Category Archives: Four Mice

November 8, 2015 · 2:58 pm

HARLEQUINADE / ALL ON HER OWN Garrick, SW1

A DOUBLE BILL: RATTIGAN AT PLAY AND IN GRIEF

There may be voices which jibe at Kenneth Branagh for being producer, deviser and co-director of a year-long season, finding starry casting like Dame Judi Dench and Michael Pennington and then giving himself the central role of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale.

As it happens, he may be the boss but he is superb in it (see below for five-mouse rave). And he also neatly undermines any murmurs of “who-does-he-think-he-is-bloody-Garrick-or-what?” by running it in rep with Terenace Rattigan’s gleeful parody of the theatre world in Harlequinade, himself playing the dedicated but dreadful Arthur Gosport: producer-actor-manager of a government-subsidized wartime initiative to take Shakespeare to a depressed Midlands town which doesn’t particularly want it. This gives him ample opportunity to portray vanity, directorial incompetence, and aching middle-aged insecurity over having to play Romeo opposite his younger wife (Miranda Raison, here spoofily actressy). Thus the entrepreneurial actormanager Branagh neatly takes the mickey out of those who take it out of him.

Harlequinade itself is a bit creaky, Rattigan enjoying the typical theatre-man’s sentimental self-mockery. It opens with a balcony scene rehearsal in which the female “darling”on the balcony asks the male ‘darling” below whether he’s going to keep in “that little jump” tonight? Huffily, the male darling says “I thought it helped the boyishness of the character”. As the wig does, until he pulls it off in exasperation to reveal the thinning pate. What is even less helpful is that he is back in Brackley, a rep stamping-ground of his youth, where the chirpy intruder Muriel turns out to be the result of a 17-year-old fling and the pram in the wings makes Romeo a grandfather. Aptly – given Branagh’s other opening production – he is auditioning Perditas for The Winter’s Tale when Muriel pounces on him with a cry of “Dad!” and all he can splutter is “Which text are you using?”
So there are some good jokes, and a gorgeously bossy Zoe Wanamaker as Dame Edna, the formidable aunt and grande-dame of the company with her devastating “notes”. But in this 100-minute double-bill evening which runs in rep alongside the big Winter’s Tale, the real find is the twenty-minute opener, ALL ON HER OWN, a dark Rattigan monologue by Zoe Wanamaker as a widow with a whisky decanter, addressing the husband who probably killed himself.

As she breaks into his voice in imagination and memory the widow strips her own pretentions bare. She reveals a life cultured, upmarket, but always a bit ashamed of her rich builder husband, impeccably polite to him but failing in love . She strips her pretensions bare, speaking for him at last in the inescapable haunting that is memory. “DId I kill you?”. Rattigan’s own lover was a suicide: grief and understanding blaze through this short, painfully arresting piece. It makes a curious bedfellow to Harlequinade, but worth seeing.

box office 0844 482 9673 to 21 Jan http://www.branaghtheatre.com

rating four, but only  because of the Wanamaker parts!
4 Meece Rating

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November 5, 2015 · 12:48 pm

LOVE FOR LOVE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

FLOUNCES AND FLIRTS,  INSULTS AND INNUENDOES…A RESTORATION ROUT 
There’s a bustle of backstage larking before the curtain, cast dashing around in shirtsleeves, manoeuvring a hamper , getting stuck in ropes and tripping over a life-size model crocodile. So get in your seat early. Especially if you want a random hug from Mr Scandal (Robert Cavanah) or to be picked on to represent Queen Anne with a polystyrene crown from the gift shop plonked on your head (the Queen, it seems, saw Congreve’s play on her 32nd birthday, in 1697).
Director Selina Cadell notes joyfully in the programme that Restoration Comedy was always complicit: actors and audience alike letting it be known that it was all “play’ and the relationship was open: not until 1912 did the idea of the “fourth wall” get traction. So throughout this riotous, consistently entertaining evening characters make eye contact, confide, point, and require the front row to look after their jackets or hats. Not (be reassured) embarrassingly. There is even, briefly a tatty songsheet lowered from the gallery in the hope we will join a sailorly chorus.
I will not attempt to lay out the plot, how the spendthrift layabout Valentine wins his Angelica, whose ruse foils Sir Sampson Legend’s attempt to disinherit him, or why the straying wife of Foresight the duff astrologer is in cahoots with the equally loose-bloomered Mrs Frail to stop the favoured sailor son Ben marrying Miss Prue. It’ll all come clear in a firecracker onslaught of sharp lines, witticisms, flights of fancy and splendid insults. “Dirty Dowdy!’ “Stinking tar-barrel!” “Crocodile!” “FIsh – impudent tarpaulin!”. Not to mention double-entendres of magnificent clarity – one discussion about whether a woman went “to World’s End” takes us way beyond Chelsea. Enlightening that it was deemed suitable for Queen Anne, when you consider how strictly Royal Variety Performance artists are warned off innuendo today.
The joy of it, credit to both Congreve and Cadell, is that for the whole of the first half never five minutes passes without some new, distinct and preposterous character arriving. As costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt has opted for period silhouettes but “modern hair” rather than alienating periwigs, they are both appropriate and cartoonishly familiar today. We meet Valentine – Tom Turner as a languidly poudré rake lounging in his rooms in peacock blue and being berated about late payment by his valet (nobody in this play has any humble respect for anyone else, which is bracing and very Congreve). Soon Cavanah’s dark, sarcastic Scandal joins VAlentine, then – leaping over the chaise-longue in a Tintin quiff and a plump fluster of pink bows and orange tags – we have Jonathan Broadbent, who was so enchantingly touching in My Night With Reg. Soon there is the vain, tyrannical, affronted father, Nicholas le Prevost (an actor so accomplished that he can growl out Georgette Heyerish lines like “faith ’n troth she’s devilish handsome!” as if it came naturally). There’s the earnest fool Michael Thomas as Foresight with his astrolabe and stuffed croc; Hermione Gulliford upmarketly tarty as his wife, Zoe Waites even more so as Mrs Frail, and at last the seafaring Ben, very ahaaarr-Jim-lad, attempting vainly to woo the mummerzet -accented and pink-haired loutess, Miss Prue (Jenny Rainsford, gloriously funny).
In a riot of colour and choler, furbelows and flirtation, tricks and traducings, with a surreal Benny-Hill dash-through, two sweetly mournful songs and a rude shanty, it scrambles rumbustiously to its end. The Restoration had years of dreary Puritanism to get over. In the age of political correctness its spirit returns to comfort us.

box office 0844 800 1110 rsc.org.uk to 22 Jan
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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November 5, 2015 · 12:34 pm

LOVE FOR LOVE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

FRILLS AND FLIRTATIONS, TRICKS AND TRADUCINGS…
There’s a bustle of backstage larking before the curtain, cast dashing around in shirtsleeves, manoeuvring a hamper , getting stuck in ropes and tripping over a life-size model crocodile. So get in your seat early. Especially if you want a random hug from Mr Scandal (Robert Cavanah) or to be picked on to represent Queen Anne with a polystyrene crown from the gift shop plonked on your head (the Queen, it seems, saw Congreve’s play on her 32nd birthday, in 1697).

Director Selina Cadell notes joyfully in the programme that Restoration Comedy was always complicit: actors and audience alike letting it be known that it was all “play’ and the relationship was open: not until 1912 did the idea of the “fourth wall” get traction. So throughout this riotous, consistently entertaining evening characters make eye contact, confide, point, and require the front row to look after their jackets or hats. Not (be reassured) embarrassingly. There is even, briefly a tatty songsheet lowered from the gallery in the hope we will join a sailorly chorus.
I will not attempt to lay out the plot, how the spendthrift layabout Valentine wins his Angelica, whose ruse foils Sir Sampson Legend’s attempt to disinherit him, or why the straying wife of Foresight the duff astrologer is in cahoots with the equally loose-bloomered Mrs Frail to stop the favoured sailor son Ben marrying Miss Prue. It’ll all come clear in a firecracker onslaught of sharp lines, witticisms, flights of fancy and splendid insults. “Dirty Dowdy!’ “Stinking tar-barrel!” “Crocodile!” “FIsh – impudent tarpaulin!”. Not to mention double-entendres of magnificent clarity – one discussion about whether a woman went “to World’s End” takes us way beyond Chelsea. Enlightening that it was deemed suitable for Queen Anne, when you consider how strictly Royal Variety Performance artists are warned off innuendo today.
The joy of it, credit to both Congreve and Cadell, is that for the whole of the first half never five minutes passes without some new, distinct and preposterous character arriving. As costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt has opted for period silhouettes but “modern hair” rather than alienating periwigs, they are both appropriate and cartoonishly familiar today. We meet Valentine – Tom Turner as a languidly poudré rake lounging in his rooms in peacock blue and being berated about late payment by his valet (nobody in this play has any humble respect for anyone else, which is bracing and very Congreve). Soon Cavanah’s dark, sarcastic Scandal joins VAlentine, then – leaping over the chaise-longue in a Tintin quiff and a plump fluster of pink bows and orange tags – we have Jonathan Broadbent, who was so enchantingly touching in My Night With Reg. Soon there is the vain, tyrannical, affronted father, Nicholas le Prevost (an actor so accomplished that he can growl out Georgette Heyerish lines like “faith ’n troth she’s devilish handsome!” as if it came naturally). There’s the earnest fool Michael Thomas as Foresight with his astrolabe and stuffed croc; Hermione Gulliford upmarketly tarty as his wife, Zoe Waites even more so as Mrs Frail, and at last the seafaring Ben, very ahaaarr-Jim-lad, attempting vainly to woo the mummerzet -accented and pink-haired loutess, Miss Prue (Jenny Rainsford, gloriously funny).
In a riot of colour and choler, furbelows and flirtation, tricks and traducings, with a surreal Benny-Hill dash-through, two sweetly mournful songs and a rude shanty, it scrambles rumbustiously to its end. The Restoration had years of dreary Puritanism to get over. In the age of political correctness its spirit returns to comfort us.

box office 0844 800 1110 rsc.org.uk to 22 Jan
rating four

4 Meece Rating

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November 3, 2015 · 11:29 pm

AS YOU LIKE IT Olivier, SE1

A MAGICAL GLADE OF OFFICE FURNITURE…

Of all Shakespeare’s comedies, this is the one which most combines memorable lines – the seven ages of man, Rosalind’s quickfire epigrams about love – with a defiantly absurd plot and a rejection of every probability except that of young love. Indeed I should confess that the prolonged homoerotic practice-wooing between Orlando and a disguised Rosalind in britches has in many productions made me what to howl “Oh, tell him you’re a girl! Get on with it!” And that’s even without the lion-attack-rescue-reconciliation between Orlando and Oliver, – covered in one rushed speech – or the sudden resolution of the old feud as a messenger turns up in the last minute to announce that the wicked Duke has met a monk and changed his ways. It makes you suspect that Shakespeare, up against a deadline, suddenly realized he had got four girls in wedding-dresses and their grooms, plus a long-lost father and a depressed Jacques, all stuck in the middle of a forest with no money. Quick! Reform an offstage Duke!

Its central theme, though, is eternally appealing: that a stiff, unhappy, formal and arid world must be shaken up, its inhabitants thrown into a hostile forest so they can re-work their relationships. So director Polly Findlay opens it in a formal office, where bells govern everything and the only foliage is screensavers and stunted bonsai trees next to the shredders . It looks like a bit of a City trading-floor, not least when Joe Bannister’s blond, public-schooly Orlando has to wrestle, first with his domineering brother (Philip Arditti) and then more dangerously, with Leon Annor, enormous in Lycra and fright-mask, who has been tipped to kill him.
When Rosalind and Celia flee , rather than replace the office set by flying in some trees, designer Lizzie Clachan offers a scenic coup de theatre. Desks and chairs fly upwards, toppling and spilling to hang: monochrome, tangled and threatening as a winter forest. Some chairs still have cast members lurking aloft on them, making sinister woodland sounds. It looks like a freeze-framed explosion in Staples.

At first it felt a bit too clever, a desperate measure; but on the ground there is solidity, and the two fugitive girls carry it. Rosalie Craig is an utterly charming Rosalind, suddenly powerful and confident in her drag, and Patsy Ferran a mischievous physical foil as Celia: nimble and scornful and practical. The forest people too become foils and mirrors: there’s John Ramm as the exiled Duke clinging bravely to decency, Paul Chahidi an unusually troubled Jacques deep in questioning depression, and the shepherds. Among whom Siobhan McSweeney is a standout funny Audrey, and Ken Nwosu delivers the famous definitions of love with a poignant perfection.

So gradually the production drew me to its weird, angular, ultimately bright neon heart. The company singing, by Orlando Gough, is ravishing in it its eerie yearning harmonies. And the introduction of a flock of sheep played by the huge ensemble crawling around in Arran sweaters is a definite enhancement; especially as so many of them make the additional effort to jostle, try and mount each other, graze nose-down, and chew showily. One heroic ram fully consumes one of the hundreds of green Post-It notes on which Orlando writes his awful poems. Actors, gotta love ‘em!
box office 0207 452 3000 to 5 March
In cinemas on 25 Feb 2016
Rating four   4 Meece Rating

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October 27, 2015 · 11:46 pm

HUSBANDS AND SONS NT Dorfman, SE1

THE PEOPLE OF THE PITS
Tender, fierce, intelligent and humane, this superb production reminds us that D.H.Lawrence was at his best a great interpreter of 20th century change. Years before the showy hysteria of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (heaven knows why the BBC chose the worst of his works to dramatize) he wrote plays about his Nottinghamshire pit village, vivid with understanding humanity, humble observation and pity. Here are themes of marriage and pride, trapped lives and rich communities, possessive fearful mothers and feckless endangered sons. Here is class and money and the yearning for art and the painful the rift between generations when education takes the young out of manual work. Here too, noted with generosity, is the increasing independence of women.
Three separate plays are superbly sewn together by Ben Power and presented in the round, village households lying before us schematic but detailed in another fine Bunny Christie design complete with fires and candlelight and washtubs and kitchen tables. The families’ lives weave through lanes and kitchens a pattern of light and shade. The oldest play, the 1909 “A Collier’s Friday Night” is more of a sketch, with Lloyd Hutchinson as an ageing curmudgeon supping tea from a saucer in his pit-dirt and berating his wife (Julia Ford). Her eye is on their son , home from college talking of Rimbaud but forgetting to take the bread out of the oven; at one point he interrupts the father’s snorting wash-down with the announcement “Fancy! Swinburne’s dead!”.
A still more possessive mother is up at the Gascoignes: Susan Brown magnificent as the contemptusous mother-in-law of prim Minnie (a finely tuned Louise Brealey) who is annoyed at the infantile helplessness of her handsome new husband Luther, not to mention the fact that he’s got the neighbour’s daughter up the duff. Finally, up the road is Anne-Marie Duff electric in the most troubled role as Lizzie Holroyd, victim of a drunken husband she cannot stop loving and hating.

With unobtrusive skill, Power and director Marianne Elliott weave it together, occasionally letting the families meet or refer to one another without diluting the individual stories (Hutchinson’s grumpy patriarch brings home the drunken Holroyd, who stays asleep on their outside lavatory during the other family’s latest row). The intercutting and counterpoint of emotional tides and themes is reminiscent , in a very good way, of the best soap opera direction (Excavation Street, perhaps) . But pure theatre are the moments when all the emotions gather silently against a scratchy plaintive record they all might hear, or a Lawrentian poem from lonely clever Ernest in the dusk.

Flashing rattling indications remind us of the mine that dominates their lives; the accents, thee’s and tha’s and nays and nivers, are pitch-perfect (my Mum was from thereabouts, and did it sometimes). A lost world rises before us, every voice in it ringing true with the sad, sweet music of humanity.
box office 0207 452 3000 to 10 Feb
co-production with The Royal Exchange Theatre

rating four

4 Meece Rating

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October 18, 2015 · 5:53 pm

JANE WENHAM, THE WITCH OF WALKERN Touring

Touring Mouse wide

TOURING NEAR YOU;  RICH DARK OOZING EVIL AND FEMINIST DEFIANCE

A fierce bleak play, this. Set in 1712 but, taking the wider world as it is, not un-topical: hangings, tortures, religion turned into a sour power-trip. Here are superstitious dreads and demonization of anyone different, whether homosexual, eccentric or just female. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’ reimagining of one of the last witch-trials in England gives us a stimulatingly nasty picture of a village suffering from an oppressive, sly, sadistic hysteria, whipped up by bad sexual secrets and the neurotic, unhinged virginal zealotry of the vicar. The devil hangs over it, and not only in the imagination of hunched crones fantasising over a fire-pit about demonic carnality: rather like the book-group from hell which can’t move on from Fifty Shades of Grey.

It’s strong stuff, and Ria Parry’s stark direction serves it well (though some scenes go on a shade too long, and the opening could be clearer. We need to know what has just happened: the hanging of a “witch” whose young daughter Ann (a touching, troubling performance by Hannah Hutch) is grieving her, while the locals chunter prurient satisfaction and blame the dead woman for all the local evils, notably a wife’s repeated miscarriages.
Cut to a strong scene with an elderly Bishop (David Acton), an educated man who dismisses necromancy as “tricks of the light” and nonsense, versus the worryingly stiff young vicar (Tim Delap) who prates“thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. He has his eye on Jane Wenham, a reclusive elderly herbalist he thinks is next up for the witch-pricker and the gallows , because she has a pet cockerel which might be Satan. The Bishop wearily tries to dissuade him. But lest we canonize him too soon, it appears that he himself is taking advantage of Kemi Martha (Cat Simmons) a freed slave-woman who is his housekeeper and bedmate.
Meanwhile in the village the husband of the miscarrying woman is having a fling with the tavern-keeper, and poor lonely Ann has been giving herself unjoyfully to all comers in the barn. But she confides in the seemingly kindly Jane Wenham that her sexual desire is actually for women, and is furiously shooed away as “misshapen”. So when a child drowns, and the sly old demon-fantasisers (Judith Coke brilliantly sinister as Priddy) help the vicar to close the net round Jane, Ann vengefully joins the accusers. The final scenes with Amanda Bellamy as the tormented but defiant Wenham are fast, powerful and important.

It’s a rich dark mix : I can see why Lenkiewicz threw in the lesbianism, not to mention the vicar’s sudden burst of lust and the bishop’s ex-slave. It does paint a complete picture of sexually driven hysteria and exploitation, but these elements make it veer off-piste for a while. As for the references to child abuse and Blind Priddy’s robust description of the devil’s “kingo like a broom handle” in either a dream or a memory, it pulls no punches. As a result of which, I am sorry to say, one of its rural tour dates, the private Ipswich High School for Girls, was panickily cancelled on the pretext of bad language and “safeguarding”.
But you know what? If ever there was a show that GCSE and sixth-form girls needed to see – this being both the Twilight fiction generation and one bombarded with both online porn fantasy and news footage of Iranian hangings – here it is. Yes, you’d need decent thoughtful teachers to run serious discussions and analyses straight afterwards. But to ban it altogether feels worryingly early-60s. Even then, I hope and believe my convent school would (with a gulp) have let it through.

bookings and tour dates http://www.outofjoint.co.uk
rating four  4 Meece Rating

Co- production by Out of Joint, Watford Palace Theatre and Arcola, touring in association with Eastern Angles. I saw it at Woodbridge: next up, West Yorkshire Playhouse, 21-24 Oct, then Liverpool Everyman, Bristol Tobacco Factory, Salisbury, and Arcola from 5 Jan.

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October 12, 2015 · 10:50 pm

THE FIRST MAN Jermyn St Theatre, SW1

EUGENE O’NEILL,  EARLY AND IMPASSIONED…

Well, God bless the little Jermyn. Director and AD Antony Biggs, an unwearying ferret of lost drama, has dug up another barnstorming early 20c number: a UK premiere, no less, from lEugene O’Neill. The author, it seems, didn’t much rate it in 1922, and went on to success with more famous The Hairy Ape (about to run at the Old Vic). But on this smaller stage, with an impressive cast of 12 , the forgotten work flares into savage, passionate life.

Opening with a familial “unfortunate tea” in a Connecticut front room, it hurtles rapidly into scenes so emotionally violent, visceral and verbally shocking that you hang onto the arms of your seat. After a brief interval, a looming firelit tension punctuated by eerie wolf-howls of anguish fractures in turn into jagged fury, before a final funeral scene puts the lid on it with the hero repeatedly seeming to charge like a maddened bull at an unnerved group of relatives wincing in unison. Unsayably shocking things are said, enormous dependencies and betrayals hurled around as a smalltown earthquake rips up family decorum.

It may be this intensity, growing too fiercely and fast, which made O’Neill shove it back in the drawer after early outings. Or it may have been that Curtis’ worst remarks had too much echo in his own family life. But it’s a pity, because it has all the furious vigour of its decade: a postwar loosening of gender expectations and a hysterical pursuit of science. Against a clever impressionistic set of curtains daubed with Lascaux cave drawings Adam Jackson-Smith is Curtis, a Post-Darwinian anthropologist off to search the Gobi desert for the Missing Link between ape and man. His wife Martha, played with dignified, humorous authority by Charlotte Asprey, usually travels with him as “a chum, a comrade…more efficient than a whole staff of assistants and secretaries”.
After losing two small children years before, they have agreed to seek what he calls “a more difficult beautiful happiness” than mere family life, which is suspiciously convenient to his ambitions . But his friend Bigelow (Alan Turkington) is a widower with children, and Martha at 38 now longs for a baby. The scene where she tells Curtis she is pregnant – after the awful tea-party with his stifling family who hate her for being a “Westerner” – has him rivetingly losing all decent control and shouting “I cannot understand! I depend on you! Treachery! Ruining our life!” “YOUR life” she says reasonably, and he goes wilder still with “There are doctors….”. Asprey and Jackson-Smith strike violent sparks off one another in furious, incompatible mutual need: it’s electrifying.

Then we meet the family again (a very fine ensemble, with flares of salty character for every one of the eight) lurking by a dim fire hearing the keening howls of a proper Victorian-style obstetric horror-labour, brilliantly sound-designed by David Gregory to be not quite human. There’s even the looming presence of an old Aunt Elizabeth in black bombazine in the corner ( Lynette Edwards. and she gets her moment too).
The smalltown muttonheads have decided that Curtis’ weird attitude to the baby is not just because it sabotaged his work, but because it’s not his. He is unaware that they think this, and it feeds a fearful melodramatic showdown after the ultimate disaster. The gulf between Curtis’ enormous – and creditably believable – agonies and desire for a “fine free life” and their smalltown worries is something nobody feels more strongly than him: “Your rabbit-hearted emotions! bread and butter passions!” he shouts.

And it is to the credit of this vigorous production – and the beautifully directed panic of the family – that pig as he is, you rather side with Curtis. Though if there’s an actual hero, it is definitely Martha. A name , I’d suspect, artfully chosen to echo Martyr. Epic stuff. A nugget of theatre history in two sharp, unflagging hours.

Box office 0207 287 2875 to 31 October

RATING   FOUR   4 Meece Rating
rating four

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September 25, 2015 · 11:08 am

HECUBA Swan, Stratford upon Avon

A KIND OF HORRIFIC GRACE..
We are having a spate of grisly classicana at the moment, brutal old tales of curses and murders and doom spinning down the unforgiving generations. A brace of stage Oresteias, a scorching Elektra, Bacchae everywhere you look. Here, though, is another take on the ancient horrors of the Trojan war.
Marina Carr, admirably uninterested in male heroics and subtly channelling present-day brutalities, centres her re-telling on Hecuba, wife of King Priam and queen of the ancient civilization ravaged by the Grecian invaders. Taking Euripides, Homer and other ancient variants, Carr delivers something unutterably bleak but strangely beautiful. Not least in the restraint of Erica Whyman’s direction and Soutra Gilmour’s design: no silly gross-out spectacle or property rubber limbs here. The story is told mostly in narration by the various characters, each recounting conversations, sometimes relating one another’s lines: a tactic which at first slightly alienated me, but whose poetic distancing grew more powerful by the minute, reminiscent of Synge and Yeats in Deirdre of the Sorrows.
But oh, the pity and horror and blunt stupidity of such war! We meet Hecuba on her dead husband’s throne, describing the torn bodies of her sons lying around her, Priam’s chopped-off head seeping on her knee, her baby grandson’s body flung among them, his head crushed. Her gentler daughter Polyxena weeps and the tougher less loved one, Cassandra who foresaw it all, sneers “Don’t you just love war. Sexy!”. Derbhle Crotty is a marvellous Hecuba, mature and enduring, proud. “Three thousand years of breeding in that pose” says the conquering Agamemnon, who strides in gleaming with barbaric warrior pride . The admiration is not mutual. “You came as guests, reeking of goat-shit and mackerel, saw our fields and palaces..”. The Greeks here are marauders, aggressors, imperialists, who know no rules of war. Outside women are being ravaged, old ones killed, babies thrown on pyres. “Different rules now” says Agamemnon “Everything is in my gift”.
Ray Fearon’s Agamemnon plays brilliantly against Hecuba. Here is a Spartan boy soldier who led troops at thirteen, never learned to read and write but sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia on the strand to get a fair wind. The brilliance of Carr’s characterization is her indication of the man’s intelligence, blunted by violence, and the vulnerability which Hecuba – still assured, though defeated and grieving – can raise in him. He cuts her own daughter’s throat for a fair wind to get his rabble of Grecian tribesmen home, knowing perfectly well that the superstition is “all shit” , and afterwards tends the hungry, ragged queen and takes her in his arms, needing her comfort not only physically but asking her how to run a country.
“Our laws” she says calmly “Were ten thousand years in the making”. That his army has destroyed them in mere hours is, Agamemnon perceives miserably, a less proud thing. In an extraordinary, arresting scene the child Polydorus, last son of Priam and knowing he is to die now, sits on his father’s throne. On press night it was Luca Saraceni-Gunner, a child of devastating dignity. His calm nobility leaves the immense Agamemnon muttering “I am humbled, reduced..”.
Hecuba is doomed, enslaved, defiled, bereaved, begging on her knees. But never reduced. Agamemnon speaks of her having “a kind of horrific grace”. The phrase  sums up the play. Can’t get it out of my head.
0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 17 October

rating four   4 Meece Rating

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September 22, 2015 · 11:58 pm

DINNER WITH SADDAM Menier, SE1

THE WORST GUEST EVER…FARCE AND FEAR
It’s the least likely setting imaginable for a farce, even a black one. We are in Baghdad, in the Alawai family’s kitchen and dining-room on the 19th of March, 2003: the hours before the American Shock and Awe bombardment. But for a while, we might as well be in any domestic sitcom. The set (by Tim Shortall) is recognizably modern-suburban with just an Arab twist in the windows, which helps; the opening scene is almost Life with the Lyons, as the exasperated wife Samira (Shobu Kapoor) stumps in with the shopping after a frustrating search for basics, and berates her idle husband Ahmed (Sanjeev Bhaskar) who has done nothing about digging the well for when the water gets cut off. Student daughter Rana (Rebecca Grant, the straightest of the characters) quarrels with her father about his plan to marry her to her awful wealthy cousin Jammal. A geeky comedy plumber (Ilan Goodman) has sneaked in, who is actually Rana’s disguised real boyfriend.

There are some sharp lines and laughs; so far, so rom-com. But Anthony Horowitz, creator of Midsomer Murders, Foyle’s War and numerous novels, has thrown real political fury at his first stage play. Chancing upon the curious fact that the dictator Saddam Hussein had a faux-democratic habit of calling on ordinary families – albeit surrounded by heavily armed guards – he supposes that on this perilous night the dictator would have left the palace (of which the USAF missiles would have co-ordinates) to descend on the Alawais. The terrifying, eye-patched faintly camp security chief Colonel Farouk turns up (the splendid Ilan Goodman again, for good reasons which become clear). Farouk is a man reputed to have pulled out his own eye with a corkscrew for a bet, and announces that Saddam is on the way and the neighbours have duly been arrested, just in case. Some plot devices are neatly planted – a mis-labelled jar, two identical bags in the fridge, a too-tight suit – and these duly cause increasing mayhem. Bhaskar does a good Cleesian line in manic-panic, the lumpen fiancé Jammal the traffic policeman is given full comedy revoltingness by Nathan Amzi, and as the first act ends Saddam is among us, with a steel-lined trilby and two armed guards.

At which point Horowitz’ motive starts to pay off. Steven Berkoff, for it is he, is a truly terrifying Saddam: giving him glimpses of affable humanity and plaintive self-exculpation in between executions remembered – and in two cases ordered on the spot. Quite apart from the chaos sometimes going on in the next room, and a scatological interlude with Jamal’s tummy-trouble (this author has written a lot of teen fiction), the focus is on this terrifying giant baby, this killer buffoon. One long and startling riff from him must have given director Lindsay Posner a few hard moments, since it stops the farce action dead: but it does hammer home the points which Horowitz is fizzing with furious determination to make. That the West supported, praised and armed Saddam Hussein for decades; that Britain extended Iraq’s export credit a mere week after the Halabja massacre of Kurds; that Western sanctions killed more children than Hiroshima, depriving Iraq of necessary medicine, sanitation and nutrition. And, not least, that the American ending of the first Iraq war for fear of homecoming body-bags gave the monster dangerous confidence. “Their tears are their weakness” he says, bragging that his own casualties have no names or faces being just soldiers of Iraq. He cites with scorn the list of failed US overseas interventions ever since Vietnam.
All true – as are picaresque facts like Saddam’s early career as a bus conductor, and the fact that you could be thrown in jail for spilling coffee on his photograph. And as the farce resolves – the Alawais survive, pretty much – you cannot leave without sad sour reflection. Not least on Saddam’s line “In a country of so many sects and ethnicities it is essential everybody agrees on one thing. That they don’t want to be tortured”. It isn’t a classic farce, despite some fine laughs, and could do with pacing up a little before it transfers, which I bet it will. But goddammit, it’s a handy prelude to Chilcot, which alone earns it the fourth mouse. Wonder whether Sir John will report before the run ends? Or, indeed, book a ticket?

box office 0207 378 1713 to 14 November
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 22, 2015 · 1:47 am

MR FOOTE’S OTHER LEG Hampstead Theatre, N1

A FINE PLUM-PUDDING OF ACTS AND IDEAS

“Sex and the 18th century” said Brigid Brophy, quoted by the playwright Sam Kelly, “are the two most interesting things in the world”. The fiery, subversive free spirits of the time certainly kicked at religious, scientific and social barriers with glee: Georgians are never boring. And Kelly dramatizes and telescopes the career of one of the ripest: Samuel Foote. Actor, dramatist and theatre manager, whose “mimicry and audacious pleasantries” got him thrown out of Oxford , he found celebrity, clashed with censors and rivals, sparred with friends – Garrick, Peg Woffington, Prince George himself – had a leg amputated after being thrown by a royal horse, rallied, got a royal warrant as compensation, and used his wooden leg as a comedy prop, often while wearing a frock and bonnet. Oh, and he was tried for homosexual assault of a footman.

Kelly gives us this irresistible figure as a very modern character: a satirical celebrity who admits that he has “something wrong in my head, I never knew when a joke went too far” . A man living on the edge financially and professionally, never ceding to prudence or decorum, whose decline is both inevitable and wrenchingly sad. Who better to play it than the matchless, the twinkling, the deep-feeling, unassailably truthful, woundedly human , energetically rageous and intermittently dead camp Simon Russell Beale. What a treat.

The play kicks off with giddy comedy in a flash-forward , as Foote’s faithful servant the freed slave Frank (Micah Balfour) searches Dr Hunter’s anatomy store for his dead master’s old wooden leg, assisted by the old stage-manager Mrs Garner (Jenny Galloway, dropping tart lines with killer precision as she searches the specimen racks – “Cocks in bottles, best place for them”). It whips back twenty years, and on Tim Hatley’s fine backstage set we find our hero taking elocution lessons backstage under Charles Macklin, alongside a Brummie-accented David Garrick (Joseph Millson) and a still almost incomprehensibly Irish Peg Woffington (Dervla Kirwan). Foote himself , looking like a truculent Mr Toad in a periwig, has learnt the part of Titania. So we don’t stop laughing for the first ten minutes, even through a fatal onstage accident and a backstage pisspot intervention.
And the laughs go on, as Foote ,Garrick and Woffington start a rival theatre, running skits in the Haymarket until Garrick peels off to be more respectably Shakespearian. While Foote perversely decides that Othello could be played as a comedy, it leads to a scene unique in drama when two Othellos, blacked-up in identical tunics, brawl violently in the dressing-room where Woffington in her petticoats and the black Jamaican, Frank, try to separate them and the new King George III (Ian Kelly himself) appears in the doorway.

The loss of Foote’s leg, and his descent through deeper disinihibition and recklessness, darken the second half; sweetened by the ultimately touching reconciliation of the three friends in Woffington’s final illness (Kirwan is superb as the gallant, sexually free trouper). Above all there is Russell Beale’s gift for simultaneously conveying Foote’s personal despair , heroic flippancy and – beneath the latter – a genuine and important conviction that comedy, subversion, drag and satire are high moral forms. Raging against Garrick’s sacred-Shakespeare pomposity he cries “The theatre is a knocking-shop , always was..laughter means the audience is rubbing up against something they thought was right”.
Woven in with this is Dr Hunter (Forbes Masson) and his medical questing, alongside Benjamin Franklin to debate the mystery of consciousness in the brain with both chemical and electrical impulses, with a metaphor of thoughts hovering in

themselves in a communal zero-gravity suspension. It is all, as Frank joyfully says of London, “inebriating”.  Though there are moments in the second half when it needs a bit more soda in the tipple, as theatre, censorship, medicine, brain science, Abolitionism, American independence, the rotting effect of celebrity and the capturing of lighting with kites all jostle for attention, and Foote becomes a lost Lear in a huge feather bonnet crying “We do not know we have a mind until we begin to lose it”. It’s a rich plum-pudding , and maybe could have done with the omission of a nut or two. But wow.

Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 18, 2015 · 2:43 pm

SO HERE WE ARE Hightide Festival, Aldeburgh

YOUTHFUL YEARNINGS A CONTAINER PORT CAN’T CONTAIN…

You grow up with your mates in a dead-end town, and you’re a solid gang – five a side footie team, in and out of each other’s houses since you were all six – but some of you start to grow away. From the same street and school some lads will be builders or roofers, like Pidge and Smudge and Frankie, but some will get on and out. Like Dan, who went to “uni” and is headed for a job in Hong Kong, in a suit.

Today they’re all in suits, mind, because they’ve come from Frankie’s funeral. Three are perched on a Southend dockyard container, bantering , farting, quarrelling like so many Likely Lads. Dan is on the ground, not joining in. Maybe he knows more about Frankie’s death than they do. Any minute the lost boy’s girlfriend Kirsty will turn up, to do a ceremonial loosing of black balloons in his memory.

Luke Norris’ 2013 Bruntwood prizewinner – on its way to the Royal Exchange in Manchester next week – is beautifully staged under the festival’s director Steven Atkinson, with the looming scruffy container delivering a fine coup de theatre halfway through its 90 minutes as we flash back to Frankie’s last day alive. We see him and learn more about what drove him to that “accident”. After the banteringly uneasy opening – often very funny – Norris leads us smartly through the pressures and doubtfulness of growing up as a young man whose education and chances are cut off, and whose yearning for an outer world will always be at the expense of the safety that lies in what he knows.

Daniel Kendrick is wonderful as Frankie: eager, doubtful, confusedly fascinated by the immigrant Latvian workmate only he pays attention to, and struggling emotionally with the need to escape more than Southend itself. His girlfriend Kirsty, Jade Anouka, is a fulfilled busy primary-school teacher and doesn’t see it; no more do the three team-mates, Mark Weinman the calmer of the them is engaged, an endearing Dorian Jerome SImpson is the pie-eating Smudge, nicely combining apparent dimness with a fiercer emotional intelligence than the rest; and there’s a rackety, cracking debut from Sam Melvin as the motormouth PIdge.
Each of them has in some way misunderstood Frankie, though they loved him. Dan (Ciaran Owens, broodingly present in his silence through the banter) knows better than anyone why it broke down. Comedy and sadness melt together. And as word-of-mouth is particularly interesting in these festival moments, I can report that members of the Aldeburgh audience, inhabiting quite another sort of East Anglian town, class, and outlook, spoke afterwards with real empathy, real sorrow for the world’s Frankies. Which is as it should be.

http://www.hightidefestival.org transferring to Royal Exchange, Manchester 24th.

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 16, 2015 · 11:55 am

USHERS Arts Theatre, WC2

SMALL BUDGET, BIG HEART, WELCOME UP WEST
I had been wanting for a while to catch up on this fringe squib about the lives of front-of-house theatre workers, and with devilish cunning Max Reynolds’ production, sharing the Arts with American Idiot, runs four matinees a week – tues, Weds, two on Friday and one on Saturday. Thus not only us theatre anoraks with too many booked-up nights, but actual ushers themselves can go.

And should. From Yianni Koutsakos’ and James Oban’s musical (book by James Rottger) I expected larks, and I got them. Not least from Alexandra Parkes in a stonking professional début as big Rosie the usherette-cum-stalker. She does a riotously raunchy, fabulously fearless number in a basque, about stalking Michael Ball, and crowns it with a very, very slow-motion performance of the splits.

I expected pastiche and joyful in-jokes and got them too: a fine Billy Elliott joke, some clever parody numbers, often half-hidden references, and plenty on the imaginary big man himself, Sir Andrew MacTosser, Most Powerful Man In Theatre. I relished the cracks about the ways of audiences: tourists, critics, tiger Mums and brats, stagies, husbands dragged along unwillingly, snogging lovers, and the awkward tardy bumbling pests who cavil at programme prices and insist that there is no spoon in their ice-cream when there is. Under the lid. I nodded at the central conceit of the villainous Theatre Manager Robin (a basso profundo Harry Stone, mugging like a more heavyset James Dreyfus, urging upselling and spend-per-head. It was nice that the show these downtrodden ushers are working on is “Oops I did it again – the Britney Spears Musical”, complete with tacky merchandise – “if it got any cheaper, Bill Kenwright would be touring it”. I like the set too, the back view of the kiosk.
All good fun. But I had not expected it to be so touching: a lightly taken, cheerfully poignant reflection on unappreciated lives and private dreams. The action takes place in the half-hour before the house opens, during the interval, and after the end of the invisible show, with occasional video-training screen moments from the evil Robin. Rosie, loves all leading men and hates actresses, new girl Lucy is fresh out of drama school and hoping for a break, handsome Stephen has toured as Joseph but yearns in a high tenor for character parts (“I want Phantom, not that random? Bloke who gets the girl in the end!”). Above all there is Gary (Ben Fenner) who has a chance to work in Austria but may have to leave his lover Ben behind. Poor Ben has suddenly realized that nobody wants to be an usher, nobody trains three years to sell ice-cream “always watching, never participating”. Gary’s aria about love and choice has one of the best couplets ever in a musical: “Once in a world of ice cream and joy / At a kiosk of wonders, a boy met a boy…”. Lovely.
And of course there’s a happy ending, a big reveal, and an OTT tap-dancing curtain call. Eighty minutes well spent, and a grin from the real ushers as you leave. Small budget, big heart, lovely show.

Box Office 020 7836 8463
http://www.artstheatrewestend.co.uk to 18 Oct
rating: four    4 Meece Rating

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September 15, 2015 · 10:49 pm

KINKY BOOTS Adelphi, WC1

THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR DANCING.  IF YOU DARE. 
Sequins, feathers, glitter, two and a half hours of hurtling from one noisy shining set-piece to another, this is more of a gig than a drama. If you’re fine with that – and why not – here’s your big night out. It’s less earnest than Made in Dagenham, less romantic than The Bodyguard, far less human than Once, or The Committments, or Memphis. But it is very, very Broadway: slick shiny, flicking the emotional buttons with economical briskness (being a Real Man, living up to your Dad, all that). Garlanded with Tonys, after Broadway and LA, Harvey Mitchell and Cyndi Lauper’s musical comes home with a British cast to the nation it’s about.
For the original movie – based loosely on some true events – is about a failing shoe factory in Northamptonshire saving itself by making specialist high-heeled footwear robust enough for the heftier drag queen. It was one of a slew of films – from The Full Monty and Brassed Off right through to the recent Pride (bound to end up as a musical, betcha) – whose theme is the late 20c decline of British industry, coupled with a rousing sense that hey, we’re warm-hearted people who love cabaret and gays so it doesn’t matter that we don’t make much any more.
Am I being cynical? Suppose so. But entertainment at this level is quite cynical itself. The story of Charlie (Killian Donnelly, as likeable and tuneful as ever) reluctantly taking on the factory and forging an unlikely partnership with Lola the drag queen is briskly narrated, big songs designed more as showstoppers than emotional plot-drivers. Likewise the collapse of his engagement to Nicola and his rapprochement with Lauren from the shopfloor . The homophobic horror of the conservative workforce, important in the film, is reduced to one thuggish dissident, Don, and resolved in another showpiece of a slo-mo boxing match between him and Lola. The glorious moment when George the veteran shoemaker overcomes his unease in the fascination of the technical demands of a stronger heel is pretty much thrown away between big belting X-factor-y numbers.
But hey, who cares? the showcase drag pieces are acrobatic, speactacular, breathtaking, glittery and funny (Jerry Mitchell directs and choreographs, asking feats of his stilettoed chorus-men way beyond what is probable, logical or wholly safe). David Rockwell ’s factory set is nicely adapted to the choreography, especially the moving conveyor-belt dance: a unique bit of staging if ever there was one. Donnelly is delightful as ever, deploying a wider emotional range than the script really deserves; Jamie Baughan is pleasingly gruff as homophobic Don, and as for Matt Henry as Lola, he’s a revelation: a spectacular cabaret artiste, queeny and showy but able – like Donnelly – to conjure up real feeling and a touching insecurity in between the big explosive numbers.

As for Amy Lennox as Lauren the factory girl who falls for the boss, her Northampton-accented lament, especially in The HIstory of Wrong Guys – is the funniest, freshest comic turn in a musical since Sheridan Smith burst on us in Legally Blonde. So though the sequins and unthreatening drag acts are pretty whoop-de-doo, and the two stars immaculate, for me it is Lennox – and the ensemble and the bonkers Gregg Barnes costumes – which overcame the cynicism and won the fourth star.
Box office 0844 412 4651
rating four    3 Meece RatingCostume design mouse resized (that last one is the customised costume-director mouse for Mr Barnes)

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September 14, 2015 · 10:35 pm

PHOTOGRAPH 51 Noel Coward Theatre, WC2

SCIENTISTS, SEXISM, THE SCR AND THE SECRET OF LIFE
Nicole Kidman, an Oscars star descending again on the West End, is the “story” here; so begin by saying that as the half-forgotten 1950’s Jewish scientist Rosalind Franklin she gives a quite wonderful performance. She’s restrained, fine-judged, tensely weary and luminous in stillness or crackling with energy as the prickly, driven, brilliant biophysicist whose work getting images of infinitesimally small molecules led directly to a blazingly important breakthrough: Crick and Watson’s discovery of the double-helix structure and functioning of DNA.

They and her colleague Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel prize in 1962; Dr Franklin herself died four years earlier, at only 37, her tumours possibly caused by exposure to X-rays in long days and nights in the lab. Kidman has said that this new play by Anna Ziegler attracted her because her own father was a biochemist, giving her a sense of scientific dedication. But any woman would burn a little with desire to record female pioneers in a time when, as at Kings College, even brilliant doctoral a woman wasn’t allowed in the senior common room. And would be – as here – automatically assumed to be an assistant not a prime mover, irritatingly addressed as “Miss” rather than “Doctor”, and dismissed as “a right old hag” when she asserts herself.

Ziegler’s play, told in short scenes and direct narrative by her and the posse of men around her, is a fiction based squarely on fact and memoirs. Under Christopher Oram’s toweringly macho, half-ruined postwar set of Somerset House looming over the bleak underground KCL lab, it gives Kidman some wonderful opportunities: sharp dry ripostes, sudden ferocities, and sour comedy as she fences with her lab partner (Stephen Campbell Moore oddly touching as the shy, defensively arrogant Maurice Wilkins). Her “I don’t want to be your friend” and scornful reference to his bad marriage when he clumsily attempts to win her over could alienate but oddly doesn’t: because by then we believe utterly in this woman’s focus. The work is everything, and the higher the mountain “the further I get to go”. Only in dealings with the amiable American PhD student Don Caspar (Patrick Kennedy), who shares her romantic joy in “shapes..endless repetition, the nature of the world” does she unbend. In a beautiful, sudden moment Ziegler gives her an imagined internal monologue, a yearning “to wake up without feeling the weight of the day pressing down, to fall asleep more easily..to be kissed, to learn how to be ok being with other people…to be a child again”.

There were moments when I worried that it would become a history-of-science lecture, and in its exposition of bickerings , rivalries and technicalities would curl up its own back end like a failed helix itself. But Will Attenborough’s crazy-haired arrogant young Watson and Edward Bennett’s sardonic Crick are an energizing double act, their blokey tesing relationship with Wilkins a painful contrast with the isolation of the clever “Rosy” who can’t talk things over in the SCR bars with them. And in the last third of its 90 minutes (Michael Grandage’s direction always spare, elegant) it lifts off, the metaphor of the double spiral which without touching feeds itself into life is replicated in the interaction of the pairs of humans.
That is moving, as is the ‘failure’ of the isolated Rosalind to see the extraordinary truth revealed in Photograph 51. Her photograph: the one that broke the intellectual dam and swirled the men to global fame. You leave reflecting on a neat irony: for in opposition to the cliché about emotional women and rational men, it was excited scribbling intuition which gave Watson the road to the answer, and meticulous insistence on irrefutable evidence which made the woman delay…

box office 0844 482 5130 http://www.noelcowardtheatre.co.uk to 21 Nov
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 9, 2015 · 10:58 am

BRAVE NEW WORLD Royal & Derngate, Northampton

VISIONS FROM 1931 OF A TEST TUBE FUTURE…
Hot on the heels of Headlong’s obliquely brilliant treatment of 1984 comes a rival dystopia: Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, eighteen years before Orwell and before the second war: the comparison is fascinating. Orwell saw ordinary people, recognizable but crushed by brutality and surveillance, thoughtcrime punished and history denied by violence. Its science is basic – telescreens, shredded newsprint and photos. Huxley – whose brother Julian was an evolutionary scientist and eugenicist – in envisioning his hyper-controlled society saw the future’s horrors as technological, humanity itself turned into a man-made biological hierarchy from Alpha to Delta. Embryos and infants are conditioned to their destined planned occupations, the freely available “soma” drug, controlled consumerist leisure and universal promiscuity keeps everyone happy and prevents the subversiveness innate in family, intimacy and poetry.
Dawn King’s adaptation, under James Dacre’s stark, tight direction, sticks thrillingly close to Huxley and demonstrates enough recognizable 21c phenomena to bring on nervous laughs (not least, early on, at the Hatchery’s director explaining that the trickiest embryos to condition are Betas, middle managers: because you have to make them efficient but not ambitious to be Alphas). We have IVF now, and a prospect of genetically engineered foetuses; we are moving towards considering Huxley’s brisk “end-of-life facilitators”, and also have a cadre of high-consuming and promiscuous alpha-betas. Some of the skycopter-riding workers on their way to electromagnetic golf or the “Westminster Abbey cabaret” are indistinguishable from modern city traders at play. The scornful writer Helmholtz, bored with writing prolefeed “dramedys” and feelie-movies would be quite at home with the modern screen. We have throwaway clothes, too, and high-consumption leisure: World Controller Mond is female in this adaptation, a scornfully masterful Sophie Ward, and explains that they brought in countryside-aversion conditioning because country walks don’t encourage the buying of enough expensive equipment.
There is a lot of explanation, as in Huxley’s novel, which could have torpedoed it as drama but doesn’t because it remains so creepily fascinating a vision. Skilful robotic ensemble moments upstage hint at the toiling, happily drugged Deltas and the use of sexuality as a bonding, tranquillizing group experience. The story itself concerns Bernard Marx – an Alpha who is chippy because he had some Epsilon blood by mistake (Gruffudd Glyn is perfect, just that bit smaller and geekier than fellow-Alphas like James Howard or David Brunett). He takes Lenina, the pretty Beta, to a “Savage reservation” where unaltered humans live wild tribal lives as a control group.

They bring home John (William Postlethwaite) a noble savage whose mother (this being a dirty word in the test-tube society) was from the manufactured world but got lost and lived on, grey and raddled, in the reserve. John has found an old volume of Shakespeare, and lives by quotations: Huxley, unlike Orwell with his proles, had to telescope the idea of a primitive noble savage with that literary and poetic sensitivity, so he could attack both aspects of the main society – its philistinism and its science. Abigail McKern has great fun as the mother, disgusted with her exile into a primitive world without soma and disposable clothes and where babies come out of the “poor quality storage” of the womb.
But Lenina, unsatisfied by the multiple partners of convention, wants Savage John. Her frank (very modern) advances send him into a frenzy, Hamlet-cum-Romeo, ranting of the rank sweat of an unseamed bed and vowing that she shall not melt his honour into lust. So the second half is darker, more urgent, tragic.
And for all the necessary exposition, it works; Dacre knows how to keep things sharp and tight, and Huxley’s vision still carries the same scorching unease, the same powerful demand for “the right to be unhappy”, to love and yearn and dream and fail .

box office 01604 624811 to 26 sept
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 5, 2015 · 6:14 pm

JEEVES AND WOOSTER IN PERFECT NONSENSE on tour!

Touring Mouse wide LOAD UP THE TWO-SEATER, JEEVES, WE’RE ON TOUR

It always seems unfair when particular delights, best-comedy Olivier winners like this, are reserved for the West End, even if they do run a whole year and do bargain ticket offers. On the other hand a touring cast can find itself unfairly considered – well, a bit second-rate, after starry names took turns up West. But the Goodale brothers’ fabulous treatment of P.G.Wodehouse, in which Bertie attempts to put on a play about the eventful cow-creamer weekend at Totleigh, more than survives its transfer to the open road . From Crewe to Colchester,and Aylesbury to Inverness you have a treat in store.
The play itself is gorgeous – my London review here gives the general idea – http://tinyurl.com/oxse654 – but in some ways, tweaked a bit and performed with a ferocious brio which endures all the way to a jitterbugging curtain-class and whoops from the audience, this felt even jollier. The friend I took actually got pains from laughing too much.

Having talked to the new cast – Joseph Chance as Jeeves, Matthew Carter as Wooster and co-author Robert Goodale as Seppings – being just up the road I sneaked in to the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds on its second night out. A bit unfairly, as reviewers aren’t yet invited, but I can report that it is a riot. Sean Foley’s original direction is now taken over by David Goodale – brother of Robert and co-creator of the play – and Alice Power’s set and costumes are even more gloriously, vaudevillishly ingenious and silly than before. Joseph Chance, new to the company, is sternly impassive as Jeeves but hurls himself alarmingly (sometimes simultaneously) into roles as diverse as Gussie, Stiffy Byng, Madeline, and Sir Watkyn Bassett, and Matthew Carter is the most gormlessly endearing of Berties.

But I have to say that the greatest glee of the night comes from the hurtling performance Robert Goodale himself, as Seppings the decrepit butler of Aunt Dahlia’s household, roped in by Jeeves to fill in the other parts. He plays his employer, the pleasingly gung-ho and intermittently violent Aunt Dahlia, plus Constable Oates and the 9ft tall Roderick Spode (on a dangerously rolling rig with Dahlia’s skirt showing underneath ). And also takes on a number of props and special effects, including a loudly applauded turn as a level crossing on Bertie’s painstakingly staged drive to Totleigh.

They’re having a riot, these chaps, and so were we. And yes, the surprise bicycle, savage terrier and rubber duck bath scene are still there. Gruntled? You bet.

ON TOUR http://www.jeevesandwoosterplay.com/2015-tour-part-1/

RATING   four 4 Meece Rating

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September 2, 2015 · 10:56 pm

FLARE PATH Richmond Theatre and touring

In 1941 young Terence Rattigan was creatively blocked, gloomy after an early success then a relative failure. He joined the wartime RAF as a tail-gunner in a Wellington bomber, and in a crippled plane, on a dangerous landing, snatched a torn draft from his notebook. The play, fresh from his own experience of comradeship, duty and fear touched audiences deeply: one fellow-airman said there was “shock, that he had seen so deeply into us”. Their world after all was new in the history of wartime: aircrews in rural England would stroll the lanes by day and meet their wives and girlfriends – in pubs like the one where the play is set – and that night fly missions over Germany amid flak and flames. Soldiers in the field can retreat into a supportive military world: these boys, often still in their teens, lived half their lives in an idyllic England, knowing they might lose it forever in a few hours time.

 

 

 
The play fell out of use for decades, in the postwar queasiness about the civilian cost of bombings over Hitler’s Germany. But Trevor Nunn’s West End revival in the Rattigan centenary reminded us what a terrific play it is: perfectly constructed, emotionally intense, suspenseful, a model of courteous clarity in its vignette of a single night with one set of aircrew and civilians. That clarity is important, and old-fashioned in its skill: my companion, not having grown up like me with air-minded brothers, knew nothing of RAF routines and bantering culture, but understood it all. It is good that this Original Theatre Company production is going to tour, and bring back that unforgotten interlude of duty, debt, skill and stoicism.
Justin Audibert directs what is in the main a strong cast, notably Alastair Whatley as the puppyish, larky pilot Teddy Graham, morale-boosting joker of the base: his emotional collapse in the dawn is truthful, sharp and shocking. His glamorous wife Pat – on the verge of running off with a more glamorous old flame from the movie business – is played also with particular fine judgement by Olivia Hallinan, conveying with proper Rattiganesque pain the conflict between her romantic passion and the gentler, maternal and dutiful feelings that Teddy awakes in her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile the night and morning of the older, more battered, angrier Polish airman and his ditzy, decent barmaid wife Doris (Siobhan O’Kelly, caricaturish at first but getting far, far better as it goes on) is moving. Those who know the play will find, once again , the letter scene and redemptive final twist just as they should be. Though the Pole, I think, is not given quite all Rattigan’s unsparing lines about his desire to flatten all Germans.

 

 

 

 

But the play’s the thing, a memory and a message from a real past, and this company do it decent credit in taking it on the road again. It has rom-com sweetness, but the lethal reality of the times sharpens it: Rattigan took care to debunk romanticism. As the Wing-Commander “Gloria” Swanson says “I hate that patriotic bilge in the newspapers, but we do owe these boys…”. Seventy years on, we still do, and it is good to see an honest rendering like this.

 

 
box office 0844 871 7651 to Saturday touring     nationwide to November

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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September 1, 2015 · 11:52 pm

PEOPLE PLACES AND THINGS NT Dorfman, SE1

PRIORY PEOPLE…

Acting is a useful metaphor (one man in his life plays many parts, etc), and in this portrait of addiction, therapy and recovery author Duncan Macmillan squarely – and a bit riskily – makes his central character, an alcoholic and drug addict, an actress whose problem includes not being sure who she really is. We first see her skidding off-piste as Nina in a production of The Seagull. Ushered incoherent off the stage, in Bunny Christie’s uncompromising white-tiled tunnel of a transverse set she finds herself at the reception desk of a rehab institution, shouting “Cunt!” down the phone at her mother.
In arrogant exchanges with a doctor (Barbara Marten) Emma says that she just wants a quick fix, a “tune-up” and a certificate that she no longer presents a risk to employers. She vents petulant, shuddering boozed-up benzodiazepine rage when told that it will take weeks if not months, and that she will have to join group therapy and follow an AA “twelve-step” programme, accepting both responsibility and weakness, calling on “a higher power”, . and making amends.
She derides the idea of higher power, spouting jumbled defiance of the therapist she considers her intellectual inferior, citing Derrida and Foucault and generally being vile. Her room rises spookily from the floor: director Jeremy Herrin in Headlong tradition pulls no punches in visually and aurally involving us in maelstrom of hallucination and withdrawal. But our heroine won’t co-operate with group therapy, and the risk of making her a self-absorbed actress – rather than someone from an unglamorous life, who also might get addicted – lies in the possibility that away from the earnest Dorfman audience, her thespian posing and showy scraps of Streetcar and Fukuyama might drain all sympathy.

It nearly did even for me, and I revere actors and understand the reality of addiction. Denise Gough gives a storming and courageous performance, a draining and career-making turn; but Macmillan’s unflinching evocation of a person chemically hollowed out into a deluded, self-obsessed, lying, treacherous, greedy ball of rage is so strong that you hover between pity and revulsion. Still wincing from compassion-fatigue after Stef Smith’s “Swallow’- where the self-harming heroine blames her behaviour on everything from 9/11 to Auschwitz – I lost empathy when this Emma cited global miseries and distant war zones yowling “Self-medication is the only way to survive in a world that is broken”. Even though she claims her brother’s death as excuse, it later transpires that she was so well away even before it that she didn’t get to the funeral.
On the other hand, Emma’seloquence is such that once or twice you switch sides and wonder whether the author’s target is actually the pious , “boredom and shame and fucking orange squash” culture of the rehab industry (it’s never explained who pays, by the way). Marten, doubling as the doctor and group leader, has exactly the kind of fuzzy grey hairdo which makes normal people fear therapists; and the sharply played ensemble group, once launched into antiphonal fragments of glum back-story, hover between pitiable and plain depressing.

But take heart. The second act, in which after a fresh crisis Emma capitulates, is far more engaging. And there is a harsh, truthful and rather brilliant twist at the end when we are reminded that the slightly cultish role-playing and warm mutual support of group meetings is not necessarily a realistic preparation for confronting the family your addiction spent years destroying. Overcoming addiction is indeed something to celebrate and praise: but not everyone has to join in straight away.
box office 0207 452 3000 to 4 Nov

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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August 31, 2015 · 9:54 pm

MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS Theatre Royal, Bath

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

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

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August 28, 2015 · 8:15 am

OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD Olivier, SE1

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

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

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

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

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August 21, 2015 · 10:13 am

FOR SERVICES RENDERED Minerva, Chichester

THE BARBED SHADOW OF AN OLD WAR

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

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

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August 16, 2015 · 5:37 pm

THE MAN CALLED MONKHOUSE Assembly Hall, Edinburgh

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

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

rating four   4 Meece Rating

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August 15, 2015 · 1:06 pm

THE FRIDA KAHLO OF PENGE WEST C Nova, Edinburgh

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

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

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

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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August 14, 2015 · 1:18 pm

THE CHRISTIANS Traverse, Edinburgh

A TAINTED HALLELUJAH

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

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

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

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

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August 13, 2015 · 8:22 am

OF MICE AND MEN Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh

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

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

rating  four4 Meece Rating

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August 8, 2015 · 10:49 pm

TINA C: HERSTORY Underbelly Potterow Topside , Edinburgh

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

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

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

rating:  four 4 Meece Rating

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August 7, 2015 · 3:16 pm

LETTER TO LARRY Jermyn Street Theatre , SW1

A LOST LADY RETURNS, SAD AND BEGUILING

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

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

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

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August 4, 2015 · 10:19 pm

SPLENDOUR Donmar WC2

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

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

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

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

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

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August 4, 2015 · 12:12 am

DEAR LUPIN Apollo, W1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rating: four

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August 1, 2015 · 1:11 pm

BAKKHAI, Almeida, N1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI GOES HAPPILY DEMENTED AT THE ALMEIDA

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

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

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

– CHARLOTTE VALORI

Rating: four 4 Meece Rating

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

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July 24, 2015 · 1:32 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

box office 0844 826 4242 to 29 Aug

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

rating four
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July 4, 2015 · 9:17 pm

THE GRUFFALO Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue

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

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

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

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July 1, 2015 · 11:14 pm

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Vaudeville, WC2

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

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June 27, 2015 · 8:11 am

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

COMFORT YE! HANDEL AND THE FIRST MESSIAH

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

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

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

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

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

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June 27, 2015 · 12:09 am

THE TRIAL Young Vic SE1

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

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

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

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

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

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June 26, 2015 · 11:59 am

THE SEAGULL OPEN AIR THEATRE Regent’s Park W1

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

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

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

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

box office 0844 826 4242 to 11 july

rating four  4 Meece Rating

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June 15, 2015 · 7:36 am

THE HOOK Royal, Northampton

UNDER THE BRIDGE, MEN UNDER PRESSURE

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

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

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

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

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

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June 12, 2015 · 7:39 pm

OTHELLO Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford Upon Avon

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

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

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

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

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

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June 12, 2015 · 7:51 am

AN AUDIENCE WITH JIMMY SAVILE Park Theatre, N4

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

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

box office 0207 870 6876 to 11 July

4 Meece Rating

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May 29, 2015 · 2:38 pm

PETER PAN Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park W1

AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE

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

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

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

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

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May 26, 2015 · 11:42 pm

THE BEAUX’ STRATAGEM Olivier, SE1

SONGS, SCUFFLES, VILLAINS AND VIRTUE IN 1707

Towering staircases and sliding panels transform the big stage from tavern to genteel house, with a pleasingly inexplicable intermittent folk-band lurking on the top landing. Here for two and a half frenzied hours Simon Godwin zingily interprets George Farquar’s Restoration comedy with a cast of 21, not one part a dud. It is farce bordering on panto, edged with songs, enlivened with scuffles, glorified with random absurdities and containing a hard nugget of feminist polemic. You get scheming London beaux chasing rich wives ,confused by equally artful Midlands villains, a churlish drunk, a daft and deadpan comedy butler (O, Pearce Quigley, what a joy you are!). There are spirited womenfolk, a bossy matriarchal herbalist, highwaymen robbers, a magnificent rumpus of a fight conducted partly in stunning 18c ladies’ underwear, a lost earldom, an amorous French officer bursting into Piaffesque song, a French priest exposed as an Irish spy,  lies and redemptions and a Deus-ex-machina in a periwig . And – here’s the polemic – the conclusion, so daring in 1707, that sometimes divorce is the only thing for it.
For it is not quite your routine Restoration romp ,in which a Lady Teazle must return repentant to her husband. Susannah Fielding is Mrs Sullen, fourteen months married to a man who ignores and despises her, and values only her fortune. He comes to bed drunk, all cold feet and snoring, but she longs for his love and schemes uselessly to make him jealous by flirting with the Frenchman. With difficulty she resists the more congenial advances of the rascally beau Archer (Geoffrey Streatfeild, holding a delicate balance between opportunism and growing decency). Her cry to the audience after the interval gets applause; “In England – A country whose women are its glory – must women be enslaved?”. Fielding perfectly evokes an intelligent woman in an age without rights, her misery curdling occasionally into cynicism “London is the place for managing a husband…wheedle your booby up to Town!”. At her side, the single Dorinda (Pippa Bennett-Warner) is equally spirited but not yet trapped, though Samuel Barnett’s pretty, fake Lord Aimwell is moving in on her.
The delight of Godwin’s production is that it gives proper weight to the nastiness of a bad marriage while letting rip with splendid nonsense . It revels in faints and fake fits, cries of “Unlace your stays! Unbosom yourself!”, Ealing-comedy burglars, cross-wooings, double-entendres, some rich Brummie accents and wiggling wench-work, and sudden interpolations like Barbara Kirby as a dotty old countrywoman seeking herbal advice from batty Lady Bountiful – Jane Booker in unforgettable lateral-sprouting hair. But even at its most Benny-Hill moments the core problem remains: as Mrs Sullen sadly says to her spouse “Have we not been a perpetual offence to each other?”. Thus Dorinda’s happy marital conclusion must be matched by an equally happy divorce for her friend. So when they all dance farewell (including the tied-up highwaymen, jerking and squabbling) there is a real sense of release both comic and moral. And it’s a Travelex: all yours for fifteen quid if you’re quick.
Box Office 020 7452 3000 to September Sponsor: Travelex
http://www.ntlive.com: broadcast live to 550 UK cinemas on 3 Sept

rating;  four   4 Meece Rating

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May 26, 2015 · 12:19 am

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

DARK, STARK AND DANGEROUS:  A MERCHANT FOR TODAY

What an odd, stark, angry, intelligent Merchant this is! Wholly unlike the last RSC production, Rupert Goold’s spectacular Merchant-of-Vegas gameshow. Polly Findlay sets it modern dress, on a bare stage whose floor and backdrop are gold bars, mirroring the auditorium and making us visible witnesses to the case of Antonio, the shipowning speculator, and his deal with Shylock the Jew. A gilded pendulum swings constantly at stage level; the three caskets descend too, 65 feet from the grid on wires , bald as geometry diagrams – cube, cone, cylinder .
Jessica’s window is right up there too, high over the blank gold. Lancelot Gobbo, face-painted and inevitably annoying (not Tim Samuels’ fault, it’s the least engaging Shakespeare’s clown), makes his entry sitting among us and shouting up. The Prince of Aragon shakes hands with the front row with bonhomous posh confidence before getting the caskets wrong. Young Christian Venetians swagger like Bullingdon-boys , mock old Shylock, steal his daughter and his money , cringe when he turns on them and cheer when Portia’s chop-logic strips him of all dignity.
It is a production full of jarring unease, its text mined with sharp intelligence by Findlay (fresh themes sprang up from lines I had never noticed before). Antonio (Jamie Ballard) sets the tone, staring alone from the stage as we settle, confiding his neurotic, edgy depression to a fully lit house, a man in trouble. The coxcomb Salerio comes on with a cowlick quiff like a raven- haired Tintin to josh with him: street-boy Gratiano romps with “skipping spirits”. But it is Jacob Fortune-Lloyd’s handsome Bassanio with whom, Findlay makes snoggingly clear, Antonio is in love. Ballard handles brilliantly the Merchant’s borderline-hysterical agreement to the loan which will take his lover away to chase Portia, pledging “my purse, my person, my extremest means”. Yet having warmed us to him in his loneliness and need for his preening bisexual pal, Ballard jerks us back to discomfort by spitting in the old Jew’s face even as he borrows his money.

Shylock, inspired casting, is Makram J.Khoury: Palestinian, patriarchal, heavily accented, standing out from the brash youngsters in Semitic appearance and venerable age. He makes them seem small, petulant, vicious: but we know what he is going to want with his knife and this jars against our sympathy. His “Hath not a Jew eyes?”, addressed to the jeering lads, is electrifying, a real plea; it is mirrored in the court scene by Portia’s directing ‘The quality of mercy” right at him. It is as if the play, the very audience, pleads with each to be human, and fails.

Findlay finds in her Portia, too, a troubling ambiguity. Patsy Ferran (last seen as Aharrrr-Jim-lad in Findlay’s NT Treasure Island) at first seems permanently set to “sprightly”, but with her transformation into lawyer finds a sharp authority and something oddly nasty in her shrill taunts. It gives a raw, undeniable depth of disillusion to that final rom-com conclusion which always sits so oddly. After the tense trial , Antonio’s dissolution into unforgettable moaning terror and Shylock’s“I am not well” , the sourness endures. Portia is the boss , and like us has little faith that Bassanio won’t stray. Even more strikingly, hearing that Lorenzo inherits Shylock’s remaining fortune makes his stolen bride Jessica flee the stage in distress. Convert she may be, but her father’s humiliation shadows any happiness.
Gobbo (reduced now to candle-monitor) dresses the stage with dozens of flames reflecting in the gold; dissonant religious chants sound above. We are not convinced that all is resolved, nor should it be. Findlay’s achievement is in making that unease clear, sharp and decent: where nobody comes out well, nobody deserves to be happy,
box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org to 2 Sept
Live in cinemas on 22 July   Rating :  four  4 Meece Rating

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May 15, 2015 · 8:04 pm

THE ANGRY BRIGADE Bush Theatre W12

AN OLD ANGER, SPEAKING TO TODAY

We are short of good political playwrights: they tend to hail from the left and be either depressingly prosey or brainlessly ‘bouffon’ (ISLANDS at this very theatre is a memory to purge). But now we have James Graham. A self-described political ‘geek’, he does not start from partisan anger , though there is in his work great humanity and seriousness. Rather his shtick is fascination with ideas: how they grip people, and get them enmeshed in the complex political and pratical world and go awry. THIS HOUSE was set in the painful hung parliament of 1974; TORY BOYZ centred on a gay, working-class northern Conservative researcher; THE VOTE celebrated the oddity of the polling-station. This time he looks at 1971-2, and Scotland Yard’s hunt for the “Angry Brigade” anarchists. Marvellously retro (he’s talkin’ bout my generation – Mateus Rosé and grungy people in squats grinding on about how women having to do ironing is “The most violent act imaginable” . But in the modern age of Occupy and the Russell-Brand tendency, not to mention jihadis, it is also thrillingly topical.

Graham has researched and reimagined both the police operation and the lives, writings and ideas of the young bomb-makers who targeted banks, police, a minister’s home, the Post Office Tower and the 1970 Miss World pageant. The result, directed with vigour and toughness by James Grieve, is a marvellous play: as rich in ideas as a pudding in plums, compassionate and serious and dryly funny and fascinating. Produced by Paines Plough and the Theatre Royal Plymouth, it has toured and is reworked and cast for the Bush. Two acts use the same four players: first we meet a Scotland Yard unit led by an abruptly promoted DS Smith (Mark Arends) because the bosses feel that only young people can get into the mindset of the terrorists, who fit no familiar criminal template.

He is joined by Morris, snarky and bored (Harry Melling, always good value) and two WPCs who find difficulty not saluting (Pearl Chanda and Lizzy Watts). They read the rebels’ favourite tracts, listen to their music, at one point go into a surreal orgiastic dance of excitement as deduction gets close. Melling and Watts double as witnesses and suspects, and overhead projections show the printed, cardboard threats of the Brigadeers.
There are funny moments – as when “Camden” is breathed with horror as a place where dodgy types hang out – and good aperçus like Morris’ grasp that “the political spectrum is not a line from left to right, it’s a circle . When you go as far left as communism, which believes in equality and classlessness, the tyranny required to enforce such a change moves it all the way back to right-wing fascism” . An anarchist under questioning complains that the British police don’t fight back. “Other countries, we charge, they charge back. But you lot, you stand there rigid in your lines, smiling…the lines will hold. They’ve held for centuries, Nothing to see here’. (ah the nostalgia!)

After the interval the same four play the central Brigade group, holed up in an East London house, three middle-class and one – (Melling again) a working-class Northerner. Each is reacting to a different childhood rage. The interplay is tense, touching, mixing weakness, sincerity, anger, quailing doubt , arrogance, and anarchic nonsense (“Why do there have to be walls?”). No spoilers, but it moves towards an inevitable end when young lawbreakers and young enforcers must meet. Rising manic energy, a bomb-crashing of steel filing cabinets and wild careering through the auditorium are delicately interwoven with tenderness, doubt and sadness. It’s brilliant.

BOX OFFICE 020 8743 5050 to 13 June.
rating    four     4 Meece Rating

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May 14, 2015 · 11:48 pm

HIGH SOCIETY Old Vic SE 1

A SWELL PARTY…

Joe Stilgoe the piano man holds the stage as we settle, receiving a fusillade of unhelpful audience requests (“Bolero! Summertime! Pink Panther! Prokoffiev’s ninth!” – that last from Andrew Marr, cheeky monkey). Brilliantly, he delivers them simultaneously, singing Summertime over Bolero chords, and getting audience participation in Fever. Crafty to set a cabaret mood  before we get down to business with “Come see the rich of Oyster Bay / On this their daughter’s wedding day!” as the silver piano sinks ingeniously into the floor.

Some of us needed persuading: for all the glory of Louis Armstrong, Sinatra and Bing, I never enthused about the 1956 film : Grace Kelly draped on that yacht crooning True Love felt like being pelted with marshmallows. Didn’t even like the play The Philadelphia Story, one of Kevin Spacey’s first productions here. Caring about the romantic troubles of the East Coast plutocracy is not automatic: so what if Tracy is marrying the wrong man, misses her first husband and gets drunkenly entangled with an undercover reporter? Brittle high-society needs Coward wit or period distance not to irritate.

But this – Spacey’s last hurrah as Artistic Director – is a different beast from film or play: Arthur Kopit’s book has access to extra Cole Porter songs, with all their bitter-sentimental ambiguities and yearnings. Director Maria Friedman has cast it cannily and enlists Nathan Wright’ s athletic, joyful storming, whirling choreography and fabulous Tom Pye designs (I am a bit of a pushover for people tap-dancing on silver pianos, it’s a weakness). So once it gets going – the first act, to be brutal, still needs a trim – Friedman finds the real gold, an emotional reality in the wayward heroine, in the tough lovelorn girl reporter (Annabel Scholey) and even in the repentant adulterous paterfamilias. Above all, Kate Fleetwood as Tracy eschews all temptation to easy ingenue charm, evoking a tough egg who has been round the block a few times and is well on the way to being a discontented rich-bitch. So when she sings “Once upon a Time” and softens, melting into memory of sailing days with Dexter – the True Love – there is suddenly real feeling. He lean on the orchestra rail above, she watches a model cutter glide slowly across the floor (poor sail-trim, but pretty). And in the second half, Kopit brilliantly places Cole Porter’s “It’s all right with me” as a serious dramatic moment.

All the singing is bang on: Rupert Young is Dexter, hampered by the essential dullness of any romantic hero, Jamie Parker has wicked fun with Mike, Jeff Rawle totters and taps gloriously as daft Uncle Willy and and Richard Grieve as Kittredge the wrong-groom looks pleasingly like Michael Howard, with an apt air of pained dignity. And the ensemble is tremendous, the formal maids and butlers a character in their own right.
The Vic is still “in-the-round’, a beloved Spacey innovation, and the arena – with cast dashing in from all directions – gives an unexpected warmth and immediacy . We are a circle of witnesses to a lantern-lit night by the pool, to awful hangovers (Fleetwood hilarious as a drunk, and even better as an appalled morning-after bride shoved anyhow into her wedding dress) . Most spectacular of all, we are sitters-out, enthralled, at the tremendous ball. That Act 2 opener is fifteen minutes of explosive, butterfly-bright spectacle not to be missed: what with the firework light effects, the tap routines, the multicoloured taffeta explosion, double-bass-twirling and crazy brush-percush, and what I can only describe as a bout of competitive homo-erotic piano duetting. Well, you had to be there. As Tracy says about the yacht, it’s designed with care, built with love, and emerges “easy to handle, quick on the helm”. Fit for Kevin Spacey’s last sail into the Old Vic sunset. We thank him.
box office 0844 8717628 http://www.oldvictheatre.com to 20 August

Rating four    4 Meece Rating

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May 14, 2015 · 12:03 am

COMMUNICATING DOORS Menier, SE1

IN WHICH THE OLD LION OF SCARBOROUGH TACKLES A TIMELESS PHILOSOPHICAL CONUNDRUM…
…Which is to say, the question of whether time-travel would enable you to change the past, hence the present, via parallel universes of possibility. Sir Alan Ayckbourn confected this odd , ultimately enchanting tale of thriller-noir skulduggery by a greedy financier and his murderous sidekick.  Thanks to a hotel-suite closet proving to be a portal into the past in twenty-year increments, doughty female practicality from two doomed wives and a leather-clad tart overcomes evil and safeguards the future. Except, naturally, for the preposterous baddie, played by David Bamber with a camp menace equalled only (Ah, memories!) by Kenneth Williams doing his send-up of Charles Boyer in GASLIGHT in Round the Horne.

In classic Ayckbourn mode it begins with a slow burn, establishing – by way of a dying man improbably hiring a dominatrix to witness his confession – a back-story which is destined to be disrupted by time-travellers from twenty and forty years earlier (pay attention there at the back! Actually, don’t bother: Lindsay Posner’s direction and Ayckbourn’s courteous clarity keep matters perfectly comprehensible, even once the time capsule cupboard starts rotating).

The play speeds up no end once scientific impossibility and determined women take over control: for it has three of the larkiest imaginable female comedy drama roles.
Rachel Tucker is the prostitute Poopay, condemned at first to be merely stroppy, baffled, horrified and nearly throttled. Not enough to work on at first, but when she meets wife no. 2, twenty years back from her own time, the glorious female interaction around which the play rotates can really begin. The catalyst is Imogen Stubbs as the middle-aged Ruella , fabulously scoutmistressy with an underlying warmth. This is the sort of formidably pragmatic Good Woman who on being invaded by a terrified whore from the future takes it in her stride with prison-visitor breeziness, and commands her to assist in preventing the murders. “None of this feeble attitude! Shape up, girl!”. Between them and the portal success seems achievable, but comes up against that philosophical puzzle about whether being dead in one time-frame necessarily means a chap won’t turn up in another one wearing leather murdering-gloves and a younger wig (grand barnet-work from Richard Mawbey the wigmeister, as men and women change decades in no time at all).

The youngest woman of the three is another incomparable dramatic comedienne, Lucy Briggs-Owen, a heroine of mine after lately lighting up evenings from Srtatford to St Martin’s Lane. Her second posh-airhead appearance is – well, nonpareil. I eschew spoilers, though there are at least four indescribable scream-and-giggle shocks and a magnificent three-woman physical cliffhanger not to be missed. No complaints about the men either: Robert Portal morphs over forty years from evil dodderer to dashing newlywed, and Matthew Cottle – also time-travelling – blinks and gapes for England as the hotel security man with a nervous dread of women and potential “lesbianity”. And talking of security, the 2020 bits are set in a London of gun battles on the Strand and precarious peace talks between warring boroughs. Sir Alan’s little joke, circa 1994: but hey, getting closer all the time…

Box office 020 7378 1713 to 27 June
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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May 11, 2015 · 10:38 pm

HAY FEVER Duke of York’s Theatre, SW1

THE BLISS OF JUDITH BLISS:  FELICITY INDEED

Whenever I see this beloved play again I wish it was my first time. It should be seen in youth – when the dread of embarrassing parents getting emotional is at its height ; and again in middle-age, to empathize with Judith Bliss’ envy of the fresher generation.

For Hay Fever breathes a spirit of mischievous mockery, invincible youthful cynicism. This is the 1924 Noel Coward knocking off a deathless play in three days, playing with the idea of his own ideal tribe – charming, theatrically showoff bohemians – tormenting and confusing staid weekend guests with deliberately created dramas. Young Sorel and Simon (Alice Orr-Ewing and Edward Franklin) have each invited older admirers – she a stiff diplomat Richard, he the fortyish“self-conscious vampire” Myra (Sara Stewart). Their grumpy novelist father David (Simon Shepherd) has invited a flapper to “study the type” (Celeste Dodwell panics beautifully). But at the centre of the action is Judith Bliss: a diva who should never have retired from the stage and needs to live through scenes from the iffy melodramas of her heyday. Her admirer is a pop-eyed callow youth (Edward Killingback) As each family member contributes to Judith’s game, the visitors are in turns ignored, embarrassed, seductively flattered, manipulated, compromised, and driven to flight.

Lindsay Posner’s production for Theatre Royal Bath is set in period (the Howard Davies one a few years ago up the road gave the family more modern bohemian style, a messy studio-barn-conversion). Here Peter McKintosh’s s set is traditional, which permits an especially magical moment for Felicity Kendal in the second act finale, draped backwards over the banister in stage agony. Her Judith Bliss is a delight, even sharper and funnier than last year in Bath. It has sometimes been played as a Junoesque tragedy-queen, but is even funner as Kendal’s superannuated, shingled flapper, a menace who y has been overacting for years and now hurls herself opportunistically into any role the moment offers – vamp, matchmaker, self-sacrificing old mother, betrayed wife, repentant adulteress. Yet all the while she never quite drops the beady eye and sharp asides of a practised control-freak.

Every move Kendal makes is perfect, a masterclass in subtly acting the part of someone acting hammily. There’s a mimsy flailing of flirtatious fists when she asks the lunk Sandy about his boxing, a downward glance at “dreams trodden in the dust” and a cry of “I am growing old, and I must face it” coupled with a reassuring glance in a hand-mirror. Her seduction of the poor diplomat (Michael Simkins) is quite perfect, as is his gradual dissolution from senatorial dignity to clumsy flirtation and utter horror at Kendal’s fake emotional overkill. His demeanour the next morning , as the four visitors flee, has all the ratlike scuttling dissolution of a Cabinet Minister caught in a strip-club.
Coward intended only entertainment; but frankly, if from time to time in life you do get trapped in someone else’s “featherbed of false emotions”, phrases from the play are useful . I have, personally, used Sorel’s irritable “You are being Beautiful and Sad!” and David’s “Don’t be statuesque!” . It’s good to have it back onstage again.

box office 0844 8717623/ http://www.atgtickets.com to ! Aug

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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May 11, 2015 · 9:51 am

THE AUDIENCE Apollo, WC1

IN WHICH THE QUEEN REGENERATES AS KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS

A playwright’s work is never done. Not if politics are involved: Peter Morgan relates that once it became clear that David Cameron was back, he slept two hours and got up to rewrite the PM’s scene with HM Queen for that night. Seems that they were so surprised that Samantha had been “packing vans” already. Excellent.
I went on election night itself, to see how after a couple of years it felt to reprise Morgan’s imagining of the weekly audiences: twelve Prime Ministers over sixty years. I had loved it in its Helen Mirren incarnation: despite the humour and the respect there is little caricature or satire, nor too sentimental a royalism. I wrote “funny, truthful, good-hearted, spiky, full of surprises”.

That still holds. Cast changes are effective: David Calder as Churchill gives just the right elderly bombast in his exchanges with the young Elizabeth, and Sylvestra Le Touzel is a more convincing Thatcher, mastering the eye-flash and tripping gait. Nicholas Woodeson as Wilson returns, in Morgan’s best scenes as he and the Queen find joshing common ground . Stephen Daldry’s direction is fluid, filmic, making the most of the moments when Elizabeth talks briefly with her rebellious child self, warning her of a world of heavy reverence where “No one will ever call you by your name. Or look you in the eye”.
There are tweaks to the play: Tony Blair now makes a brief appearance, which helps to underline Morgan’s tart verbal paralleling of Eden’s Suez invasion and Blair’s Iraq venture (that “is it legal?” echoing down the decades). I am less enamoured of the zhoozhing-up of ceremonial with the Coronation moment, and two huge Life Guards stamping up and down during the interval, but the Americans nearby adored it, which I suspect is the reason. For me it clashed with the intimacy of the play’s tone.

And the new Queen? For Mirren has regenerated, Dr-Who style, as Kristin Scott Thomas. And yes, it feels different. Mirren has a warmer wit; her evocation of the Queen’s wry awareness of her powerless pomp, dutiful personality and deep religious faith convinced entirely. Scott Thomas is harder-edged, chillier. Morgan seems to have removed from the script the moment I found most touching in the Mirren version, when she is asked about the Duke’s health and suddenly almost chokes, speaking about the heart device“keeping him alive”. That’s gone; but it wouldn’t have worked as well with Scott Thomas. She can do huge crazy emotions (as in Electra) but not that delicate modest suggestion of suppressed depths. She is, on the other hand, perfect at delivering a sudden waspish “Are you wearing make-up?” to a Cameron fresh from the TV studio. And if you haven’t seen it before, do go. The play’s the thing.

Box Office 0844 482 9671 to 25 July                 theaudienceplay.com
rating four    4 Meece Rating

Box Office 0844 482 9671 to 25 July                 theaudienceplay.com
rating four

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May 6, 2015 · 10:34 pm

THE VOTE Donmar, WC1

AND NOW THE REAL ELECTION…AT LAST…
Election day, Tony Benn used to say, is the only time we are all equal. One citizen, one secret vote. And despite the short-sighted, corrupting Blair extension of postal and proxy votes to the merely lazy or self-important, most votes are still cast with a stubby pencil in a schoolroom or community hall. Here, for fourteen hours, (they get a special working-time-directive dispensation) polling clerks from the Council supervise a meticulous regime of privacy, integrity and, supposedly, dignity.
Before our eyes in drift the voters: daffy or drunk, frivolous or earnest, first-time kids, proud new-fledged citizens from the ends of the earth, the senile and the pompous, the committed or vague. Some you can hardly trust to hold a pencil, others are brisk and sure; lovers giggle, spouses snar, but they’re all equal. James Graham, author of THIS HOUSE and COALITION, set out to express the ordinary moment of voting, in which this preposterous, overblown lying campaign must end. Comic without cynicism, it is unexpectedly touching.

This Donmar undertaking is, as its director Josie Rourke explains at previews, “a weird television-theatre experiment thing”. Its official opening will actually be its last night – election night, Thursday 7th, when it goes out live on More4 TV. The audience arrives half an hour early to queue in the fake polling station and vote for fictional characters: good to see Ian McKellen, Nicholas Hytner, John Carey , Yevgeny Levedev and a host of notables meekly obeying. It runs precisely from 8.30 to 10pm, shadowing that weary last 90 minutes before polling stations close, boxes are whisked off to the constituency count and exit-polls announced. It has an improbable cast of 44, nearly a quarter being bankable stars (Judi Dench and Finty Williams, Mark Gatiss , Catherine Tate , Tim West ..!) It is set in a supposed London marginal, in a nicely evoked primary-school hall, with the council staff forced to sit on the vaulting-horse because nobody turned up to open it at eight as the law requires and unlock the chairs, so Kirsty the poll-clerk (Tate) took an axe to the door .) .

I won’t spoil it with detail – though the Russian lesbians with a selfie-stick and the shrieking teenagers shouting “Siri – who do I vote for?” are memorable, as are the pinstriped upper-middle bickerers, and Judi Dench’s cameo as a domineering mother of her (real!) daughter Finty Williams. Nor will I reveal the daft plotline which emerges concerning malpractice, Haribos, and increasing desperation. You really have to watch it. If only for the joy of seeing Mark Gatiss as a polling officer gradually overcome by events.

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But for all the jokes – and they are many – for me it breathed a kind of awe. From the first moment when big Llewella Gideon crashes to the ground and demands that Timothy West (another great cameo) turns her voting-slip upside down without looking at it, the principle of individual privacy is stressed. As, for all the disasters and pomposities, is the idea of dutiful civic respect for rules: there is a grassroots glory in their petty, old-fashioned carefulness. “It has to mean something!” says Gatiss desperately, as ten o’clock nears in mounting disorder. Farcical it may be, but Graham catches something of the immensity of democracy which must descend to small simple places and embrace the dim and grand alike; petty protocol guards fragile freedom, and stubby pencils may put an end to power.
By the way, for those who believe all theatre to be rife with bilious bias, note young Mr Graham’s subtlety. There’s a poignant moment as the no-hope Tory candidate – young, black, of Nigerian parentage – chokes up with emotion at the sight of the ballot paper “I’m actually – a bit – seeing my name there…my parents would…”. Clever, and honest.

Rating four . The Vote is broadcast live from The Donmar Warehouse on More4 at 8.25pm, Thursday 7 May or available on demand on All 4 from Friday 8 May http://www.channel4.com

4 Meece Rating

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May 5, 2015 · 10:48 pm

NOISES OFF Mercury, Colchester

LORD, WHAT FOOLS THESE MORTALS BE…

“Doors! Sardines! Getting them on, getting them off. Getting the doors open. And shut. That’s farce. That’s theatre. That’s life!” Ah, how bitterly true: how accurate a metaphor for life is the tale of a hapless theatre company, attempting the most technical of exercises in the company of fallible colleagues. Like John Morton’s 2012 and WIA on television, by showing us the detail of one human enterprise going wrong it illustrates all the errors and temperaments which beset human endeavours. And makes you howl with gleeful recognition; being removed just far enough from reality (it’s a play about a play and full of theatre jokes..) it allows us the cruellest of delights.
I hope Daniel Buckroyd’s Mercury production tours. Not just because it’s a good one but because the last national Noises Off tour (a recast version of Lindsay Posner’s starry Old Vic one) was four years ago, and there must be people who have never seen Michael Frayn’s masterpiece of farce: a reflection which grieves me greatly. At a moment when The Play That Goes Wrong (a humbler but worthy successor) has won an Olivier, it is grand to see it back.
For newcomers, a recap: the first act shows the final rehearsal of an awful farce called Nothing On (full, gloriously pretentious spoof programme provided); the two-tier set revolves (brilliantly here, do get back early from the interval to watch) so that the second act shows it from backstage. The play progresses out of view and the entrances and exits see rising fury and violence among the cast; the third act finds it on the last night of its tour, out front again, going terminally wrong. By which time we know the script, and the characters, all too well. Dotty, playing the comic sardine-loving charlady is getting on and has put her savings in the show; an unwise fling with the divinely dim leading man leads to furious rivalry with the morose, divorcing nervous wreck Freddie; Belinda mumsily tries to smooth things over, the bimbo Brooke keeps losing her contact lenses, and “Selsdon Mowbray” (great old theatre name), is an alcoholic wanderer. Nor does it help that the director, a frustrated Eng.Lit graduate reduced to touring farce, is sleeping with both Brooke and poor put-upon Poppy the stage manager.
I saw a late matinee preview, and they were already spot on, move for move, tumble for tumble (Louis Tamone does terrifying work on the stairs). Having seen it several times I was at first doubtful about the director – Hywel Simons playing it low-key, rather than theatrically shouty and camp as some do – but I warmed to him, and his downplaying makes identification with his frustration easier. Louise Jameson is quite wonderful as Dotty, and David Shelley gives Freddie a fine exasperating pathos. But they’re all good, and the timing bang-on, as it needs to be in this tricky farce. I wondered whether the joy would be as piercing as in the starry West End one. But actually, it was. And the whoops of glee – and surprise – around showed how well (unlike poor Selsdon) it has aged. It does what we need in this harsh election season, as required by the thwarted director’s cry “I didn’t come to the theatre to listen to problems. I want to be taken out of myself. And preferably not put back!”

box office 01206 573948 to 16 May
rating Four   4 Meece Rating

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April 29, 2015 · 11:07 pm

EVERYMAN Olivier, SE1

THIS VERY NIGHT SHALL THY SOUL BE REQUIRED OF THEE…

God is sweeping the big blank stage. We won’t know for a minute or two that Kate Duchene IS God, given she’s a weary grey-haired cleaner in a tabard. But in Carol Ann Duffy’s modern take on a medieval morality play, interpreted by Rufus Norris, that’s who God is: incarnate among us, char-ing for the orgiastic, coke-fuelled birthday bash of “Ev”: Chiwetel Ejiofor. Knowing all things (cleaners, like God, tend to) she predicts that she’ll be sweeping up condoms and worse by morning – “Don’t ask”.
At the party, crazedly choreographed by Javier de Frutos, we see that she’s right. Everyman is a high-living, bonus-fuelled party animal, surrounded by sycophantic friends bellowing “Happy fucking birthday!” (Duffy wins the palm as the sweariest poet-laureate yet). But, following tradition, Death comes for him. He falls off the balcony on his 40th, draped in police incident tape in a moment of staging which feels suspiciously designed to remind us of Norris’ London Road. Death, a drily funny Dermot Crowley, dons a white forensic suit and rubber gloves (no scythe in 2015) and warns Ev to render God an account of his life. So, as in the old plays, Everyman vainly seeks advocacy from his friends (“We’re well out of our comfort zone here, this is mental”), from the family he has neglected, including a gloriously grumpy Sharon D Clarke, and from the good deeds he never did.
Despite the stardom of Ejiofor and the always interesting Duffy as writer, it felt a risk for Norris to set out his stall as new Artistic Director with a 100-minute religious masque: given that the number of believers eager to take offence is now matched by equally offendable atheists. But with wit, panache, showmanship and the occasional earnestness of the verse offset with sly comic timing, he pulls off something both spectacular and serious. Hytner, remember, put Jerry Springer The Opera in his first season: more scatological, but with the same Judaeo-Christian theme of death and judgement. A nice symmetry.

And moments to remember. Ejiofor is its powerful core, swaggering, hungover, arrogant or terrified, learning humility before our eyes. Duchene, reappearing in his darkest hour as a fellow-tramp but still God, has a wisely underplayed strength. Tremendous projection expresses the global news and disasters which Ev has ignored; the ensemble in various guises moves kaleidoscopically and there is a wonderful mash-up score (William Lyons, with Paul Arditti’s sound) from disco to lament to the harsh choral beauty of The Lyke-Wake Dirge (“This ae nicht… fire and fleet and candle-licht, and Christ receive thy sawle!”).

That is sung by the ensemble startlingly disguised as 8ft-high walking rubbish tips; a huge wind-machine blows fake money and paper rubbish across the stalls as Ev laments in a plastic wasteland “I thought the world was mine to spend, a coin in space…”. Cue penance, apology, terror. But the final moments, when he learns to give thanks for the failing body and the world it shared, are strongest. Death’s rolling incident-tent (more police tape) sweeps aside his physical functions – personated by the ensemble, medieval style – leaving Ev alone. “I think I have a soul like this planet has a moon, my own soft light when there is only endless night. Let it go free of Time…In all humility, let it go free of me..”

Death is furious at this gentle resignation, and threatens the audience. “who’s next?” We laugh. Nervously. But not nervous for the new NT regime, not now. Offbeat but traditional, theatrical but heartfelt, it’s a triumphant night. There are £15 tickets, so get queueing.
box office 0207 452 3000

Sponsor, Travelex. In Cinemas 16 July via NT Live
Rating four    4 Meece Rating

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