Category Archives: Four Mice

THE STATE OF ENGLAND:  FUNNY, BEAUTIFUL, SAD     

AND TOURING! 

Some issues do best as satirical or farcical comedies: English class division, illicit sex, misunderstanding. Others sit less easily with the comic muse: cot death, grief, young lives wasted in war. Torben Betts, in this terrific play, is comfortable handling both, and does so with almost total success. It ran briefly in multi-ethnic, diverse East London: but with this new touring cast will be able to show a wider Britain to itself: at first teasingly, but then with an admirable sad seriousness.
For Oliver and Emma are parlour-leftie southerners with small children who have moved up North to save money and (especially in her case) to fulfil a self-righteous fantasy about living among “real people”. But the real people next door are the vampy Dawn (Kerry Bennett) and Alan (Graeme Brookes). Alan is an immense man-mountain in an England shirt, so untutored in middle-class ways that when they are invited round he sends his wife first, while he finishes watching the England match. He then turns up with a monologue of post-match analysis while the hosts stand speechless.
So far, so funny. Oliver – a redundant MoD civil servant with at least some grasp of practical reality. – attempts gauche friendliness. But Emily Bowker as Emma is a living nightmare in her self-designed asymmetric-chic outfits, pretentious abstract artworks and serene yogic poses. Her meditation and left-of-Corbyn love of the People does not stop her hissing disapproval at Dawn’s tight red dress, or delivering blistering condemnation of Alan’s clumsy paintings of his cat, Vince – Invincible (named after the aircraft carrier on which he was a cook).

 
We get a hint in the first act that Emily is in some sort of grief, from four years previously; but bravely, Betts does not allow her to solicit sympathy for a long time yet. She can’t even bear the St George’s flags on the houses outside in a World Cup year defacing “A beautiful street of 19c stone houses…I AM sympathetic, Oliver, towards the oppressed, but mindless patriotism!” . She is also “trying to move beyond sex”. Dawn, sensibly, isn’t.

 
The postman Alan , though, rapidly becomes one of the most beautiful characters of recent theatre. Boasting to Oliver about his wife’s hotness he says that when he first saw her naked he wept: the supposedly new-man southerner can’t quite take that. And when Alan talks of and shows his paintings – which are splendidly terrible – Emma’s vicious demolition of his work as she prates about how art should “reunify body and soul” and so forth, is torpedoed by his shy “when I paint I don’t feel so lonely”. Merit or no merit, he’s an artist and she’s a pretender. But he still cuts up his paintings, embarrassed. Brookes’ performance is splendid, nuanced, genuine: my only suggestion (and it was a preview at Bury I saw) is for director Christopher Harper to suggest he does a bit less of the maddening laugh in the first scenes. Conveying annoyingness without annoying the audience as well is a tricky ask.

The fate of Alan’s beloved cat becomes both comic and profoundly sad; in the second half, with good twists, we learn more about him and Dawn , about Oliver’s underlying nature (a lovely cynical concluion here) ; we may respect, to a reasonable degree, nasty Emma’s reason for sorrow. And as a portrait of flawed people in a Britain divided by class and also at war – there’s a painfully sharp line from Dawn about soldiers, which I won’t spoil – it becomes genuinely beautiful as well as sharply perceptive . Honour to Original Theatre and to Theatre Royal Bury, the producers. It’s a good long tour, into June. Catch!

tour dates on http://tinyurl.com/zxx76eg
rating four   

A CREEPY BRILLIANCE  FROM QUEBEC

 
What’s going on? Who are the people in the next flat, why are they so friendly and yet so odd? Are they commonplace swingers, murderers, or a delusion brought on by grief, solitude and thwarted sexual need? Or are they – gulp – actually dead all the time? Why is their adult son Francois covered in scars and prone to Tourettish shouting? For a few seconds you think it’s overacting, but no: this is Dyfan Dwyfor, seasoned chap, very good as Yuri Gagarin five years ago; and the director is Sir Michael Boyd, no less. So it’s Francois who’s deliberately made so odd. Good grief, odder still in twenty minutes’ time.

 
Though hang on, there’s oddity everywhere: is it perhaps possible that the only character who is actually real is LIndsey’ Campbell’s tormented, confused Alice, adrift in a hideous wonderland of white-rabbit husband Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) and the intrusive neighbours. Oh, and where is the crying baby, if that is what it is? And where did the props people source a squeaky rubber duck with such a worrying timbre? Not to mention the fifth and final member of the cast, of whom we shall not speak for fear of spoilers…

 
The head spins, pleasantly, and the heart stirs with unexpected shafts of proper pain. New Francophone playwrights in translation are invading our theatre scene, and very welcome too. A sharp fresh playfulness emerges , not Genet-style sadism or glum existential solemnities, but a sort of skewed naturalism which uses the fact of live theatre itself to explore the perilous shores of familiar emotion . And, quite frankly, mess with your head. We have just had Florian Zeller making us experience the edges of dementia in THE FATHER and maternal need and delusion in THE MOTHER, before twisting around into the brilliant near-farce of THE TRUTH. And now here is Catherine-Anne Toupin, another French-speaker (though in Québec) , elegantly translated by Chris Campbell of the Royal Court.

 
On the face of it, here’s a standard urban fiction setup: a weird-people-in the next apartment story. LIke Rosemary’s Baby, The Ones Below, or half a dozen comedies. But from the first moments it deploys a particular unease that theatre is good at showing: it is clear that Alice is depressed or distressed, not sleeping, and her husband Ben, a young doctor, worn out by her crisis. Which has something to do with the – possibly non-existent, or lost – offstage baby. Which in a fleeting moment later, you think Alice may have killed. Or not. But one of the three members of the neighbour family – whose apartment, with metaphorical symmetry is said to be “the same but the other way round” – may also have done a dark thing, long ago. Or not.

I would hate you to think it is doomy. Apart from the crazed Francois, the parents are at times and at first, pure comedy : Guy Williams as an urbane, whimsically sociable Gilles, once-famous author of a (probably psychology) text, and Maureen Beattie going for broke, Abigail’s-Party style, as an overbearingly friendly Juliette with Morticia Addams pageboy hair, ferocious maternal authority, and a sequence involving unseen underwear. Which had the whole theatre focusing, in shock, at her white knees in case she fulfilled the threat to part them.

 
So on it goes: the tone sometimes erotic, sometimes comic or banal then suddenly inappropriate. At one point (when Dwyfor goes really nuts) quite violent. And at last, the point of the mirror-image flat metaphor is reached in a surreally and really frightening conclusion. Another metaphor hovers then, of the behaviour of parent cuckoos towards weaker birds. And again Lindsey Campbell’s delicately drawn Alice makes your heart turn over in horrified empathy. What is real, what ever has been, was it all a nightmare, how deeply can birth or the lack of it destabilize a woman? Creepy, rather brilliant. Power to the Bush, Traverse and Ustinov for bringing this to us. I have little hope for quiet dreams tonight.

box office 020 8743 5050 to 12 April
rating four   

THE ANGRY YOUNG MAN RANTS AGAIN,  THEN CHANGES SEX

This is a sharp bit of work by Derby, marking 60 years since John Osborne’s splenetic debut blew the lid – so theatre legend insists – off a complacent postwar anyone-for-tennis world. LOOK BACK IN ANGER was condemned as “squalid” by some, but hailed by Tynan for pinpointing a depressed, anarchic, resentful class hostility of working-class youth sick of wartime deference but not yet liberated by the ‘60s. It’s especially sharp since Derby – where Osborne was working as a stroppy stage manager in a failing marriage – actually turned down the play first time round.
So here it is again: a theatre monument in itself (how Osborne would hate me saying that!). And here is that dread ironing-board, at which poor Alison stands, berated on a long dull postwar Sunday afternoon by her husband Jimmy Porter , comforted by the amiable flatmate Cliff, rescued by her ex-Raj Colonel father and visited by her posh friend Helena.
Pleasingly, the matinee audience actually gasped at the shocking moment in Act 2 between Jimmy and Helena: that’s how half-forgotten this play is. I have, since a schoolgirl encounter, always felt about Look Back In Anger much the way Alison must have felt about Jimmy: drawn by the energy, wit and invective, but unable to live with the viciousness. Jimmy – chief voice of the play – is frankly a great big ADHD toddler: sulky, resentful, terminally inconsiderate, surrounded by a litter of books but wasting time jeering at the Sunday papers; yearning for “bite, edge, drive, enthusiasm, Hallelujahs” but energized more by laddish brawls with Cliff and contempt for his upper-middle wife’s mother (“Overfed overprivileged old bitch, pure evil”) and her Anglo-Indian father “a sturdy old plant left over from the Edwardian wilderness”. When his own mother dies, and pregnant Alison has left him for a bit, he yowls for his own bereavement while snarking that his wife is a “selfish woman” and dismissing her pregnancy. His“Why do we let these women bleed us to death?” annoyed me fifty years ago, and still does.
But seeing the play again, done with vigour under Sarah Brigham’s direction in a lovingly rundown set, I relished subtler Osborne moments. He allows humanity to the old Anglo-Indian Colonel (Ivan Stott) and posh Helena’s speech on right and wrong has a sharp clarity , something which an audience can fasten onto for support in JImmy’s more tempestuous world which fetishises only suffering and hopelessness. . Daisy Badger is terrific as Helena, brittle poise covering real softness . Patrick Knowles’ square-set, sulky Jimmy is fully in command of the invective, and indeed of the ghastly bear-and-squirrel baby-talk which is the flip side of the weak-willed revolutionary. Augustina Seymour shines as Alison: silent and enduring at first, depressedly pragmatic, finally half- destroyed by grief over her lost baby.
As for its role in reflecting more widely on a lost Britain and the effort to find a new one, I would meanly say that Alan Bennett actually hits that key more cleanly in Forty Years On. But this raging, flawed black diamond of 1955 is worth polishing up, and Brigham does it proud.
And so to JINNY – the hour-long companion-piece Derby commissioned to play in the same scruffy flat (ironing board and all). It is set in 2015, among a newer generation of 25-year-olds frustrated by lack of opportunity and resentment of the posh. In Jane Wainwright’s monologue the principal is not Jimmy but a Jinny, a young woman on a zero-hours contract who aspires to be a singer-songwriter. Joanna Simpkins, with wild red-tipped hair and a Tracey Emin scowl, sings (very poignantly at one point) and, being female, at least does her own ironing. She is no fool, but has stalled helplessly since taking a music degree and fallen behind her ‘uni’ contemporaries, especially the more middle-class ones like “Elinor with an i – who is not only patronizing, but a nutritionist”.
She takes us through a day in which she wakes in the seedy shared Derby flat she shares with a pregnant friend, and bunks off work to meet a potential manager. He is looking for a rough-edged feminist vibe and assures her “menstruation is trending!” . It does not go well, not least because Jinny arrives in bike shorts with her helmet still on, interrupts the interview to take a call from her beloved Nan and therefore isn’t let back in, then runs off home in tears leaving her guitar, pausing only to assault a billboard for having smiley white teeth and being on the side of the shiny winners in life’s lottery. “What does she know? what do any of them know about us?”
There are witty echoes of the Osborne play: the posh resented friend, the sense of outsider status, the helpless angry fruitless inferiority when she encounters a receptionist “wearing those earrings people wear when they hit forty or work in an art gallery, she should be eating a scone or something”.

SImpkins, however, holds our sympathy and the playwright is cunning enough to throw doubt over her world-view . Early on Jinny relates how in her schooldays a friend, Tania, wanted to be a vet but was dissuaded by dull patronizing teachers: a standard educational trope of today: schools putting down ordinary folk’s ambitions, bah humbug. Yet in the last few minutes we casually learn that Tania is a vet now. So it’s about Jinny herself, not the cliché of a generation betrayed. Just as the Angry Young Men were never really Everyman. Just angry. And eloquent.
box office 01332 593939 to 26 March
rating four

A TWO-WHEELED CHARIOT OF FIRE

I suppose there must be some lazy, vacillating, unfocused Yorkshirewomen, but I’ve not met one yet.  And of that tribe of gritty, unselfpitying, fiercely down-to-earth females, few surpass the late Beryl Burton.
Beryl who? How dare we! It is a scandal that any of us need to ask. The final tableau in this intimate, larky, metatheatrical bio-play about the highest achieving of sportswomen sees the cast of four  surrounding her fallen racing bike with innumerable trophies – best British all-rounder 25 years running, world champion more than once, holder still (despite technological advances) of unbroken records including a 12 hour 277 mile marathon  in which she overtook the entire mens race …

 
On it goes.  And if you want more tough, underdog unsung credibility,  reflect that – women’s sport being a Cinderella and cycling in her day mostly a working class club sport – Beryl achieved most of it on shoestring and domestic sacrifice, supported by her faithful husband and soigneur Charlie. She had to cycle to competitions – Yorkshire to London, even – and achieved her early training by working as a labourer on a rhubarb farm (there is a fine educational digression abut the West Yorkshire rhubarb economy). One telling scene shows how – having missed the last train to the world championship at Leipzig – the couple daren’t have the hotel breakfast because their only money is Charlie’s last week’s wage. On being informed by the more appreciative Germans that there is nothing to pay because of her fame, Beryl and Charlie are too embarrassed to change their mind and have the breakfast after all. Very Alan Bennett, that. Less Bennettish is the fact that they’re only late because Beryl stopped off to defend her 100-mile title at home first.

This debut play by Maxine Peake for the West Yorkshire Playhouse toured last year and  frankly, the more often it pops up again the better.  Beryl’s story needs no embellishment – weak heart as a child, missed the 11-Plus through illness, emerged furiously determined to “make her mark” and ignore medical advice to avoid exertion. Here is ferocious ambition,  nerves overcome, family stress, injury, triumph after triumph, more injury. Great story, but it does need a lightness of touch: and Rebecca Gatward’s production achieves that in pared down playful style. Samantha Power plays the adult Beryl, Rebecca Ryan her youthful self and then her daughter (who in one race at last beat her, which didn’t go down well). Lee Toomes is an amiable Charlie, and others; Dominic Gately all the rest – mother-in-law, club trainer, assorted waiters, rivals, everything.  Four bikes on stands get vigorously pedalled against projected Yorkshire scenes and cheering crowds, manoeuvered and repaired: during the early part the actors slip out of character with good jokes (when Rebecca Ryan suddenly swaggers pelvically across the stage as a factory- hand the others puzzle “What’re you doing?” “I”m being a bloke!”. Artful, exiguous props cause jokes too, but wisely, as the play grips tighter, Gatward has them lay off that.

 
It’s hugely enjoyable, warm, credible, respectful for all the larking. But I hadn’t expected one private tearful moment: it came when, getting her MBE from the Queen (Gately again, in a tiara) Beryl turns and murmurs awestruck “She knew who I was, Charlie..”. A whole vista of working-class , secondary-modern, farm-labourer-housewife yearning pulsed in those words. This extraordinary athlete had to work punishingly, with furious dedication, to win that moment. In an age of instant celebrity it almost hurt.

box office 020 8174 0090 to 19 April
rating four   

GETTING THEM OFF FOR VICTORY, UP WEST

 
I loved this show at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and – especially given a couple of rather snotty lukewarm reviews – thought I should check it out on its transfer, which runs into the summer. And so it should. For me, it still works.
To recap briefly: it’s a newborn musical incarnation of the true story made famous in the film with Judi Dench: how a doughty widow bought the Windmill Theatre to put on “Revuedeville” , with the legendary Vivian Van Damme as her manager, and decided to improve its failing fortunes by persuading the showgirls to get naked. She used her formidable respectability to persuade the Lord Chamberlain that it was going to be art not stripping, because once naked the girls wouldn’t move, but represent classical paintings under filmy light (“subtle lighting and a conscientious hairdresser” on the pubes).

 
And so there is nudity, and very pretty too: I can’t stand alongside those who gloomily regard it as exploitative, not in a world where female nudity of a far more seedy, raunchy variety glimmers at us from every newsstand. The nudity of the Windmill was – and the show makes this beautifully clear – more about an age of comparative innocence, when that nakedness was a precious and sought-after rarity, a dream of love. Particularly for young men who would soon die in war – like the stagehand who falls for the tea-girl turned star, Emma Williams’ sweet Maureen.

I also appreciated once more the shape and craft of the show. Terry Johnson’s book (he also directs) gives us a first , longer and at first more frivolous, act, taking us from the mid-30s to the war years, but shades it into a startlingly dark interlude and song when Van Damm (Ian Bartholomew) the Dutch-Jewish impresario, reports the invasion of Holland; then in the Blitz the Windmill is hit, and in a particularly courageous and surprisingly moving moment Emma Williams breaks the no-moving rule – “I’m not standing still for this!” and steps forward starkers as the bombs fall to finish the defiant anti-Hitler number “He’s got another think coming” after the male singer falters.

The lyrics by Don Black are sharp, every song serving the story and pushing it forward; the music by George FEnton and Simon Chamberlain is sometimes the best sort of pastiche, sometimes original and moving. And Mrs Henderson herself is the unmatchable Tracie Bennett: lately a memorable Judy Garland but here deploying a sharp, acid wit, convincingly aged as a patron saint for all women determined to get a bit of fun out of their latter years . “I can be anything I want – except young”. That’s an song which could last. So is the memory of the old lady’s dryness, perfectly rendered by Bennett. Up on the roof, wearily firewatching in the Blitz, she is told “You’ll catch your death” she replies “Oh, I think Death’s busy enough elsewhere”.

 
Sweet and sour, nostalgic and sharp, with a kind of unapologetic showbiz honesty, here is another play celebrating the stage (alongside Red Velvet and Nell Gwynn, it’s a bit of an epidemic) . And it celebrates women, too, and defiant ageing. I still like it a lot.

box office 020 7400 1234 to 18 June
rating four

SHAKESPEARE’S TOWN LAID BEFORE US

 
The year 1613: somewhere offstage old Shakespeare is dying, and in her husband’s physic-garden, competent and dignified, his daughter Susanna assists her middle-aged husband Doctor Hall. She manages her small daughter and the maid Hester, laughs with the neighbour Rafe Smith who comes by to sell ribbons, and impatiently fends off the young buck Jack, a local grandee’s son who is supposed to be learning herbal medicine from the doctor. Jack, bright but unreliable, rattles off his lessons about worm-poultices, women with “irregular lunar evacuations” and the use of lead and turpentine against “Signor Gonhorrea, the Italian disease”. That is, when he is not sticking his hand in Hester’s skirt or conjuring up unwelcome memories of boyhood days when he, Rafe and Susanna all larked together by the Avon.

 
Peter Whelan’s play, revived with perfect timing in the quatercentenary, draws you in with effortless grace, evoking from the start both the period and the intimate family tensions . Emma Lowndes’ Susanna seems almost an Ibsen heroine, married to an undemonstrative academic and more than tempted by Rafe (Philip Correia) who is in an unhappy marriage after the death of his two children. Lowndes gives Susanna a spirited individuality, at first seemingly wrapped in duty, but wilder, on the edge of infidelity when she finds herself alone in the night-scented garden with Rafe, and “Love’s alchemy” makes wrong things right. He is the one who, gripped by honour, hesitates.

 
Their desire, though unconsummated, is almost her downfall when the irritated, sacked and arrogant Jack (Matt Whitchurch, every inch the Hooray Henry) drunkenly denounces her in the pub for adultery. Clerical court records of the year show that Susanna did defend such an accusation. The doctor reacts with disbelief and horror and defends her honour vigorously yet – with a marvellous, layered, ambiguous performance by Jonathan Guy Lewis – he knows deep down that his wife’s heart is not quite his. Susanna, only technically innocent, suborns Hester to a whiteish lie about the order of events on that evening. Again, the two women’s relationship is beautifully evoked (and Charlotte Wakefield’s Hester gets her great scene later on).

 
When it becomes clear that the Church court will not sit before the mellow old Santa-bearded Bishop but his Vicar-General, a suitable shudder runs through us because in an artful opening scene Whelan lets us glimpse Michael Mears’ Goche: a tall grim figure in Puritan black and tight cap who looms and shudders like a tall disapproving ferret as he condemns the morality of the doctor’s trade, since illness is clearly a divine punishment. We foresee trouble, and indeed when Jonathan Fensom’s pretty garden set abruptly becomes an echoing Worcester Cathedral, Mears gives a terrific pouncing, chilly, hypnotically alarming interrogation as poor Hester the country girl sways with cathedral vertigo, looking up at the soaring God-filled vaulting overhead.

So we have a society in change: passionate modern lovers, a dutiful decent scientist (“I am no bigot, I treat Roman Catholics, even a Popish priest”). We have the arrogant gentry hooray-Henry making trouble, and the cold Churchman grasping atavistically at Godly power. Director James Dacre, who leads this theatre, a few years back memorably directed another Whelan play , the WW1 story of The Accrington Pals. Here the same sense of careful respect of period combines with universal recognizable humanity in a tight, instinctively connected ensemble.

In his programme notes Dacre reflects on modern parallels: intrusion, private lives hypocritically exposed, a dramatic inquisitorial public inquiry. But for me the greatest pleasure was the sense of 17c smalltown England, lovingly and domestically evoked. Scientific effort and religious power, private desires defying convention, serious debates about honour and the heart: Shakespeare’s world. He may have set Othello and Iago in distant wars and made jealous Leontes a king, but he had seen their archetypes in just such a Stratford as this.

 
Box office: 01604 624811 / http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk to 27 Feb
then touring to 7 May – Cambridge next.
rating four  

BARE AND BLEAK:  A YOUNG MAN’S CRISIS 
The playtext of Rob Hayes’ monologue austerely insists that performance “should not exceed 60 minutes in duration”. This author doesn’t want it larded with significant pauses or dreamy mannerisms: and in honouring his intention, the remarkable Ben Whybrow (directed by Clive Judd) brings it in just under. No mean feat: for all its emotional intricacy and verbal subtleties, the play at that length requires rapid-fire delivery bordering, quite often, on gabble.

And that is its strength, and a reason why this 2015 applauded Edinburgh production richly deserves its trip south. It is both terrifying and intermittently funny, unnervingly perceptive about a particular young male crisis. It is deadly earnest in its determination to strip bare some, at least, of the reasons why at Anna Haigh Productions’ show the seats need to be strewn with pamphlets and cards from the  charity CALM: Campaign Against LIving Miserably, which offers peer support to men in crisis.
The protagonist, unnamed, is pacing like a nervy zoo animal, in a state of tense distress and on the edge of suicide. His girlfriend has left him; he is struggling – explicitly and with bleak effective laddish humour – with the physical symptom of an extreme eleven-day constipation. He has a job, which he is losing because he won’t go in, and dreams of writing jingles for advertisements because of their short but unforgettable perfection. He has tried Seroxat, but won’t go back to the GP because of an unreasonable, OCD dread of germs, which also makes him leave his shopping in bus shelters rather than carry bacteria home. He is sleepless, distressed, griping, sorrowful, desperate: suicidal, but uncertain of achieving even that.

The character grows round and likeable though. He is saddened by porn’s brutality, a “beautiful person providing this profane service for me”, and remembers the loving, decent relationship he has lost. But at extremes he veers off into violent fantasies of killing and predation, crying how little is left for men and their hard-wired need for ascendancy. “We’ve been fixed by society, neutered. By the markets, by diversity, by unwarranted shame, by these loosey-goosey ideas like equality which push exactly not just every single structure mankind has ever built, but also against human nature itself”. He cries “Shaming us won’t work, nothing will work…you’re only pushing us deeper underground, making our conviction all the more venomous. And we will win, we will do anything to win”.
If that, to a feminist reader, seems horrible I can say that it doesn’t actually feel that way on the stage. Because the young man is in front of us, suffering greatly, trapped between an old message telling him he is a lord of creation and a real world which informs him that he isn’t. He needs a father, an elder brother, a mentor, an adult woman who loves him and laughs with him about the cosmic joke of it all. Not every suicidal young male draws his pain from this precise source. But some do, and it was good to see so many young men – and girlfriends – in the audience.

box office 0207 407 0234 to 6 Feb
rating four   

THE BOHO BOUVIERS:  REBELLIOUS RECLUSES

Hot on the heels of THE DAZZLE (about the New York Collyer brothers living in hoarderly squalid isolation) this is about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Little Edie half a century later, living in even more eccentric squalor in the Hamptons. Both interpret true stories. Even more thematically satisfying for the playgoer, no sooner has Imelda Staunton bowed out as Mama Rose dominating her daughter in Gypsy, than we can contemplate the equally showbiz- thwarted Edith senior sabotaging hers. Delusion, eccentricity, toxic but irresistible family bonds, musical obsession and memory: great themes, played out with satisfying difference on stages either side of the Thames.

GREY GARDENS is inspired by a 1975 cult documentary, exposing the reclusive lives of the first cousin and aunt of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Indeed “Little Edie”, who had a sort of cabaret career, became a cult herself, camp fancy-dress often referencing her dashingly chaotic outfits and the headscarf she wore after reportedly setting fire to her hair. In the opening moments of Scott Frankel’s musical (book by Doug Wright) an announcer sententiously intones “How could American royalty fall so far, so fast?…”

 
Far indeed. There’s a wonderfully distressed, atmospheric wooden set (by Tom Rogers) of rafters, gallery and prop rubbish including a fallen chandelier, birdcage rubbish and broken mementoes. Moody lighting and echoing sounds evoke the broken-down house at Grey Gardens with its 52 cats and feral raccoons in the attic. Squalid, yet the pungent personalities and insouciant one-liners of the women make it weirdly liberating. When Edie complains that the health authority keeps putting leaflets through the door about the mess and is thus just adding to it, you’re on her side.

We glimpse this 1970’s world first, Sheila Hancock like an old lion beneath a great mane of grey hair and Jenna Russell as the daughter in the first of her barmy outfits, calling the cats. But during the first song it becomes 1942 and Jenna becomes the mother, quarrelling with a younger Little Edie (Rachel Anne Rayham sprightly in daring pink culottes) over how many songs Mama can inflict on the girl’s engagement party to Joe Kennedy Jnr. . The real Edie, by the way, used to claim she would have married Joe and been first Lady if he had not been killed; in sober fact she barely knew him. But for the fiction the romance is solid: Aaron Sidwell perfect as the smart young airman his family planned to be the first Catholic President: “Me and the old man mapped it out. First pick up some medals overseas..” then the Senate.

 
The lovers sing happily, but the rackety glamour of Edith senior is a threat: poor Edie protests “the parents of the groom are a li’l bit formal, let them think that we are normal..”. Sure enough her match is torpedoed by the mother’s “proud” account of Edie’s past; to ram the point home, Billy Boyle as old Bouvier instructs his schoolgirl granddaughters Jackie and Lee: “Hit hard, little girls, marry well!”. and excoriates Edith’s pianist George Gould Strong, as “an unsavoury fella, tickles the ivories with fingers as white as a ten-dollar whore”.
Michael Korie’s lyrics are witty, sharp, every song to the point: Thom Southerland, nonpareil director of fully-staged big studio musicals, keeps it roaring along with a nine-piece swing band above. The exuberant rebelliousness of Russell’s Edith senior underlines the theme of the price paid by female eccentricity. Little Edie, eager still for a normal marriage, is part of that price: doomed both by expectations of “aristocratic responsibility” and by her mother’s delusion that her own marriage is solid, though really “marriage is for tax codes and morons, not free spirits like us”.

 
And so to Act 2, 1972 and the pair living as social outcasts in a cloud of flea-powder and cat hairs, eating erratically, bickering, uttering the deathless one-liners with which the real Bouvier-Beales entranced the documentary makers, plus some sharp lyrics (“I had a life I thoroughly enjoyed – an absent spouse and cats to fill the void”.) Sometimes the first half’s characters reappear : as cats, as ghosts, as dreams swirling in the dim light. Sidwell becomes the vague helpful teenage Jerry who wanders in to eat sweetcorn and mend things. Jenna Russell’s Little Edie, only half-immersed in the twilit world her mother enjoys, yearns for freedom but can’t break out; they bicker but depend on one another.

Not a happy life, though not as grim as The Dazzle: strong flavoured individuality and sour wit make even its darker moments provoke a laugh or a cheer. Russell carries the heavier burden – the final, heartbreaking lament and heroic moment. But it is Sheila Hancock, triumphantly grimy and defiantly dishevelled in the bug-ridden bed, who becomes a kind of queen. The cast found it hard to stop the audience roaring for more curtain-calls. Another smash for the Southwark.

Box Office: 020 7407 0234
http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk to 6 feb

rating four

DARK DOINGS IN THE BURROW

I hope that the great Beatrix Potter, out of copyright just last year, would be pleased at the pointing, bouncing, giggling and gasping in Red Rose Chain’s little theatre. At the sharing, too, of jokes between the smallest children, their big siblings, and the parents at their side. For of all “nursery” authors, this sharp-eyed and mischievous illustrator, author and naturalist is one of the most rewardingly dramatic. Peter Rabbit – orphaned by Mr McGregor’s pie habit – escapes, as does Tom Kitten from the awful roly-poly-pudding fate: but even the most innocent of children know, and want to know, that there are real dangers and fates out there.

Joanna Carrick’s roistering, artfully pretend-improv adaptation launches with relish into one of the more thrilling ones. Tommy Brock the badger feigns friendship with daft old Benjamin Bunny in order to steal his helpless baby-rabbit grandchildren, and gets banished from the house by tearful Mummy Flopsy (we’ve all had relatives like that). Brock breaks into Mr Tod’s fox-earth to use his batterie de cuisine for rabbit pie, but falls asleep with his boots on; the fox comes home indignant (but nervous, for badgers have bigger teeth), and makes such a mess of his revenge that under cover of their brawling, two heroic rabbits rescue the babies from the oven. Dramatic? Star Wars, eat your heart out!

It’s a three-hander, with hasty costume-switches which amused the children greatly. Carrick frames it as two disgruntled urban kids exploring their new attic in the countryside: Lawrence Russell and Kirsty Thorpe kick around old dust-sheeted toys, cookpots and random furniture and find the old books “Baby stuff!”. The ghost of Beatrix Potter appears – Rachael McCormick – grumbling at their bleeping, rackety modern ways, and counters their scornful “nothing ever happened in the olden days” with a few hair-raising Victorian headline tales – kidnappings, a baby set afloat in a cradle, a woman buried alive, dogs boiled up for margarine. That made the older kids sit up a bit.

So they all set out to act the Tale of Mr Tod, and great fun it is: plenty of physical jokes, pratfalls, unexpected props (an epidiascope, for heaven’s sake, projecting shadow-pictures) and inspired improvisation: the rabbits’ tunnel needs front row co-operation, which I was proud to join, holding up the wall. Some knowing gags too: the wicked badger turns TV presenter of “Baking with Brock”, Russell as Mr Tod is rather camp and preoccupied with the state of his soft furnishings, and McCormick does a saucily twerking Mrs Tiggywinkle. Nor does Carrick shy away from Potter’s grand vocabulary : Tommy Brock is still ”an incurably indolent person, snoring industriously”.

 
So we all had a grand time. And most strikingly, this being Ipswich, and only 90 minutes, many parents (including our local MP Ben Gummer with his alert small Wilfred ) had brought technically too-young children, a few under two. And they probably didn’t get the whole drift, but crowed and pointed and laughed and stared at the capering adults and daft hats. Result.

box office 01473 603388 http://www.redrosechain.com
to 3 Jan
rating four   

WHO NEEDS CHARLTON HESTON? 

 
I have a weakness for schlock-historical movie epics, due to a regular childhood treat when I was at school in France and my Dad and I would sneak down the Rue de Bethune in Lille to find one: Quo Vadis, The Long Ships, The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra… Of course the emperor of them all was William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur – a Tale of the Christ”, based on a stonking great overblown 19c novel by the Civil War General Lew Wallace, in which a heroic Jewish boy Judah Ben-Hur triumphs over Roman imperial bullying. It is all set between the Nativity and the Ascension, with Jesus popping up at various points to inspire. It won eleven Academy awards, cost $ 15m dollars, employed 50,000 extras, 365 actors and 78 horses for the nine-minute chariot race. It makes today’s CGI epics look wussy. But apart from epics, another weakness I admit is for larksome, apparently hasty and low-budget performances like The Reduced Shakespeare Company.
So when Patrick Barlow – famed for The 39 Steps and the National Theatre of Brent – decided to do Ben Hur with four actors and a few props, framing it as a misguided megalomanic’s project with an emotionally fraught cast, I naturally threw myself at it.

It does not disappoint. Tim Carroll directs with brisk wit, and Michael Taylor’s designs ensure happy visual moments, all the way from the Magi’s stuffed camels awkwardly kneeling at Bethlehem as plywood angels are noisily cranked over the stable, to the stuffed galley-slaves, entangled toga-sleeves, overhasty quick-changes, lawnmower-powered chariot horses , collapsing pillars and spectacular Ascension. The text meanwhile mingles beautifully awkward backward-Latinate syntax and faux archaisms (as indeed does Lew Wallace’s book). And, as traditional in these performances, the internal disaffection of the cast provides an underplot.
John Hopkins plays the hero, Ben Jones hops in and out of being the villainous Messala and half a dozen others, Alix Dunmore plays (among other things) the two key women and is very funny too: but the greatest joy of it for me was the veteran: the comedically nimble Richard Durden, playing an elderly RSC retiree dragged back by Hopkins to play the elderly matriarch, a Roman admiral, various others, and the weary voice of sanity when the young cast members get their love-lives in a twist. The school parties around me at the matinee loved every minute, and so did I.

box office 020 7328 1000 to 9 Jan
Joyfully joint-produced with Fiery Angel and the Watermill
rating four   

 YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL! SURE YOU WANT IT?

Revolving sleek as a spaceship is Es Devlin’s multi-layered set: the office and neon slogans of Swan cosmetics: bottles and jars, seductive smartness and ethical boasts of “changing the world one girl at a time”. Making a sly point, the white futuristic plasticity also contains the heroine’s home, where her husband Neil grunts unresponsively at the kitchen table to her teenage daughter. At fifty-five Linda has risen to “have it all”, and it’s all-of-a-shiny-piece. Much good will it do her. Penelope Skinner’s artful new play, alternately hilarious and alarming, makes sharp feminist points but dryly suggests that while 2015’s women and girls do have a lot to contend with, some of the shitstorm is (if not totally our fault) encouraged by the ways we tackle it.

It opens with Linda, senior and award-winning brand manager, doing a presentation about a new cream to be marketed with realistic images of women over fifty, rather than showing women who don’t yet need it. She speaks of the middle-aged problem of “vanishing”, not being whistled at by builders, etc: I jibbed. Some of us find the vanishing restful, don’t envy the catcalled young and think the beauty industry is a bit of a ramp anyway.

But Skinner is well aware of all this, as becomes clear when Linda’s family swim into focus: Imogen Byron a delight as the stolidly sane14-year-old who isn’t interested in that stuff, or in her mother’s gushy tributes to her ‘beauty’. She has other ambitions, involving everything from armed robbery to travel, shipwreck and shark attacks; for a school audition she plans to do a male Shakespeare speech and resents the drama teacher’s view that in plays about men the stakes are inevitably higher because, unlike us, “men, like, actually kill each other”. There’s a lovely ironic scene near the end reflecting that line: won’t spoil it

Then there’s Alice, a truly stunning performance by Karla Crome. She is 25, depressed, and actually wants to vanish: dressing fulltime in a skunk-themed onesie because of a peculiarly awful bit of female victimhood she suffered at fifteen. Linda has unwisely got her work-experience (without admitting the relationship) in her office. Where we find the horrifying corporate-Barbie Amy (Amy Beth Hayes) who definitely wants to have it all. Wedding now, then “Three years to get promoted before optimum baby age, if you go much past 29 you risk being phased out in the workplace and your body doesn’t ping back into shape. And if you don’t ping back into shape you could end up being fat for the rest of your life and if you’re a fat woman you actually earn less…”

 
We laugh. But my companion , a former corporate executive winced in recognition. We laugh a bit at Linda too, though her misjudgements are subtler – ordering her daughters “don’t take racist of sexist people too seriously” ,being fixated on staying size 10, and rushing home to make risotto superwoman-style rather than actually listening to her daughters. Her nemesis approaches: Amy undermines her at work, there’s trouble with the CEO Dave (Ian Redford nobly sacrificing vanity to look tubby, grizzled and unlovely while patronizing “a woman your age”). Neil has a fling to feel like a rock star not a middle-aged schoolteacher, and Linda’s mental cracks culminate in a properly apocalyptic King Lear moment, with the revolving set flashing in a rainstorm. What has been a funny, sharp, satirical comedy of manners darkens satisfyingly , with some really cruel twists well laid down in the first act.

 
Excellent. But come last to the headline story: Michael Longhurst lost his star Kim Cattrall to health issues only ten days ago. Noma Dumezweni stepped in as Linda. On press night – impossible at this time of year to delay – she was script-in-hand for some sections. She is superbly nonchalant with it (after all, women execs do carry paper around a lot). And she inhabits the central role with dry wit, crackling energy, lovely comic timing and real heart. What a star. The play is actually better than HANGMEN (lately transferred) so let’s hope the Court scores another West End hit.
box office 020 7565 5000 http://www.royalcourtheatre.com
to 9 Jan
Rating four   

STILL SHOCKING,  STILL SEXIST !    GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES SMACKS HIS LIPS OVER A VINTAGE PINTER…

I get the itching feeling that if anyone else had written this play we’d call the police. But they didn’t – Harold Pinter wrote it – so we won’t. Like all the best thrillers it is absolutely outrageous. Prostitution, death, perversions of every aspect are indulged  and laughed at and we’re all 100% complicit.

Teddy has been away for a number of years (in America , being a Professor in Philosophy of all things) but has returned to visit his family, new wife by his side. And what an awful place to bring a woman. His father hates women, his uncle has  an aversion to them, both his brothers are boasting rapists and one is a pimp. The poor dead mum is a conversational vigil and punch bag – all very Freud.

For all its chilling flights of lunacy, Jamie Lloyd has compacted this troubling, tense, intriguing, sexist and furiously crackers play into something incredibly lean and precise. Everything is incredibly measured, making the flashes of anger even more terrifying.   Soutra Gilmour’s brilliant set is a deep, abstract room which zooms backwards as if looking down the barrel of a gun. A single door gloomily stands at the end. Home sweet home.

Ron Cook as the furious father Max gives the kind of terrifying performance only someone under 5ft could. He’s planted in the middle of the empty living room, sitting in the only armchair, spitting about sluts, hatching disgusting plans and presiding over his perverse family. The dialogue between him and his brother Sam (Keith Allen) is where Pinter’s lines really get cooking. Both have that excellently distracted, hauntingly calm  Pinter delivery, without sounding like actors doing Pinter. Keith Allen is camp as tits, and nails every gag.

Gemma Chan is thankfully one of the sturdiest performances on stage. Everything in the play is geared to make her the victim but with the few lines she’s given she chills the rowdy male atmosphere in a brilliantly icy fashion.Gary Kemp as her odd, odd husband (Teddy) and John MacMillan as his younger, simpler, brother (Joey) slice through the comedy and the darkness well. John Simm as the third of the boys (Lenny) has moments of sheer perfection, but occasionally slips into ‘I’m speaking Pinter lines’ mode.

Despite a distracting interval (they should just run it 1h45 straight through), Jamie Lloyd has pulled of yet another tightly wound and wildly chilling Pinter revival. The duller moments are quickly glided over and the awful sexual and jealous tension is fully indulged in. We all felt at risk.

Box Office 08448717615   to  13 Feb  (alas, a day too early for a Valentine’s Day outing for the brave…)

rating  four