour, with Lauryn Redding and Anthony Spargo hurtling between characters from Richard the Lionheart to Queen Victoria with a series of (rather classy) quick-change costumes and a magic folding prop-box as castle, prison or tumbril. There is the inevitable delight in beheading, bum-wiping (Henry VIII”s Groom of the Stool), and any war which turned out to be pointless: some good jokes about William Wallace and the Bruce. There is an attempt at curing an audience member of the Plague by rubbing a chicken’s bum on her neck and “purifying the air” with loud noises.

That detail of superstitious plague-cures was why in the end, I gave in and admitted that as school or holiday trips go, it’s not bad. For Deary may jump on disgusting facts and embarrassing errors of judgment like Richard I’s crusades, but they are real facts and sometimes enlightening: these children now know the scale of plague deaths, the progress of Boudicca, why the Stone of Scone matters, how Tudor executioners got paid, and that the heroic legend of Dick Turpin and Black Bess is hogwash. They know that history is a big, brash riveting story. It’s not just Second Period After Break on Wednesdays, as it was for my bored generation; or “How would you feel if you were a Roman Soldier’s wife?” as it sometimes is now. It’s a story.

Box office: 0844 412 4662 to 5 Jan

Rating : three

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November 27, 2013 · 11:08 pm

ONCE A CATHOLIC – Tricycle, NW6

KICKING THE HABITS IN A KILBURN CONVENT

Mother Basil is dissecting a rabbit’s reproductive system for the O-level set, but as she reaches “vagina” the Angelus rings and everyone must recite “The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary..”etc. As work resumes, an innocent enquiry about sperm sends Mother Basil into palpitations and Mary Mooney to Reverend Mother Thomas Aquinas for a bollocking.

Full disclosure: I was a convent girl, a decade later than this play’s 1950 setting, and could have joined in that Angelus without hesitation. But my nuns were of a subtler and kinder disposition than the maniacal blackbeetles in Mary O’Malley’s 1970’s hit play. It is a savagely funny portrait of the Catholicism of the Irish diaspora, cultishly clinging to the regulatory aspects of the Faith at the expense of spiritual and charitable ones. It struck me as a curious parallel with how today’s Islamic burqa-fundamentalists console their exile in these chilly climes.

The play deals with three 15-year-olds, all inevitably called Mary, and their attempts to understand sexuality in the teeth of their demented mentors: three nuns, Father Mullarkey, and an ancient music-master obsessed with Gilbert and Sullivan. Two have boyfriends and know a bit, not least from the dirty bits of Leviticus. One is dating Derek, played by Calum Callaghan as a perpetually hair-combing Teddyboy with a bow-legged me-and-my-testicles swagger; another finds a dreadful posh-Catholic Cuthbert and goes all the way (ah, more personal memories: a chap called Malachy once informed me that extramarital sex is “all right between Catholics, because we can confess it”).

Director Kathy Burke opts to play it hard for laughs. Don’t look here for the tragedies of Catholicism or the agonies of children. Cecilia Noble could have delivered Mother Peter’s homilies about Purity in a cooler, more sinister way, but here all religious adults are played as one-note cholerics. And it is indeed hog-snortingly funny, from Mother Peter brandishing the compulsory stout Lady of Fatima Knicker, to the Purity lecture and Mary Mooney’s Irish Dancing. It’s not topically vicious: Father Mullarkey (Sean Campion, delightful) is not a bad man, just an eejit, embarrassedly kind when Mary Mooney (Molly Logan) wants to confess a Mortal Sin. She was coerced into giving a lad what she thinks he called a Twentieth Century Fox…Oh, she means a J. Arthur Rank. Tactless of the priest to offer her a sausage, but she does get absolution.

She wants it. Indeed the most serious character, and the only subtle performance, is Logan as the lumpen, lank-haired devout child of a family too poor to pay for her to go on the Fatima pilgrimage: a sweet open soul unrecognized by the purblind nuns amid her slyer classmates. Her wounded sincerity edges this romp of a show closest to angry satire. But it’s a period piece, and probably best played as a lark. There are darker plays to be written about Catholicism and sexuality, but in the cheerful ‘70s, when we shudderingly shrugged off the 1950s gloom, this one was needed.

box office 020 7328 1000 to 18 Jan

Rating: three

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November 26, 2013 · 12:03 am

LIZZIE SIDDAL Arcola, E8

ART AND LOVE AMONG THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

1850, and in William Holman Hunt’s studio a new model poses: head gently inclined and body in corsetless flowing robes, the distressed-maiden look beloved of pre-Raphaelite painters. In bursts a tousled Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Tom Bateman): smitten, he invites her to drop her millinery day-job to be Beatrice for his Dante picture. But no sooner has he booked her than the elfin figure of John Everett Millais (James Northcote, an elegant weasel) poaches her in turn to pose in a bath as Ophelia once the bonnet-trimming season is over. “I am the best painter in England. This will be my masterpiece. I will make you immortal”.

And so he does, though in January, which gives her pneumonia. But it is Gabriel whose muse and lover she remains. Meanwhile the testy Holman Hunt (Simon Darwen) disastrously attempts a romantic rescue of a cheerfully pragmatic whore (Jayne Wisener), because “reclaiming a woman would be a heroic act”. That ends as badly as you’d hope, and indeed from time to time there is a touch of Monty Python in his depiction of the artists. Why not? comedy is a quick way to expose absurdity, and its comic counterpoint is one of the pleasures of Jeremy Green’s vigorous, entertaining and ultimately haunting play. It’s good: appropriate to have its first outing in this former paint factory, but I’d put money on it going further.

The balance is beautifully kept under Lotte Wakeham’s sharp direction, and the picture darkens towards the end. For the central story, given all its dignity, is tribute to the South London seamstress who could read, loved poetry, and longed to paint and express her faltering visions of transcendence. She had some talent, spotted by John Ruskin (a peerlessly creepy yet sincere portrayal by Daniel Crossley). Emma West is perfect: she has a remarkable resemblance to the redhead of the pictures and a still ethereality in her small, pale, unusual face. Which makes it all the more beguiling when Siddal reveals a sharp wit, and tragic in her final desperate decline.

For while it was healthy artistically for the Pre-Raphaelites to challenge Victorian stiffness, it was still mid-century. Defying convention in real life brought collateral damage. Siddall lived with Rosseti and expected marriage; he demurred as she became weary, weakened by her Ophelia immersion. Prescribed laudanum she became addicted; he married her out of pity, she being at 29 “used goods”. Two unhappy years and a stillbirth saw her dead from an overdose. In grief and guilt Rossetti buried all his poems in her grave.

Oh, and seven years later he had them dug up and published. This ghoulish fact dramatically book-ends the play, graveyard lanterns opening it and a wicked final scene showing the artist persuaded by his chirpy agent to retrieve the manuscript and have it disinfected for two guineas. Nobody will blame him, because “talent vindicates all behaviour”. The eternal cry of the artist…
box office 0207 503 1646 to 21 Dec http://www.arcolatheatre.com

RATING: four

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November 23, 2013 · 10:04 am

STICK MAN Leicester Square Theatre, WC1

STICK MAN Leicester Square Theatre, WC2

“I wanna watch a movie” grumped a small voice behind me. Firm came the reply “We’re not going to watch a movie. This is a theatre. It’s exciting. It’s your first time”. Nursery teachers, grannies, mums and the occasional daddy dragooned their charges onto booster cushions in a sussurration of anxious excitement. It is two years since I was charmed by Scamp Theatre’s rendering of Julia Donaldson’s book, and it’s fresh in from a long tour for Christmas. So I dropped into an early matinee off Leicester Square – unaccustomedly louche for the church-hall playgroup set, but thrilling as a first West End experience.

Of all the early-childhood (3+) theatre around, Sally Cookson’s production remains one of the most satisfying and layered. Deceptive simplicity, repetitive rhymes and Playschool larks relate a thrilling story. The current performers are Richard Kiess, Alex Tosh and Cassie Vallance (who does a virtuoso dog, swan, and river). Benji Bower’s music keeps small hearts beating and Kiess, satisfyingly twiggy in his tan jeans, carries the small model of Stick Man ,faithful to the Axel Scheffler illustration . It keeps being hijacked, and he winces convincingly when it is bitten, thrown, soaked, or used as a bat. The story is that he leaves his ladylove and children in the Family Tree and goes for a run, but a dog gets him, then a girl throws him in the river, a swan builds a nest with him, and he nearly ends up on the fire at Christmas until, by rescuing Santa with a well-judged prod, he earns a sleighride home.

You feel utter identification growing around you as he endlessly protests “I”m not a bat! I’m not a Pooh-stick! I’m Stick-Man, that’s me!” Small children understand. They are endlessly scooped up, carried, taken to places they resent and called by wrong nicknames. Stick-man expresses that healthy indignation. And he’s lost, and they know about that too – “Stick man is lonely, stick man is lost, stick man is frozen and covered in frost”. His children are missing him, and worried Daddy won’t be home for Christmas. So involvement rises, the little movie-buff behind me joining in the cries of “Wake up!” when our hero falls asleep in the grate, in imminent danger of conflagration. Like all the best children’s theatre, it will send them home to make their own shows under the table and behind the sofa. All they need is a stick.

Box Office: 08448 733433 | http://www.leicestersquaretheatre.com
wed-sat 1030 am, plus Sat-sun 2 pm.

Rating : Four very young mice

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November 21, 2013 · 11:36 pm

IN THE NEXT ROOM – THE VIBRATOR PLAY – St James’ Theatre, SW1

GASPS, SHRIEKS, ELECTRICITY AND SADNESS

Coincidentally (and after a week when loveless porn and sex education were splattered all over the news) the Twitterati gasped at Darla and Jon of Topeka, who are still keeping up abstinence a year after their wedding, to be “double holy”. They say that when Bedroom Thoughts occur, she spritzes cold waterand he “eats a whole raw potato to take him out of the mood”.

That Ruskin-like sexual taboo took us nicely into Sarah Ruhl’s remarkable play, born on Broadway and first seen here at the Theatre Royal Bath. It is set in the home of an 1880’s American doctor, beautifully built on two levels with swags, ruffles, piano, curly wallpaper downstairs and stern panelling in the consulting-room above. Dr Givings‘ speciality is female hysteria: weepiness caused by “pressure in the womb” and treated by causing “paroxysm”. Until lately he – or his nurse assistant Annie, who has a touching emotional subplot – brought it on manually; thanks to Mr Edison he now has a vibrating appliance. Paroxysm is, of course, orgasm. Ruhl , fascinated by this quirk of medical history, with director Laurence Boswell and some very brave actors achieves both a great many laughs of the Harry-met-Sally variety, and some sad and profound insights into human unhappiness.

At first we are drawn into mere absurdity, as the doctor (Jason Hughes, stiffly earnest) treats a patient (Flora Montgomery) who has become so depressed she sees ghosts in the curtains. She has never experienced such abandonment (“If I felt such things in the presence of my husband I would be so embarrassed I would leave the room”). In medical surroundings however her shrieks contrast with the prim detachment of the doctor. At least until he turns the machine up and the lights fuse.

Meanwhile downstairs his wife, a chirpy, bright young woman played with enchanting eccentricity by Natalie Casey, is sorrowing because she has no milk to feed her baby. She hires a wet-nurse, herself grieving for a dead infant. The theme is being divided from your biological nature – whether feeding your child or experiencing a climax with your lover. And while I suspect some men will just laugh, I found that evocation of womanly dislocations very moving. Not least in Madeline Appiah’s fine performance as the dignified “darkie” wet-nurse, trying neither to love the baby or to hate it for not being her dead son.

A male hysteric – an artist played with gorgeous yellow-book silliness by Edward Bennett – tips the second act into rudery (he gets the machine, too) and offers the doctor’s wife romantic visions. Some all-girls electrical experimentation also leads to a revealing conversation with the wet-nurse, who – being free of all this white-madam refinement – knows perfectly well what orgasms are for. Conclusions arrive, albeit a bit slowly.

Ruhl’s writing is beautiful and adventurous: I love her reflections on the electrical age ending the old “solemnity” of candle-flames. Equally often it is snortingly funny. Take the doctor’s outrage after his wife has been fraternizing with the artist: “How do you know about biscotti!?” Ugh, Italian ways! Biscotti can lead to all manner of smut. A chap must keep tight hold of his raw potato.

box office 0844 264 2140 to 4 Jan. Producers: Peter Huntley and Just for Laughs Theatricals, in association with Theatre Royal Bath

rating: four

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November 20, 2013 · 11:04 pm

ERIC AND LITTLE ERN – Vaudeville, WC2

BRINGING BACK THE SUNSHINE

“Are you going to read your newspaper or annoy me?” asks Ern, trying to concentrate on his bedtime reading. “I can do both!” replies Eric confidently, a 6ft, bald, black-spectacled eternal six-year-old: charming , enraging and unforgettable. Behind me a woman’s voice gasps in mirth “Just like my husband!” . Moments later, Eric wanders to the window and hears a police siren, and suddenly most of the audience are laughing before he can say “He’s not going to sell much ice cream going at that speed”. This ninety-minute evening often feels less like a show than a ritual of remembrance, gentle mourning and solidarity.

There have been other Morecambe and Wise tribute acts, recently a tremendous performance by Bob Golding as Eric alone. For me that threatened to overshadow this affectionate re-creation by Jonty Stephens and Ian Ashpitel. But their focus is the relationship between the pair over 43 years, first in variety then in TV shows – at their peak written by Eddie Braben – of an innocent brilliance whose closest modern equivalent is probably Miranda (and even that is less innocent.)

The first act, though studded with jokes from the Braben years and a daft old vaudeville klaxon gag or two, is dramatized, and works about 70 per cent of the time. Ernie is in a hospital bed, nearing his own last heart attack in 1999 when the shade of Eric, dead fourteen years, turns up at his bedside messing about in a white coat (much serious tutting over the clipboard, culminating in turning it the right way up). He gradually rouses Ernie to remember routines. Stephens captures the restless funny-bones of the taller man and Ashpitel the wounded self-image of Ernie: both convince after a while. Poignant moments deflate just in time (“I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d lost you, Ern” says Eric. Then thoughtfully “Bought a hamster, probably”. The gags endure, diamond-bright. Some are sublime and perennial, like Morecambe’s wounded “I was playing the right notes. Not necessarily in the right order”. Some clean-yet-mucky ones will never die. “Paintings? My auntie’s got a Whistler” – “Now, there’s a novelty!”. Others are doubly funny for being out of date. “Marjorie Proops” “Really?” “Every day in the Mirror”.

Ah, memories! Bill Cotton , Lew Grade, Winifred Atwell, Bob Martin’s dog powders, Russ Conway, Des O’Connor (“short for Desperate”). For anybody over fifty these are magical incantations, words of power and comfort. For the young, the second act is at least a demonstration, BBC-Sunday-night-style, of their virtuoso crosstalk before the red plush curtain. Why not? Writing and personae like these are too precious to die with their original performers. Tributes are OK if done with love. And that fizzes from the audience like Tizer.

box office 0844 412 4663 to 12 Jan (mainly matinées after mid- Dec)
Supported by : Stage One

Rating: three (and a vaudeville mouse as a makeweight)

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November 19, 2013 · 11:13 pm

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN – Gielgud, W1

DARKER THAN HITCHCOCK, FOX AND HUSTON TAKE A TRAIN TO HELL

Here’s dark brilliance, a glimpse of the void. The set itself is noir, a tangled ever-changing revolving nightmare of city, fairground, mansion and and treescape. The very costumes are monochrome: against a hundred shades of grey there flickers a shine of 1940‘s platinum-blonde or a bride-white negligée. Tim Goodchild’s design, with remarkable lighting and projection by Tim Lutkin and Peter Wilms, perfectly frame an unexpected and heart-hammeringly tense evening.

Unexpected, because Hitchcock’s famous 1951 film based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel went only halfway to hell. Here Craig Warner has gone all the way, back to the book. It begins like the film with two men meeting on a train – thoughtful quiet Guy and pushy, manic, overfriendly Charles Bruno. The latter posits a fantasy in which they could baffle detection by doing one another’s murders. He assumes that Guy would like to be rid of his unfaithful separated wife, while he wants his father dead. Guy thinks it is a bad taste joke. It isn’t. His wife is strangled at a fairground and Bruno nags him to fulfil his side.

Hollywood, anxious for virtue to triumph, departed from Highsmith at this point. But theatre seems tougher: the whole of Act 2 is unfamiliar, and I will not rob you of one single gasp by spoiling it. So let us talk instead of quality: something which Robert Allan Ackerman gets from his starry cast in plenty.

Laurence Fox is the architect Guy, at first so quiet one worries for his audibility in the train scene: but that geeky pianissimo makes all the more dramatic his flowering, or descent, into panic and beyond. I have never seen Fox operate at quite this level, and it pins you to your seat. Still more alarming is Jack Huston’s Bruno: not the chill smiling psychopath of Hitchcock’s version but a manically unbalanced walking Oedipus-complex, fixated (shades of Highsmith’s other antihero, Ripley) on getting close to Guy himelf. Huston disintegrates before our eyes. The strangling scene is mild compared to his recounting of it, and when his parricidal fantasy unreels, high on a vertiginous staircase, the tangled projections overhead seem to be a map of his very brain.

In the rising hysteria the women strike contrasting notes: Myanna Buring flame-haired and vampy as the victim wife, Miranda Raison cool, pure, and innocent until too late. But wildest of all is Imogen Stubbs as Bruno’s mother: a glamorously fading, plaintive smother-mother played with an intensity worthy of a Tennessee Williams creation. When the horrid truth overwhelms her in turn, the stage itself shivers.

It’s a classy bit of work, not least because actual violence occurs only once before the end. Poker, axe, flamethrower and gun seem to threaten, but as Guy says hell is all inside the skin. A man can be hollowed out by evil: and that’s when a mere thriller becomes an epic.

box office 0844 482 5130 to 22 feb
Rating: four

PS: With the superb clarity of youth, my occasional companion Jennifer-Jane Benjamin has taken to delivering reviews with one-word-per-star. Midsummer Night’s Dream was “Shouty, Mirthful, Gay”. Strangers on a Train is “Bonkers, Incestuous, Clever, Creepy”. Heaven knows what’ll happen when she hits five stars..

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November 19, 2013 · 5:14 pm

TORY BOYZ – Ambassadors’ Theatre, WC1

A LATE BUT BRACING BOUQUET FOR THE NYT

Next to the Mousetrap and opposite the Ivy, in the grubby splendours of this pocket playhouse the National Youth Theatre’s rep company is packing its last few matinee-only houses. So it should: it was a smart move to revive (with the author’s skilful updates) James Graham’s 2008 play about the Conservative Party and gay rights.

Or, given that the said party has just endorsed same-sex marriage, the more difficult matter of gay acceptance in its own ranks. Graham, of course, lately wrote the NT hit THIS HOUSE about the 1970’s hung parliament, and this earlier work shows how he got to that remarkakble level while still under thirty. Hes grasp of the ambiguities, glories and absurdities of Parliamentary government has been refining over years.

Our hero Sam – subtly and touchingly played by Simon Lennon – is a young working-class northerner, a Tory research assistant with a passion for improving the world and particularly schools, which are his minister’s brief . Scenes where he explains civil government to lairy schoolchildren are terrific: you can almost smell the sweat and swagger of them as they role-play and bicker. “Sir, is the Chancellor really allowed to tell the Prime Minister to fuck off?”. But just as the kids have an ineradicable habit of using “gay” as a synonym for “rubbish”, so it is clear to Sam that as his arrogant chief of staff says, Europe and homosexuality are the party traditionalists’ two biggest emotional problems. If you want to freak one out, “offer him a copy of Attitude in one hand and a croissant in the other”.

Ambitious, idealistic, and shakily unable to get it on with a cheerful young suitor who keeps trying to date him, Sam becomes haunted, with a series of fifty-year flashbacks , by the young Ted Heath, beautifully evoked in all his forceful grumpy reticence by Niall McNamee. In a lovely touch, he does up the buckle of his raincoat with care before stepping out with his only female friend. Better safe than sorry. The historical imagined moments are neatly and clearly staged, and as Sam struggles towards clarity and self-acceptance through an obviously vain attempt to find out whether Prime Minister Heath was actually gay or not, the plot thickens nicely. And there are two very touching moments: Sam’s final encounter with the mouthy schoolboy Ray (Aaron Gordon) and a supernatural, but satisfying, colloquy with poor old Heath. The play will last; and some at least of its young cast will go a long way.

box office 084 4811 2334 to 29 Nov

Rating Four

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November 16, 2013 · 12:03 am

EAT PRAY LAUGH – Dame Edna Everage farewell tour – Palladium, W1

FAREWELL, POSSUMS!

My gladdie lies before me on the train seat as I write, wilting gently. I doubt I shall throw it away, for the opening night of Barry Humphries’ farewell UK tour is poignant. My brother Mike and I have seen every one of Dame Edna’s West End appearances since 1969 (her bizarre Albert Hall concerto four years ago and the panto debut at Wimbledon were interludes in a 15-year gap between full shows). When it all began we were young, and the Edna character was just an opinionated Moonee Ponds housewife in upswept glasses, but some things endure. On that night 44 years ago, knees less creaky than now obeyed the command to “Stand and tremble!” the gladioli the muscular Edna hurled at us. Tonight we did it again.

As years rolled by Humphries has elevated her to megastar status, with wilder gowns and sparklier glasses. The legendary targeting of the audience became ever more terrifying: last time we were in Row E, and cowered as rows behind and ahead of us were mercilessly questioned. This time – inspired by a self-absorbed bestseller – Edna arrives on a jewelled elephant and claims to have been in a celebrity ashram, with the Dalai Lama and Sharon Osbourne booked in under false names and “little Stephen Fry. Booked in as Stephen Fry”. There’s the traditional verbal strafing of the front rows: “You’ve come dressed for the occasion. Not this occasion, obviously. Cleaning the car. Or assisting a family pet to give birth”. This culminates in the claim that she is licenced to conduct Punjabi weddings and the singling out of an earringed youth and elderly lady, strangers, as bride and groom. Reports from previews say Edna targets gay men to improve the joke: on press night, nimble as ever, on discovering that the victim had a wife at home in Kent she rang her to break the news of the remarriage and broadcast her baffled bedtime replies over the loudspeakers.

Cruel? Not really. The immense, self-aware persona rises above that, mocking her very mockery: she is the archetype of every waspish female relative who has punctured our self-esteem since childhood. But this time we can laugh. And as a seasoned Ednologist I have to say that there is a softness now, a dilution of the basilisk glare, which is not entirely due to the light of nostalgia.

I write of Edna, and the second half is hers. But Humphries’ first half is just as skilled. Sir Les Patterson, no longer “cultural attaché” but wannabe TV chef, amiably repulsive as ever, makes ‘fusion barbie’ rissoles, spitting, vanishing noisily into the dunnee and telling an apparently pointless, maundering senile anecdote culminating in the rudest joke of the year. Briefly replaced by his (newly invented and near-the-knuckle) gay clerical brother, he undergoes a coup de theatre to become Sandy Stone, the mournful old suburban ghost reflecting on a lost child long ago. Some jib at this deliberate lowering of the energy and acknowledgement of grief, but in character comedy it always feels like the ultimate act of theatrical courage and bravura: saying “I have the skill to make you cry. It’s just my choice, tonight, to make you laugh”.

I like that. After the final climactic waving of massed gladdies Edna becomes a mere projection and Barry Humphries walks on as himself, 79 years old, to say goodbye. We stay on our feet in something close to awe. And in sadness, nimbly punctured by a sardonic “Promise to come to my next farewell tour”. One can only hope.

box office 0844 412 4655 dameednafarewell.com to 5 Jan
Rating: Inappropriate. Too historic. So here’s a cross-dressed Ednamouse instead.

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November 14, 2013 · 11:26 pm

THAT FACE – Landor, SW9

AFFLUENCE AND ADDICTION IN A STORMING REVIVAL

After three red-carpet nights up West there’s bracing refreshment in a pub theatre, especially offering the first London revival of a play which in 2007 amazed the theatre world. The first of the “middle-class dramas” promised by Dominic Cooke at the Royal Court saw Polly Stenham, then 19, winning a clutch of awards and an Olivier nomination with a dark, passionate 90-minute portrait of an affluent family in freefall. Having missed it then, I was eager to find out what the fuss was about (one critic called her a new Tennessee Williams). Curiosity was the greater because her most recent play No Quarter (also about a messed-up rich family) struck me as pretentious, vapid and fey.

This one is brilliant. In No Quarter there was a tiresome sense that druggy, posh decadent bohemians are somehow more interesting than other people – an attitude you can only get away with (and then, not for long) if you’re Noel Coward. In this earlier play, though, the teenage Stenham confronted head-on, with real fury as well as absurd humour, the damage and horror of addiction. Sixteen-year-old Mia (Stephany Hyam) is initially seen as a sadistic boarding-school brat helping her ghastly friend Izzy (Georgina Leonidas, a sexy spitfire nightmare) to torture a younger girl. But by the end we weep for what her terrible parents have made her: Hyam, in a terrific professional debut, finely balances shrillness with childlike vulnerability.

Eighteen-year-old Henry (Rory Fleck-Byrne) has been trying to cure his mother of alcoholism and prescription drug abuse since he was thirteen, and is locked into a dreadful co-dependency, unable to escape the dual roles of baby boy and adored boy- acolyte, sleeping on the end of her bed in case she chokes herself in the night, joining in her crazed dressing-up games. “If you left she’d either top herself or get better” says Mia; but the poor good boy is trapped. Their father is in Hong Kong with a new wife and baby, only flying home when the school rings up to expel Mia for feeding her mother’s drugs to a child who ends up in a coma.

As we agonize over “underclass” families and the children of addict mothers and absent fathers, Stenham’s pitiless message is that equally terrible childhoods may lie hidden, cushioned by money and Docklands flats. Tara Robinson directs with headlong, violent verve: the scenes unroll around a bed which can be in a dormitory, either apartment or – with sad chill – can represent the distance between father and daughter in a smart restaurant: a flat white emptiness. Caroline Wildi as Martha the manipulative, unrepentant addict mother is a gaunt and glaring, beguilingly horrible figure: a performance which, staring-eyed in that intimate space, will be hard to forget. A gripping play, with a proper beating heart. I now see what the 2007 fuss was about.

Box Office: 020 7737 7276 | http://www.landortheatre.co.uk to 1 Dec

Rating: four

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November 13, 2013 · 10:22 pm

MOJO – Harold PInter Theatre, SW1

FLASH-FLOOD OF TESTOSTERONE IN OLD SOHO: FEMALE CRITIC UNMOVED.

Three distinct audiences will head for this play. It brought an Olivier to Jez Butterworth at the Royal Court in 1995, and some will come in mere homage to the playwright whose eloquence and mythic echoes gave the world Jerusalem, 14 years later, and to his director Ian Rickson. Then there will be (already are!) hordes of teenage girls drawn by the casting of Rupert Grint, Potter’s Ron Weasley. And finally it may lure a new generation of young men, drawn in by the £ 10 day-tickets after hearing that it is very Tarantino. Black comedy, gangsters, a sleazy club, a corpse chopped in half in two dustbins, a shooting, and sharply dressed young men forever calling one another cunts. Add to that an ecstatic programme essay on early rock ‘n roll, and the playwright’s claim that he wanted dialogue “as rhythmic and compulsive as Shakin’ All Over ,or Hound Dog” . Sweary rock ‘n roll! Cool.

It is set in 1958 in Ezra’s club on Dean Street, perfectly realized by Ultz and given meaningful extra gloom by references (classic Butterworth, and effective) to a fine July day outside. It starts in the upstairs room where six guys, in various combinations, fret over the poaching of their star Silver Johnny by a rival, and break the news of the owner’s murder to his weird son, Baby. The second act is downstairs, as they endure a terrified siege alongside the corpse-bins..

The idealized image of a grimly macho ‘50s Soho clearly gave the 26-year-old Butterworth a heavy dose of pre-natal nostalgia. There are no women – the only mention of them being scatological remarks about how they lose control of their bodily functions when Silver Johnny is onstage. Daniel Mays provides the humour and some humanity, in a wilder reprise of his terrific TV role as Ronnie Biggs and his recent Donmar part as a dodgy lawyer. His cheeky-fixer facade crumbles into hapless panic and little amphetamine spurts of viciousness. Grint as Sweets the drug provider is an endearing fool; Ben Whishaw is frankly superb as the damaged, cold-eyed Baby. The second act, which he dominates, is by far the best.

But to be honest, this supposed modern-classic almost lost me before that. Call the characters classical archetypes, interpret it as an epic clash of two kingdoms with Baby as Hamlet, or an “austere, savage, hilarious ritual” of male tribes (that’s what Butterworth says in the programme) and you can admire it. Everyone did when it was fresh and shocking in 1995. But two decades of TV and film obsession with similar macho gangs, monotonous cuntified abuse and self-pitying male self-forgiveness have blunted that sharpness. It’s finely acted, set, and directed (though it could lose ten minutes in the first half) and I am almost ashamed to say it left me cold. But it did, it really did.

box office 0844 871 7622 to 25 Jan http://www.mojotheplay.com

Rating: three

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November 12, 2013 · 10:58 pm

JEEVES & WOOSTER IN Perfect Nonsense – Duke of York’s, WC2

BERTIE STORMS THE STAGE – and gets the cheese!

When Bertie Wooster, with a start, realizes that the curtain has gone up and turns from his easy-chair to apologize (“I thought we said 7.30 for eight?”), there is flash of overwhite teeth, a sleek Brylcreem parting and a vacuous “Haw-haw-haw” from Stephen Mangan. Which together made me think “Blimey! Duke of York’s Theatre, and there IS the Duke of York! Prince Andrew, to the life!”.

Which I am sure is not deliberate. But it added another tiny layer of pleasure. And this adorable production is about layering joy on joy, joke on joke in a delectable millefeuille of absurdity. The Goodale Brothers script keeps P.G.Wodehouse’ language at its heart in a way TV dramatizations don’t manage. It does this by making Bertie the narrator: to have him only in dialogue is never enough to keep us gruntled, because the joke in the novels is that the dim tongue-tied Bertie is, in narrative, a matchless verbal acrobat.

The idea is that he is back from the eventful weekend at Totleigh Towers in The Code of the Woosters – the one with the cow-creamer, Spode, Madeleine Bassett, Gussie Fink-Nottle and Aunt Dahlia’s blackmail . Someone at the Drones told him he should be on stage, so there he is, alone with retro footlights and visible fly-ropes. He cannot, of course , manage without Jeeves: so in shimmers Matthew Macfadyen, razor-sharp creases to his trousers. He wheels on a series of chimneypieces, walls, a car, a gratuitous ceiling at one point, and in the second act a home-made revolve off which Bertie tumbles in panic. “It’s called scenery, sir. Quite widely used in the theatre”. Game as ever, though distracted by wanting to play with the props, Bertie struggles on, warning us “There are boring bits in every play. This is one” as he tries to get dressed unassisted behind a screen.

Jeeves takes on other parts – blundering newt-maniac Gussie in pebble glasses and Fairisle tank-top, stridingly bossy Stiffy Byng, Sir Watkyn, and a soppily romantic Madeleine in half a curtain and a lampshade, the quintessence of feminine threat as she utters, to a shuddering Bertie, “A sigh that seemed to come straight from the camiknickers”. Aunt Dahlia’s ancient butler Seppings (Mark Hadfield) is everyone else – the aunt, a worryingly camp ginger manservant, a policeman , the sound-effects and the eight-foot tall fascist buffoon Spode. The Hitler moustache is easy enough, but the diminutive Seppings’ has to achieve Spodeian height with increasingly desperate theatrical devices , which brought actual cheers.

The joy of Sean Foley’s direction is the way that Wodehousian absurdities (plus a few extra to tidy up the ending) are complemented, not overbalanced, by Alice Power’s set and innumerable vaudeville devices and jokes about doubled characters trying to meet one another. It’s top-grade physical meta-theatre, yet still Wodehouse. I could go on – about the rubber duck, the side-whisker disaster and bowtie triumph, the dog attack, the knotted sheets, the surprise bicycle. But just go. Tickets start at twenty quid. It’ll sell quick, so Bertie would say, screw your courage to the sticking-plaster and besiege the box office.

box office 0844 871 3051 http://www.atgtickets.com to 8 March

rating: five

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November 11, 2013 · 11:15 pm

TWELVE ANGRY MEN – Garrick, WC2

Storming out of 1950‘s America with a fresh, stunning ensemble, Reginald Rose’s jury-room play hits modern London with the bitter topicality of a knife-blow. Written for TV in 1954 it came to the stage, then the famous Lumet film in 1957. But although its characters are a faithful cross-section of ‘50s white American manhood, it speaks with vigour to any age about anger, prejudice, the power of reason, empathy and honour.

The outline plot (lovingly parodied since in everything from Hancock to Rugrats) is familiar: a jury split eleven to one , a dissenter turning them round to a Not Guilty verdict. The charge is murder: a slum boy of sixteen (clearly, though not explicitly, of an ethnic minority) stabbing his violent father. The judge’s voiceover tells us that the sentence is death if guilty. Bias, lazy conclusions, circumstantial evidence and jurors’ shrugging faith in weak witnesses get gradually dismantled. Attitudes are stripped bare in the pressure-cooker of a sweltering room in thunder season. Individuals, known only by numbers, erupt from enervated silence to voice their real thoughts: notably Miles Richardson’s No.10, with a roaring, violent outbreak which is pure BNP: “These people – born to lie, born to kill, you know what they’re like, breed like animals -!”

Psychologically the play between the men is thrilling enough, and written with marvellous tightness, even humour. but Rose is canny enough to create detective-style cruxes around evidence: the knife, the passing train, the witnesses’ errors. It could risk stasis, despite the outbreaks of near-violence as it heats up, but Christopher Haydon directs with rapid fluidity, assisted by an understated but artful revolving table (Michael Pavelka’s design) as if we were ourselves pacing round to see things from a new angle.

And his cast are beyond praise. Martin Shaw is the dissenter, almost an angel (the final lighting shot on his pale suit suggests it), and plays initially with a gentle steely stillness, letting his tempo rise under perfect control. The American Jeff Fahey as his most bitter opponent plays superbly against him, patrician poise disintegrating into private vengefulness. Robert Vaughn is the wise, calmly thoughtful elder; Ed Franklin touching and troubled as the only one who knows about chaotic lives and knifings from his own background.

But all twelve are tremendous: trapped onstage throughout, each of them – in body-language and expression – immaculately serving the ebb and flow of anger and argument. And – this doesn’t often get said – all credit to commercial theatre, unfairly sneered at for catchpenny values and leg-shows. Producer Bill Kenwright for the second year running (remember last year’s brilliant Three Days In May?) has the bottle to put on a straight play involving nothing but middle-aged blokes sitting at a table on a single set discussing principles. No pretty girls or love interest, just superb drama. Respect!

box office 0844 412 4662 to 1 March

Rating: four

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November 7, 2013 · 8:31 pm

TARTUFFE – Birmingham Rep

MAKING MERRY HELL WITH MOLIERE

It kicks off with a lad sliding down the banister of Liz Ascroft’s brilliantly skewed mansion set (twisted like the Valkenborch Babel Tower and faintly inscribed with an elegant Fragonard). The first speech is a rant from a ferocious grandma, waving a lapdog in a box and barking for it between lines like: “If I can say this without giving offence, you’re wrong in everything you say and everything you do”. This figure, who handily identifies the family members with a shower of insults, is Janice Connolly: known and loved in Brum for solo shows as “Mrs Barbara Nice”, here gracing the Rep with her matchless comedy-knees and solid, benign hilarity.

That opening gale of merriment sets the tone for an evening of pure frivolity. And why not? Its a recession, its November, its Birmingham, its probably raining. In reviving Moliere’s angry, twice-banned 17c comedy about Tartuffe, a holy-joe hypocrite invading a bourgeois family, Roxana Silbert’s first production for the Rep’s new theatre plays it for fun. Which is not consistently easy, because Chris Campbells new translation eschews the verse form which in French made Moliere’s lengthy philosophical speeches flow more easily. Some may also deplore the missed opportunity to make topical points about fanaticism rather than revelling in farce.

But its funny, and thats what Moliere wanted: excoriated for his parody of religious hypocrisy and of those like the householder Orgon who fall for it, he wrote “the comic is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see and avoid it”. Thus, the broader the better. The utter preposterousness of Tartuffe, a con-man trying to seduce Orgon’s wife Elmire (Sian Brooke), is invisible to the dupe. He tries to force his daughter to marry the interloper, gives him all his money, and ignores every argument and evidence of his felony until – in a second-act scene of comic physical perfection – Elmire forces him to witness her near-rape, and he crawls out from under the table to confront the sagging underpants of his fallen idol.

Tartuffe is Mark Williams, a hippyish sandalled guru (“Laurent, just roughen up my spare hair-shirt”) but the real delight is Paul Hunter’s Orgon, idiotic in orange socks and a Craig-Brown hairdo, the one character who is allowed a certain roundness and genuine pained revelation. The costumes are modern, down to a ra-ra-skirt and leggings on Ayesha Antoine, who is nimble fun as the scornful interfering maidservant. But a periwig does appear and disappear, and the towering white perm on Connolly’s head has pleasing 17c echoes: imagine an albino turkey rashly attempting to mate with a Marie Antoinette up-do.

There are intermittent breaches of the fourth wall, to the crowing delight of the front rows, and happy local jokes in the crevices of Moliere: HS2, local parking, government policy, and the cast’s horror that a visiting bailiff is from Wolverhampton. It ends on a high. What more do you want?

0121 236 4455 or www. birmingham-rep.co.uk to 16 Nov.

Rating : three

plus a first sneak preview outing for Panto Mouse…because it nearly is one…

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