Category Archives: Five Mice

November 23, 2016 · 7:11 am

THE SHAKESPEARE TRILOGY – Donmar at Kings Cross

O BRAVE NEW WORLD, IN BRAVE CAPTIVITY

 

Three years ago the Donmar’s all-woman Julius Caesar, set in prison, left me feeling that something genuinely new had happened: a revolution, a seismic shift in the possible. Gender was made irrelevant by the unforgettable performance of Harriet Walter as Brutus: pale, handsomely chiselled, androgynous and tragic, her bright, dangerous eyes gave a strung-out sense that beneath the utter control Caesar’s assassin is haunted, “sick of many griefs’. I wrote then: “if this extraordinary human being gets shoved back full-time into frocks it will be a shocking crime against theatre.”. I wanted to see her Iago, Leontes, Richard III, Macbeth, Lear – possibly in a mixed cast. Individuality transcended gender.

 
Since then we have had other women tackling the great male Shakespeare roles: Maxine Peake’s Hamlet, Glenda Jackson’s Lear. But now, following an equally successful Henry IV (both parts truncated into two sharp hours) Phyllida Lloyd brings both back, in this tented Donmar outstation which convinces all too easily as a prison gym. And the team add a third: The Tempest. So Walters is Brutus, Henry IV and Prospero; and on some courageous days you can see all three, with a lively versatile cast. That Storm Angus made me miss the Caesar with this largely different cast is a source of great annoyance: but as Walters’ Brutus, at least, it is imprinted on my memory so strongly never mind. The other two were tremendous.

 
The setting is more than a directorial conceit to roughen and de-gender female actors: the company worked with real prisoners and with their Clean Break theatre, some of whose members have been cast. Several actually studied to represent real inmates: Walters takes (watch their online video) powerful identification with an American woman lifer who has served 35 years after playing getaway driver in a political heist which – not directly through her – killed   two policemen.  Walters reports that this woman has found, over years, a remorseful private peace. The result of this play-within-a-play is an intriguing double vision: women sometimes wholly being men, sometimes revealing that they are women damaged by life, sometimes slyly aping male swagger and aggression. After all, a collection of rough-edged women of all ages can be as larky and prankish and teasing as any Cheapside revellers, as combative as soldiery, as quick to stir as a Roman mob.  Sex ceases to register, though one extraordinary musical ensemble in the Henry IV – led by Sheila Atim as Lady Percy lamenting Hotspur’s departure – is deeply womanly in its grief.

 
There are brusque interruptions from staff (very handy to make sense of the quick scene changes in The Tempest) , and occasional slang and seeming losses of cool by the “inmate” performers. Fights are subdued by officers, Falstaff suddenly can’t take the rejection of Prince Hal and disrupts the final scene, Brutus collapses sobbing when the ordeal is over. And when Falstaff’s gang turn too explicitly and brutally on Mistress Quickly she stops the scene in tears.

 

 

Apart from the centrality of Walters there are some terrific performances: notably Jade Anouka as a willing subservient Ariel and a red-hot, ferociously athletic Hotspur. Sophie Stanton is a swaggering Falstaff, the class joker and a fine grumpy Caliban; Clare Dunne a forthright lad of a Hal, Karen Dunbar an extraordinarily pitiable drunken Bardolph and a downtrodden Trinculo.

 

It is playful, poignant and electric in turns. The pathos of the tatty props – a tinfoil crown, an island made of rubbish on a string, a toddler chair Falstaff straps on as a cod crown – adds to the sense of urgency: these are desperate people, imprisoned both literally and mentally but escaping through the telling of a story and the imagining of other personalities. The storm in The Tempest is a prison riot, banging on doors, Prospero whirling in shouting frustration in her cell below: Miranda’s shocked “Oh that I have suffered with those that I saw suffer” takes on an urgent meaning as the rioters are returned behind the mesh. When Ariel is reminded of Sycorax she curls on the prison bed like an abused child. When she is set free it is to leave the prison, as do others: they thank Prospero as he/she settles once again, in the cell and poor Caliban goes round with the floor-polisher in the corridor beyond. When the two plays about political power end, an officer strides in for lock-up and for rulers and citizens alike it is “Line up! Lead out!” . The bruised faces lose their intensity and performance energy  to become once more immpassive, sullen social rejects. It hits you on the raw. Just as theatre does in real prisons.
http://www.donmaratkingscross.com 0844 815 7151 to 15 dec

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rating five

5 Meece Rating

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November 18, 2016 · 9:15 am

THE TEMPEST Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

O BRAVE NEW WORLD….

 

 

The talking-point is Ariel: a daring innovation for live theatre. Motion-capture technology sensors on Mark Quartley’s graceful body – skintight in an airy suit of cloudy blue muscle give him a double presence. So sometimes (not constantly) as he leaps and crouches and gestures a vast projected avatar of flame, nymph or terrifying harpy can fly or flare overhead. And indeed the production is visually beautiful: Stephen Brimson Lewis’ design and the Imaginarium studios update the mission of 17c masque to make us gasp and marvel. Framed in the ribs of a great wrecked hull we see marvellous things: even Prospero’s classical display of fertility spirits does not slow the final scenes, but shimmers with high operatic intensity (Paul Englishby’s music breaks your heart). Even if Iris and Ceres do, in their fantastical costumes, evoke a sudden curious memory of Edina and Patsy.
But never mind all that. For all the glory and ingenuity of spectacle, the point is is that Gregory Doran’s superlative production, with Simon Russell Beale as Prospero, is the gold standard: the Tempest against which others are compared for decades to come. For Doran the text must always yield up its secrets, not a word or phrase unconsidered, so that even the most familiar plays spring to life and startle under his direction.

 

 

This is my third Tempest this year alone, yet aspects of the play hit me afresh. I have never seen more clearly the delicacy of the scene where Antonio and Sebastian move from irritable shipwrecked banter to murderous conspiracy: it is like a telescoped Macbeth, with Tom Turner’s swaggering Sebastian tempted and Oscar Pierce, smaller in heart and stature, at moments jesting about murder like Richard III. Nor, for a moment, did I understand the reason for a brief comic moment when the herd of strange pale ragged spirits tease the labouring Caliban : Joe Dixon, huge , menacingly ungainly, primitive in pathos, always clutching a fish like a great twisted child with a comforter . But a moment later Caliban’s own line “for every trifle are they set upon me!” recounts his torments and in that deft flick of a touch, his inwardness is laid open. Some of the text’s strange meaning is illuminated simply by the physical: as Ariel sings Full Fathom Five the spirits become floating corpses between the old timbers, and often you glance aloft at the ragged beams and see Quartley’s graceful shape watching, vigilant, his spirit-face intent as he observes human behaviour. This haunting presence, and a sudden still, unplayful moment at his “Do you love me, Master?” add new depth to his final, shattering evocation of pity.

 
It is a deep production: full fathom five. Russell Beale’s Prospero is a marvel of thoughtful intelligence as one would expect: wound with tension from the opening, too lonely in his power for private peace. This is not a lordly magical ruler but an old man half- broken by long painful scholarship, burning resentment and the vengeful heart which is his own “thing of darkness” . Odd irascible paternal moments (SRB can do comedy, as we know) do not diminish a deeply human evocation of pain and need. Done with such feeling the play shakes the heart more deeply even than Lear, because of the electric moment when Ariel, inhuman, has been watching the suffering of the captives and confronts his master with the need to let his heart move : “Mine would sir, were I human!” . Beale roars, suddenly, terrifyingly: twelve years’ frustrated vengefulness escaping in broken breath. For he must forgive, break his staff and drown the book, and imagine no more harpies. This Prospero, in sudden painful gentleness, finds the reconciliation and redemption which Lear never does. I was shaken, close to tears, still held by it through a four hour drive home in the windy dark.
Ah well. If this earnestness puts you off, let me reassure you that there are some excellent laughs. Trinculo and Stephano are genuinely funny, their relationship mirroring the theme of dominance. And very fine jokes are the Miranda-firewood one and the “brave utensils”. Oh, see it for yourself.
box office 0844 800 1110 to 21 January
rating five    5 Meece Rating

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November 14, 2016 · 11:33 pm

SCHOOL OF ROCK New London Theatre WC2

TWO LORDS A-ROCKING…

 
Now we know why Lord Lloyd Webber got so grumpy about being summoned back from the US to vote. Been head-down and happy, revelling in his first Broadway hit since Superstar and polishing up heavy-metal numbers for a rabble of underage whoopers, ten-year-old guitarists and mini rock-gods in school blazers. Result: the wildest bunch of swirling, stamping, joyful muppets on a London stage since Matilda, and an irresistible, feel-very-good-indeed show.

 

 
With Laurence Connor over from the US to direct a fresh British cast, ALW has a stonking hit on his hands: light, joyful, touching, youthful and musically inventive. Three years ago his wife Madeleine “chased” the rights to the film School of Rock, and he set to recreate it as a new musical. The film was about Dewey, a failed rocker who impersonates a schoolteacher in a strict dull pushy preppie school to raise the rent, and surreptitiously turns his fourth-graders into a rock band for a contest. The film used rock standards, and while the book (by Julian Fellowes) follows the story closely, Lloyd-Webber’s songs and Glenn Slater’s lyrics are entirely new, and more satisfyingly woven into the developing story.

 
It’s a romance, a lovely fantasy about a redemptive teacher and a yearning for the semi-fictional days of rock’s rebellious innocence, before the calculating boy-bands and grasping industry managers. It’s a heartfelt plea for freedom, creativity and musicality (ALW, onstage on press night, was almost tearful with pride at his young talent: as I long suspected from those daft throne-shows on TV, the man is at heart a music-master himself) . It’s witty, too: the big stomping “Stick it to the man!” is none the less stirring because Dewey defines The Man as guilty of every vague thing “global warming, Pokemon Go, Kardashians..” . Principal Mullin’s ballad “Where did the Rock go?” as she briefly unbends her martinet strictness is a beauty, full of Lloyd-Webber’s old emotional intervals and soaring romance; delivering it Florence Andrews mourns all of our lost youth: “The world spun like a record, as the music faded out”.. The various quartets and ensembles in which the children plead “if only you would listen” make the hairs on your neck stand up too. Indeed the children – there are three teams of thirteen, all very young – include serious talent on guitar, drums and keyboards, and the characterization: geek, outcast, bossy girl, hidden talent, and gayish stylist, is neat and good-humoured. The staging and choreography swirl and stamp with glee, the children always childlike. The furious parents’ evening scene is a masterpiece of chaotic precision.

 

 
And as for the star… David Fynn is a find, an enchanting evocation of a slobbish enthusiast, ambitious dreamer and parasitic pizza-muncher whose selfish longing for stardom mutates into respect and leadership for his plaid-uniformed band of ten-year-olds. He rocks, he leaps, he falls over, he skids across desks, he is abashed and cunning, reckless and feckless and rock ’n roll . Your whole heart, willing or not, goes out to him from the start.

 
Lovely, altogether. It includes good musical jokes too: one when a girl auditioning attempts a few bars of “Memories” and Dewey howls “never sing that in this building ever again!” for CATS monopolized the New London for 21 years. And another involving Mozart’s Queen of the Night Aria. Wait and see.

 
One prosaic thing I’d mention, being of sensitive hearing: you may want to know that it’s not deafening. I was in the fourth row, and at the sight of the vast speakers (‘the weight of a Land Rover Discovery” says the programme) I cringed in anticipation. I once had to flee HAIRSPRAY with a headache. But the sound is immaculately pitched, not overwhelming even when you can feel the floor shake (not only in the stamping dances: it moves when Fynn falls over, too, he’s a big lad). So if great-Aunt Ermitrude volunteers to take the kids, she’ll be fine. She’ll love it as much as they do.

 

 

box office 0844 811 0052 to 12 Feb
rating five   5 Meece Rating

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October 27, 2016 · 12:07 am

AMADEUS Olivier, SE1

ONE OF THE GREAT NIGHTS
The old man’s eye is unforgiving, his squat wrecked strength of will cows the vast room as he invokes us – “ghosts of the future” – to hear his confession. “You must understand me. Not forgive: understand”.  Antonio Salieri, opening and closing a stormy three hour memory-play, must persuade posterity that he killed the upstart genius Mozart, and thus share a twisted immortality. The decade’s destruction of his soul is brought before us by Lucian Msamati in the performance of a lifetime (even for him). He evokes all the great  immortal yearnings that his rival’s music brings, all the rage of virtuous mediocrity unrewarded, all the agony having your soul moved by the God-given, effortless talent of “an obscene child!” who is the great artist. Msamati  seethes, struts, writhes and falls like Satan himself, never loosening his grip on the pain . Or on us.

 
Set against his enraged solidity is the skipping preposterous figure of Mozart himself: the slight, exuberantly silly prodigy kept childish and dependent by his father:  the frolicking, foul-mouthed pest who –  without laying down his billiard cue or his latest mistress  – can conjure miracles of grace and spirituality, holding whole operas complete in his head to scribble on hands-and-knees on top of the nearest fortepiano. It is a famously daunting part, because he must be both appalling enough to repel us a bit yet – in the final decline Salieri manages for him – aware like a desperate child of the greatness and eternity of his gift. Adam Gillen goes at it with unsettling energy: think Fotherington-Thomas on benzedrine doing a Kenny Everett impression with a bad dose of Tourettes. In the second half her draws out with particular finesse the vulnerabilityo of the man-child; his final scene with Salieri is almost unbearably painful, as the great Requiem throbs around us.

 

 

It was time Rufus Norris’ tenure at the national saw one of those landmark, memorable five.star opening nights: two thirds of the audience on their feet calling back a huge ensemble (its never all, NT regulars tend to think standing ovations are common).  Now we have that great moment. Peter Shaffer’s extraordinary imagining about great art and great envy in the 18c Austrian court has its first revival to be staged its original home, and under director Michael Longhurst, designer Chloe Lamford and (not least)  Imogen Knight’s movement direction,  the play gets everything it needs for perfection and awe.  It is stupendous. Some revivals skimp on the moments of music, for few can afford an onstage orchestra and singers , and if you do it is hard to use them in abruptly cut-off fragments which serve Salieri’s furious, overwhelmed glances at sheet music; or to create great swelling chorales and full-dress chunks of opera. almost as asides.

 
But here, on the Olivier’s vast stage, we have it all. And each of the envious Kapellmeister’s pained, jealous descriptions of a high lone oboe or a cascade of crunching harmonies is there, before us, live, astonishing still.  The Southbank sinfonia clamber, reform, sink into a pit or, in one terrifying moment, on a stepped platform slide triumphantly downstage  towards the sobbing, retching Salieri, their celestial harmonies and glowing brass and varnish nearly running him off the edge. The soloists – especially Fleur de Bray – are marvels, the chorales stirring, the moments of ornate 18c absurdity and carnival make your eyes pop. And the orchestra becomes a Greek chorus at times, emitting alarming musical pulses and discords or moving in their black suits like a threatening sea.

 
Nothing jars, except that the whole theme is jarring: asking questions of all who try to create and know far they -we – fall short. Tom Edden is very funny as the crisp philistine Emperor Joseph II, as are Geoffrey Beevers, Alexandra Mathie and Hugh Sachs as his courtiers; Karla Crome earthily touching and real as Mozart’s longsuffering wife, particularly fine in the seduction scene. It’s wonderful. That the author died this year before he could see this production is painful to think.

 

 

box office box office 020 7452 3333 http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
On screens nationwide 2 February 2017
Sponsor: Travelex, 14th season!
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

Musicals Mouse width fixed

(this is an extra one for the musicians)

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October 18, 2016 · 11:27 pm

A MAN OF GOOD HOPE Young Vic, SE1

AN AFRICAN ODYSSEY

 
Not all refugees are in Calais or aiming for here. This enthralling piece from Mark Dornford-May’s Isango Ensemble of Cape Town tells another story, an African epic beating and yearning with the voice of a great continent. Musically magnificent, poignant and joyful and vigorous, it is based on Jonny Steinberg’s book, the true story of Asad Abdullahi al-Yusuf, a stateless Somali refugee of a proud tribe – “thirty-five generations!” – cast wandering across the troubled bosom of Africa.

 

 

Steinberg met him in the Blikkersdorp township five years ago, hustling, running errands, surviving in a shack with his family. He learned the story and step by step we watch the unfolding of a life. First the modern Asad, Ayanda Tikolo, is seen: nervy, on alert for attacks, nobly sad-faced. Our awareness of that haunts all his younger selves, as they dance and travel past us. There’s the eight-year-old Asad (an irresistible small child performer , Siposethu Juta or Phielo Makitle) who saw his mother shot in the civil war in 1991, escaped to Kenya to a UN refugee camp, learned scraps of English. He finds brief protection from an adult woman cousin (Pauline Malefane) but when she is shot must nurse her, forced to clean her intimately even through her periods “I had no choice” and keep her alive.

 

 

Chased on alone to Ethiopia the boy grows up – Zoleka Mpotsha then Luvo Tamba take on the role in this skilled, relaxed, freewheelingly disciplined barefoot ensemble. Asad finds casual work, marries, and travels to the promised land of wealthy South Africa. Where, as an asylum-seeking migrant “stealing our jobs, bringing crime”, he meets hostility and violence from a black community, itself embittered by the souring of the Rainbow Nation promise.

 

 
It could be grim: and there are moments almost unbearably moving, especially in the deep silence after the child’s mother is shot, broken by the chirping of crickets and then a high wailing note from the boy, taken up in deep harmony , almost reminiscent of a Byrd lament, by the rest: hairs rise on your neck, as soul of Africa keens for its losses. The music by Mandisi Dyantyis and Pauline Malefane, on six huge marimbas and any number of percussion junk, is complex, sophisticated and hugely operatic. And there is a dignity in Asad, and his sense of tribe and culture, which underpins the whole story. Asked for his name, from childhood he sings his tribe’s tune of identity, and through the tale he finds succour in the diaspora of his kin.

 

 

But it is unsentimental and tough-minded about this too: at one key point a relative refuses the child help, being only by-marriage; in South Africa the hostility of a people disillusioned and degraded by generations of apartheid weighs heavy on the struggling Somali small-tradesmen. In a strange moment of pride Asad says he will live in the suburbs; the South Africans mock him, only white people live there; and he protests that he is not black…his lineage is long and noble, that “blackness’ means something different to him. But after losing his first wife and son because she cannot stand the prejudice, he is the one who finally rejects tribalism by marrying a woman of outcast, ‘unclean’ tribe. The theme of clannishness and culture which can be either pride and protection or imprisoning prejudice is subtle and strong and honest. It echoes with many things, from ISIS to UKIP and raises the piece above the mere glory and uplift of music and dance, to a serious moral significance.

 

 
The final moments reflect Steinberg’s tale of Asad’s final remarks. He gets his American asylum papers at last, ruefully remembering how as a little child he dreamed that “America is always safe, there are no guns, everyone is rich”, and faces another future as a migrant there. But he won’t read the book. Too many lost loved ones, too many rejections. “The story is not for him” Steinberg writes. It’s not therapy for a man who survived and grew noble without it. It’s for the rest of us to learn from. Grave, exhilarating, honest, unmissable.

 
box office 020 7922 2922. to 12 Nov
rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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September 27, 2016 · 8:07 am

THE WIPERS TIMES Watermill Theatre , W.Berks & touring

 

OH, WHAT A WITTY, AND PITIFUL, WAR

 

There is greatness in joking at the mouth of Hell; especially if those jokes are part of comradeship, a gift to those alongside. A hundred years ago in the ruins of Ypres, a weary, dusty group of the 24th Sherwood Foresters were scavenging for things to shore up the battered trenches, and chanced upon a hand-fed printing machine and some trays of type. A sergeant knew what it was, so a couple of young officers – Captain Fred Roberts and Lt.Jack Pearson – decided to produce a magazine. Not informative, certainly not piously or patriotically inspiring: a jokey satire-sheet, poking fun not just at the Germans but at the General Staff, the absurdities of military life, the war itself. Spoof ads and agony-columns, parodies of Kipling, Belloc, and cushioned war-correspondents: jokes about gas, and mud, and death; the script for a cabaret (“Music by R.Tillery”). Or “Questions a platoon commander should ask himself: Am I as offensive as I might be?”.

 

 
Forgotten for years, there was nonetheless enough surviving material and history for Ian Hislop and Nick Newman to mine and produce what – after a shorter TV drama-doc – has become a quite magnificent stage play. It is another evidence of what I have said before (http://tinyurl.com/q53tp5p) that theatre in the last two years, has taught more vividly about the realities of WW1 than any other medium. In a claustrophobically, brilliantly realized trench and office set, eight nimble players scuttle, shift, hunch, joke, and evoke both the awful reality and the redemptive way that young men will use black humour and samizdat flippancy to survive. Both the leaders won the military cross, so there was no hiding from the reality of war; they tussled with authority but – again, a tribute to soldierly spirit – were defended by General Mitford despite the outrage (very entertainingly done) of his prim Lt-Col.

 

 

 

The officers – James Dutton a round-faced optimistic Roberts and George Kemp a dry, saturnine Pearson – are perfect foils for one another, and Dan Tetsell as the Sergeant (and the General) particularly fine: but all eight deftly double or treble, the one woman, Eleanor Brown, sliding from Temperance campaigner to Madame Fifi to Roberts’ wife.
Caroline Leslie directs , and the design, lighting, sound and use of music are of the highest production values, perfectly conceived. But then the whole enterprise has the marks of long, seriously loving, perfectionist conception, having grown over fifteen years. Particularly striking is the way that Hislop and Newman, with 30+ years of Private Eye joke conferences behind them, have been able to study the actual gags in the surviving Wipers Times editions and work imaginatively backwards to imagine the incidents and the banter which gave birth to them.

 

 
Theatrically, odd pop-up moments and music-hall moments give the sketches life, but the writers have the brains not to fall into expressionism or sub-Brecht gimmickry. It’s very straight. It tells the story.  It is profoundly respectful.    It has a more powerful punch than on TV, and is funnier too, with a live audience to gasp and laugh. It does not, especially in brief dark moments after the Somme, gloss over the reality of death and grief , or the dislocated bafflement of return to civilian life after the Armistice. It is, in short, very very good.

 

 

box office 01635 46044 to 29th October
Then touring: Sheffield, Ipswich, Salisbury. Deserves more. http://www.uktw.co.uk
rating Five   5 Meece Rating

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September 21, 2016 · 10:42 pm

NO MAN’S LAND Wyndham’s, WC2

AGE, MEMORY, WHISKY AND DEATH… DRINK TO THAT

 
“But you see, its ABOUT being rather bored and baffled. Thats the POINT” said a pleading voice in the interval scuffle. She wasn’t entirely offbeam: Pinter is not everybody’s cup of bitter, clouded tea. But boring it could not be, this revival of one if his best plays from the turbulent 1970’s: a time perhaps of even more than usual dissatisfaction and upheaval for this most angrily morose of playwrights.

 

 

 

 

Not boring, because it is a piece requiring – and getting – two superlative, ageing, unshakeably confident and dryly perceptive actors to make sense of the principals. We have the dapper Hirst in a Hampstead drawing -room framed in flickering heathland leaves, and Spooner, a random, rumpled , camply garrulous old stranger (or is he?) who he has asked in for a drink.  Famously they were Ralph Richardson and Gielgud when it was first played at the NT and Wyndham’s: now, matching them absolutely in quality ( so Benedict Nightingale says and I always believe him) it is Ian mcKellen and Patrick Stewart, theatrical knights of our own century.

 

 

 

They put not a foot wrong, and in the case of McKellen’s long opening  rambles about his poetry, his averred strength (“because I was never loved”) , and how he never stays long with others “they do not wish it”, his feet are vital. Insinuating but vulnerable he sashays, weaves and writhes  his sinuous form around  he room inside those most distressful suitings, one stained old trouser-leg tucked into his sock, as if the trousers perhaps came off earlier in his heathland wanderings. Despite his protestations at being too old even to “peep”at such things.  Stewart is more solid, at first dropping only immaculately timed responses (After some useless personal probing of his host Spooner protests “I have gone too far”, to which Hirst “I expect you to go a great deal farther”. The pair ricochet off one another’s damaged, depressed, very masculine carapaces with remarkable virtuosity. And it’s a joy to watch.

 

 

 

Pinter, however, rarely can resist larding his airy Hampstead neuroses with bullyboys, menaces, leatherjacketed thugs from some feared, incomprehended, but fascinating underclass of his imagination. The servants of Hirst – rough Owen Teale and camply swaggering Damien Molony – .preen, menace and curse their way to no particular effect during the end of Act 1: although the despairing helplessness of McKellen around them is superb, Hirst having crawled off drunk. The play for me dips drearily here, probably provoking that interval remark nearby.

 

 

 

But fear not. The second act, still as odd and deliberately dislocating, is studded with comedy gold: notably the pastiche-bufferdom of the morning after as the two old men appear to know who each other are (or not) reminisce about possibly fictitious old pals and affairs .“I would be taking nothing of yours” avers Stewart amiably, of some old adultery “only that portion of herself all women keep for a rainy day”. Typical, that.. And with the return of the menacing servants they move into a final poignancy of decline -but a decline you can “drink to”, a no-man’s land of hope so long lost that it doesn’t matter. An an astonishing long riff of pleading from McKellen ushers us into the final twilight.

 

 

 

 

And it does in the end mean something profound and not at all dull, about age and memory and approaching death . Goodness knows, Pinter takes an idiosyncratic route to get us there, but there are lines that burn into your head. Pinterite or not, it’s something to see: the quintessence of acting, a poem about life.

 

 

box office 0844 482 5120   http://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk to
rating:   five. 5 Meece Rating

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August 17, 2016 · 12:49 am

GROUNDHOG DAY O ld Vic, SE1

MINCHIN MAGIC.  ONE TO SEE AGAIN. AND AGAIN.

 

 

The film by Danny Rubin gave us the expression for eternal déja-vu: Bill Murray played Phil the arrogant celebrity weatherman, sent grumbling to smalltown Punxatawney for the folksy ceremonies of February 2nd . That (as well as being my birthday!) is when the groundhog’s shadow predicts the next six weeks’ weather. The folklore is old English: “if Candlemas day be fair and bright, winter will have another flight”. But, mysteriously condemned to wake every day to find it is still the 2nd, weatherman Phil must learn to live it again and again until he grows kinder and earns a future.

 

 

 
The film is clever and funny. But a musical? Well, MATILDA showed that it pays to trust Tim Minchin – music and lyrics – and Matthew Warchus’ direction. And with the book reworked by Rubin, and Minchin’s quirky brilliance and fearless willingness to oompah when it’s needed, somehow the music explodes the smart little story into a big shining cloud of philosophical and moral questioning: laced with killer jokes, wickedly clever lyrics and joyfully witty choreography by Peter Darling (I have never seen a stage revolve so elegantly used). Ellen Kane co-choreographs, and also designs the intricately calculated set of tiny lighted houses and gliding walls; not to mention the wonderfully hokey smalltown winter outfits of the townsfolk.

 

 

 

These matter because the ensemble is really the co-star. Of course Andy Karl is quite fantastic as Phil, driving every scene with a high-energy, perfectly judged journey from furious sarcasm, through bafflement, cynicism and suicidal despair to eventual redemption . Carlyss Peer is likeable as Rita, the producer he hits on and eventually falls for. Others get solo chances: Minchin also lets rip his romantic soul in two unexpected, very beautiful songs from Georgina Hagen as Nancy the wistful one-night-stand girl and Andrew Langtree as the geeky insurance-man Ned. There is a marvellous scene with the town drunks, “Pissing, often missing” and an even better one when Phil seeks help from alternative Reiki-enema’n psychiatry healers all carolling – “I dunno what I”m sayin’, but this guy’s desperate an’ he’s payin”! “

 

 

 

For all that ,though, it is the big leaping, revolving, singing human stew of townsfolk who turn your heart over: officials, workers, bandsmen, carnival revellers, old ladies, slobs, shmucks. The ensemble sing big joyful anthems to spring, and hope, and groundhogs; they express all the innocent human smalltownery which Phil despises. Their magnificence makes Phil’s initial contempt stand out more strongly: “”I have been broadcasting too many years . To talk to these hicks about magical beavers!”.
Minchin playfulness romps through – I love a man who can rhyme toxin with “constipated oxen”, producer with juicer, and give a sad bimbo the reflection “No point protestin’ – cos if you look good in tight jeans that’s what they’ll want you dressed in”. The episodic repetition of Phil’s day speeds up so fast in the first half that you get dizzy, then the second half surprises you first with melancholy, and then with sulphurous darkening to rage, suicide, and a nightmare sequence of despair (with Karl flying aloft in his underwear, and uncannily bi-locating thanks to Paul Kieve’s illusion). The feelgood ending involves massed tap-dancing and a high-speed redemption involving a circling piano,a giant groundhog and a sunrise. And, dammit, a tear in the eye. Minchin magic.

 

 
box office 0844 8717628 to 17 sept Principal Partner: Royal Bank of Canada
rating five   5 Meece Rating

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August 5, 2016 · 5:49 pm

YOUNG CHEKHOV Olivier, SE1

A TREMENDOUS TRINITY   

 

This trilogy, transferred from Chichester is an epic: a thrilling voyage through time to the earliest days of Anton Chekhov. And, if it is not too philistine a thing to murmur, it will draw to him even those people who don’t fire up with exciteent at the later masterpieces – especially the often morosely played The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters. There are still a few chances to take in the ‘three-play-day”, and however hot and tempting the summer day, it will demonstrate even to doubters that eight hours of 19th century Russian drama can be a perfect way to spend it.

 

 

 
Three three theatre giants – Chekhov, adapter David Hare and director Jonathan Kent – with a brilliant cast create a world joyfully funny, vigorous, real and ruefully familiar to anyone who ever had a family, a neighbourhood and a heart.   Those who already love Chekhov will find all the themes there – passion, disappointed lives, debts, women emerging aflame with opinions and demands, and a 19c Russia trying to work out whether to look ba k to an age of peasants and leisured  landowners or to face a modern, vigorous but perhaps less ethical commercial age. The  set by Tom Pye is gloriously romantic: a woodland, reedfringed  garden with a stream which in the final play becomes a lake.

 

 

 

These are very early plays:  PLATONOV is a rumbustious chronicle of an educated, thwarted widow Anna – Nina Sosanya – and a Byronically handsome man who creates havoc in a family and within himself –  James McArdle, a magnetic presence whether satirically teasing poor dim Maria, passionately wooing Sofya, suddenly regretting it, bumming money off the local rich man and throwing it away, or finally succumbing to men-behaving-badly depression in grimy underwear. Irresistible.   At 20, Chekhov never trimmed the work down from six hours, gave it a name or saw it performed: but Hare’s version is tight, wickedly witty , emotionally honest and rife with snortingly funny one-liners . It is not as confusing at it might be, but fabulous entertainment, increasing pace with sudden entrances of all and sundry, often shouting and in ridiculous hats. It makes you reflect that this Chekhov – able to mix broad observational comedy with harsh shafts of painful feeling – is an ancestor of Ayckbourn and sitcom as much as of the greater modern names.

 

 

 
IVANOV was the young Chekhov’s first produced play , more tightly focused on the central character:  Geoffrey Streatfield is depressive, disappointed , self-lacerating, self-pityingly remorseful and broke:   out of love with his dying Jewish wife and beguiled by the lovely Sasha, his creditor’s daughter.  Olivia Vinall (who is in all three plays) is luminous, blondely angelic and gloriously tempting, but here firmly bossy – a one-woman “ambulance corps” for hopeless Ivanov – “My job in life is to understand him!”.  Her family elders , in a memorable upmarket party scene,  are variously awful and hilarious and rampagingly hungry, but Chekhov always allows gleams of redemptive humanity:  Jonathan Coy is superb as the put-upon father, begging the pair of them just to live a normal flawed life and get on with it.  Darkness rears up in one horrifying three-word shout which makes the audience gasp: then room and wife sink through the floor as if in despair  and Ivanov reels off, wrecked,  into the trees, reeds and water of the bleak beautiful set which serves all three plays.

 

 

 
The last is best known, but still vibrates with youthful melodrama and fury.  THE SEAGULL is the tale of geeky struggling author Konstantin  (an intensely felt performance by Joshua James) , his love for innocent Nina (Vinall shining again) and his diva mother, a bravura Anna Chancellor  with  a pretentious, weak, famous lover Trigorin  (Streatfield again).  The moment when she has rugby-tackled him to stay with her, and he stares helplessly over her shrieking head mutely appealing to the audience, was met with   gales of laughter.

 

 

 

 
All three plays have fireworks, real and emotional; all end in a single pistol-shot; all have glancing references to the figure of Hamlet, both embraced and toughly challenged. All three show us Chekhov not – as we know him from plays like The Cherry Orchard –  as a gentle dispassionate observer,  but as a fierce youth.
He was starting on his lifetime themes of frustration, debt, passion, escape, city versus country values,   human absurdity magnified by vodka, and suicide .  He is young, not afraid to mix hilarity and satire with deep shafts of complicated feeling.   The final curtain call on the three-play day brings everyone on:  McArdle (I am happy to say) back in his long underpants as the battered Byron of the first play , not as the a sober prim doctor he plays in the second.   We cheered them all to the echo.    If you’ve time for only one play,  Platonov is  funniest and The Seagull the most wrenching.  But all three are wonderful.

 
Box Office 020 7452 3000 through September. 7 more 3-day-plays on sale.
rating FIVE   5 Meece Rating

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July 13, 2016 · 11:51 pm

INTO THE WOODS Menier, SE1

ONCE UPON A TIME, WHICH COULD BE NOW…

 

 

What a marvel is this Sondheim / Lapine classic musical: playful and deep, absurd and earthy, mocking and wise. And what a piece of luck to plunge into its eventful world of fairytales entangled and askew, just when we are stumbling through the tangled woods of nightly news – wolves, lies, witches, giants, temptations, choices, alliances, guilts, remorses, forgivenesses, necessary wars and dark revenges. As I went in, checking the newsfeed, Chancellor Osborne was wandering off alone into the distant trees. By the interval Boris was Foreign Secretary. Drunk with storytelling and news the head reeled: all it needed was Michael Gove offering to sell Sarah Vine for five magic beans. Maybe I need more sleep.

 
Yet by the end of this wonderful piece there is more than story, a deep human complexity and moral reflection: “I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right!” says the witch, and one longs for her to take command. Here are the great arias and choruses about bewilderment and choice (“Is it always or, is it never and..?”) and the witch’s warning that “Children will listen…be careful”. I had seen Into the Woods before, long years and sorrows ago: but now the depth of Sondheim’s understanding felt far stronger. Maybe in another few years it will change again.

 

 

 

Yet it’s all done with folk-tales, the stories we offer our children (albeit in the grimmer versions, and with adult admissions that happy-ever-after may involve disillusion, princes falling for other princesses, blinded Ugly Sisters still needing looking after by someone, and Rapunzel getting post-natal depression and blaming her mother.

 

 

 

Fiasco Theatre ’s off-Broadway production has a pared-down vigour which makes 2 hrs 40 fly past, so that you can hardly bear being separated from the joyful, energetic cast in the interval. Ben Steinfeld – who co-directs with Noah Brody as one of the Princes (and the wolf) himself plays the central role of the hardpressed Baker , and greets us informally at the start with the observation that Jessie Austrian as the Baker’s wife is visibly pregnant. Which since the core plot is about her not being so, we were asked to excuse. No problem there: her touching, gutsy performance and gently soaring voice are worth it on any terms. But all the actor-musicians , who wander to the side to pick up instruments from time to time, play seamlessly and joyfully together. Andy Grotelueschen is a particularly expressive and hilarious bearded cow (and a prince)’ a dumbly deadpan Patrick Mulryan is Simple Jack. There’s a marvellously tough, street-smart Red Riding Hood from Emily Young, and of course the Witch: Vanessa Reseland, possessively human over her daffy, ariel Rapunzel (Young again) . Reseland has superb attack and a shattering voice as she moves from burning , terrifying need to blame, pragmatic ferocity and the uselessness of remorse.

 

 
Framed by old piano keyboards and crazy montages of twisted instruments, Derek McLane’s set emphasises visually that it is Sondheim’s music which carries the emotions and truths: never a note wasted or a word lost, lyrics as tangled as undergrowth or soaring above the forest canopy. In our woods of war and change and quarrel, wolf-harried, mistrusting our magic beans and trembling at distant giants, it was both a magical escape and a lesson.

 

Box office 020 7378 1713 to 17 Sept
rating five      5 Meece Rating

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June 28, 2016 · 10:56 pm

FAITH HEALER Donmar WC2

FAITH . FAILURE AND THE GENIUS OF FRIEL

 

 
A veil of rain surrounds the stage where three narrators will appear, each with their own version of a shared life “shabby, bleak, derelict” . Yet, in Brian Friel’s eloquent profound vision, it is a life as heartshaking and important. Frank Hardy is an itinerant faith healer, huckster and mountebank working the Celtic fringes; the others his robust old-school vaudeville manager Teddy, and his mistress Grace, who ran away with him despite her father’s fulmination about “chicanery”.

 

 

 
And it is chicanery, mostly: except for the rare strange moments when something happens, and a miracle happens. Or ten miracles, on one never-forgotten night in a Welsh meeting-house. Otherwise, unrolling leisurely but gripping before us, there is an account of the bickering, broke roadside life in the shabby van, a career without breakthrough or redemption leavened by gleams of humour, even glory.

 

 

 

The form of the play was startlingly new in 1979: four monologues, the first and last from Frank himself, these sandwiched, amplifying or clear his mistress, wife (or widow?) and Teddy the manager. Each, as in life, misreports the other and the three central events: one a triumph in Wales, one a squalid tragedy in northern Scotland, one a terrible consummation in Ballybeg. Between them these three weave an account of their intertwined lives which becomes a meditation on charisma, spiritual yearning, flawed, thwarted or exuberant love.

 

 

 

Stephen Dillane is Frank, low-key, sardonic and troubled, half-philosopher half-drunkard, confused by his unreliable gift. Gina McKee is Grace, who we meet in the aftermath of a trauma we only slowly discover, talking of a love which “obliterated me, me who tended him, fed him, debauched myself..”. She tells of a child’s grave; but it is, startlingly, only the seemingly cynical Teddy who tells us that tale in shattering immediacy. Yet that comes only on the far side of an account of his life and philosophy of showbiz management which brings unexpected, almost shocking gales of laughter after the sombreness of the first half. Few comedy writers could have invented the saga of Rob Roy the bagpiping whippet; and I cannot imagine anyone better to create Friel’s Teddy onstage than Ron Cook. Dapperly rundown in a bowtie, Cook delivers a quite brilliant forty-minute monologue, taking us from rollicking cynicism about his travails with Frank (reckons he should have stuck to “something nice and easy like a whistling dolphin”), all the way to a painful, briskly understated sensitivity. When he lays out the harshness of Kinlochbervie and hints at the dark terrible Ballybeg moment, the house holds its breath. And then Dillane’s Frank is back: still with one unforgivable lie , but ascending to a strange sad dignity in his own grim redemption.

 

 

 
Lyndsey Turner’s cast cannot be bettered; the veil of rain and sparse props of Es Devlin’s design suggest just enough, never too much. It will haunt me for days and weeks.
Box office 0844 871 7624 to 20 August
Principal Sponsor: Barclays
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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June 27, 2016 · 11:41 pm

THE TRUTH Wyndham’s, WC2

ZELLER ZOOMS UP WEST, SHARP AS EVER

 

 
The Menier, back in spring, brought grave delight and snorts of laughter with this zinger of a play by Florian Zeller; its rapid transfer up West is more than well deserved. My earlier review is here http://tinyurl.com/zzpno6y – but it was irresistible to see whether an elegant, chamber four-hander at 90 sharp minutes ,which convulsed the small theatre, would transfer to the pomposities of the West End.

 

 

 

And it absolutely does. It makes many other plays feel overwritten and laboured: Lindsay Posner’s cast, now well dug in, present a masterclass: a string-quartet, a fugue of misunderstanding, confusion, falsification, obfuscation, attempted diversion and – in the case of the glorious central adulterer, Alexander Hanson’s Michel, a mounting hilarity of male outrage. His cry near the end, wanting to know “what sort of play we’re in, comedy or tragedy?”, is a question for us as well as the blustering deceived-deceiver and his deadpan best-friend and cuckold, Paul.

 

 

 

Zeller’s fascination with identity, confused reality, audience manipulation and the way emotional rugs slip unexpectedly from under our feet brought us the soberer THE FATHER and THE MOTHER in London recently. Here, he takes the traditional adultery farce firmly from the hairy old hands of the Feydeau generation, sharpens it unrecognizably, and overlays it with his existential preoccupations and spikes of real pain. The two men – Hanson and Robert Portal (Paul) – have on this second viewing grown to a particular brilliance in their big confrontation, when none of us can be sure whether Paul is brilliantly acting or genuinely angry, shocked, vengeful or just manipulative; Hanson here, a cornered buffalo, finds his very limbs hardly obeying him as layer after layer of potential truth hits him.

 

 

 
Frances O’Connor as Alice has a sexual sophisticate’s smoothness overlaying shafts of uncertainty and guilt; Tanya Franks as the other wife a deadpan chic cool, which gives way shockingly in the final moments to a remarkable piece of silent intense facial acting. They all, to some extent, lie; are all to some extent deceived. It zings, it turns on a sixpence, confuses, delights, prods pretensions. It has no mercy but a headshaking compassion. Brilliant.

 

 

 

box office 0844 482 5120   http://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk to
rating: still five…5 Meece Rating

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June 18, 2016 · 8:38 am

RICHARD III, Almeida N1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS CHILLED, THRILLED, DAZZLED

 

 

Ralph Fiennes is a menace. An utter menace. Other actors beware. He will cheat, stab and simply out-act you right off the end of the stage.
His command of the audience, the material and everyone else around him is terrifying.
Around the bright Fiennes, the small Almeida stage is dull iron, backed by a curtain of chain mail. Above us, a large crown looms large over the action and below, an awkward grave muddies it. As we find our seats men in hard hats inspect the hole in the ground. This is 2012, rather than 1485. This blessed plot has been car-parked over, and the confused people of Leicester are surprised to find the warped skeleton of a Monarch has been living beneath them.

 

 

 

 

Rupert Goold has pulled off an absolute triumph in making something which on paper seems trite, actually play out as delicately moving. In the final moments of the play, as Richard dies and Ralph’s spiney, limpy frame falls back into the hole, and the hard hats come crawling back out, the weary scene almost brought me to tears. It was Shakespearean history dragged kicking and screaming into relevance. The ruthless backstabbing looked like the most recent of corporate dramas, the battle was a fresh slice of action, the humanity as relevant as ever.

 

 

 
Richard is the quickest of wits. Fiennes, the consummate comedian, gives the
most technically precise, charismatic and chillingly charming of performance.s The glint in his dark eyes could boil water. He is not a olde king tyrant living on the page: he is your worst nightmare, stood breathing in front of you.

 

 

 

And his peers slot excellently in around him. The most memorable , the women. Perhaps more functional,  the men. Vanessa Redgrave dusts off her best shattered lioness as Queen Margaret, Joanna Vanderham gives a screamingly heartbreaking Queen Elizabeth and Susan Engel as the Duchess of York makes a complicated character the easiest of watches. The men – partner -in-crime Buckingham, quickly-dispatched Clarence and loyal Catesby – grip tightly, but never really draw blood. Maybe the superhuman glow from Fiennes dulls their performances, but in a production as good as this that is far from criticism.

 

 
I am usually of the opinion that any play over 2 hours in self indulgent, but at 3 hours 15 minutes this is worth every minute. Long live the king.

 

Until 6th August.
Box Office: 020 7359 4404
This production will also be screened in cinemas on 21st July.
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

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June 10, 2016 · 10:59 pm

ILLUMINATIONS Snape Maltings

STRINGS, SWINGS, A SOPRANO SOARING

 

 
In E.M.Forster’s HOWARD’S END, the dreamy Helen Schlegel can’t listen to Beethoven without imagining heroes, goblins, dancing elephants and shipwrecks. If you are prone to a similar synaesthetic response, here comes 75 minutes of bliss. If listening to Britten’s Young Apollo makes you wish for a man juggling bowler-hats and a woman in a long tutu cartwheeling amid dark sinister goat-men, book in now : there are only two more performances. If a really good John Adams glissando brings visions of an artiste’s glorious slithering in aerial silks, Struan Leslie’s remarkable melding of string orchestra with expressive circus will enchant you. And of course if like me you then recklessly add another layer of seemingly unconnected art-memory, the suspension of a dark male figure descending on a trapeze to scoop up a sleeping soprano can have you murmuring Keats’ The Eve of St Agnes to yourself (“Awake, arise my love and fearless be..”).

 

 

 
Nicholas Collon, conducting (and once briefly getting crowdsurfed backwards by the Circus ensemble) shares the wide Maltings stage not only with the strings of his Aurora orchestra but with a dramatic set by Gary McCann, which looks at first like a New York skyline in silhouette but reveals itself as more like a disorganized furniture warehouse, where someone has put the chairs on top of the wardrobes and balanced a bed impossibly overhanging a 10ft void. Into this precarious bed, admirably self-possessed, climbs the glamorous operatic-baroque soprano Sarah Tynan in a sea-green robe and blue cloak. Under the latter, on what looks like a very hard plank, she rests seemingly asleep until woken to sing by her Britten cue and the dark erotic forces of nine circus performers around her trapezing, aerial-hooping, menacingly stalking and crazily cartwheeling.

 

 
If there is an award for gamest soprano of the Aldeburgh Festival, she’s won it: some artistes, even operatic ones, would stiffly remind a director of their eminence – “For this I train ten years?” – if asked to spend the first twenty minutes feigning sleep, then get dangled upside down, and manhandled by a chap in fur leggings and numerous elvish figures in tight newsprint Lycra, all while singing Britten’s Les Illuminations . Not to mention getting dizzily hauled 50 feet up on a flimsy hoop into the pitch darkness of the Maltings rafters. What a trouper.

 

 

 
Mais serieusement, as we Francophiles say, is it worth doing, is it good, is it art? This is, after all, the opening flourish of the tres serieux Aldeburgh Festival. So yes, absolutely, it is tremendous. The music which Struan Leslie has put together with the Britten settings of Rimbaud’s weird, surreally sensuous French poems is Debussy and John Adams, and somehow it creates one odd, fantastical dreamscape; to my ear it is all immaculately played, and the circus skills, synchornized almost eerily with the mood and pace of the music, are high in every sense (there’s a segment on two trapezes and a swinging strop which made me grip the seat). Tynan’s voice of course is astonishing: pure violent vigour, breathtaking sweetness, goddess authority.

 

 

 
And it’s witty: the orchestra move around the stage between sections with an air of great enjoyment, and one at least has no inhibition about having a quick swing on the aerial strop himself on the way across, dangling his double-bass in the other hand. An odd, wild, engrossing 75 minutes.

 

 

http://www.aldeburgh.co.uk running this Sat and Sun
Cheapest tickets £ 16 and all half price to under-21s. Who will love it!

rating:  five mice for audacity  5 Meece Rating

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June 8, 2016 · 6:11 pm

TITANIC Charing Cross Theatre SW1

A DREAM AND A DISASTER:  TRIBUTE WORTH PAYING

 

 

Full disclosure: I really care about the Titanic story, love maritime history, have met one of the last living survivors of the 1912 disaster, and visited exhibitions about it here and in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The rediscovery of bandmaster Hartley’s violin stirred my depths. I was enraged by the dreadful eezi-pleazey James Cameron film, with its catchpenny inverted snobberies and schlocky Winslet-diCaprio rom-com; not to mention the shameful slur on First Officer Murdoch.

 

 
So I approached this one with caution. But within ten minutes was head over heels in love with it, not just because of Maury Yeston’s stirring music and lyrics (this man knows how to use the human power of a chorale). It was also because of a kind of fidelity: to the period’s Edwardian style, musical and visual, to its vaulting ambition and belief in a new world of engineering and opportunity, and to the simple fact that on a sea voyage however firm the class distinctions every individual has a right to hopes and dreams.
In a damp sparse midweek matinee (a tricky time at home, one leaps at chances) it blew me away. A bit embarrassing, that, since now two days running two modest new musicals have dazzled me into multiple mice: but after all Yeston’s score and Peter Stone’s book won a hatful of Tonys in the US and great plaudits here three years ago. So it isn’t just me. That director Thom Southerland (who just scored again at Southwark with Grey Gardens) should have brought it home to this cosy spot under Charing Cross station is something to rejoice at: though it seems a pity that a more prestigious theatre didn’t fight for it.

 

 

 

 

Because it is, I tell you, rather wonderful. Honestly. Go see it. Some very good price tickets.
Yeston says that it was the idea of dreams and ambitions that drove him, and it certainly drives the tremendous opening: David Woodhead’s set of decks, rails and moving companionway is neatly echoed by the little theatre’s balcony rails and retro lampshades, and the company of twenty swarm onto the ship, excitement mounting. Glee and pride and astonishment and thrill shake the house, from the scuttling stewards loading 1100lb of marmalade and countless potatoes to the sixty-shilling Irish girls in third class running away to a better life, the aspirational second-class Alice (Claire Machin) determined to stand next to an Astor or Guggenheim if it kills her, the first-class passengers who are also given their humanity, and the labouring stokers in the engine-room.

 

 

 

 

The use of big, joyful choruses is tremendous throughout – though individual arias stand out too, notably Matthew Crowe as the nerdy, snooty wireless operator warming into benevolence at the marvel of his dee-dada -dit trade, Alice’s dream of ambition, and several moments of marvellous macho belting from the strong men at the heart of the crisis. Philip Rham is the Captain, Sion Lloyd designer Andrews from the Harland and Wolf shipyard, and the nearest thing to a villain on board is Bruce Ismay (David Bardsley) from the White Star Line.

 

 

 
For under the glee and the exposure – neatly indicated – of private dreams and circumstances among the passengers, musically and verbally throbs always the approaching doom, the reward of hubris. Ismay was determined it should be a six-day ship on the transatlantic route (“even the Krauts can do it”) and urged high speeds and the short, icebound northern route. The others uneasy concern joins icy mist swirling around the bridge, human preoccupations swirling below on a calm moonless final night, the music swelling every few minutes into a great chorus of hope we know is hopeless. We strike the iceberg at the end of the longer first half: the rest is a dramatic foundering, and finally a decently quiet memorial to the 1503 who died, with a sheet of names and the memories of real survivors. Stirring, decent, strong.

 

 

 

http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk
Box office: 08444 930 650 to 6 Aug
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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June 7, 2016 · 11:30 pm

THE GO-BETWEEN Apollo W1

INNOCENCE, EXPERIENCE, MEMORY, TRAUMA

 

 
Around a derelict room and abandoned trunk, Michael Crawford prowls, a tweedy, damaged old man at the heart of this low-key but unforgettable new musical: singing, remembering, haunted by a diary . It opens with no showy feelgood overture but an almost liturgical harmony as an ensemble of pale ghosts torment him with “We are still here…” . No band: a lone grand piano with Nigel Lilley the musical director , draws harmonies , discords and operatic recitative from the ever-shifting ensemble; who also become , through understatedly beautiful movement, not only characters but a strawstack, flights, a row of shops in 1903 Norwich. The music is sometimes lushly romantic, sometimes borrowing from Edwardian comic-song and ballad, sometimes as eerie and threatening as in an occult thriller. It is a hypnotic show: Sondheimish, in a good way.

 

 

 

 
So this new British musical (from Perfect Pitch with Northampton, Derby and West Yorkshire Playhouse) is special. L.P.Hartley’s 1953 novel became a famous film and lately was a BBC drama, but to make it a musical felt foolhardy. A tormented memory-piece about an Edwardian schoolboy’s loss of innocence, remembered by his damaged older self fifty years later, falls neither into the realm of rom-com or high drama. But the composer is Richard Taylor of Whistle Down the Wind, who has just astonished and delighted us with the equally intimate Flowers for Mrs Harris. And, crucially, the book and lyrics are by David Wood. As our leading children’s playwright (remember Goodnight Mr Tom) he naturally homes in on the boy, the baffled innocent at the story’s heart. Roger Haines’ direction, deceptively simple, is in movement and emotional control a piece of pure theatre.

 

 

 
Crawford is the old Leo Colston, anxiously watching his past unreeling around him and arguing with his younger self, sometimes rapt in memory of the good times, sometimes horrified. The story (for newcomers) deals with a naive, awkward schoolboy Leo, invited by his far grander friend Marcus to summer at Brandham Hall in Norfolk. His shy adoration of Marion, the sister, gives him the task of carrying messages between her and a rough tenant farmer, Ted Burgess, without understanding how transgressive this is. The final disaster, for which the child feels responsible, has blighted Colston’s afterlife: the question is whether in memory he can find redemption. In an age very conscious of childhood trauma and dangerous memory it could hardly be more topical.

 

 

 

 

Although it is, of course, also thoroughly Edwardian. Wood’s text catches all Hartley’s period atmosphere: not least in the language and unawareness of the two schoolboys (peerless on press night – William Thompson as the sensitive Leo, Archie Stevens as the rumbustious, very funny Marcus, very Molesworth in his prepschool slangy “come on, old turnip-top!”). They sing like angels, especially Leo, Thompson more than holding his own in duets with Michael Crawford. But Gemma Sutton’s Marion is pure magic too: arrogant in her beauty, recklessly in love, manipulating the boy’s adoration, daughter of a time when, as her gentlemanly fiancé says, “Nothing is ever a lady’s fault” but she pays for that with her freedom.

 

 

 

The sombre, disfigured Viscount Trimingham is Stephen Carlile, again catching the period manner exactly, and Issy van Randwyck, correctly matriarchal, finally explodes into terrifying fury as her plans unravel. As for Stuart Ward’s Ted, he conveys enough crass roughness to underline the social impossibility of the affair, and enough solid decency beneath it to serve the tale’s climax and conclusion.

 

 

 

There are some stunningly beautiful songs – not least Leo’s yearning sense of emerging as a butterfly in the hot, hot dangerous summer, and Crawford’s redemptive finale;. The set-pieces, swimming-party, cricket match and denouement, are climactic. But it is the line of the story, the urgency and emotional truth Wood and Taylor bring out of it, which sends you away happily startled.
box office 0844 579 1971 to 15 october
rating five

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April 26, 2016 · 11:56 pm

CLYBOURNE PARK Richmond & TOURING

A MODERN MASTERPIECE

 
This is that finely balanced thing: a comedy built around a tragedy. Six summers ago, a newfledged critic for the Times, I wrote about its British premiere: “Bruce Norris’ play is billed as a satire on race and property in America, in 1959 and then the present day, but it reaches wider. Norris is in fact occupying territory somewhere between Arthur Miller and vintage Ayckbourn, and holding it triumphantly.”

 

 
His central idea is the observation that inner-suburban areas which once were all-white, dreading a black influx, find themselves fifty years later dominated by a black community and at at risk of a gentrifying invasion of white people drawn by promiximity to “downtown”… which might ring some bells in our cities. We first meet the ‘50s couple, covering the deep pain of a two-year-old tragedy with banal banter, and finally succumbing to rage or tears in dispute with a pastor and a frightful neighbour who is horrified at their selling to a black family. In Act 2 we meet the 2009 moderns, locked in fraught debate as the white incomers plan to rebuild the same house bigger, and the black locals (upwardly mobile now but descended from the ‘50s incomers) civilly disguise their contempt.

 

 

 

The Court’s version went to the West End, but has pretty much vanished from our canon of modern classics since. So cheer for Daniel Buckroyd of the Colchester Mercury, whose elegant and thoughtful productions tour the land (link below) and redress the howling injustice of Londoners getting all the fun. I only wish that the tour was heading into more towns where, as in Norris’ imagined neighbourhood, there are mingled sensitivities about both house prices and race. Or, as Bev and Russ in Act 1 would say , the matter of “coloureds” – until Jim the dreadful patron1zing vicar says piously ” don’t we say Negro now?”

 

 
The slyness of Norris’ brilliant text mines awkwardnesses like that, in both the 1959 and 2009 acts. Hypocrisy, deep worried prejudice  and self- interested alarm contort language and betray themselves. I had remembered the magnificently shocking second act in which the moderns are constantly on their mobiles, debate hopelessly, and manage, one after another, to offend one another (on race, gayness, feminism, patriotism, disability, rape, vulgarity, you name it). You hear the actual gasps before the laughs: even at the show I saw, a last matinee on a quiet day in Colchester,

 

 

.
Buckroyd’s cast are tremendous: Mark Womack particularly as the enduring, suffering Russ in the first act, and Gloria Onitiri deploying – as the black ‘50s maid and the successful modern woman – first dignity, and then venomous, brittle killer timing. Another shout for Ben Deery’s infuriating malicious geek Karl in the first half; but they are all great, perfect casting and solidly at ease as an ensemble.

 

 
What I had forgotten about is Norris’ satisfying, sly mystifications: you only gradually see what is happening in both acts. The first begins in deliberately banal uncomical chat between the 1959 couple, the second in a committee whose purpose one cannot quite grasp. But clarity grows, and the growing interweaving of themes, remarks, and character traits between the two disparate acts is masterful. Nor does Norris fall into the trap of exaggerating the similarities of then and now: the second Act is not a mirror image of naive 1959 racism, but a tricky modern swamp of hypocrisy, awkward liberalism and lurking unsayables.

 

 
And the tragedy stays at the heart of it. We come poignantly full circle to a final haunting, and a reminder that next to real loves and griefs , all offence is trivial. Brilliant.

 

 
Richmond Theatre to 30 APril, http://www.atgtickets.com/richmond
then touring Guildford, Cambridge, Oxford, Theatr Clwyd.
rating Five   5 Meece Rating

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April 26, 2016 · 12:54 am

SHOWBOAT NEW LONDON THEATRE WC2

ROLLING ALONG, CARRYING ALL BEFORE IT

 
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly – you gotta laugh and you gotta cry. And believe me, you won’t help loving this stunning, flawless, celebratory production. Swooping down from a five-star run in Sheffield, it’s the swansong of its Artistic Director Daniel Evans as he leaves to run Chichester. So anyone in Chichester worrying about its future blockbuster musicals can calm down. This is as good as their GYPSY, though Kern and Hammerstein’s 1927 musical is less focused on one huge star: its joys and dramas and legendary numbers spread across an exuberant ensemble.

 

 
They spread over decades, too: there’s an epic quality to this grandaddy of the modern storytelling musical, as forty years go rollin’ along over showpeople and lovers. In 1887 we meet them on the levée at Natchez, Mississippi, black workers toiling under bales of cotton, white performers primping up for Captain Andy’s vaudeville night aboard the Cotton Blossom. From there to 1927 fortunes rise and fall, roulette wheels spin, hearts are broken , babies born, war and Prohibition and the KKK and the long, cruel backwash of old slavery define an America struggling into the new age.

 

 
It is an epic indeed, operatic and cinematic (old monochrome footage flickers by, setting the moment without fuss). It is funny and melancholy by turns. From the moment when the great paddle-steamer first rolls towards us, and bent beneath baskets and bales “coloured folk work while the white folk play” , the combination of seriousness and spectacle dazzles. But never at the expense of storytelling: innocent Magnolia and dashing Gaylord lock eyes on the wharf, Julie and her man are banished for their negro blood, Frank and Ellie-Mae bicker and seek their stardom, and Captain Andy (Malcolm Sinclair) grows old under the sharp tongue and rigid principles of his puritan wife. Everything happens, every big number rising like a wave and ebbing into gentleness, for the joy of Hammerstein’s book is in the contrasts of mood. Emmanuel Kojo’s deep beautiful renderings of Old Man River flow through the show, sometimes creating an actual physical frisson; the love duets of Gina Beck and Chris Peluso as Nola and Gaylord melt heartbreakingly together (these are fine, fine voices). Alistair David’s choreography gives us joyful, stamping dances in thrilling ensemble numbers. A wrenching farewell from father to child is followed by an angry, sozzled, unforgettable rendering of “Just my Bill” from Rebecca Trehearne’s Julie; abandoned Nola’s growlingly low contralto “Fish gotta swim” is frivolously reworked by the Trocadero’s sharp pianist into a ragtime beat. A triumphant ‘after the ball” actually had the front rows singing along. Sandra Marvin’ s Queenie and her Joe entertainingly define long patient and impatient marriage. More than one star is born in this cast tonight.

 

 
Oh, and one line rings particularly in the mind as Andy, in the new ‘20s world of flapper dresses, admires the ladylike poise of his granddaughter Kim . “When she sits on a chair” he growls “She realizes that the human knee is just a joint and not an entertainment”. That sticks, because when Danny Collins’ Frank dances his superbly bizarre, mad-twisted-grasshopper legwork completely negates that statement. This man’s knees are a entertainment, one you won’t forget.
soon forget. Especially if you go again. Which lots of us, I suspect, will.

 
box office 0844 412 4654 to 7 January 2017
rating Five   5 Meece Rating

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March 31, 2016 · 11:16 pm

HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES Theatre Royal, Haymarket SW1

THE CLASSIC COMEDY OF CLASS AND CONFUSION  

 

 

We’re back in the 1960’s, and how! Beyond the jolly geometric curtain a bygone world revives. Shiny pink plastic boots, a ridiculous frilled sub-Laura-Ashley print dinner frock. Nicholas le Prevost doing breathless “Swedish jerks” before setting out for work with bowler and brolly, and coming home to prod suspiciously at an avocado pear , while entertaining a shy colleague for the sake of old-fashioned departmental teamwork. A lost world teeters uncomfortably between postwar formalities and hierarchies and the irreverent modern era. Julie Godfrey’s set straddles lifestyles, one sitting room representing two as cheap clutter and middle-aged Hyacinth-Bouquet gentility interweave: a sofa-cover changes two seats along ,or clothes dry on a baby’s playpen next to a grand French window.

 

 

 

In this we watch three very English marriages in three classes: Frank and Fiona are upper-management, she content with her economic, if not her sexual, fate, he an amiable bumbler with a streak of earnest sentimentality. Bob and Terry are younger, scrappy and sexy: he rising at work, she frustrated by babycare, writing letters to The Guardian and wanting a place in the world. Between them, stuck as it were back in the ‘40s, the Uriah-Heepish William is a meek accountant dominating and patronizing his still meeker wife Mary (“You have no idea how much work I’ve put into that woman”).

 

 

But never mind the social analysis, though in Alan Ayckbourn it is always lurking; this is a hoot, one of the craftiest , most theatrically innovative farces-of-manners we have, from the start of the great man’s career. Director Alan Strachan sets it firmly in its period, not only to make sense of the phone calls which sometimes drive the plot, but to emphasise that it is as much about class and status as mere adultery. That is going on, we rapidly learn, between Bob, fed up with his disaffected young-mother wife Terry (Tamzin Outhwaits), and posh bored Fiona . Jenny Seagrove as Fiona is gloriously poised (worth the ticket to hear her say the word “Woking”) and nicely mean in her dismissive attitude to her husband Frank.

 

 

Who, in the hands of Nicholas le Prevost, is a glorious, downright adorable anchor to the piece. Hapless and well-intentioned, virtuous and kind and disastrous as the complications unfold, exuding a kind of happy doomed optimism, he’s a dream. In a strong cast another standout is Gillian Wright as mousy Mary: respect for some some brilliantly awkward cardigan-and-glove work, apparently genuine hiccups, a credible earnestness when she grows a bit and resolves to “help” after Bob’s meltdown, and a killer delivery of her last line. Apologizing for her husband’s inability to apologize she murmurs “It’s hard for him. He’s never been wrong before”. As to Matthew Cottle’s William, I have never known an actor so good at blushing bright red, to order….

 

 
The remarkable staging is deftly used: way ahead of its time, Ayckbourn puts the actors in two places and sometimes two different days at once, while sharing the set or even the same sofa and table, and seeming obvlivious of one another. The famous dinner-table sequence is matchless: Ayckbourn’s syncopation of mood as elegant as a fugue , our complicity in the pretence just pure, unfilmable theatre. Hard to imagine it being done better.  Head for the cheese, mice!

 
box office 0207 930 8800 http://www.trh.co.uk to 25 June

RATING five   5 Meece Rating

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March 28, 2016 · 6:33 pm

SHADOWLANDS Touring

HEAD, HEART, AND HOPEFULNESS

 
“God” says Christopher Riley, donnishly, “has a severely limited intellect”. Jack Lewis, his Magdalen colleague, demurs with affectionate impatience, secure in a religious faith which borders dangerously on the smug. At first, anyway. The port circulates. Their 1950’s Oxford world is scholarly, limited, safe from women. When Lewis strikes up an intellectual friendship with an American correspondent, Joy, she hits this stagnating pond with a splash. Riley attempts his theory that only men have intellect – “animus” – women instead merely have soul “anima”. Sweetly, Joy explains that as an American unused to his culture, she “needs guidance. Are you being offensive or just stupid?” .

 
Wonderful. And perhaps that, in William Nicholson’s wonderful portrait of their relationship, marks the moment when C.S.Lewis, Christian apologist and bachelor, begins to lose his heart to this brave, odd woman intellectual who he was to marry and to lose within years to a savage cancer.

 
The 1990 play is an imagining, but based on close intuitive attention to Lewis’ own writings (notably The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed) It has become a modern classic. But this is by some distance the most arresting, intelligent production I have seen (beating even the BAFTA-winning film with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger). It is a perfect ensemble: Stephen Boxer as Lewis has what I can only call an RSC seriousness: you believe in his belief, smile at his almost childlike delight in the unexpected pleasure of married companionship, and are as shaken as he is at the loss of Joy so soon after his finding her.

 
Boxer never overstates, sometimes almost allowing himself to fade into greyness alongside the more flamboyant Common-room set. Amanda Ryan, a little more glamorous than the real Joy, has a vividness which makes the love affair real, and carries beautifully a sense of the her conflicted feelings – friendship , frustration – when Lewis agrees to marry her purely for visa purposes. Alongside them intermittent moments with Simon Shackleton’s Riley remind us of the tug of safe cynical academia, and there is a more frequent, wholly delightful performance by Denis Lill as Lewis’ brother Warnie. Unintellectual, suspicious of femaleness, gently and half-unwillingly he warms towards Joy and – in profoundly moving moments – towards her schoolboy son Douglas, who was to go on living with Lewis after her death. It is genuinely beautiful.

 
Alastair Whatley’s production never misses a heartbeat: it is simply enough set, but a moment of innovative staging when the child dreams of a magical Magician’s- Nephew cure for his mother is gently but unforgettably handled. Whatley and Anne-Marie Woodley design, with elegant economy. The only quibble I have is that the dons’ suits are too smart. In a West End production some years ago I have never forgotten the obsessive wardrobe care which went into distressing Professor Riley’s corduroys with a worn patch exactly – exactly! – where the Bodleian Library tables rub against one’s leg.

 

 

Is that a flaw? No. Nothing is. And the central message of Joy to her lover – the famous “that’s the deal” – strikes as sharp to the heart as ever. I saw it in an Ipswich matinee with a quiet-breathing rapt audience. The tour goes on: it’s at Windsor now, fittingly for the week of Easter (01753 853 888) and there are at least nine more cities before 30 July. Catch it.

 
tour details http://www.shadowlandstour.com      5 Meece Rating
Rating: five

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March 17, 2016 · 12:21 am

THE TRUTH Menier, SE1

THE TRUTH GAME. OR NOT. 
Its’ a while since so many shrieks, barks and snorts of laughter shook the seats around me: don’t take your drink in, you’ll risk doing the nose trick in the first two minutes. It may be, given a particularly fine depiction of alpha- male pride and panic by Alexander Hanson, that a bit more of the laughter was – ahem! – female. But there were definite guffaws , sheepish or vengeful recognition from the blokes too.  For this is a punch-in-the-guts, cruelly affectionate,  whip-smart ninety-minute treat.   Seasoned comedy director Lindsay Posner, fresh from the considerably less brilliant The End of Longing, must have thought all his birthdays had come.

 
The hilarity of the peace – for all its potential bittersweetness – is slightly unexpected, since this is the latest of Christopher Hampton’s fine, subtle translations of plays by the Frenchman Florian Zeller . THE FATHER , which gave Kenneth Cranham a career-crowning hit, did allow some sad laughs but is a portrait – an experience, almost – of dementia. THE MOTHER is about fragile maternal obsession.  Both wowed London with odd,  brilliantly theatrical dislocations and tricks of perception, a delicate, deliberate sowing of uncertainty which some will call Beckettian (though Zeller is more accessible and less doomy) and others will call Pinteresque (though frankly the Frenchman is better: not as bullying or as pretentious as our Harold).
 
This play is lighter than the last two we saw, halfway to farce at times though not with farce’s crassness. There are two couples: Michel (Alexander Hanson) is having an affair with his best friend Paul’s wife Alice (Frances O’Connor). This we know for sure, because we first see them in a hotel bed. From then on, however, we are never quite sure in any of the encounters who is lying, who is believing who, which of them is pretending not to know something they do actually know (or do they?) , and who is lying about whether they told another one the truth.

 

 
There is Michel’s wife Laurence (Tanya Franks), sleek and unreadable but suddenly seeming open and friendly; , and Robert Portal as Paul deploying an unnerving deadpan. Between them and Alice Michel – the only one whose feelings are made transparent – rattles in increasing unease. Hanson, reddening in the face, at times almost biting the chic white walls, lurches between blustering overconfidence, defensive outrage , and (very French) chop-logic argument about when it’s kinder to lie.

 

 
The whole is a virtuoso display of zinging lines, laughingly cruel perceptions about male behaviour (oh, the tennis match!) and emotional handbrake-turns and screeching halts. But, to carry on that metaphor: as in the late Top Gear debacle, all the skids and wheelies are never far from a Cenotaph of real pain: real love, real betrayal.  At one point Michel asks “just what sort of a play we are in, comedy or tragedy?” A bit of both. And very classy it is too.

 
box office 0207 378 1713 to 7 May
rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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March 8, 2016 · 11:39 pm

MOTOWN Shaftesbury Theatre, WC2

IT GLITTERS!  IT SINGS! IT MAKES SENSE. EVEN IN MAD TROUSERS!  

 

I expected a big splashy jukebox musical, a-glitter with tearful Broadway sentiment and popster pizzazz. And indeed the tale of Berry Gordy’s legendary Motown record label is told through fantastic tribute renderings of its back-catalogue, the soundtrack of dates and disasters from 1959 onwards. From the Four Tops and the Temptations – and the Commodores in their fabulously ridiculous trousers – to the Supremes and Jackson Five , it’s all there rendered at gale force twelve in innumerable changes of very shiny clothes (there are fifteen wardrobe and dresser jobs credited, and even so I can’t see how they manage). The choreography even catches with gloriously absurd precision those old-style Vegas moves: all acrobatic jerky unerotic knees-up , snake-hippery and synchronized pointing at the audience. Or, in really high emotion, the ceiling.

 
But rejoice! beyond the retro panache lies a thing of wit, dry intelligent self-knowledge. Berry Gordy himself wrote the book and put the show together with director Charles Randolph Wright. His groundbreaking black music label was – and remains – a serious dream from childhood, when he thrilled as all America – black and white – did, when the boxer Joe Louis beat the German Max Schmeling in 1938. Gordy, who started as a songwriter (“Reet Petite” lies at his door) cites that prewar moment as a seed of his ambition, and is justifiably proud of how Motown powered through in an age of discrimination. Just as in the splendid recent MEMPHIS, set ten years before Motown took off, we see a radio DJ refusing at first to play “race music” but having to capitulate to demand.

 
The joy of this show is that for all the celebration, Mr Gordy does not spare himself : he frames the show – with nicely hokey domestic flashbacks – in the moment of its 25th anniversary in 1983, when artists who had left the label for big money gathered to mark the day, and the miffed 55-year-old founder refused to go. Until, of course, in the final scene he repents. In between, big numbers and small fragments are brilliantly chosen ; the man who insisted ”a song must tell a story” does not spare himself embarrassments. There are small misjudgements, spats with a tricky Marvin Gaye (Sifiso Mazibuko), a lifelong bromance with Charl Brown’s irresistible Smokey Robinson, and the long affair with Diana Ross even including a first night when he fails to come up to scratch in bed. Not to mention her subsequent exasperation with his being keener to give her “notes” after her shows than to take her to dinner. Cedric Neal is a wonderful Berry Gordy, always at the centre of things, showing the conflict of a creative spirit who turned midwife and mentor, and suffered the inevitable blowback when his big stars outgrew the label and left it in trouble. But there is no self-pity: just wry satisfaction in having “led them along a path I didn’t know was there”

 
Neal himself sings like a dream, as do all the vast ensemble who become successive groups in dizzying sequence. Lucy St Louis is pure Diana Ross, both in melancholy Billie-Holiday vein and doing her big Vegas number “Reach Out and Touch” while drawing two front-row punters onto the stage steps and getting them, and us, to sing along (one was a solid Dundonian lady who did fine, the other a very bluesy chap in a purple hat). As for Michael Jackson’s moment – ah, so long before the craziness and lawsuits – out of a tiny 12-year-old emerges a huge sorrowful bluesy voice, startling the 1968 Gordy into spluttering that this infant seemed to have lived thirty years of heartbreak, and protesting that he ought rather to sing something “a kid might sing”. That number is a huge ask of any child, but they’ve found four boys to share the part, all British: who knew we could breed mini-Jacksons so readily?

 
It’s a piece of history. The quarter-century takes in Luther King (Gordy made albums of his speeches), Vietnam, Kennedy’s assassination: in one fabulously funny, telling 1960s scene Smokey sings in Alabama flanked by armed police with batons snarling “No mixing!” to the black and white audience. What he sings is “You really gotta hold on me”.
Nice. And I am proud to have been on my feet when, on the opening night, the cast brought on the real Berry Gordy, 86 years old, laughing and thanking London for being one of the first, in 1965, to welcome Motown’s tour. And then, amazingly, on came the real Smokey Robinson…
Oh how we whooped. Yes, it’s more than a jukebox show.

 

box office 020 7379 5399 to 22 Oct
http://www.shaftesburytheatre.com

RATING  five  5 Meece Rating

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February 26, 2016 · 7:17 pm

THE PATRIOTIC TRAITOR Park Theatre,

BANG THE DRUM FOR THIS ONE:  AN INTIMATE EPIC OF WAR AND FRIENDSHIP

 

This premiere for the Park is a cracker: a serious, grownup, constantly entertaining light on history with fine-drawn characters, and some acidly sharp philosophical resonances for today’s troubled Europe and our divided government. Jonathan Lynn wrote and directs: as co-author of the Yes Minister series and the recent (less impressive and even more cynical) stage play we know he has a sharp political eye. But this one is richer and more acutely perceptive than mere satire.
It deals with the relationship between Charles de Gaulle and his old friend and mentor Philippe Petain, Marechal of France, national hero, victor of Verdun in the first war but collaborator-Premier in the Vichy government during the second. When, of course, de Gaulle was the leader of the Free French resistance. The play is framed with Pétain, 89 years old, in a cell in 1945 awaiting trial for treason after the Liberation. It flashes back to the eve of World War 1 and the first meeting between the peppery, dry-witted senior officer and the gangling, awkwardly scholarly, intellectually arrogant and humourless cadet De Gaulle. It takes them in sparring friendship through that war’s attrition, the uneasy 1930’s, and Pétain’s rise to an aged and disastrous political career as head of the puppet government, signing at one point a death warrant on the Resistance leader who was once almost a son to him.
I can’t recommend it strongly enough to newer generations, not least in a time when questions of sovereignty, patriotic feeling and the very nature of nationhood underpin less bloody but equally emotional political divisions in our own land. Pétain, the pragmatist who reckons they could rub along with the Germans and save more deaths, at one point says impatiently that “For de Gaulle France is a dream. A romance. For me it is the land, the cheese, the people”. De Gaulle just says “I am France. If I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself”. And, austerely impatient of those slow to join the Resistance, “What can you expect from a nation which elevates food ,wine and fashion to national preoccupations?”. Nor is he impressed by the deals offered by “perfidious Albion” and its Churchill who is every bit as stubborn and arrogant as he is himself.

 

The key performances are superb – amid a versatile ensemble giving us soldiers, collaborators, Nazis and a nicely pompous Lord Halifax (very Yes Minister, that bit). But it hangs on the leads: Tom Conti, with a neat white moustache, is Pétain: instantly likeable, clubbable, dryly humorous, lecherous, stubbornly commonsense, amused by the earnest de Gaulle. Who is Laurence Fox, equally fabulous casting in the role, all Thucydides and poetry-books and arrogant social ineptitude and irritable strategic brilliance. They men are nicely defined by their broad leather military belts: Fox’s always straight as a die on his rigid up-and-down frame, Conti’s always at a bit of an angle, with comfortable bulges above and below.

 
Sometimes it is blisteringly funny: a scene on the eve of a WW1 battle has them growing drunk together, jerkily discussing the concept of the Nietzschean Superman until the older man grows bored and lurches off to the whore he’s ordered. Sometimes it lets us see the edges of horror, as the wily old pragmatist signs off the “repatriation of political dissidents” to Germany – meaning, Jews. Sometimes there is real pain in the mutual disillusion of the friends. Always it is intelligent, well-researched but imaginative about human struggles and choices. It’s sparely set, as between sandbagged wings a great map of France reminds us how fatally the Maginot Line stopped at the “friendly” Belgian border . But Andrea J Cox’s vivid soundscape gives us bombardments, bands, bugles, and a moment of the Horst-Wessellied. And so the two men circle one another, magnets both drawn and repelled, as France endures her darkest and proudest hours.

 

It’s terrific. Honour to the Park, but this deserves a rapid transfer. Hope so. A commercial theatre ecology – which after all sold Ben Brown’s “Three Days in May” in the big Trafalgar Studios to illustrate our own end of the 1940 dilemma – should welcome it in.

box office 020 870 6876 http://www.parktheatre.co.uk to 19 march

rating five    5 Meece Rating

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February 2, 2016 · 10:17 pm

RED VELVET Garrick SW1

RED VELVET:   DEEP AND RICH AS EVER
This (I sneaked in to an early preview , because I am on holiday) was my third visit to
Lolita Chakrabarti’s play, starring her husband the matchless Adrian Lester (my Times review, paywalled, is on http://tinyurl.com/nbfj6dl – an earlier review is on this site. I liked it from the start, , as everyone else did; was please to be one of those who voted both Chakrabarti and Lester their awards at the Critics’ Circle a couple of years ago. I called it “sharp and entertaining”, and was delighted by the tribute to a largely forgotten theatre hero: Ira Aldridge, a black American actor who in the 1830’s, even before slavery was anned ,replaced the ailing Edmund Kean as Othello at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. For two nights the “negro” strangled the milk-white Desdemona onstage before shocked, racist Victorian opinion stopped him. It is always fascinating to observe how much extreme racism has an element of sexual dread in it, a white man’s fear of the powerful black: living in South Africa as a teenager for an awful year, I remember that well. And you’ll find it too in that splendid musical MEMPHIS.

 

 

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

 

 

But seeing it yet again, and on the far side of Adrian Lester’s stunning and thoroughly modern Othello at the National Theatre – and, what is more – in one of those plushy Victorian theatres where it all happened – I can confirm again that as sometimes happens the play has grown bigger: stronger, more remarkable, finding deeper feeling in the deep red velvet folds of bygone theatricalia. There is now a more shocking magic in Aldridge’s deep, dark dignity and bitter banked-down rage; more charm and mischief of his lighter moments and the edgy intelligence of his discussions with his co-star Desdemona : once again a splendid, sparky Charlotte Lucas giving Miss Tree a courage and sexiness while maintaining our understanding that she has grown up Victorian. There’s real brilliance as the two meld stylized 1830s mannerisms with real emotion in the terrifying handkerchief scene which closes the first half. And there’s fascination – for us theatre anoraks – in comparing it with Lester’s interaction a couple of years back with his modern Desdemona, Olivia Vinall…

 

 

Mark Edel-Hunt is splendidly affronted as young Charles Kean, as is Emun Elliott as poor Laporte, the manager. There is real power and misery in Aldridge’s final row with Laporte, and generosity in the author’s letting him express the frustration of those who, faced with a moral choice, decide to keep their job rather than be Spartacus. Indhu Rubasingham’s production is a jewel in this Branagh season: we should all be grateful.

 
Box Office: 0844 482 9673
Online Bookings: http://www.branaghtheatre.com
 to 27 feb

rating five   5 Meece Rating

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January 23, 2016 · 8:23 am

THE PIANIST OF WILLESDEN LANE St James Theatre, SW1

A MEMORIAL IN MUSIC

 

This is a solo show, a memorial to a mother and to a generation. It is performed not by an actor but by the American concert pianist, Mona Golabek.  Yet as a piece of theatre – 90 minutes long – its simplicity and immensity create one of the greatest impacts of the year so far.. If you don’t shed, or at least suppress, one or two tears I may have to disown you.

 

It is done with gentle simplicity:  great gilt frames, a grand piano and the narrator. But there is Grieg and Chopin and Beethoven, snatches of Scriabin and Debussy , thundering Rachmaninoff and gentle Bach: all woven seamlessly into the stark, terrible, courageous, touching tale of one girl’s journey through the 20th century’s greatest ordeal.

 

Golabek introduces herself, and thereafter speaks as her mother, Lisa Jura. The frames become portraits or scraps of monochrome newsreel as we are taken into the world of a little Viennese girl in the ‘30s, who always dressed up smart to skip down the road for her beloved piano lessons.  Until one day her Herr Professor tells her, looking at the floor, that the new law says he cannot teach a Jewish child.
Her father , a successful tailor, loses business and goes out gambling in desperation. On Kristallnacht, stripped and spat on , he manages to keep hold of a scrap of paper. A single ticket for the Kindertransport.  And Lisa is chosen, her mother adjuring her to go to England, find a professor, and “always hold on to the music”. She is fourteen years old when she takes that train to Liverpool Street. Through her next six years, and through the story as told on stage by her daughter Golabek, it is the music which sustains both her and us.
It is easy to forget, in pride at the Kindertransport rescue and the selfless heroism of parents who sent their children away, that mere safety is not all a child needs. Lisa, holding in her head forever a memory of the lost home and the lost lessons, was sent as a skivvy to a grand manor where she crept downstairs by night and pretended, hands hovering over the keys, to play the grand piano. When the silence was too much to bear and she played, the servants gathered marvelling but the head housemaid reproved her: going alone to London to protest, she found a berth in a crowded hostel – 17 girls and 14 boys, in Willesden lane. It happened to have a piano, so she stayed.
It is told often with great humour, Golabek’s voice and narrative gradually becoming more mature (the adaptation by Hershey Felder is skilful, economical and understated, wisely leaving the huge emotions to the music).   The child plays alone in the basement in the Blitz, trying to drown the bombs with Grieg.  War news on the radio and readings from other children’s letters mark the anxious days, but they are all sent to work, she sewing uniforms in a factory.  The hostel is destroyed, the young refugees scattered, adjured by Mrs Cohen always to “Show the British people your utmost respect and gratitude”.  She rebuilds, brings them back together, urges Lisa to a scholarship at the RA.  Lisa sees Dame Myra Hess at the stripped National Gallery , playing Bach so that, as the great pianist says, “through all the dark times we never forget our humanity”.
And all through it Golabek keeps returning to the piano, sometimes not for five minutes or more when Lisa is exiled from it, but always returning triumphant, to send out waves of faith and defiance and longing, the spirit of lost Vienna.   A technical note: Golabek is sometimes narrating, even as she plays, and the sound balance is, mysteriously, perfect.

She plays her Wigmore Hall debut at last, and the VE bells ring; but Auschwitz is uncovered , and more news must be borne. Yet still there is humour and hope, for the young must look forward. She  fancies a boy in the hostel, Aaron who joins the RAF; she meets her future husband ,a Free French officer, when she plays hotel piano to soldiers before D-Day.  In this bygone teenager’s story, and the music which pervades it, the veil of time rolls back.
box office 0844 264 2140 to 27 February.
Rating Five.   5 Meece Rating

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January 22, 2016 · 10:01 pm

GUYS AND DOLLS Savoy Theatre, SW1

ANOTHER CHICHESTER SMASH COMES WEST
This is a revisit, to a partly recast Chichester show: and I must admit I had qualms about losing that generosity, that overflowing vigour you get with the classic musicals on the Festival Theatres’ great three-sided arena. Back in the retro, ornate proscenium world of the Savoy I feared it would be somehow constrained by the square magnificence. And, not least, whether the amazing 3D choreography by Andrew Wright and Carlos Acosta would feel cramped.
But the magic is still there: how could it not be, in Frank Loesser’s exuberant 1950 fairytale of gamblers, showgirls and tambourine-banging missionaries out to convert them. The book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, drew on Damon Runyon’s world: a sunny, larky, airbrushed almost Wodehousian interpretation of New York lowlife. Even Big Jule (Nic Greenshields) is lovable in his gun-toting menace. And Peter McKintosh’s great illuminated arc of nostalgic advertising posters – pure Disney, in a good way – works remarkably well, especially in the clever use of deep darkness upstage, a chiaroscuro effect which makes the stage look bigger than it is. So Gordon Greenberg’s production sings and soars pretty well unfettered. And the choreography – especially the Cuba scene and the leapfrogging, hurtling, somersaulting gamblers in suits and ties – is positively Acostacrobatic, spectacular. “Siddown you’re rocking the boat” is a bit less overwhelming than at Chichester, but still one of the top sights of the London spring. Selina Hamilton is London’s Havana diva, and brawls a treat with the missionary – Siubhan Harrison magnificently taking over as Sgt Sarah with fearless drunken hurtling. And Sophie Thompson’s Miss Adelaide is back, as at Chichester : adorably crazy, whether amid her Hot Box hoofers in gingham corsetry or bewailing her reluctant fiancé. Irresistible is her high Bronx twang swoops gloriously down to a dismayed baritone, her stooping S-shaped anxiety the flip side of her bravura career.

 

In this London production her paramour is David Haig: back in his trademark moustache (we sort of missed it in his magnificent performance in the Madness of George III a couple of years back). He is a lovely Nathan Detroit: a middle-manager of the underworld, one minute assured in his crap-game management, the next cringing at Big Jule, but intensely likeable (and an unsuspectedly fine singer). And Jamie Parker reprises Sky Masterson – chiselled and cool, letting the the character breathe, hesitate, and genuinely change as he falls in love. the laughing cheer when he reappears with his Mission uniform had a real audience warmth to it. And Greenberg’s detailed, loving production keeps its fine passing jokes: my favourite being the moment when he makes momentarily solid the women’s dreams of a ruralized Nathan and domesticated Sky. It takes only seconds, that, but adds to the sum of happiness; so does the real steam from the New York pavement gratings and the momentary appearance (twice) of a wobbly nun on a bicycle with a collecting-bucket.
So yes, the Chichester magic is still there. It can keep its full tally of happy, hoofing, dancing mice. It’s romping on into March, and a fine night out.

box office cft.org.uk 01243 781312 to 12 March
Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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December 27, 2015 · 2:48 pm

QUEEN ANNE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

A HALF-FORGOTTEN QUEEN RISES…

 
School history was terrible. Terrible! We got the Tudors, and a bore-in about the Thirty Years War, but a fog of confusion and a sense of 1066 And All That has long surrounded the Glorious Revolution, Willamanmary, the Spanish Succession, Whigs versus Tories, and why Blenheim mattered. Shamed but invigorated, I now owe much enlightenment to the RSC; this time to playwright Helen Edmundson, whose marvellous The Heresy of Love threw light on Spanish religious despotism.

 

Now she turns her attention to Queen Anne, associated previously by us ill-taught ignorami mainly with fine square brick mansions. Poor Anne – heir of William of Orange, daughter of the deposed Catholic James but herself a staunch Protestant – reigned only from 1702-1714, weakened by her duties and by seventeen pregnancies resulting in only one survivor; a son who grievously died at eleven. The Georges succeeded her and “Georgian” became an era of fame. We do not speak of the Age of Anne.

 
Yet this fascinating, strongly based reimagination of her years acknowledges a woman who, on the face of it far feebler than the great Elizabeth, held the balance in difficult times and through painful personal relationships, not least with her beloved friend Sarah, wife of the Blenheim victor John Churchill, first Earl of Marlborough. Cannily, Edmundson has us meet her first (and several times again) via satire – rampantly rude skits, songs and droopy false breasts deployed by Tom Turner as a hawkish sneering Swift, Carl Prekopp as Defoe, and Jonathan Christie as the pampheteer MP Maywaring. Her friendship with Sarah is mercilessly guyed; so we are primed when we first see her (Emma Cunniffe) dumpy and sad in a nightie as she recovers from the latest miscarriage, suffering the manipulation and power-play of her glamorous Sarah (Natascha McElhone). Future Queen and subject are more like the needy friendless schoolgirl with a crush on the dashing Head Prefect.
The development, and collapse, of this unequal friendship is the backbone of the play, with a third and equally interesting (and historically real) woman in the background: Beth Park as Abigail a poor relation introduced to the new monarch’s household as a personal maid by the scheming Sarah. Her genuine care and gentleness finally rival Duchess Sarah’s influence, to the latter’s intense rage. Some marvellous snarling insults unveil Sarah’s shallowness: excoriating Anne’s “dumb stupidity..a grub! A lump!” as she sides with Whig pamphleteers against the influence of the unprepossessing but artful Harley (Jonathan Broadbent). Emma Cunniffe’s determined, stolid dutiful growth in stature is immensely moving to watch, duty and faith oddly, poignantly recognizable even in the happier life of our own Queen.

 
It is thrilling and always gripping, Natalie Abrahami’s direction wonderful in pace and variation. As in The Heresy of Love, Edmundson brilliantly creates a sense of an older, historic world by using an old rhythm – a great deal of iambic pentameter – without selfconscious archaisms of speech. So these early 18c people spring violently to life before us, in their rows about money, the cost of wars, scandal and blackmail and political finagling and the fragile Act of Union (“What mean the Scots? What irks them now?” got a laugh). There is pathos, danger, character, fury (not least from McElhone when foiled). It pays tribute to an overlooked woman with Abigail’s defiant final riposte to Sarah’s mockery of the determined little Queen. “She’s kind, she’s wise, she prays and tries to do right” .
Fourteen more performances. Hope it transfers. Might go again…
http://www.rsc.org.uk to 23 January
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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December 2, 2015 · 11:58 pm

FUNNY GIRL Menier, SE1

THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE  OF ALL…

 

For half a generation there has been a truism in the musical theatre world that nobody can do Jule Style and Bob Merrill’s FUNNY GIRL, because Streisand played the 1920’s eccentrically comic Ziegfeld star and nobody can beat her. So why try? Thus not many have done so: one Broadway revival got “postponed”. But nothing daunts the Menier, fount of daring musical revivals. Michael Meyer from New York directs, the Savoy transfer is already in the bag, and the starring role is our secret weapon: Britain’s own high-voltage electric waif, Sheridan Smith.

 

She nails it: every wisecrack and every nuance, and she takes several opportunities for sly, new and very British moments: for instance when the dashing Arnstein (Darius Campbell, looking about 8ft tall) has first impressed her with his ruffled dress shirt, she coos that even his fingernails are polished: and then allows herself the tiniest moue, as a girl does when a heart-throb seems potentially too camply groomed for safety. She acts every song, hurls every long money-note into a gasping auditorium, and brings truth to every emotion, turning on a sixpence from brash jokey confidence to anxious selfconsciousness as her love-match flowers (what a seduction scene!) and then goes sour.

 
Matthew Wright’s costume and hair design artfully make Smith look dumpier than she could ever be in real life, closer to the dynamic plain-girl that Brice must be. Next to a superbly tall ensemble of chorus girls and boys, and even more alongside Arnstein, she is almost dwarfed. Her early galumphings and deliberate ungainliness – remember Smith’s masterly deployment of ‘comedy legs’ in Legally Blonde all those years ago – can shade into professional grace, and comedically snap back again.
Mayer keeps it moving, the ensemble neatly dancing scenery and props on and off with Lynne Page’s choreography whirling, tapping, offering sudden glorious jokes like the Rat-tat-tat-tat soldier number, a brilliantly absurd bit of ballet and above all the Henry Street party . Where the old ladies Meeker, Bride and Srakosh are glorious: Valda Aviks, Gay Soper and Marilyn Cutts, the latter celebrating fifty years onstage. Joel Montague is a touching, skilful Eddie, Bruce Montague the great Ziegfeld (“The headdress is too tall for the arch? Raise the arch!”).

 

Alan Williams leads a ten-piece band, and – well, we all left very happy. Obviously we did: Sheridan Smith made us all, for a brief moment as we stood to cheer, join in the last bellow of “…are the happiest people of all!”

 

Sold out at Menier 0207 378 1713: booking fast at Savoy Theatre till July
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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November 26, 2015 · 11:41 pm

LITTLE EYOLF Almeida, NW3

SUNRISE TO STARLIGHT, A NORTHERN TRAGEDY

 

Under a bleak black mountain panorama, this is a shattering play about selfishness, mismatched love, and how grief and guilt can make you monstrously cruel unless it redeems you. It is not Henrik Ibsen’s best-known (though Antony Biggs at the Jermyn did a fine revival a few years back with Imogen Stubbs). But Richard Eyre, following his Hedda Gabler and a still-haunting adaptation of GHOSTS, brings the same deep sorrowing intelligence to bear in adapting and directing this.

 

 

He runs it (as before) straight through in eighty fine-balanced, emotionally gripping minutes. The same design team: Tim Hatley, with Peter Mumford’s vitally important lighting design, take a spare white stage from an opening sunrise beyond the peaks to the final starlit hope. Ibsen was an old man when he wrote it, well versed in its themes: inadequate marital love, the “law of change” which makes all things crumble and re-form, and the terrifying emotional vacuum of fin-de-siecle atheism. But here his catalyst is rawer and deeper: an innocent death.

 

 

Geeky writer Alfred (Jolyn Coy) has never quite meshed with his wife Rita (Lydia Leonard) ,a blazingly sexual, unsatisfied ball of need. He is still babyishly close to his half-sister Asta (Eve Ponsonby, touchingly conflicted beneath a sensible exterior). Rita resents her, and Asta herself finds it difficult to surrender to an adult love of Borgheim (Sam Hazeldine). As a practical road-building engineer the latter is the only sane and happy one – “the world is wonderful!” to him and he wants to share it.

 

Rita’s is desperate for Alfred’s embraces: needy, prowling in a thin wrapper, at one point she opens it to him hurling her desire like weapon, while with superb tiresomeness he chunters of packing up writing his vapid philosophy book about the nature of human responsibility and devoting his life to education their small lame son Eyolf, who alone can “Fill his life with purpose”. She, with shocking openness, cries that she wishes Eyolf had never been born, because she can’t share Alfred. “I want to be everything!”

 

He backs away from her advances. Coy and Leonard make this properly excruciating. “We had a love that wrapped us in flames!” she cries, and he “I wasn’t wrapped in flames”. We learn that he married partly for her money, to give his orphan half-sister security; later, that the child is only crippled because he fell off a table as a baby while they were making love.

 

 

Into this tangle of discontent falls a real thunderbolt, after a very unsettling visit from the Ratwoman : Eileen Walsh a horribly matter-of-fact Irish crone, the travelling pied-piper whose art is to lure to their drowning the “squeakers and rattikins, crawlers and creepers that scamper and plop into the milk-pails” . She gleefully says “Bite the bitter apple, little master!” as she leaves. And while the adults variously vent their anger and delusional ideas, Eyolf drowns in the fjord, watching her row away.

 

 

The rest is grief, a working-out of horror and cruel accusations, and realization that the cruellest thing of all when a child dies is that banal, whats-for-dinner life will go on. “We are stuck on this earth, both of us”. For all his bleakness Ibsen does usually offer a glimmer of dawn, and here Eyre and his cast serve it with delicate, unemphatic precision. Rita is the one who finally sees that even in the last horror, life may, if you can look outward, still be conducted with “something a little like love”. No flames, but a dim, flickering starlight hope.
box office 0207 359 4404 to 9 Jan
Sponsor: Aspen
rating five   5 Meece Rating

box office 0207 359 4404 to

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November 19, 2015 · 9:06 am

ROBIN HOOD Chipping Norton Theatre

OH YES IT IS!     CHIPPY , HOME OF PANTO, STRIKES AGAIN

It is, famously, the local panto for the Cameron family, though the paterfamilias PM himself might want to avoid swivelling heads and accusing stares when Robin, robbing the rich to give to the poor, chucks the last handful of chocolate coins out and sneakily mentions tax credits. The even better joke is when Denis the tax-gatherer opens the Sheriff of Nottingham’s filing cabinet to find , as the late Coalition’s treasurer did, a note saying There Is No Money left.

 
But never mind that: Ben Crocker’s latest is an absolutely cracking, proper pantomime, directed with gleeful inventiveness by Abigail Anderson in storybook sets (Russell Craig designs) and with fine songs ranging in style from nonny-nonny folk to music-hall. No stupid smut (well, one child-friendly poo-joke), no weary pop songs , no bought-in megastars doing their standard ‘turn’. Just wit, storytelling, enough participation to keep the young happy, and all the traditional elements – songsheet, water-fight, spotted bloomers, damn good female legs in tights – woven in without any exhausting overkill (“Behind you” occurs just once, neatly, as part of a door-joke).

 

 

There are four children onstage, and very good too; the villainous Sheriff (Andrew Piper) is all one could ask for, a failed Richard III with personal issues. And its pacy: before you’re through your first ice-cream, ten minutes have seen a song, a chorus of sarcastic pop-up puppet rabbits , Marian in shapely tights, a stave fight (girl-on-girl with Rosanna Lambe’s gender-changed Little Joan) ; plus all necessary back-story and the explosive entrance of Dame Connie Clatterbottom.

 

 

 
Ah, the Dame! Astonishingly, it seems that this is Andrew Pepper’s first outing as Dame, and he is a joy: of the rangy rather than tubby variety, which is handy when forced onto a giant swivelling archery target, but exuding warm flirtatious absurdity and effortless stage presence. He’s pure music-hall in his big numbers, and as schoolmistress saying “No-one needs a machete or a pump action shotgun in class” to the disguised villains he-she has fine authority. And in the magnificent bedtime strip sequence, some fifteen layers down to the bloomers, he must have brought tears of joy to costume designer Emily Stuart: few gentlemen can flick a pantaloon across the stage with more brio.

 

 

So yes,we three adults loved it, and so did every child in earshot (they were all in earshot,as well they should be. By the way, Crocker also respects the Robin Hood legends, down to Alan A’Dale’s lost love and the outlaws’ dismay at Robin’s cockiness in contesting for the silver arrow and landing himself in prison. Go for the big rackety starry spectaculars if you must; but this is a fine start to Christmas. And even better, it confines its nod to the season to one tuneless joke version of Jingle Bells, and spares us a premature Santa. Joyful .

 

box office 01608 642350 to 10th Jan
Sponsored by Kingham Hill School
rating five   5 Meece Rating

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November 12, 2015 · 11:19 am

THE MODERATE SOPRANO Hampstead, NW3

OPERA’S THE THING!   YOUR LIFE IS BUT A SIDESHOW!  HURRAH! 
A play about the foundation of Glyndebourne Opera – “Snobs on the grass” as some cruel postwar journalist wrote? Tartan picnic rugs, Fortnums’ hampers, corporate networking? By David Hare?? Get away with you!

Yet this is a heart-soaring, joyful and sad and humane piece, and if it doesn’t follow Hampstead’s other recent triumphs and storm the West End, I’m a tartan picnic-rug. It was after Hare dramatized his his jaundiced memories of a constipated 1962 public-school in “South Downs” that the producer, Byam Shaw, suggested he take on the story of how John Christie, an eccentric wartime soldier and Eton science master, inherited the estate in the early ‘30s and decided to build an opera house and a festival. The “moderate soprano” of the title is his wife, the singer Audrey Mildmay, who he besieged with gifts and flowers until she married him: he was already fifty. Ironically she died before him, leaving him bereft. For the festival seasons he recruited Rudolf Bing, Fritz Busch and Carl Ebert: its a memory-play of the interaction of the five, of Christie’s explosive energy and his love story.
It is glorious. Simple in a way, discursive as characters speak their memories in between scenes. Sometimes it is very funny, at times profoundly sad. For what Hare makes of John Christie’s story is not “heritage theatre” but a hymn to art and its ambiguities, an elegy for the passing of life and a portrait of a man who is energetic, self-willed, choleric, impassioned. Sometimes Captain Mainwaring, sometimes almost Eric Morecambe, he is absurd but awe-inspiring, a “character’ but also a deep and needy personality. Roger Allam is perfection: chubbed-up, in a bald wig, here is the bluff reckless middle-aged soldier who one night in Bayreuth discovered “the sublime – until I heard that music I had no idea who I was”. Line upon line he delights: “Hate music-lovers, awful people, do nothing but complain – but I love music!”.

With his team assembled and the first season coming, he reacts with explosive horror to Bing and Busch telling him it can’t be Wagner – “you’ve built a jewel box, not an epic theatre” and shudders at the thought of Mozart, in the immortal line – “He may be great but is he any GOOD? Samey, jangly, it’s all servant-girls and awful giggling and big wigs”. As for his furious insistence that operagoers must pay heavily, wear boiled shirts and get on a train to deep Sussex on a working day, it is superb, and nobody could deliver it like Allam. These damn people must, he says, not just fiddle around with “ telephones and whatever they do in offices” then ‘take in a show’. They must accept “It’s their lives that are the sideshow! Opera’s the thing! And if it uses up their time and wipes out their savings so be it!”. And you know what – I was sort of with him there…
Nancy Carroll is a perfect foil as Audrey, sinking her identity and her art in his explosive will, loving him, her postwar decline tragic. Paul Jesson and Nick Sampson react wonderfully as Busch and Ebert, and George Taylor is a sinuous,sardonic Rudolf Bing. Who had to spend the war years working in Peter Jones, and only felt at home in the hair salon because its febrile atmosphere was most like opera – “I love hysteria…Nietzsche said, for art there must be frenzy”. The frenzy of a tubby, determined man with a yearning for sublimity receives, in this lovely play, the respect that it should.

Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com to 28 Nov

rating  five  5 Meece Rating

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November 7, 2015 · 11:23 pm

THE WINTER’S TALE Garrick, SW1

IN WHICH FAITH IN BRANAGH AWAKES...

Kenneth Branagh’s Garrick year as actor-manager opens in unquestionable triumph. One of Shakespeare’s greatest, most redemptive plays is richly served without flaw or gimmick, traditional in this l 1889 theatre but fresh, clear, heartfelt.  The court of the jealous Leontes profits from being set not in antiquity but in a late Victorian – perhaps Tsarist – red-velvet palace in a Christmas season: under the tree a cosy opening vignette of the child Mamillius at old Paulina’s knee, begging “a sad tale’s best for winter”. His mother, prefiguring her statue moment, stands pensive aside, a column of white.
The perennial problem of Leontes’ sudden crazy suspicion of his wife and Polixenes – which can be a barrier to credulity – is softened as the family party begins with grainy old home-movies of the friends as youths, projected on a homely sheet. This, and one unmanly embrace, offer without simplistic emphasis the possibility that the jealousy is of both wife and friend. But as in life, its origin ceases to matter once self-deluding righteousness drives the sleepless half-crazy tyrant onwards, hurling terrible words at a bewildered, dignified Hermione.     His faintly Tsarist air also supports the superstitious reliance on the oracle (Hermione is the emperor of Russia’s daughter in the text, something I had never noticed; Rasputin did, after all, get a grip on that menage). The emotional hit of the first act (co-directed by Branagh and Rob Ashford) is shattering.
Judi Dench as the indignant, matriarchal Paulina is as you would expect matchless. But the sense of greatness, of timeless truthful wholeness which hangs around her in these great and generous parts, is shared this time by Branagh himself as Leontes. I have been in the past a Branagh-sceptic, but I take it back. This is an honestly great performance, restrained but vibrant with crazy emotion, the actor fully inhabiting a Leontes gripped mid-life by an emotion he cannot even understand, let alone justify. “I am a feather for each wind..” The bewildered dignity of Miranda Raison’s fine Hermione cannot reach him, nor the reasoning of Camillo and Michael Pennington’s sorrowful, appalled Antigonus. Branagh’s scenes with Dench crackle as vividly as the real brazier centre stage as she berates his “needless heavings”, thrusts the newborn Perdita into his arms and, when threatened with the fire herself, flings back “I care not!”. The emotional tornado pauses for its still centre during the solemn trial scene, as a calm, wounded Hermione mourns her newborn infant torn from her to murder, “innocent milk in innocent mouth”. Apollo’s vindication comes; as Mamillius’ death strikes Leontes, Branagh curls like a wounded dog, howling agony, drawing even Paulina to attempt some comfort . As the palace dissolves into a bare seafront old Antigonus sweetly cuddles the baby he must leave on the strand, and a coup de theatre of “pursued by a bear” echoes the home-movie moment we began with (indeed Christopher Oram’s designs serve every nuance and mood of the play with quiet precision).

Dench as Time speaks the sixteen-year gap; amid the fleeces come John Dalgleish’s lanky folksinging chancer Autolycus, the two shepherds (again perfectly judged, unclownish, decent) and the rustic, simple-hearted charm of Jessie Buckley’s Perdita. Polixenes’ irrational rage mirrors Leontes’; then back in the now pale, marble-grieving halls of Sicilia the family resolution is, as always , brilliantly given by Shakespeare to mere third-party witnesses – “Such a deal of wonders!” says Cleomenes happily. This is the late, mature playwright, aware that a classic neat romance-of-revelation moment must not dim the surreal beauty of the resurrection scene. As Dench’s steady voice injuncts: “It is required you do awake your faith”, we do. Heaven knows I have seen this play half a dozen times and read it as many, but I gasped, and tears came. For the lost ones – Antigonus, Mamillius – and for the fragility of new joys and the remission of old sins.

box office 0844 482 9673 http://www.branaghtheatre.com
rating Five    5 Meece Rating
It is, of course, sold out. But if you can’t arm-wrestle a ticket off somebody…there is a relay in cinemas worldwide on 26th November. It runs in rep with the double bill of HARLEQUINADE and ALL ON HER OWN: review of that follows tomorrow.

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November 7, 2015 · 8:11 am

LA SOIREE Spiegeltent, South Bank

ROLL UP, ROLL UP, ROLL OVER…

It’s back for Christmas: pure entertainment, faux-decadent but full of heart, skilful and cheerful and elegant and daft. In the great glittering tent by the Thames battering circus music softens us up to be astonished by miracles of grace and balance, to catch our breath at impossibilities and giggle at benign naughtinesses. Over eleven years the “new variety”, boldly burlesque grown-up circus has refined and perfected its formats, and collected artistes from across the world: aerialists and exhibitionists, jugglers and jokers, Weimar wannabes crooning darkly in preposterous feathers, acrobats in bondage gear. On any given night a selection of them hurtle and fly and preen and beguile and clown. I fall for it every time, one of the best , racketiest of nights out with never a minute wasted.
That lack of time-wasting is a prosaic thing to mention, but it matters: there is no ringmaster to drive you nuts with drawn-out pleasantries and unnecessary build-ups. Once it begins, smooth stage-management whirls it from act to act, balancing silent astonishments with sharp (and yes, some very adult) verbal jokes. Old hands will recognize seasoned Soirée performers. Clarke McFarlane in his studded leather biker outfit and bare tummy makes a couple of appearances as Mario Queen of the Circus, makes us sing We Are The Champions in tribute to the great Freddie, juggles and crowdsurfs and attempts a world record for the most people inside a hula-hoop. (Two. If he catches your eye to help him, don’t).

Captain Frodo the Norwegian contorionist does the thing with getting his body through two tennis-rackets: I have to cover my eyes intermittently in horror, but he is so verbally funnyand so likeable as he delivers an earnest commentary with one arm and leg through a racket and tangles himself in his microphone that his final extrication is cathartic. Australian Asher Treleaven with his “Sexy Diabolo For Ladies” and disgraceful Mills and Boon reading is a joy still. The English Gentlemen Denis Lock and Hamish Mc Cann, in bowlers and pinstripes, again do headstands and impossible balancing acts on one another while reading the Financial Times or puffing a pipe. Seen that and loved it several times, including the bit where they strip to union jack underpants and sock-suspenders; but Denis Lock now returns with another turn. It is a new, extraordinarily beautiful and scientifically fascinating bubble-blowing act. What? Bubble-blowing? for grownups? Yes. Astonishing.

Among these favourites are newcomers: Melanie Chy, androgynously ferocious doing hand-balancing on a smoking giant motorbike; Bret Pfister tough and tattooed swirling in a hoop overhead; a remarkable, sultry new aerialist General Yammel, who smokes a cigar while gyrating crazily on slings. The linking chanteuse this year is Miss Frisky (without her familiar cabaret oppo Mannish), doing the Weimary thing in an explosion of orange hair and gold lamé.
It couldn’t be done better. And for all the adults-only lines (well, I’d happily take a savvy mid-teen) the overarching spirit is of innocent, astonished joy.

http://www.la-soiree.com to 17 Jan   5 Meece Rating   give ’em the cheese!  Five.

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October 29, 2015 · 10:18 pm

THE HAIRY APE Old Vic SE1

FROM THE FIRES BELOW,  O”NEILL’S  ACCUSING VOICE 
From the opening moments of Richard Jones’ stunning, nightmarish production of Eugene O’Neill’s early play we have both the shock of expressionist newness – it can still disconcert, a century on – and a powerful sense of period. Both are profoundly right. The ships’ stokers, black with smoke and filth, are figures frozen in the angular energy of 1920’s socialist realism, lurching in robotic concord as if hit by the ship’s roll in their yellow steel barred cage. They come to life to quarrel and brawl and sing and stamp, or listen to Irish Paddy (Steffan Rhodri) declaiming O’Neill’s passionate threnody for the real days of seafaring. Days when “there was clippers with tall masts touching the sky, the clean skins and clear eyes of the men, free men…work, but work under the sky with skill and daring in it..”. All the baffked anguish of industrialisation rolls through it.
Only Bertie Carvel’s Yank, alone and moody at the end or suddenly erupting in caged, stamping energy, is inwardly struggling to make sense of life. It is to be his journey and his doom, this proud aloneness: his story could not be more stark and simple. On the great deck above the spoiled young heiress of the Douglas Steel empire bickers with a stiff aunt , the face of her father the tycoon adorning the shining bulkhead. Young Mildred has persuaded the Engineer to let her see the stokehold and “how the other half live”. When they descend to the fires and men who keep the liner moving smoothly, she sees Yank looming diabolic and dark against the flames . “Oh, the filthy beast!” she cries, and faints in her pristine white frock.

Yank does not get over it. His pride is shattered. In dock, he roams Manhattan half-coherent with revenge . Nightmare, puppetlike masked figures of the wealthy swirl around him; he lashes out and ends in another cage, a prison cell. Carvel’s angry Bronx is sometimes only half-coherent in the dodgy Old Vic acoustic (it’s back in proscenium mode now) but it doesn’t matter. The anguished reiteration of words and themesgrows in power: steel becomes his preoccupation, the bright metal which brings weary captivity to some and wealth to others. Prison shouts echo from every corner of the theatre. An innocent radicalized, he finds the IWW, the Workers’ Union derogated by the newspapers as “a dagger to the heart of America”. But Yank’s enthusiasm for dynamite over leafleting has him thrown out as a suspected spy.

His weary dusk is spent slumped alone against the barley-sugar of the proscenium edge (an almost accidental poignancy, so rich does the Old Vic paintwork look against his shabbiness) . A great balloon moon whose face is the Douglas Steel logo hangs smug above; finally comes the zoo scene where he envies the gorilla because it does not have to think. It is not, like him, trapped in a reflective, feeling, remembering human brain within a world which ignores it and makes him a commodity. All he can do is force open the cage.
The gorilla itself, his merciful executioner , is remarkable. All the physical ensemble work is: expressionistic without pretension, deft, frightening. Stewart Laing designs, Aletta Collins choreographs, sound and light draw its ninety minutes tightly together. A time to remember.

box office 0844 8717628 to 21 Nov
rating five   5 Meece Rating

Principal sponsoring partner: Royal Bank of Canada

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October 2, 2015 · 11:57 am

EVENTIDE Arcola, E8

THE GREATNESS OF SMALL LIVES

We are in a pub garden in rural Hampshire, where landlord John is gathering logs for the fire (in high summer, “it’s part of what people come for”), and telling a joke about a ferret and a blow-job to cheer up Mark, a lanky, sad youth. Along comes Liz the bravely prattling church organist. They talk. A year later, they meet again. That’s all. But it is immense.
Sometimes a new playwright emerges bringing not only skill, but a determination to offer a perspective and preoccupation outside the mainstream of dramatic, and indeed national, discourse.  Barney Norris’ theme is unregarded lives in rural communities: villages hollowed out by alien money, agribusiness and a hypermobile world.   But his concern is neither agitprop nor nostalgia, simply an exploraion of how people inwardly navigate the rolling waves of life.
Norris first full play, Visitors, was a quietly, beautifully, tragic reflection on loss and memory, with an old farm couple at its heart. This time the three protagonists are on the face of it less vulnerable  as they  confront the universal problem of how life plods or races past you, unstoppable, unseizable except in fragments. It is also about the consolation of mere human interaction: chats in a drab pub garden with a semi-stranger.   But by pretending to no grandiosity Norris reaches out further and deeper – as Jez Butterworth did in the more swashbuckling JERUSALEM – into tradition, belief, identity, love, and the immense question of how anyone finds a place on a fast-turning uncaring globe. All this through jokey boozing John, young Mark the road-mender and odd-job labourer, and nervy Liz, who drives two hours to play the moribund church organ because it’s the only gig she can get.
The trio are variously likeable, and wholly believable (I find it hard to think of them as actors cven now, but they are James Doherty, Hasan Dixon and Ellie Piercy, perfect casting by director Alice Hamilton). They talk in the pub garden – first over a morning and evening, then a year later. At one point, two of them remember a verse from “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” and tears rise; but Norris turns the mood in seconds to a shock laugh and a crassness and breach. It is not without outside incident : it’s the landlord’s last day, he having sold to a chain after his wife left: the same morning sees the funeral of young Mark’s old schoolfriend, which he is missing because he needs the council work of repairing the war memorial she crashed into. “It’s for the centenary” he says; and skinny in his work boots, fresh from sleeping alongside motorways in the van he seems an modern heir of those WW1 recruits. In the second act Mark has sorted out his life, John returns just for a day, still lost, and Liz is giving up organ playing.

None of them are yokels: John’s conversation, when not ferret-based, is sharp, literate, poetic and aware, and Mark has a restless wish to know more of the world and “fill up his bookcase from down at the Sue Ryder”. Both have travelled: indeed a sidelong delight of the play is Norris’ beautiful debunking of the great modern god Travel. John went to Nepal but “there’s only so many hours a day you can spend being fascinated by how foreign everything is”. Mark – now humbly learning FIlipino words off his work colleagues – came home from India after only a week having given his money to beggars. He was repelled in a proper, decent spirit by the filthy poverty. “I just thought, you cunt – coming over here like it’s an adventure, when it’s these people’s lives..Disrespectful, to be there staring at everything’. Superb.

box office 0207 503 1646 to 17 OCT then tour: Bury St Edmunds, Oxford, Salisbury, Bristol.
http://www.upinarms. org.uk
rating five

5 Meece Rating

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October 1, 2015 · 11:53 pm

MEDEA, Almeida, N1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS ANCIENT TRUTH IN A GLORIOUSLY DARK DIVORCE

“I can unmake you the same way I made you. I write the story, remember?” Rachel Cusk’s brilliant vision of Euripides’ Medea for the Almeida transforms the barbarian witch into a modern-day writer: but, just as the ancient Medea’s spells had immortal force, so the new Medea’s power with words, particularly her fearless refusal to compromise on the truth, alienates and terrifies all those around her, and endows her with the ability to change her own destiny – at the terrible price of her sons’ lives. However, in Cusk’s profoundly contemporary version, Medea doesn’t actually shed blood: after all, “There are more ways of killing a child than just stabbing it to death like some wild animal.” She commits an equally unthinkable act: she abandons them. And sure enough, her children die, just as surely as if she had butchered them with her bare hands as Euripides decreed. From an elegantly restrained (Pinteresque) opening scene, Cusk sets and maintains an atmosphere of brutal tension which lashes out regularly into loud, snarling rows, placing the family on the psychological torture-rack of a messy divorce to reap a whirlwind harvest: gender battles, marriage myths, bitter recriminations about mid-life crises, all delineated with savage realism. Elizabeth Barrett Browning may have lovingly termed Euripides “the human”, but in Medea he shows us all the sides of being human we are ashamed to acknowledge, the play’s finger placed unerringly on our darkest secrets, nastiest failings, and most vulnerable weaknesses.

One of this Medea’s surprise strengths is how closely it can follow Euripides despite its modern setting, with many vital details (the cursed necklace, Glauce’s burning by poison, Aegeus’s childlessness and Medea’s clever bargain for safety in return for a cure, even her final vindication by the power of the sun) lovingly and cleverly transposed by Cusk, despite the introduction of an entire new character (a Brazilian cleaner, acting as a more sympathetic Chorus) and plenty of new ideas. Even Cusk’s text, which bristles and glowers with four-letter-words of all hues, will suddenly chime intimately with the original when you least expect it. Above all, Jason (a debonair Justin Salinger) is as suave, self-serving and loathsome as always; a man keen to have his way, and not interested in being made to feel bad about it. It says much for the failure of modern feminism that Cusk didn’t need to update Jason whatsoever to make his opinions, and his position, absolutely believable for a modern audience.

Kate Fleetwood is mesmerising as Medea, a taut, sinous pillar of vengeful contempt, turning her fury directly on the audience, as well as Jason: “It gives you a thrill to watch me suffer. The less I pretend, the more of a kick you get.” Our society piles just as much pressure on an abandoned wife to accept her husband’s decision as the ancient Greeks did; a Chorus of yummy mummies swap school-gate gossip and condemn: “How could she not have known?” A sudden switch from prose to rhyming couplets from a divine hermaphrodite Messenger strikes an odd note at first, but listen closely: the big finale is as horrifying, and disturbing, as ever.

~ CHARLOTTE VALORI

Rating: five 5 Meece Rating

Until 14 November at the Almeida Theatre, Islington, as part of their GREEKS season. Box office: 020 7359 4404

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September 30, 2015 · 10:19 pm

SHOWSTOPPER! Apollo, W1

UNIMPROVABLE IMPROV…

You won’t see this show again, nor the other Showstoppers’ evenings I have loved in Edinburgh. If you weren’t there tonight you’ve missed a medley of Daily Mail headlines in the style of Fiddler on the Roof, a Mamma Mia finale, a Gypsy Kings’-style stamping love duet, a corgi chorus, Shakespeare rap, West Side Story rumble at the Cereal Cafe to a backing of “Snap Crackle and Pop”, and a moody Kurt Weill number. But don’t worry. Get down to the Apollo, shout a few suggestions at random, tweet some more dodgy suggestions in the interval, and watch your most feverish, late-night musical-theatre fantasies come true.
I adore the Showstoppers, because few sights are more enlivening than consummate, long-trained skill giving itself to the service of pure frivol. The runaway success of Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong proved that: do silliness well enough, and Britain will sit at your feet. This one may well follow it. The crowd-funders who have brought this musical improvisation company to its first West End run were right to believe in it: the tickets are cannily priced (it’s fine up in the circle, and under-25s get terrific half-price deals). As a way to spend a couple of hours with your mates just down the road from dreary old Thriller, it beats a lot of full-fledged musicals. Devised and perfected over eight years by Dylan Emery and Adam Meggido, with Duncan Walsh Atkins as musical guru and director, the group each night deploy seven out of the twelve players, men and women, and three of the five musicians in the tight company. They are all so well-accustomed to picking up off one another musically and verbally that a crazy, patchwork, but oddly satisfying musical results.
What happens is that the MC (Emery) on the side of the stage pretends to be cobbling up a pitch for a Cameron Mackintosh on the phone, and canvasses the audience for settings and titles (“The Daily Mail office” was the set this time, the title “The Lying King”). Other demands are randomly met: in this case the Cereal Cafe, the Queen’s corgis giving birth, and Jeremy Corbyn. The team take every theme up and run with it, occasionally freeze-framed by the MC taking an audience vote on the next development.
Sudden chorus lines appear, devising appropriate dances; two-player scenes flow naturally until one actor attempts to wrongfoot the other, who recovers magnificently; whole new musical genres are thrown to the musicians and created on the hoof by the singers. At one point on this particular night the MC demanded of us “some typical meaningless Cockney saying” and someone on the floor shouted “Up your bananas, Daddy!” . Seconds later, a riotous dancing Chas ’n Dave chorus was in full swing.

Always – each time I have seen it – the nonsense builds into huge, harmonic choruses which remind you why even quite lousy musicals jerk the heartstrings if you let them. Actually, you could acquire a full education in the styles and abilities of musical theatre by going every night . One is tempted. And this review, let me finally tell you, comes from someone who as a rule, really dislikes improv comedy. Must be the music that lifts it to something special.

box office 0844 4829671 to 29 November http://www.showstopperlondon.com
rating Five. The fifth is for sheer nerve.  They deserve the cheese for courage.   5 Meece Rating

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September 24, 2015 · 5:55 pm

HENRY V Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

THE HOLLOW CROWN : A  CIRCLE COMPLETED 

This is the crown, the final flourish of Gregory Doran’s magnificently rendered history cycle. We have seen preening emotional Richard , troubled Henry IV declinging as his roistering son hits the whorehouses with Sir John Falstaff ; seen that Hal – Alex Hassall, who carries on the role here – fighting off Hotspur and at last attaining the “polished perturbation” of the crown. Poor Falstaff is gone now, babbling of green fields on his deathbed; his band of rogues join young Henry V in the battlefields of France.
It is a troublesome play in some ways, famous for the great Agincourt speeches and feeding (as a mischievous programme-note by Jeremy Paxman observes) a warlike patriotism, a legend in which England forever stands alone, outnumbered and gallant. Technically, it flits from place to place with a Chorus figure between scenes. It is often fiercely cut. But not here: in three hours of crystalline intelligence and thoughtful detail, Doran and his cast give us something marvellous, not macho but both mocking and understanding of the timeless terrible business of war. His Chorus is Oliver Ford Davies, grandfatherly modern in drooping cardigan, wandering through scenes which freeze into ghosthood as he tell us the story and enjoins us to imagine a dim heroic past for ourselves.

The production’s pace is judged to a hair, combining sharp comedy with a deep seriousness, turning from one to the other in half a breath sometimes. For instance as the bloodstained, exhausted young King hears that the battle is won and the day is ours, a thread of birdsong brings tears to his eyes as he sinks to his knees in prayer. And the Welsh braggart Fluellen (Joshua Richards) allows barely a second before starting to prattle about his countrymen’s valour and contribution, as Hal rolls his eyes tolerantly. Nonsense about leeks nudges alongside a great choral Te Deum; on the very battlefield, when we have just seen the young King steeling himself, alone, to “imitate the action of a tiger”, there is a meeting of officers in an absurdity of accents: a huge farouche Irish McMorris with a heavy brogue and Fluellen with his Kinnockian verbosity each staring nervously at the incomprehensible barks of the Scot Jamy (Simon Yadoo, take a bow).

To home in on such detail is not irrelevant: a great beauty of this production is Doran’s retention of many moments often cut, right from the start where the Archbishop discourses tediously on Salic law for five minutes to justify the English claim to France. Here, its sly usefulness is in allowing Hassell to show in his face how very new this kingly, political responsibility is to him, and how unsure of it he still is. “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” he asks, almost hopelessly; but his laddish pride tips over when the Dauphin sends him tennis-balls and pop-up mailed fist making a V-sign.

The story, through all the pathos, comedy, martial moments and heroic legend, is a coming-of-age one. At first I was concerned that Alex Hassell, so beguiling as Prince Hal, was less comfortable with the language and manner of kingly formality. But then, a new King would be, fresh from Falstaff’s party world: and as the war develops Hassell gives usa real and moving sense of a young man struggling to become a leader. A young man burdened, too, with the inherited remorse of his father’s usurpation of the crown from Richard: Doran gives us absolute acceptance of the religiosity. This Henry prays, and means it, and fears doing wrong. His scene in disguise among the soldiers makes your neck-hairs stand on end: a deep felt chilling silence ensues as he recognizes his responsiblity for the blood of common soldiers. The St Crispin’s day speech is stirring, authoritative rising to oratory, as ever; but more moving still is his moment of lonely prayer, like Nelson’s, to the God of Battles.

Details, grace-notes emerge every moment from a strong ensemble: Robert Gilbert as a foppish blow-dried Dauphin wickedly contrasts with the battered Hal; Antony Byrne’s oafish Pistol throws a surprise punch and is battered by a leek; odd understage uplights in Stephen Brimson Lewis’ bare beautiful set create subtle shifts of mood. And the merry political coda, the wooing of Katherine by a Hal grown young and unsure again, sees the women matching up to it: Jennifer Kirby playful and icy by turns as the princess, and Jane Lapotaire drily, grievingly, resignedly queenly. It’s the hardest of the history plays to do well. And this is done magnificently.
0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 16 nov (then to Barbican in Dec)

rating   FIVE 5 Meece Rating

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August 10, 2015 · 9:41 am

AN OAK TREE Traverse, Edinburgh

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

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

rating five      5 Meece Rating

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August 8, 2015 · 1:42 pm

IMPOSSIBLE Pleasance QueenDome, Edinburgh

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

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

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

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

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

rating  five  5 Meece Rating

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June 24, 2015 · 10:59 pm

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM Phoenix, WC2

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

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

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

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

Rating five

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June 17, 2015 · 11:01 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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June 11, 2015 · 9:42 am

A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS Chichester Festival Theatre

SUNNY SUMMER KICKS AND SOARING SONGS

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

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

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

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June 11, 2015 · 9:18 am

THE RED LION NT Dorfman, SE1

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

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

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

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

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

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May 27, 2015 · 10:58 pm

TEMPLE Donmar, WC1

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

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

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

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

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May 12, 2015 · 10:14 pm

THE FATHER Tricycle, NW6

THE DARKNESS OF DEMENTIA 

Devastating. No other word for it. Without sentimentality, in Christopher Hampton’s powerfully simple translation, the French playwright Florian Zeller leads us into the unknowable, all-too threatening realm of dementia. In a mere 90 minutes James Macdonald’s production shatters your peace and challenges your humanity as violently as a good Lear. For we are not only observers but partakers of mental chaos: the retired engineer André is the victim without pretension or Pinteresque brutalities Zeller simply demonstrates how it might be to live from minute to minute unsure. Not being certain of your closest family, of where you are, when it is, what is happening, why the furniture seems not to be there, why people are treating you strangely…

It happens in one room – so we think, or he does, though it isn’t – and jerks in short scenes separated by dead blackouts and a dazzling flashing frame (Miriam Buether’s design, simple but disorienting). Bright virtuoso piano at first mocks with its precision the confusion of André’s mind: but speeds, stops, jangles, mingles with unidentifable sounds in the blackouts.
Kenneth Cranham, in a performance whose humanity, power and control should in justice win many awards, is André: Claire Skinner his daughter Anne. We see her husband Pierre, Laura the carer, another woman, another man; but they are not always the same person. Even to us. The “who are you? Why are you here?” is at first generally clear : we are in a naturalistic world where Claire (deploying a fragile, thwarted, worried competence) confronts her father’s absentmindeness, short-temper and confused paranoia about his carer. Cranham creates an André who had, sometimes still has, wit and charm and bluff sense: able to turn the tables with a reproving “Why are you talking to me as if I was retarded?” or to explain to the carer “My daughter has a tendency to repeat herself , it’s an age thing”.

So we laugh. But when he stands baffled in pyjamas, searches obsessively for his watch or is confronted – as are we – by a different face claiming to be his daughter, unease grows. Worse, an unidentified man (Jim Sturgeon, truly upsetting in his confident shaven roughness) sometimes replaces the son-in-law and taunts him repeatedly “How much longer do you intend to hang around getting on everyone’s tits? Ruining your daughter’s life?”. He is slapped. We do not know whether this really happens or is in his head, because by now we are in there too, and hardly breathing.

As every familiar piece of furniture vanishes and the room becomes a care home, André is a child again, not knowing his name, but afraid, wanting to be fetched home, comforted by a strange nurse. “I’m losing all my leaves…branches..in the wind”. It is one of those performances you believe too much, too painfully, so that even the curtain-call doesn’t help you regain control. But it is brilliant, and necessary,. Honour to the Tricycle for bringing it up from the Theatre Royal Bath.

box office 020 7328 1000 to 13 june
rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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April 16, 2015 · 12:24 am

GYPSY Savoy Theatre, SW1

IT DON’T GET BETTER THAN THIS…
Is there any odder opening line to a big musical number than “Have an egg-roll, Mr Goldstone”? Is there any dryer account of the emotional tangle of mothers and daughters, showbiz and ambition than this Laurents / Styne / Sondheim show? Will Jonathan Church’s Chichester never give over turning out productions so fabulous that they transfer and bring London to its feet? Is three standing ovations even enough? And is there any actress more heroically accomplished, more vividly alive, more formidable in song , speech and silence, more superhuman yet more likeable than Imelda Staunton?

Questions, questions. Jonathan Kent’s production thrilled Chichester last year. It is, if anything, even more kaleidoscopically irresistible set in the Savoy’s weary gilt-and -velvet. Posh enough, yet retaining a tang of the ‘30s vaudeville houses through which Mama Rose pushes her troupe across Depression America, hectoring towards stardom the favoured daughter June and dogsbody Louise. From the moment Staunton storms up the aisle brandishing a lapdog and shoving other children away from blocking Baby June’s squeal ’n splits routine, we are there. Anthony Ward’s sets, swift-moving and unfussy, take us to squalid digs, looming backstage barrenness and luscious limelight. Stephen Mear’s choreography wittily evokes all levels of aptitude: baby June’s robotic precision and eyes-n-teeth smile, Louise’s willing awkwardness, the boy dancers’ romping amateurism morphing into their accomplished, balletic or tapping adult selves. Character blooms in every step of the jaunty desperate family dance when Mama’s strategy has stranded them broke in Texas with the “Toreadorable” troupe; there’s the glorious cow, and at last the three strippers. Especially Louise Gold’s Amazonian centurion, grumpily demonstrating how to bump it with a trumpet.

The joy of Gypsy is that, set in the dying throes of vaudeville, it can twist in a moment from some gorgeously entertaining absurdity or repartee to a bleakness of poverty, delusion and betrayal. All the cast give the serious emotion full weight: there are silences as memorable as the big numbers. There’s Rose’s utter stillness as she reads the letter from the defecting June, then Louise and Herbie frozen in turn as she rallies and turns the beam of her lethal attention on the remaining daughter. Lara Pulver returns as a fine-drawn Louise, touchingly quiet and tomboyish until her wild final blossoming – elegantly spanning four costumes and risingly glamorous locations – as Gypsy Rose Lee. Peter Davison is Herbie, giving the lightly written part real dignity and heft.
For all the glee, and our mass inability to resist leaping to our feet at the end of the two biggest Mama Rose numbers, it is not a show you leave without sober reflection. My daughter, fresh from reading Jung, quoted him – “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically…on children than the unlived life of the parent” . Its rueful insights are perennial; Rose’s determination to keep control rather than marry is pure feminism (“After three husbands it takes an awful lotta butter to get you back in the frying pan”). And her ultimate she-Lear rage, Staunton unforgettably vulnerable as she stands alone against blackness and shakes her booty in furious flirtation and storming at fate mirrors with sharp awkwardness an even more modern phenomenon. Women still wince at middle-age and missed chances, envy daughters, claw towards their own limelight. Even – as tiny Staunton looks up at the statuesque Pulver and appropriates her sable stole – deludedly purr how handy it is that they can wear the same clothes. Ouch.
box office http://www.atgtickets.com to 18 July

rating   five  (of course. Again. Including a triumphant Imeldamouse. 4 Meece RatingMeece with mask tiny compressed

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April 15, 2015 · 7:04 am

THE TWITS Royal Court SW1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES TAKES HIS INNER CHILD FOR A HAPPY SPIN…

As Mrs.Twit wisely points out – children are horrible. Too many “family shows” forget that. Instead of sweetness, children want darkness. They’ll allow a happy ending but they expect plenty of misery, menace and thrills in the run-up. Just like, would you believe it, adults. Roald Dahl built a career on this intelligent approach.

This mischievous, glorious production is more an extrapolation than an adaptation by Enda Walsh. The characters are there, their sadistic motivation intact, but in between the familiar beginning and contractually obliged happily-ever-after is sandwiched a totally unexpected, but warmly welcomed invented middle.

Years ago Mr and Mrs Twit tricked a group of fairground folk out of of their livelihood. A dog was shot, a boy’s hope’s ruined and a tattooed fortune teller duped. Bored with their caged monkeys and looking for wicked entertainment, the Twits entice them back with the promise of reconciliation and the return of their fairground. Instead they are kept fin limbo for months; teased with performing monkeys, they are practically abused by a filthy Barbara Woodhouse (Mrs Twit,) and a rustic Santa Claus with a whiff of Yewtree (Mr Twit).

Monica Dolan and Jason Watkins are near perfection as the giddily evil pair: camp, slightly perverted and beautifully drawn, a real masterclass of comedic acting which instead of splashing in the surface froth, delves right to the depths of meaty, funny parts.
The accompanying cast are all excellent. But Aimée-Ffion Edwards as the daughter monkey – who is the highlight of the monkey family’s mini plays – took what might have been functional, and made it hearty and funny.

John Tiffany has directed not just a brilliant show for children – I heard genuine laughs and panicked drama-tears from the junior crowd – but also a solid play for adults. Every laugh from the script is successfully carried to us, with heaps besides. Skits from the monkey family, Mr and Mrs.Twit penchant for fancy dress and songs are all brought together with the kind of music and lighting cues you expect from a mammoth musical. This is a shipshape show.
The set, beautifully designed by Chloe Lamford, is a large blinking hamster wheel, a round face out a which a long tongue of a stage folds out. It is wooden, scuffed and dirty, but covered in bright circus lights. And it wasn’t a lazy set. It moved, twirled, rose and opened; all the genius whizzes to hold any child’s imagination.
This was darker than the book I loved as a child, and all the more satisfying for it. Children laughed with the adults, leading each other at different points. If it wasn’t jokes about ridiculous accents (Leeds, Wales), it was the murder of Rudolph. A certain hit, with West End transfer written in spit, shit and glue all over it. Hurrah!
Until 31st May
Box Office: 020 7565 5000

rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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April 2, 2015 · 9:40 am

DEATH OF A SALESMAN Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

GREATER THAN GREEK:  ATTENTION MUST BE PAID

The greatest plays keep their truth but strike you differently every time. I saw Arthur Miller’s masterpiece at twenty, then ten years ago was electrified by Brian Dennehy’s Willy Loman in London. Now comes a different emotional hit in Gregory Doran’s RSC production, with Antony Sher as the failing, suicidal hero.
Different, not because any one production is more faithful, but merely because of one’s own attrition, life and loss as decades tick by. “Everyone cries at the end” said a confident voice in the tea-bar beforehand. But for some of us the most wrenching, releasing moments are earlier, and we are finally just glad Willy is out of the terrible race. Ah, the beauty of theatre: quiet private revelations in a public space.
Still, when he says “I still feel kinda temporary about myself”, who – at any age – does not shiver a brief “yes..”? Thoreau’s spoke of “’lives of quiet desperation…men who go to the grave with the song still in them.” The strength of Sher’s performance is that for all his grouchy hopelessness and enslavement to the big-man myth, when he plants his carrot-seeds, exults in his DIY or sees the moon between the looming towers we hear the faint flutelike song within him.

Set in 1949 Brooklyn, it is famously a condemnation of the business ethic of the time, the dream of a big desk in a big office for a big man. Yet it buzzes with topicality: we too are a culture where everyone must sell to live, “riding on a smile and a shoeshine”. Loman ‘off-salary’ is effectively on a zero-hours contract. His troubled son Biff took a wrong turn when he flunked one exam, didn’t get to university and has never settled to a job. Everyone’s mortgaged, and children fail to launch: “Ya finally own it and there’s no-one to live in it”. Topical all the way.
But Miller sweeps wider, more grandly through the human endgame. Willy protests “I am well liked..” but alone with his wife Linda admits “People don’t seem to take to me..I’m fat and very foolish to look at”. Tubby and square, grainy and growling, Sher takes the early scenes slow and querulous, almost singsong, rising to intemperate Lear-like wrath and bouncing back to optimistic fatherhood during the flashbacks to earlier times with his boys – especially Biff the sports hero (Alex Hassell, changing age brilliantly). Stephen Brimson Lewis’ set is ingenious: lighting turns the towering new blocks transparent in memory or brings the pitiless rackety New York streets and offices forward. The ghostly figure of Uncle Ben (Guy Paul) wanders white-suited under an eerie light talking of Loman’s missed chances.

At the heart of it Harriet Walter is Linda, loving a small man who “can be just as exhausted as a great one” and to whom, in that immense central speech, she affirms “attention must be paid”. There are layers of effort and fear and love in every folding of her arms, every, heroic, desperate encouragement of Biff’s hopeless business plans. Anything to cheer Willy enough to live. His business unravelling is painful to watch: Tobias Beer gives us the restless young boss sacking him while playing with his new wire-recorder(more topicality – today it’d be an iWatch). Joshua Richards is heavily, solidly decent as the only friend, from whom Loman can hardly help.

The tragedy is greater than Greek, simply because he is no king, never was. “A man has got to add up to something” he cries. But with a roar of engines and sad thread of flutes (another wonderful Paul Englishby score) he is gone.

box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 2 May
Sponsored by Interbrand

rating  five    5 Meece Rating

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March 18, 2015 · 11:14 pm

PLAYING FOR TIME Crucible, Sheffield

A GRAVE GRANDEUR, AN UNFORGOTTEN HORROR

Hard to overstate the impact, the sense of event, commemoration and bleak grandeur in this extraordinary evening. There is, in this 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, obvious solemnity in staging Arthur Miller’s “memory play” from the testament of Fania Fénélon. The Parisian chanteuse survived by forced membership of a rag-bag orchestra recruited for the entertainment of the SS officers and, horribly, to march fellow-victims to the gas chambers and pander to Dr Mengele’s experiments on music and insanity.

But add to that a central performance as Fania from Sian Phillips: eighty-one now, a war-baby with early memories of being taken outside at night to watch Swansea burning. We use some words too lightly in the arts, but Phillips’ wholly committed gently controlled performance is a marvel of fearlessness, sorrow and sincerity. It is one of those rare memorable nights when you come to believe you are not watching acting at all, but remembered experience: a necessary ritual.

It is a huge cast: fourteen women and three men, amplified with extras from Sheffield People’s Theatre. So shaven-headed women in rags are herded and surged around the big open theatre, edges of violence being glimpsed – as they were by the appalled, conflicted Fenelon – around a central area where for much of the play the hungry, fearful musicians struggle with ill-assorted instruments under the nervy, disciplinarian Alma Rosé. She was Gustav Mahler’s niece: the Jewess virtuosa violinist who with Fenelon’s orchestrating skills and grainy, Weimar cabaret voice somehow held them together.

Richard Beecham’s direction is supported by extraordinary lighting and design by Richard Howell and Ti Green, creating a darkness visible, a grey despair around the vivid individuals . It is further served by unobtrusively sinister sound design by Melanie Wilson – whistles, thuds, shouts, guard dogs barking, at last the distant artillery . And even more by the musical direction and some lyrics by Sam Kenyon, creating shattering moments. Here are the Commandant and Dr Mengele sitting splay-legged with imperial power, sentimental over the desperate gentleness of the scratch orchestra playing von Suppé, and saying approvingly “it strengthens us for this difficult work of ours” – that is, murdering twelve thousand a day.
At another moment, after playing marches as the prisoners head for the ovens and the smoke rises, Fania must sing Madam Butterfly’s hopeful song about “a thread of smoke rising on the horizon” from the ship bringing back her lover. Congratulated by the Commandant, she bravely denies her stage persona with “My name is not Fenelon. I am Fanny Goldstein”. A terrible silence.
But nothing is milked, nothing is sentimental, and Miller allows rein to the tensions between Jew and Gentile, Pole and French, the Zionist and the racially indifferent, the despairing and the defiant. Nor does he flinch from the brutalities that brutalized people pass on: the Polish women guards shoutingly bully the “Jew shit”. Marianne asks early on: “Why are they doing this? What do they get from it?” Unanswerable.

Sian Phillips is the powerful centre, but around her other performances rise too. Melanie Heslop is Marianne, moving from naive fear to greedy dissolution, whoring herself to the very executioner on the day her friend’s beaten body is left hanging dead in the rain until dark. Amanda Hadingue is stiffly Austrian as Alma, Kate Lynn-Evans is Mandel the officer whose half-humanity becomes, to Fenelon, the “problem”. A problem horribly reflected in her own honest conflict about using her art in collaboration, struggling to hold something back yet survive to testify .
And always the Beethoven and Puccini, the cabaret songs and accordion, remind us that this was Europe, this was recent. That savagery is not something alien and far away, for humanity can go downhill very fast and very far, without losing the superficial trappings of efficiency and aesthetic culture. As Fania says, “The aim is to remember. Everything”.

Box Office 0114 249 6000 http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk to 4 April
Rating five5 Meece Rating

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