Category Archives: Four Mice

April 27, 2015 · 10:35 pm

AMERICAN BUFFALO Wyndhams, WC2

MEN UP A DEAD END…
The marvellous junk-shop set by Paul Wills comes into its own most gratifyingly when Damian Lewis finally loses control and trashes it. For most of the play it simply evokes the rubbishy oppression of heavyset, patient Don Dubrow’s “Resale Shop”, up some mean street in 1975 where gambling men and smalltime crooks gather for half-baked plots and guarded man-banter. John Goodman, NYC stage and screen veteran, is Don: longsuffering, paternal, the most potentially sane of the three, doing up his saggy cardigan on the wrong buttons at moments of stress but finally, both literally and figuratively, getting it right.
Tom Sturridge is Bob, a protegé of vague function, a shaven-headed starveling teenager with a menacing naîveté and dangerous pathos, looking to Don as probably the nearest thing to a father, though resisting offers of breakfast. Last to arrive onstage, to a little frisson of here-comes-our-star, is Teach: Damian Lewis, back on the London stage after a decade . Not the Homeland Damian, and certainly not Henry VIII: lanky and manic here in a plum-coloured suit, with drooping ginger moustache and sideburns and a permanent state of twitchy offendedness (at first by the unseen Ruth and Gracie, who seem in some mumbled way to have disrespected him).

There’s an exiguous plot in which the elder two plan to steal back a rare coin – the American Buffalo – from a buyer who may have bought it too cheap; yet the real action, as usual in David Mamet’s furious dialogue, is beneath the surface. They plan and spar and disagree, and Teach vents indignantly bravura, wordily eloquent self-justifying rants like a grown-up version of Just William. The most profound of his sayings is probably “Do not fuck with me, I am not other people”. Or maybe “According to me is what it is when it is me who is speaking”. The most alarming moment in the play is not his brief violence with a sink-plunger, but a fearsome five minutes when he waves a gun around, and you’re far from certain he has the wit to put the safety-catch on.

There is the deliberately slight coin plot. But if you just watch them – and these are stellar performances – and tune to the subtext, what they are really saying translates variously as “Do you trust me? More than other guys? Are you my friend? Am I a man? Do you respect me? Will you let me down?” In an extraordinary moment Teach blusters “I am not your wife!”. It’s the least homoerotic of duets, though. Director Daniel Evans writes in the programme that the buffalo motif is important – these animals being aggressive, endangered and prone to leaving their mothers at a young age to roam around with other males. He suggests that the new wave of feminism weighs heavy on them, as well as their failure in the American business dream (as in Miller’s Death of a Salesman). Not sure about the feminism : it can’t all be our fault. Though at times I rather longed to see Ruth and Gracie come in and sort them out.
The first half is slowish, the energy rising after the interval; re the play’s fault than the players’ or directors, and probably an American audience would tune in sooner than me. But in the end, though I am not as a rule a fanatically keen Mamettian , the pathos and truth of these lost boys’ plight became moving, and memorable.

box office 0844 482 5120   http://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk to 27 June

rating four   4 Meece Rating

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April 26, 2015 · 6:16 pm

BOMBER’S MOON Trafalgar Studio 2, SE1

FROM BOMBER CREW TO ZIMMER DAYS: A TRIBUTE FAIRLY PAID

As the aged heroes of World War II slip gradually away, the urge to bear witness feels ever stronger. In Rattigan’s recently revived FLARE PATH (another production touring this autumn by the way) we were reminded of the surreal life of the young bomber crews, under fire over Germany at night and drinking in a quiet country pub near the base by lunchtime. Now screenwriter William Ivory draws on the memories of his late father – who died in 2008 – to give us a heartfelt, unsentimental evocation of an aged man, once a rear-gunner in war and now washed up, beached, trapped in a failing body in a warden-sheltered flat.

One tributes he pays is to demonstrate how funny, how deadpan, how salty such old men can be. James Bolam always brings a marvellous honest solidity to his acting, and drop-dead timing: he is wholly convincing both as an octogenarian grump who can barely get upright on his zimmer frame, and in flashback as the bright-eyed youth. Sometimes, movingly, he crouches holding that frame as he once held the machine-gun mounts. He catches the cheerful black-humoured obscenity of servicemen’s talk, and takes you momentarily into old long-suppressed fears.

The set is simple – by Laura McEwen – the bedsit kitchenette, chair and screened commode of planet eldercare; but the window in the door can become a full moon, the bomber’s moon, and the ceiling fan crossing the lights overhead suddenly evokes a plane in clouds as the soundscape (by Damian Coldwell) rises to a jet-engine roar mingled with urgent voices from long ago.

The story is just a few weeks’ interaction between old Jimmy and his new carer David – Steve John Shepherd. Jimmy is no soft touch: not unkind but sceptically cantankerous, irritated about “the big lesbian, Moira from Mobility” who keeps giving him wholemeal bread, and infuriated when the geeky, nervous Shepherd comes at him with God-bothering chat about religion and formulaic social-worker phrases. Jimmy’s mind is all there – even if his hand trembles, he recites his multiple medications with the rat-tat professional accuracy of the technical gunner he once was., when the only medication was the routine issue of amphetamines to keep men flying. And his mind is still haunted, with weary tolerance, by the last traumatic flight when his comrades died shot down over Nuremberg and he survived by a fluke and was captured in the snow.
There is gripping sincerity throughout , though it is only in the second half that we get a clearer view of the life-crisis which made David take this work, and which may yet destroy him as surely as it did some wartime comrades who capitulated to the great fear. There was a moment near the end when I feared Ivory might be going to get out of it a bit too pat, either religiously or otherwise. But he pulls it off, with the old man’s witness to the past moving towards healing for the troubled young man in the present. There’s fidelity to that World War 2 spirit, in it at the end, to that Rattigan restraint. And a small coup-de-theatre which I should have seen coming and didn’t. So the matinee audience rose to its feet, for an honest performance but as much for its grandparents , and the pity and gallantry of seventy years ago.

BOX OFFICE 0844 871 7632 to 23 May http://www.atgtickets.com From £ 15

RATING:  FOUR  4 Meece Rating

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April 21, 2015 · 11:24 pm

AH, WILDERNESS! Young Vic, SE1

THE SANDS OF TIME YIELD UP THEIR DREAMS
This is Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy: the moment when from his vortex of family addiction, illness, loneliness, romantic seaward longings and deep human empathy came a spurt of hope. It is set in the same East Coast seaside house as his fogbound, bitter autobiographical A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The title is from Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou, beside me singing in the Wilderness–Ah, Wilderness were Paradise enow!” Teenage Richard, aflame with calf-love and rebellion, has the poem by heart. It weaves through the play, together with the lush, lily-scented despairing eroticism of Swinburne and Wilde, references to Ibsen and the daring literary fin-de-siecle spirits of the author’s youth (remember the father’s disgust in the later, harsher play: “Baudelaire, Whitman Poe, Wilde, whoremongers and degenerates!”
For we are in O’Neill’s youth, idealized a decade later in 1933, yearning back to the passion of banned books, a new century’s revolt against the parental rigidities. Wonderfully cunning of the Young Vic and director Natalie Abrahami to have ‘60s Bob Dylan tracks playing as we settle: another age when youth was hopeful and despairing, embracing love and disillusion and rebellion and times a-changing.

Observed by a wandering, curiously ghostlike figure who steps into remembered characters and then watches intently, unseen in the margins , this is a portrait of the family O’Neill should have had. One in which adolescent angst and anger could clash against a partially dysfunctional household and run wild in brief dissipation, but be contained and accepted in final mellow moonlit moments by solid united parents. Martin Marquez and Janie Dee give them that solidity: he a local newspaper proprietor rooted and respected, if testy; she typically strong as Essie, who knows her duty to object to “corrupting” books and behaviour, but is perfectly aware of convention’s unimportance next to keeping the family together.

Sometimes brother Arthur – Ashley Zhangahza – sits at a battered piano and sings the gentle melancholy parlour-songs of a century past, underlining that sense of a safe if stale old world before all this new poetry stirred it up. Not that family life is smooth: Dominic Rowan is Uncle Sid, an amiable (and very funny) habitual drunkard who was once to marry aunt Lily (Susannah Wise) until she demurred at his incurable behaviour. There is real subtle pain here, though delight in the scene, nicely indicated as pretty routine, where Sid demolishes the family dinner.

But young Richard is the focal point, and George Mackay is marvellous: flouncingly adolescent, self-righteously wounded when his chastely hesitant girlfriend Muriel is persuaded to chuck him. He goes on to a low bar, where his first-time drunkenness and squirmingly embarrassed encounter with a predatory tart are quite beautiful in execution. He poses as sophisticated, tries to play cool when Muriel reappears, hurls himself flat on his face in a sea-pool to express thwarted embarrassed adoration. He is glorious.

But what keeps me haunted hours later is Abrahami’s drifting, gentle direction within a wonderful set by Dick Bird. Fresh from its annihilation under the gravel of Happy Days, the Young Vic stage is now under tons of finer sand: sculpted dunes and breakwaters beneath faded seaside clapboard, sands of time in which characters will suddenly burrow to haul out books, a table, a sea-pool reflecting the moon. Memories are as drifting and reshaped as a windblown beach. Charles Balfour’s lighting gives it a Hopper-like beauty of sharp-lit silhouette and shadow, a remembered dream. I can’t get it out of my head.
box office  www.youngvic.org / 020 7922 2922 to 23 May
rating four     4 Meece Rating

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April 21, 2015 · 12:16 am

LOVE’S SACRIFICE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

THREE OF THEM IN THAT MARRIAGE…
You get plenty of cautionary tales in John Ford’s little-remembered 1633 play. For one thing, if you get three women pregnant at once with promises of marriage and then variously insult their appearance, age and morals they will take a nasty vengeance.  In front of a Cardinal, in masks, and with an anachronistic but weirdly brilliant use of 21st century ultrasound technology under their bodices.
Nor is it wise for a young courtier to spurn the Duke’s widowed sister, be she never so shrewish a cougar, claim a vow of celibacy and then get close to her beautiful young sister-in-law. No good will come of this. Especially if the spurned widow teams up with D’Avolos, a smooth, mutteringly poisonous Jonathan McGuinness. Such death-dealing intrigues are the lifeblood of vigorous, bloodthirsty 17c drama. But this play is curiously more thoughtful, and less randomly bloody, than Ford’s incestuous, murderous “Tis Pity She’s A Whore” (lately revived at the Wanamaker, (review, http://tinyurl.com/p9zenc9 ).
Indeed Love’s Sacrifice is traditionally written off as a bit of a dog’s breakfast, with its sub-plots which only confusingly mirror the main action: T.S.Eliot said it had “all the faults of which Ford was capable”. And yet, and yet…it turns out in Matthew Dunster’s admirable and physically spirited production to be far more interesting than that: ambiguous and questioning and psychologically intense.
The triple-seduction-pregnancy sideshow is briskly treated – Andy Apollo in his RSC debut season playing Ferentes like a caddish Elvis, smoothing his quiff and hauling the women around like giggling potato-sacks. Another random branch of the tale involves Matthew Kelly as a ridiculous old man with a huge white wig, yellow stockings (very Malvolio) and an endearing servant gorgeously evoked by Colin Ryan. He introduces an exiled Lord disguised as a Fool and previously rejected by the noble (yet illicitly pregnant) widow . And so on. Fear not, though: the trademark RSC clarity keeps things as credible as is decent.

In the first hour Dunster gives it the full romp-and-rampage treatment, as hypnotic religious chant shatters into high anguished impassioned fiddle shrieks and the court scamper and lark among cathedral arches and across a high wrought-iron balcony. But that contrast, sacred and profane emotions and problematical vows clashing into disaster, deepens fascinatingly as it develops. Success depends strongly on central performances, and here we are richly served. Jamie Thomas King is the decent, conflicted Fernando; Matthew Needham as the Duke carries it brilliantly from a larky, jokesome and rather endearing alpha-male laddishness to real anguish, confusion, remorse and violence. Catrin Stewart, lately so fine in The Jew of Malta, is a delicate perfection as the lovelorn wife who confesses her adoration to Fernando but vows not to go beyond a kiss for the sake of chaste wedlock.
In the second half there are some quite remarkable scenes between these three victims of “lawless love” and impossible temptation: moments as powerful as Othello, not least in a long, intense confrontation between the heartbroken confused Duke and his wife, in which Stewart delivers crazy, taunting, extraordinarily modern sentiments of defiance: thrilling. Anna Fleischle’s design, with curious iron pillars within which hellfire seems to flicker through cracks, and Alexander Balanescu’s extraordinary score, create a genuinely unsettling atmosphere and serve both the ferocity and the dark comedy of the tale perfectly.
So long-lost concepts of chastity and honour spring back to life, nearly four centuries on, and shake us. As much, indeed, as one particularly shocking moment near the end which wrenched a sharp, unison gasp across the house. It involves white funeral wreaths. Say no more.

4 Meece Rating
box office http://www.rsc.org 0844 800 1110 to 24 june
rating : four

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April 17, 2015 · 11:38 pm

CARMEN DISRUPTION Almeida N1

WILL GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES TORE-ADORE IT?   READ ON
The best way to describe this play is as a sideshow. There is a performance of Bizet’s opera Carmen somewhere, and playing out around it are these connected lives. Think 2004’s Crash mixed with Shakespeare in Love. A mix of portraits, but with a master text to play with.
The Almeida, the West End’s cupboard cousin, has been stripped bare by designer Lizzie Clachan. Bare brick, exposed lights and no flats for the actors, yet delicate licks of red paint, gold detailing and ornamental lighting for the audience. We’re led to our seats through backstage – perhaps labouring a little too heavily the point that we’re peeling beneath the opera – past a dead, bleeding, but still breathing Bull.

I have no idea what happens in Carmen – I don’t know a thing about opera. You say ‘thrilling performance at Covent Garden’, I think man with a unicycle and flaming batons outside Boots the chemist. But thankfully this tension seemed to be in play. Michael Longhurst’s production – spare but madly theatrical – satisfyingly excavates the pop culture from the opera. In the ENO season-ticket holders, you could almost hear the Sauvignon curdling. Yes opera is about sex and death. But surely not in such a raw state as this.

In a way I’ve never thought possible, the lack of any real story, quite nicely made way for these character sketches. A business man, a rent boy, a disturbed singer, a troubled teen, a lost mother at first seem like the standard roll-call. But Jack Farthing – a latter-day Carmen as a witty Essex rent boy – and John Light – Escamillio of the square mile with sharp suits and semi-automatic delivery – were enrapturing. Carmen’s high power ejaculation about which it “is only fair to warn people” and Escamillio’s frantic defines of following people had us hooked. Their stories, perhaps linking in meaningful ways for the black ties in the crowd, were for the rest of us just masterfully told single stories.

However, these moments could be hit and miss. Katie West – as Micaëla, for the informed – had an absent unrequited love to battle with, into which she threw herself but which failed to move. And I never fully bought into Sharon Small – as ‘The Singer’.

A haunting chorus, with snippets from the opera, were for me were the only links. And eventually lost souls stumbling on the ‘chocolate box opera house’ Carmen, the curious lifestyles of opera singers, personal technology and ‘Europe’ were the playwright’s inspirations. I’m not sure all these were hit, but his skill in producing entirely entertaining and mostly crisp lives was an entertaining watch. Even if the Bizet did go straight down the bidet.
Box Office: 020 7359 4404  to 23 May

raing:  four   4 Meece Rating
Rating: four

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April 16, 2015 · 10:08 am

MRS ROOSEVELT FLIES TO LONDON King’s Head , N1

ADMIRABLE ELEANOR 

An old woman, cadaverous under harsh light, wakes fretful, remembering a war and shuddering at the Cuba missile crisis : it is 1962. We know that it will resolve, but it strikingly reminds us how that threat felt to the generation which endured World War 2. As the old woman springs up and sheds twenty years (good lighting moment!) we share Eleanor Roosevelt’s memories of 1942.
What memories they are too: even my generation is too little aware of the lady’s gallantry, gaiety and liberal passion; how admirable for Alison Skilbeck’s tightly researched, elegant monologue as the “world’s first lady” to come back to a young King’s Head audience. Especially in this VE-day anniversary year (and just as another Presidential wife, Hillary Clinton, declares her shot for the top job).

Eleanor, of course, never went that far, though after the death of her cousin-husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945 she remained a force, instrumental in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But her intelligence, nerve and above all sheer driving goodwill had played no small role in that war, and in the emergence of the American liberal spirit. Orphaned in childhood, raised without much love, she found a husband who for all his qualities (and despite being crippled with polio ) was not above marital betrayals, needing, as she ruefully observed, always a woman at hand to admire him. She was more a harness-mate, a prodder and goader and inspirer. For her own emotional fulfilment there were the warm women friends.
But in 1942, at no small risk she flew over and toured blitzed Britain, with the stated intention of encouraging the women’s war effort but in effect offering wider cheer and encouragement. Not least – as an early cheerleader for racial justice – to the African-American servicemen in Liverpool, about whom she cheekily informed a Southern senator the white girls “do not look at with terror” . Franklin was not pleased about that note, or her sneered reputation as the “Negroes’ Friend”; he needed the Southern vote, and the Ku Klux Klan quite explicitly threatened the rebellious Eleanor.

There are light moments, as the Queen (our Queen Mother) apologizes for the freezing cold of Buckingham Palace with the windows blown out, and for the economy tide=ring painted round the baths; as she sits next to Churchill and finds him rather hard going, or notices how exhausted the reporters seem to be by her fierce itinerary of night-shift workers and whistlestop city tours. She sees Rattigan’s Flare Path, experiences rather too many brussels sprouts, Moments of memory enlighten us about her life and beginnings; Lucy Skilbeck (spookily, no relation) directs a spirited 75-minute evocation both of the woman and the nation she travelled through. Sometimes Skilbeck moves to a suitably retro microphone to deliver some of the speeches of the time; sometimes quotes from Eleanor’s real letters home.

It is a bit Edinburgh-fringey, and absolutely deserves to be done with more expense and a little expansion: projections, photographs, bits of film maybe, audio from the time. But I wouldn’t change the performer, nor the spirit. And am intensely glad to have seen and admired both the show and the late Mrs R.
box office http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com to 9 May

rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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April 11, 2015 · 10:41 am

CROUCH TOUCH PAUSE ENGAGE Watford Palace & touring

A RUGBY REDEMPTION

“I’ve known since you were seventeen” says Gareth Thomas’ exasperated team-mate. “When you said you wanted me to be your best man, why do you think we spent a whole afternoon walking up and down Treorchy High Street eating chips and fucking curry sauce? I was giving you time to reconsider…”
Hand on heart, I didn’t particularly expect to enjoy this National Theatre Wales play (with Out of Joint ) about the coming-out of the tremendous Welsh rugby captain, international and 100-cap star athlete Gareth Thomas. Rugby terrifies me, I am lukewarm about verbatim theatre (which this mostly is), and read some pretty h-hum English reviews when its tour began in Wales. And, after one particularly gruelling Edinburgh Fringe, I issued a personal fatwa against plays about young men discovering their sexuality: enough, already!

But Robin Soans’ piece is different. Thomas’ self-doubt and deceit was particularly painful, alpha-male team sport being a toxically tough world for gay men (remember poor Justin Fashanu, who died, and Robbie Rogers who felt he should retire rather than play on as gay.) It is also different because private anguish and shame at twenty years of lies and fear is interwoven with his hometown’s travails. Bridgend, whose beating heart was in hard manual work, family, community and rugby, was badly knocked about by the decline of the mines (there’s a verbose explanation from that now-affluent Brussels fatcat, Neil Kinnock). It also suffered a strange, heartbreaking series of teenage suicides
So we have Thomas’ story and his parents’ and teammates’ remarks on being told: we get extraordinary facts like the way the Sun had chapter-and-verse proof of gay sauna visits and the rest in 2001, the day of an International, but for some mysterious reason – compassion? – never ran it even after Wales went down 44-15 to England and they could have crowed as homophobically as they liked. Six months later, still trying to “melt away his gayness”, Thomas disastrously married a childhood sweetheart; their scenes together are agonizing.
But alongside his tale run the problems of two ordinary teenage girls, Meryl whose angry jobless father brutalizes her mother and kills himself; and her friend, Darcey. Who suffers from schizophrenic delusions and whose near-suicide coincides with that of the rugby star.
Under deft direction from Max Stafford-Clark, each of the six players at times speaks Gareth Thomas’ words , then with clarity reverts to their own persona (or one of several, including a nervous reporter ). Rhys ap William is particularly fine as the player, and Lauren Roberts’ Darcey is irresistible: she plays it big, slobbish, lairy, manically grinning and heartbreakingly at sea in her terrifying mental world.
It was a quietish matinee I caught, but the intensity, deep goodwill and the stark honesty of the piece made it feel greater than the sum of its parts. The aftermath of coming-out is particularly striking in its refusal to embrace the feelgood sentimentality of films like PRIDE. Thomas admits that the shame of having lied for so long lingered on, that some on the terraces still shout hateful epithets, that the new “out” career involves nonsesne like panto in Wrexham, giving his name to scented candles and enduring a coming-out party run by London PRs with no proper food fit for rugby friends.
But it’s out, it’s open, and it never truly mattered. The honesty itself buoys him up, and the other characters find their equilibrium too, sing a verse of Bread of Heaven (with the proper “Jehovah” not the mimsy C of E “Redeemer” word). In a final scene they train with him and we cheer the curtain-call scrum. Loved it. Still too scared to watch the Six Nations, though.
Box Office: http://www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk to 11 April
then touring England till 20 June (reaches Arcola London 20 May)\   Touring Mouse wide
Rating four 4 Meece Rating

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April 9, 2015 · 11:50 pm

AFTER ELECTRA Tricycle, NW6

A BOHO CLYTEMNESTRA

No sooner do we get over Kristin Scott Thomas going murderously nuts as the original Electra at the Old Vic, than along comes April de Angelis with a sly, hilarious, biting and ultimately moving modern take on that primally perilous mother-daughter bond. Her wit (lately deployed in FANNY HILL at Bristol) now returns to the fertile middle-class territory we relished in JUMPY. This Theatre Royal Plymouth production certainly ought to follow it into the West End.

It begins with a classic what-if social situation: frumpy middle-aged Haydn, a grief counsellor with little cheer about her, visits her artist mother Virgie in a beautifully realized ramshackle Essex railway-carriage cottage (Malcolm Rippeth’s design). She is promptly informed that the glamorously boho 84-year-old plans to cap the party by drowning herself. “Not looking forward to the decrepit bit” breezes Mum. This, after all, is a 60’s free spirit, lately spotted at 76 in a nude peace protest, married to her art. Other visitors arrive for the terminal salad lunch: Tom the weary old RSC actor : “playing a variety of beards now, you never remember the names” carps his thwarted novelist wife Sonia. Kate Fahy and Neil McCaul give excellent glare as the poisonous couple. Then there’s Virgie’s sister Shirley, an overconfidently brisk OFSTED peer (“I was a headmistress, I”m used to controlling situations I know very little about”). And there is the alcoholic son Orrin, thrown out by his wife.
So with snorts of laughter and gasps of shock, off we go: and it’s more than a treat, de Angelis pacing her laughs neatly as surprises (Sam West directs, and I bet he enjoyed it). Marty Cruikshank is swashbucklingly enviable as Virgie, Rachel Bell a sharply smooth sister, so credible as a life peer that I almost looked her up in Hansard.
Veronica Roberts as the troubled daughter gives just enough hint of the real seriousness of the family situation and back-story, which are revealed in the second half, on the far side of Virgie’s stroke and her cantankerous near-recovery. There’s a Colchester cab driver too, a lovely gangling cameo from Michael Begley (“I picked a bloke up at Braintree once, thought he was Buddha. He wasn’t”). And finally, briefly, an art student, who matters.

The play continues to provide violent laughs, often at the expense of Tom the actor, a constant joy; but moves into darker territory with the unfolding of the question it really wants to ask: not about suicide or even really about female ageing – though there are some treasurable remarks on that subject, not least Sonia’s panicky conviction that Zumba and “West African drumming” will keep her young. Rather, it resolves itself into the starker question of whether a mother who is also an artist has a right to place her gift and her message higher than her duty towards her children.

For Virgie is a kind of Clytemnestra, though the husband she discarded was not actually killed and Haydn’s revenge is wreaked on her canvases, not her body. But what remains of this immensely enjoyable play is even more powerfully a joyful reminder of how sharp, how funny, diverse and stroppy older women can be. And how rebellious. I could quote it all night, but be satisfied with Virgie’s solution to the budget deficit: care-home denizens, she says, ought to be sent to war:

“Free travel to exotic places, no heating bills, stepping on a landmine, quicker than cancer. 80 years, shot by insurgents at Kabul while winching her mate’s wheelchair out of quicksand. Saves the NHS loads, no wasted life, no bereft mothers, no wobbly kiddie-writing saying Daddy we miss you – our kids have grown up and hate our guts. It’s a solution”….
My late Mum would have loved that. A lot.

box office 0207 328 1000 to 2 May http://www.tricycle.co.uk
rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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April 9, 2015 · 10:16 am

THE ABSENCE OF WAR Oxford Playhouse & touring

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS: HOW IT WAS, AND HOW IT WASN’T
David Hare’s 1994 play reimagining the 1992 election – elegantly staged by Headlong and director Jeremy Herrin – has toured since February, doughty as a battlebus , energized and angsty as the doomed Labour campaign. On election night it’s in Bath, a brave place to affirm in swooping rhetoric that the Labour party is “the only practical instrument that exists in this country for changing people’s lives for the good”.

So I caught it on the wing, and a fine night out it is. It was inspired by the situation of Neil Kinnock, who dragged the party’s left into a “pact with respectability” to try and end the long run of Tory triumphs. Hare writes a hilariously huffy programme note about how the Labour front-bench hated it because the hero George was not a red-headed Welshman with a wife called Glenys. Silly of them, since George (marvellously played by Reece Dinsdale) is six times more personally beguiling than Kinnock ever was: thoughtful, jokey, never eating anything at diplomatic banquets so as to save room for his own recipe scrambled eggs with chilli peppers. He’s a rounded autodidact rooted in old wisdoms, a theatre-buff who explodes in fury at wasting a Hamlet ticket because the crafty Tory leader calls a snap election (“The bastard’s going down the Mall!”). He’s wonderful. Vote Dinsdale!
But, as in history, they don’t. Hare is exploring the perennial problem of an idealistic, leftist Labour party finding it difficult to persuade a suspicious electorate that it is fit to govern. Historically, the play marks the divide between that kind of Labour (to which we seem to be returning under Ed Miliband) and the New-Lab, Blairy, relaxed-about-the-filthy-rich variety which did win five years later. George has surrounded himself with a clique of unelected policy-engineers and spinners – Cyril Nri splendid as Oliver, James Harkness a wincey Scot who eats croissants worrying that it betrays his Paisley roots: and a brisk Charlotte Lucas as Lindsay, the PR adviser.
This clique may improve his chances – so they think, as they crunch through polls about whether he is “thoughtful..downbeat..solitary..boring…” etc and beg him to say “fairness” not “equality” , to bang on about the NHS a lot, and never to mention the economy because that “reminds people he’ll be in charge of their money” . Yet at the same time this image micromanagement is imprisoning him, killing his passion and personality. So are the “whingeing backbenchers” the doughty old post-war idealist Vera (Helen Ryan, very funny in her brief fierce asides) and a treacherous shadow chancellor silkily played by Gyuri Sarossy. George flunks a nasty TV interview, punches Oliver, and faces election day with sad, steely dignity. There’s even a big rally – like the one which torpedoed Kinnock – with music of which someone immortally says “I didn’t know Hitler composed..”

So plenty of modern echoes from the distant far side of the Blair-Brown era, and plenty to reflect on, whichever is your party. Hare also skewers exactly (whether he intended to or not) the contempt rife on the political left for actual voters, who simply don’t understand what’s good for them.
One little dishonesty I could have done without: the cameo Tory PM is portrayed as an arrogant, entitled pinstriped Oxbridgey toff. Students outside the theatre were chortling about that. So I had to tell them with aged maternal sternness that actually, the Tory leader who beat Kinnock was a man who grew up with impoverished variety-artiste parents in two rooms in Brixton, and left school with three O levels, did more on his own as a clerk, and worked his way up.: John Major. So there!

0186 530 5305 http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com to 11th
then touring to 8th May – Cambridge, Kingston, Bath
rating; four 4 Meece Rating

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April 3, 2015 · 3:56 pm

DEAD SHEEP Park Theatre N4

THE GENTLEMANLY ASSASSIN RIDES AGAIN. AND HOWE…

Klaxon alert! Outrage merchants , boots on, scramble! In an election season here are theatre types in North London doing a play about Tories! Written by a BBC reporter! With PM Thatcher played in drag by chap from Spitting Image!

No, panic over, at ease, chaps. Jonathan Maitland is not spitting left-wing venom or, indeed, bashing the late Margaret more than is mild and reasonable. His lively, closely researched account of Sir Geoffrey Howe’s long-suffering loyalty and final explosive demolition of her 25 years ago is in the tradition of James Graham’s determined, fascinated humanisation of politicians in the NT’s This House and the TV play Coalition. And while director Ian Talbot makes the most of playful brief impersonations of some of the more richly impersonateable characters of the 80s – notably Alan Clark – Howe himself emerges well. Here is a principled if unspectacular hero who gave up loyalty only after a struggle, and Ian Gow as a decent man struggling to hold together the pair’s fragile relationship after Howe’s cruel demotion.
As for the casting of Steve Nallon as Thatcher, it is unexpectedly effective: not least because with the sculpted perm, ultra-careful outfits and gimlet eye there always was something faintly drag-queeny about the Iron Lady. It creates a useful sharp contrast with the other woman in the story: Elspeth Howe, wife of Sir Geoffrey and chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Broadcasting Standards Council . Jill Baker, with casual hairdo and cheerful flat-shoed bluestocking liberalism makes a wonderful contrast to the menacing burnished-blonde clip-clop of her husband’s Nemesis . The PM patronizes her , calls her “dear” and evinces clear contempt for feminism (we are overshadowed by that vast Cabinet picture of her all-male retinue). At one point she purrs “I didn’t win two elections and a war by being nice to people”, to which Elspeth retorts ‘Imagine what you might have achieved if you had been…”
Maitland flashes backwards and forwards from the pinch-point in 1989 to earlier days – when Chancellor Howe rescued the new leader from a potential party revolt, and to the triumphant conference of 1983 when she demanded the opposition be “routed!”. As the years go by the sidelining and undermining of Howe is apparent: James Wilby gives our hero the hesitant credible decency of a clever thoughtful man steamrollered by a ruthless politician. Never pathetic or bumbling, he gives precise sad weight to lines like “ “I am not Heseltine, I can’t prowl the wilderness like a hungry lion” . Domcstic scenes with Elspeth are genuinely touching, Howe sweetly sporting a picture sweater of his beloved Chevening.

Around them four other actors nimbly, entertainingly narrate and take diverse roles: Graham Seed is a strong Gow, John Wark a mischievously lisping Brian Walden, and Tim Wallers a blustering Bernard Ingham and a gloriously camp, offensive Alan Clark, bringing whoops of delight from those with 25-year political memories. The PMQ moment and the denouement, the big cricket-metaphor speech, create a proper House of Commons atmosphere.
Plenty of nice touches: Howe visibly reddening as he heads for the backbenches after twenty-five years in office, grandees scoffing at John Major – “He doesn’t even go abroad for his holidays” , and a nice swipe when the PM is asked about arts subsidy and replies that they should support themselves “Trouble is, art is not about profit as much as about a statement. Usually a socialist statement”.
One point, more in sorrow than in anger: Lady Thatcher was ever a fastidious dresser, and someone in Wardrobe has really got to run an iron over that terrible houndstooth suit on Nallon. Or bin it for something smooth and blue. The hair is great, so is the walk and the glare and the voice. But he doesn’t half need an Ironing Lady.

Oh yes, one note.  Sir Stephen Wall, from Howe’s original staff  – played by John Wark – saw it on press night and said “Terrific. … a brilliant job at being true to the character of the main protagonists …characterisation of MT was spot on: gimlet-eyed and terrifying but also with a kind and vulnerable side” .
box office 0207 870 6876 to 9 May http://www.parktheatre.co.uk
rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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March 27, 2015 · 10:33 am

THE JEW OF MALTA Swan, Stratford upon Avon

THE BOUQUET! IT WAS POISONED!
We are supposed to be thinking about the history of European antisemitism, tracking back to the 16th century when Christopher Marlowe wrote this play ,and the 15th, where he set it. And it’s all here – the ‘blood libel’, the accusations of physical dirtiness combined with greedy wealth, the spitting contempt and – not least – the undercurrent of awareness (Marlowe was no fool) that the thing which most annoyed Christians was that Jews were so damn clever, and that the fear of them was fuelled in a vicious circle by guilt at the violence meted out to them. We all fear the people we maltreat.

Thus our anti-hero Barabas – after the governor of Malta seizes all his property to pay off invading Turks – vows vengeance and runs rings round the ruling élite. He uses his daughter as bait to make suitors kill each other, then when she gets angry and converts he poisons her entire convent with rice-porridge, thus enabling the deathlessly plonking line “All the nuns are dead. Let’s bury them”. Moving on, he murders one friar and frames the other, and poisons his blackmailing servant, a courtesan and a pimp by disguising himself as a pantalooned “French musician” banging incompetently on a lute and giving them a poisoned (albeit fascinatingly slow-acting) posy of flowers to smell. Oh, and he fakes his death, admits the invading Turks through a sewer, gets made governor but burns all their soldiers to death. Which, accidentally, enables the Christian governor to turn the tables and drop him through his own secret trapdoor.

A clever Jew, see? And, as performed by Jasper Britton under the gamesome direction of Justin Audibert (a riproaring RSC directorial debut), disgracefully likeable in a confiding, Richard-III way. When he brags “”I walk abroad a-nights and kill sick people groaning under walls; sometimes I go about and poison wells…” we get a strong sense Barabas is parodying the prejudice he meets, and probably couldn’t be bothered to do any of it. And anything which could be uncomfortable about this cheerily brutal evening – pitched somewhere between farce and mumming-play – is that Christopher Marlowe is disgusted with the Christians too. They’re stupid, cruel, lecherous and as keen on money as anyone. The two friars are greedy, venal and competitive and deserve their fate. Only Abigail, used as a pawn by her father and converting when she grieves her dead lover, is at all decent (Catrin Stewart gives her great dignity and the only depth of feeling in the play). As she expires with “I died a Christian” the friar can only gropingly regret that she died a virgin too.
Audibert is not afraid of incidental comedy : even the bearers removing a corpse do “stone paper scissors” to decide who takes the messy end, and the poisoned nuns, to a background of yearning plainsong, actually foam at the mouth. Lanre Malaolu’s Ithamore , bought in the slave-market by Barabas’, escapes his early degradation to be caperingly wild and deliciously depraved. And there’s even a line prefiguring a centuries-later satire on human behaviour when Barabas says “I am my own best friend”.

Yessir! Marlowe got there before CHICAGO…
box office http://www.rsc.org 0844 800 1110 to 8 sept
RATING four     4 Meece Rating

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March 26, 2015 · 11:19 pm

THREE LIONS St James Theatre SW1

THREE MEN IN A (PROBABLY RIGGED) VOTE…

In 2010, three men came to a Zurich hotel to present (to a scandal-ridden FIFA) Britain’s case for hosting the 2018 World Cup. David Cameron the chirpy new PM was backed by two icons from different strata of British society: David Beckham and Prince William. William Gaminara, alone among playwrights (very slow, TV commissioners..!) saw that this was a gift. In 2013 I loved the result in Edinburgh; now it’s back, in from a pre-London tour (I caught it in Ipswich) just as FIFA stumbles through the fallout of its next bad decision, Qatar.

From my recce in Ipswich I can report that it is still a blissful farce: sly, sharp, its impersonations just the right side of caricature. A sycophantic Indian hotelier pops in and out of the bedroom where the men deliberate; offstage Boris is in the hotel bar and becomes involved in a reported trouser incident. Each of the men repeatedly has his leash jerked as he fields phone calls from home: Beckham being told to hang his clothes up and blag a seat at the coming Royal Wedding, William fending off Kate’s fear that if invited Posh might sing, and Cameron at one point offstage in the hotel bathroom fending off Nick Clegg while the Prince and the footballer earnestly discuss haircare.

The beauty of Gaminara’s approach is that none of them is cast as villain or gratuitously mocked in tedious leftie news-quiz style. This is more P.G.Wodehouse than The Thick Of It, as he plays not unaffectionately with the interaction of three very different Englishmen united in a quixotic, patriotic attempt which we know will fail. Cameron (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) and Beckham (Séan Browne) are not close lookalikes, but rapidly become credible. The PM is jerkily, selfconsciously masterful as he was in his early days in the job, matily trying to get his kids a playdate with Beckham’s (he is caught secretly practising keepy-uppy before the others arrive). Beckham exudes friendly decency and slow-thinking literalness. Tom Davey however is uncannily like Prince William, with beautiful deep rounded royal vowels: his earnest well-bred goodwill leavened with schoolboy practical jokes (the best capped with “it was Dads idea, I promised I’d give it a go” when he pretends to think the meeting is about cricket, and enjoys the polite panic of the others)..

In the first half relationships ebb and flow, sometimes the two Etonians bonding in reminiscence and pedantry, sometimes William and Beckham affronted by the PM’s arrogance. As they return from ‘pre-meetings’ with FIFA grandees each has his weakness revealed, not least a lovable British incompetence at bribery. Ashok the butler does, at times, become a little tedious with his learned verbosity and rather dated Empire-loyalist caricature, but it transpires there’s a reason for that.   The second act becomes nicely farcical, as Cameron imposes the old Tony Blair / Enoch Powell trick of making them all fill their bladders to add urgency to their big presentation. Which, without crudeness, leads up to the classic trouser moments.

So once again I enjoyed it no end. And there’s a joke I didn’t remember from Edinburgh. The daffy intern gushes that Boris Johnson is “cute”. To which the PM replies “Cute is not the word I”d have chosen. Almost, but not quite…”

Yes, think about it. The Ipswich matinee audience got it immediately, the dirty beasts…

box office http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk to 2 May

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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March 20, 2015 · 12:03 am

BUYER AND CELLAR Menier, SE1

SUBTERRANEAN STREISAND: SILLY AND SUBLIME
It’s a heady cocktail, the Hollywood Heartbreaker: tartness and syrup,  firewater and froth ,l served in the campest crystal with diamond sparklers.  Heady delusion meets hard dollars, and schmaltzy folksiness erects steel gates against the overpressing adoration of the faithful.  Rarely has this L.A. la-la land been skewered with such loving laughter as in Jonathan Tolins’ one-man play, a fantasy about Barbra Streisand.

That is, about her basement. He read, in her extraordinary vanity coffee table book “My passion for Design”, that as an avid hoarder of costumes, toys, antiques and curios the megastar actually built, in her Malibu basement, a row of old fashioned folksy stores .  He began to wonder how it would be if she employed a floorwalker to play shops with her, down there under the pink (flattering) light whenever she cared to wander down the spiral staircase.
Hence this 100 minute virtuoso piece, hedged carefully around with insistence that – with “a person so famous, talented and litigous” it is definitely all made up. Although apparently acquaintances of the real Streisand have cautiously admitted a certain truthfulness in the characterisation. Who knows? There are strong gates, and she is an actress born…Anyway, its too good a fantasy to spoil, and comes to the glorious Menier (directed by Stephen Brackett) garlanded with off-Broadway awards.

The performer is Michael Urie – known from Ugly Betty – as Alex, an actor sacked from Disneyland (“Mouseschwitz”as embittered ex-employees refer to it ). who takes the weird subterranean job. Urie is ,from the opening moments, an elfin delight: entrancingly entertaining word by word,  and controlledly camp. That control enables him to drop in and out another character, his boyfriend Barry who is thirty degrees queenier and has a typically schizophrenic and terrifyingly well-informed love-hate relationship with the Streisand legend .
Urie also gives us the cynical no-nonsense PA, and Barbra herself . She visits her deranged mini mall, playing improv shopping games with Alex: at this point it gets so funny you can hardly breathe. When he pretends to haggle there is “an almost erotic pleasure in denying this woman something she wants”. Then she begins to seem to show friendship: if it is ever friendship when the deal is so one-sided. Once , she demands that he stay on all evening in case she wants frozen yoghurt from her street’s candy store. Poor as a church-mouse, Alex mentions overtime and the diva cries : “It’s always about dollars and cents..why can’t people CARE as much as I care?” . Ouch.
The trajectory takes the story beyond mere sketch: Alex’s involvement torpedoes his real life by degrees, and ends in a lovely bit of disillusion.  And froth-light as it is, the play gently, affectionately teases out serious themes. It’s about fame, fortune and unbridled acquisition: the terrible glamour of the famous boss who seems for a moment to care, and the gap between rueful strugglers at the base of the showbiz pyramid and lonely deluded billionaires at the top, clinging with absurd pride to the hard-luck legend of their youth. It is about aspiration and perfectionism and the way, as Alex admits, that we are all “struggling to create our own perfect little world” and watching the stars’ lives for “the comfort of the totally impossible”.
But I would hate you to think it’s in any way a sober evening. Never stopped grinning all the way through…
box office 0207 378 1713 to 2 May
rating: four4 Meece Rating

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March 18, 2015 · 11:33 am

REBECCA – a study in Jealousy Richmond Theatre & touring

MANDERLEY AGAIN,  AND VERY WELCOME TOO 

“Last night, I dreamed I went to Manderley again…” The famous opening is spoken from the sea-bed: a dim otherworld where a jointed lifeless body descends from far above, crushed beneath a wrecked boat. Which – as a vast chandelier descends in turn – becomes sometimes a table, sometimes floor, beneath the leprous plaster and high broken banisters of a grand ruined house above. So the set itself is the ghost of Manderley and of the rockbound Cornish bay where the first wife Rebecca met her end. Within this frame, between a dark past and a smouldering end, the story will play out. Fishermen intone the first shanty “Go down, you blood red roses”. Brilliant.
Kneehigh, and Emma Rice’s direction elsewhere, are generally original, quirky, larky, musical, a touch camp, prone to outbreaks of puppetry, but focused on storytelling and above all theatrically atmospheric. This touring production, I am happy to say, is their finest since Brief Encounter . It’s a glorious evening: both faithful to the spirit and shape of Daphne du Maurier’s chronicle of second-wife paranoia and Bluebeard dread, and mischievously subversive of it.

Perhaps the Cornish setting inspired the Truro company even more than usual. In folkish Kneehigh tradition it is interwoven with shanties (and that lovely Wilburn brothers ballad Give Them The Roses Now, sung by Frith the butler to cheer up poor Mrs de Winter after the ball débacle). Cast members casually pick up instruments – bass, banjo, fiddle, accordion – and deftly create interiors with props, often singing in hair-raising harmony. There are tweaks: Rice has made Maxim de Winter’s sister Bea and her husband a pair of rip-roaring, huntin-shootin’-shaggin’-drinkin’ County party-animals, at one point executing a spirited sand-dance routine in Arabic costumes and leading a vo-de-o-do outbreak as an Act 2 opener. Lizzie Winkler and Andy Williams give it their all, to general glee, Winkler seeming to channel a hypermanic Edwina Currie in her prime.

The footman Robert (Katy Owen) becomes an elfin, broadly Welsh lad, tearing cheekily around and, in opening scenes, startlingly discussing his mother’s menopause symptoms over the phone to the lodge-keeper (“bit of a dryness in ‘er tuppence”). She’s very funny too. Danvers – Emily Raymond – is perhaps not quite as terrifying as one would hope, possibly due to modern sympathies towards her plainly lesbian passion: but having her entrances heralded by a flapping puppet cormorant is grand. So is the puppet dog, especially when he greets the terrified new bride with a nose up the crotch.

Not that she is terrified by the end. Imogen Sage is a real find, as tremulous and cotton-frocked and virginal as you could wish, but hardening and sexing-up convincingly when she discovers the truth. It’s a genuinely striking transition. So, in its way, is the decline of Maxim – glorious Tristan Sturrock, who was the original lover in Brief Encounter. He has just the casual, haughty, scornful affability and moody hawkish demeanour of a romantic hero in the 1930’s mould. As they say, you would, wouldn’t you? Even though you’d definitely regret it in the end.

His bride doesn’t: even in the genuinely dark,shivery moment when the corpse is raised and laid to rest amid shifting suspicions. The school parties around us shuddered with pleasure. So did I.
Box office 0844 871 7651 to 21 March

then TOURING    Touring Mouse widenationwide to 19 Sept – Kneehigh tour dates on http://tinyurl.com/lqvo5jo

Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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March 14, 2015 · 10:14 pm

THE CUTTING OF THE CLOTH Southwark Playhouse, SE1

A BESPOKE PREMIERE, TRIBUTE TO A TRADE

1953, a tailors’ basement workshop under Dover Street. Five people work eighty hours a week or longer. Out front, unseen, the smooth cutters and measurers greet bespoke clients; down here the “makers” work. In a set of breathtaking immediacy tools, clutter, and casual expertise come alive. Old Spijak the Pole works cross-legged on his bench as his forefathers did, sewing by hand and despising Eric – faster, earning more – for his sewing machine. Each maker has a “kipper”, a female assistant for cuffs and lowlier “ kipper-work”; Spijak’s is his daughter Sydie, Eric’s is Iris. Maurice, Spijak’s tyrannized new apprentice, spends his lunch-hour in the bare washroom writing a play…

For Michael Hastings – who died only in 2011 – was such a teenage apprentice to his father’s trade, though he became a distinguished Royal Court playwright (famous or TOM AND VIV). This slice-of-life play, never before performed, emerges from that youth. But Two’s Company and director Tricia Thorns love forgotten, truthful testimonies of the past, notably with workplace themes: LONDON WALL brought a 1931 law office alive, WHAT THE WOMEN DID gave us WW1 munitions-girls.

So it seems a period piece, larded with snatches of ‘50s pop and references to clients like Macmillan, Charles Clore and the impresario Henry Sherek, who was so large that at one point Sydie and Maurice stand side-by-side as Eric drapes the basted (tacked) jacket over both. But it bites because then, it was social realism: a portrait of a transitional moment. Spijak , powerfully played in an (at first) improbable accent by Andy de la Tour, is devoted to hand-stitching, persecuting his apprentice (James el-Sharawy) for not sitting cross-legged enough, being left-handed and insufficiently Jewish. His craft has, through disappointments we gradually glimpse, become his obsessive sole pride.

Eric (Paul Rider) is light-footed and brisk (all the cast are uncannily convincing as lifelong craftsmen, trained up by a modern bespoke tailor). He gets his joys rather in the unseen toffs he dresses: at one point, glorilusly, puts on Harold Macmillan’s new jacket and demonstrates how he allowed for the sloping shoulders of the Housing Minister , and how it would work when he was on the grouse-moor, with proudly double-lined pockets to put dead birds in. He dreams of Ascot and the Mirabelle and (with a Hancock echo) is never happier than with a Racing Gazette and “the old Puccini knocking the lid off me gramophone”. The two “kippers” are Alexis Caley as the quietly sceptical Sydie – Spijak’s daughter, taken from school at 14 to replace a mother dead from overwork – and Abigail Thaw, a marvellous drop-dead comedienne as Iris who feeds the pigeons and dreams of the seaside. And, it turns out, of Eric.

At first the wealth of detail – facings, inlays, gorges – and the noisy altercations threaten to lag or mystify; but it becomes absorbing, they become your own workmates in the L-shaped intimate room. Brown parcels of work thud down, chucked from the front office, goose-irons and blocks and half-jackets are nimbly manipulated so that the never-still movement of continuing work beneath every line and silence is masterful. We see regrets and griefs, the decline of Spijak, the progress of Maurice from victim to acolyte and beyond. A theme – unexpected in Hastings’ Angry-Young-Man, Osborne-and-Wesker generation – is how sweated labour in a time of change can be perpetuated by the exploited craftsmen’s own deep pride in expertise, and condemn those who could have escaped or embraced new technology to crippling lives. Spijaks’ father “died on a bench in Warsaw, happy doing what he could do best”.

Neither a sentimental threnody for dying craft or a shout of socialist rage , it is idiosyncratic, human, funny, sad. Near the end switchbacks of comedy surround a private tragedy and twist back to a lesser one. Thorns’ direction and the cast handle this brilliantly.

Box Office 020 7407 0234     http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk    to 4 APril

RATING   four  4 Meece Rating

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March 6, 2015 · 10:21 pm

ANTIGONE Barbican, WC2

ANCIENT GRIEF, A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

There are some trademarks here: shaven heads, bare feet, bleak staging, immense and timeless dooms and subtle, insistent soundscape. Ivo van Hove, the Belgian director from Toneelgroep Amsterdam, stunned us lately with Arthur Miller’s A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, and there is a family resemblance to that “perverse purity” in this Sophoclean tragedy , with Juliette Binoche at its heart striding stark with grief .

It is that quality which van Hove’s production most expresses: the grief of Oedipus’ orphaned daughter, desperate for her dead warring brothers and defiantly burying Polyneikes, the reflected sorrow of her sister, Ismene, at her headlong rush towards death; the grief too of King Kreon, blinded by stubborn realpolitic – “the sacrilege that I called public policy” when his own son and wife sink beneath the same dust. The production is spare, slow-paced, mesmerizing, almost incantatory with Anne Carson’s text and Daniel Freitag’s echoing insistent score: Binoche moves with beautiful, unsettling sorrow: at one point her ritual tending and burying of the brother’s dead body is beyond moving.

Yet it is a difficult tone to sustain for a hundred minutes, especially in the Barbican theatre, a space which somehow always manages to feel both cavernous and claustrophobic. Van Hove’s great View from the Bridge was born in the breathing, warm, organic, almost makeshift atmosphere of the Young Vic: the starkness there was a contrast, not so overpowering. And some may find this re-telling slow, underpowered, perhaps less engaging than Polly Findlay’s recent, more detailed production of Sophocles’ tragedy at the Olivier.

For me, though, it struck home: the way the grief crackled through it, the unemphatic message of the courtiers being in modern business-dress, the casual vernacular chorus acting as advisers and as quietly horrorstruck onlookers, the gentle angry power of Binoche. And, not least, Patrick O’Kane’s strong Kreon and a wonderful Queen Eurydike from Kathryn Pogson. There is a moment when suddenly the dead Antigone strolls to the stage’s edge and delivers lines belonging to the messenger, her accent suddenly a little French for the first time: “Citizens…” she calls us, and the moment feels thrillingly direct. A message from the deep long past, a dead hand reaching out in warning and resignation. “Fortunate, unfortunate..no seer can see what’s ahead”.

box office: barbican.org.uk to 28 March
Then touring Europe; BBC filming it for BBC4 later in the year
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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March 4, 2015 · 11:03 pm

GAME Almeida, N1

GAMES WE NEARLY PLAY

It’s the Almeida, Jim, but not as we know it. Hunched on benches in four uneasily intimate soundproofed zones padded with camouflage-print, summoned by a robotic voice and issued with headphones, we watch screens . Then blinds lift and we peer into a real flat where a young couple are exclaiming over the induction hob, the hot tub, the longed-for private space.

Except that it isn’t. The screens show in grainy monochrome a crowded observation space in the flat\s walls, where a Warden admits punters and issues rifles . In detailed CCTV we too see the flat from various angles, always with each sniper’s crosshairs. The residents have got the flat in exchange for being shot repeatedly with tranquillizer darts as they go about daily life. As the horrible boss (Daniel Cerquiera) says to the warden in charge (played with skilful low-key decency by Kevin Harvey) “they’re adults, they’re no’ stupid, they knew what this was”.

And we on our benches, darting our eyes from screen to reality, are complicit. Hard to know whether it is worse to find yourself watching the lovemaking (for it is love, for the young couple, even if just barea-rse ludicrous sex to the voyeurs) or spying on domestic life: hoovering, eating, coming home from another failed job interview…

You can’t fault Mike Bartlett for diversity: fresh from his caricaturish King Charles III he’s back at the Almeida with this hour-long, intense and angrily dystopian show whose themes – picked up artfully in the programme collage – are many. The desperation of young couples for homes and work, the Big Brother culture, pornified sex, TV’s rubberneck interest in poverty, violent screen games, the tendency of showbiz to go a bit further every year, the and the way the ghastly Hollywood glamour of the sniper is irresistible to a soft-living discontented society. Too much? Not really. This deft, brief, unnerving show brings them all together in a “Game” which – at least in the moment – feels real and imminent.

Jodie McNee and Mike Noble play the workless couple, trying for a decent life and a baby. The first time we see them shot we are not yet aware that they will recover. Horribly, the wearying repetition of their collapses continues until it begins to bore the punters and they want more: the extra frisson of shooting their seven-year-old child. He at first is scared, then withdrawn, ironically immersing himself in a violent video game and hiding in cardboard boxes, alienated and ruined. The boss on the screen, his business model fading under pressure of imitators, snarls that it would be better to “make them actually suffer – if this was Holland we could do euthanasia!”.

As the young pair suffer the humiliating price of a home, we see and hear the punters above. The strength of the piece is that it is not cheap agitprop – posh rich people shooting the homeless poor. It’s modern everyman; lads tittering as they aim at the naked girl in the bath, a shrieky hen-party, a bickering middle-aged well-spoken couple, and best (well, worst) of all, a primary schoolteacher relishing the chance to shoot little Liam. So we’re all complicit: even if we don’t yet shoot at the vulnerable, we stare at them through the one-way mirror of the telly and the tabloids. And it corrupts. The last moments of the Warden make that clear, as does the child’s blank-eyed obedience. Nothing physically gruesome: just morally. It’s shock treatment, but Bartlett’s j’accuse says necessary things.

box office 0207 359 4404 to 4 April Partner: Aspen
rating: four
4 Meece Rating

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March 1, 2015 · 1:33 pm

MY MOTHER SAYS I NEVER SHOULD Chipping Norton Theatre

MOTHERHOOD, SECRETS AND LIES

Neatly in time for International Women’s Day and the celebratory WOW-ings on the South Bank, John Terry has had Chipping Norton’s gorgeous galleried interior temporarily reconfigured in the round for a 30th anniversary revival of Charlotte Keatley’s modern classic. Tracking four generations of 20c women from the 1930’s to the late 1980’s, it’s a lovely intimate staging: birdsong and washing-lines and moody piano, and deft unfussy costume-changes as the four actresses dodge around the decades, backwards and forwards. And, occasionally, step out of time to become their child selves – as if they were contemporaries, little girls playing in a ‘waste ground’.

A device which, for a good while, I couldn’t quite bond with: it felt too self-consciously theatrical, and the actual narrative is so strong that at times the brief interruptions can irritate. But looking back, the device has its reasons; not least because the little girls are not sugar and spice but realistically crude and credible, well into mutual blackmail, play-violent fantasies and amateur witchcraft. Maybe it’s a necessary grit to keep the tale from soapiness.

Sue McCormick is a splendid, majestic big Doris as the grandmother, in brisk middle-age as a wartime mother and formidably amiable when in later years she reflects on as ixty-year marriage in which “we never liked each other much” and on the way that “When you’re old and you’re rude they think you’re losing their mind. They never know it’s anger!”. Zara Ramm is her daughter Margaret, growing up proudly postwar to expect to work, but finding only secretarial obedience and compromise. Her own daughter Jackie (Jessica Guise) is a sixties kid demanding more and getting it, but still unable to handle single motherhood and reluctantly handing over her baby to Margaret, with the hateful convention of the day which made her a pretend “big sister”.

Both are delicate, touching, subtle performances, treating the difference of age and era adeptly. The hardest job perhaps goes to Charlotte Croft as Rosie, because we see her only between the ages of ten and sixteen, largely bratty and eventually unforgiving of her real mother. Despite the older women’s vast obvious affection she has a hard time being likeable. But it’s a lively performance, and maybe the obnoxiousness is necessary for credibility. Anyway, altogether this absorbing evening captures perfectly many things most women will recognize; the half-needy, half-resentful maternal bond, the preciousness of objects and ideas handed down, the bafflement of each generation at the next one’s freedoms. And the moment of the rabbit-decorated baby dress is electric: a dangerous secret hovering behind a domestic banality. Wonderfully played.

box office 01609 642350 to 11 March
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 26, 2015 · 12:23 am

MAN AND SUPERMAN Lyttelton, SE1

BRAVADO, BRIGANDS, FABIANS, LIFE-FORCES…..

It is a truth universally acknowledged that George Bernard Shaw was a bit of a windbag. At no point did the words “Less is more”, or “Show don’t tell” impinge on his exuberant, contrarian torrents of prose, famously difficult for actors to learn and deliver at a speed necessary to get everyone home before dawn. Of his joyfully verbose oeuvre no play beats the sheer size of this five-act marathon, even though sometimes it is played without the prolonged dream-sequence. In which the main protagonist, during a restless night on a bare mountain with brigands, turns into Don Juan in hell and argues with Lucifer about everything, including the life-force which drives men towards enslavement by women and the mystery of unique self-aware consciousness in the human animal (yes indeed: GBS was fretting about The Hard Problem a full century before Tom Stoppard’s adventure in neuroscience, running in the Dorfman next door).

Fortunately, it is also true that the National Theatre has the capability to throw at this huge, sprawling, talky-talk play everything it needs to make a night of it. Not only the peerless and apparently indefatigable Ralph Fiennes as Tanner, the revolutionary anarchist intellectual perma-talker and reluctant guardian of Ann (a sparky, spiky Indira Varna) who is determined to marry him. We also get a nice Desert Island Discs joke to start with, and a glorious design by Christopher Oram, with library, carriage-yard, functioning car, craggy mountain and Spanish bower garden all framed in misty panes, behind which play vague cloudy symbols of whatever it’s all about at any particular moment. They also make a nicely blank scene in Hell for the Don-Juan interlude, though in preview it is rumoured that Satan’s cocktail-shaker table came up through the trapdoor with a bit of a crash. No probs on press night.

Director Simon Godwin also cannily gives us modern dress and a few verbal updates, and accords free, not to say licentious, comic rein to Tim McMullan as the depressed lovesick mountain brigand chief and a hyper-cool Satan in skinny jeans. McMullan is hilarious in both roles, making the most of Shaw’s ferocious playfulness to the point when – as he reminisces in a heavy Spanish accent about being a Jewish waiter at the Savoy and tearfully reads out his poetry – you start to reflect that Monty Python’s Flying Circus was not really doing anything that hadn’t been done in 1905.

Not that we’re supposed to be reflecting on any such thing, but on the multiple philosophical-biological-mystical-socialist points which Shaw is machine-gunning us with via the astonishing Fiennes, with dashes of Nietzsche, streaks of idealism, gobbets of cynicism, grumpy political paradox and some bafflingly upside-down feminism laced with memories of Much Ado as our Beatrice and Benedick finally – after three and a half rattling hours – fall into one another’s arms, cursing.

There you are. Brilliantly done, keeping us entertained against (frankly) considerable odds. Fiennes is a marvel. So is McMullan, and Nicholas le Prevost as Ramsden . I leave you though, in this election season, with a nice line from Lucifer. “Englishmen will never be slaves. They are free to do everything that the Government and Public Opinion allow them to”.

From a somewhat rowdy post-football 2339 train towards Manningtree, good night.

Box Office 020 7452 3000 in rep to 17 May . Pretty sold out BUT –
NT LIVE in cinemas nationwide on 14 May http://www.ntlive.com


Rating Four 4 Meece Rating

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February 24, 2015 · 10:43 pm

KILL ME NOW Park Theatre

GRIMLY COMIC, NOBLY TOUGH

For a young actor to play a severely disabled, facially twisted, speech-impaired young man in an electric wheelchair cannot – in this week of Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar – fail to evoke comparisons. Here, close up for a hundred emotionally and physically gruelling minutes, Oliver Gomm delivers the performance of his life. In movement, face, and urgent distorted voice he is – I mean this as high praise – every bit as unsettling as the real thing. Which means that he evokes in us “normal” onlookers, unless we are practised carers, an authentic degree of pity, unease, and awkwardness. Until (again as in real life) we grow to know and like the determined inhabitant of that body. We see him first naked, lifted from his bath slippery and jerking and swearing, an angry teenager newly sexual and despairing at his lot. By the end Joey is the wisest of them all: no angel indeed but shiningly human.

In Canadian Brad Fraser’s tough, unnerving play Gomm is Joey, who is looked after by his widowed father Jake , once a writer, with assistance from his aunt Twyla (Charlotte Harwood), the younger sister Jake raised after their mother died. Greg Wise, back onstage after a long gap, puts heart and anger and warm furious truth into the role: he makes it clear that Jake has come to think himself irreplaceable, too lovingly controlling and immersed: “I have a severely disabled son; I have no self”.

Interaction between the father and son is wrenchingly real, both in affection and anger. Not least as Jake (who is carrying on a relief affair every Tuesday with married Robyn) has to assuage the boy’s desperate erections. An easier relationship is of Joey with a schoolmate Rowdy, a cheeky, sexually adventurous “retarded” victim of foetal alcohol syndrome. He is entertainingly and authentically played by Jack McMullen, at first as an irresponsible nuisance obsessed with online porn, gradually emerging into decency as he becomes useful to the household “smelling of piss and despair”. He has to be useful because – Fraser really piles it on here – Jake himself has a fall and is succumbs to a spinal neurological condition which rapidly reduces him to a state only slightly less crippled than his son. Thus Greg Wise, like Gomm, has to perform a physically intense and agonizing change of shape and movement.

Do I make it sound unremittingly hellish? Not at all. Just over an hour in I did wonder whether the author – and director Braham Murray – were going to run into the sand, but despite a slight sag as more sexual issues are played out, they never do. Partly because Brad Fraser gives Joey sudden fabulous one-liners, which Gomm gloriously shouts, reducing the surrounding audience to uncontrollable laughter. He is every angry teenager and emerging bright young man, an essence concentrated by his entrapment in a jerking body which can’t even masturbate. The irrepressible and kindly Rowdy fixes him up, and strikes up an even more “inappropriate” arrangement with Aunt Twyla. (“Mildly retarded and well hung. Few can resist” he says smugly, causing another explosion of shocked mirth).

It is brilliantly shocking, yet deeply kind: lurching through the worst vicissitudes of unlucky lives towards a tragic but redemptive ending. For retarded or not, Rowdy’s right: you gotta fight, because nobody else will. Though I did reflect that if the play was British, its humanity would be diluted with political ranting against benefit cuts. Oddly, the fact that it isn’t makes you all the more inclined to rant against them yourself. Such people deserve everything.

box office 0207 8706876 to 29 March
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 24, 2015 · 9:29 am

OKLAHOMA! Royal and Derngate, Northampton and TOURING

KI YIP I YAY

It’s back. Again. But worth the buggy-ride: brightly directed by Rachel Kavanaugh and choreographed by Drew McOnie with athleticism, wit and inventiveness: ballet, ragtime and brawling naturalism (no tap this time) makes that element so striking that some of the London dance critics would do well to stir out of town and have a look.
The casting is a delight. The first few sung words are from offstage – Oh what a beautiful morning! – and when he appears against the sunrise gap in Francis O’Connor’s barn set, Ashley Day sure is the purdiest chap ever to wear leather chaps. Sings like a lark, insouciant and relaxed, as Laurey, (Charlotte Wakefield), stumps around in a fierce divided-skirt, her pure high soprano adding innocence to her tomboy mien. And we’re away.

The septuagenarian Rodgers and Hammerstein blockbuster itself is almost too familiar for comfort. In any revival, the first act must navigate round the perilous fact that every single tune – they come so thick and fast that there is barely time for a few sentences between numbers – is achingly familiar from Radio 2’s more vintage moments, not to mention lift muzak and call-waiting . So the moment Laurie and Curley swing into “People will say we’re in love” your attention threatens to wander, however good they are. A period of aw-shucks good natured Old West hokum is of course necessary, and Belinda Lang’s robust, sharp-edged Aunt Ellen is a joy to watch, efficiently tubbing and mangling an entire household wash in scene one. Lucy May Barker’s Ado Annie shakes it up nicely too with her I Cain’t say no: here’s a deeply engaging comedienne, who even vouchsafes us a flash of her robust pioneer panties beneath the froth of gingham petticoat.

But the teasing merriment of the first fifty minutes is needed to make the contrast with this show’s – always oddly unexpected – darkening as Curly beards the lonely hired man Jud in his hovel lined with dirty pictures and teases him that he should hang himself to get any sympathy.

I have seen this scene done with ironic lightness, which the lyrics certainly permit (“laid to rest, his hands upon his chest, his fingernails have never been so clean” etc). But Kavanaugh allows its full perplexing nastiness, and Nic Greenshields as Jud Fry is a remarkable presence; immense next to the elfin Ashley Day, stooping, black-bearded and threatening (among his last few parts I see are Big Jule, Big Davy, Big Mac and The Beast. Casting directors look up nervously, sigh with relief and tick the Big Bastard box). But he is more than a hunk: Greenshields anchors the conflict of the plot. His immense baritone is reverberating and dark, his despairing solo of murderous loneliness and desire chills, threat and pathos mingling unnervingly. As for the dream ballet in which Laurey’s unspoken fears of rape are wordlessly enacted, McOnie and Kavanaugh move the mood startlingly from athletic, ingenious cowboy fun with cylindrical straw-bales to an explicit terror of depravity and violated innocence. Charlotte Wakefield throws herself into this with real power.

In fact, for all the hokey, it is tougher than the last West End version. But the wit keeps it rattling irresistibly along with a fringe on top, never slackening pace. Ki-yip-i-yay, Oklahoma, OK! And much as I love the West End, as seat prices there go stratospheric it is good that classic musicals with top production values, big casts and solid live bands (note also Sheffield’s fabulous Anything Goes) are richocheting gaily round the regions to be seen by anyone who can raise as little as £ 16.

BOX OFFICE 01604 624811 http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk to Saturday 28 Feb
then TOURING to 8 August, Wolverhampton next!
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 20, 2015 · 9:37 am

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FANNY HILL Bristol Old Vic

FIFTY SHADES OF FANNY

A crane, giant crates. Foggy docklands, two hundred years ago. Foppishly approving Britain’s mercantile culture, Voltaire coos “You are so moderne!” Up pops Caroline Quentin, a Fanny Hill past her best and on her uppers, offering to scratch his itch. The Frenchman flees. She grumbles that customers are getting fussy (“You don’t need teeth to -“). Thus we are launched into April de Angelis’ unexpected version of John Cleland’s 1748 fictional memoir of “A Woman Of Pleasure”, directed with elegant mischievous glee by Michael Oakley.

What does a modern woman and innovative theatre want with this notorious 18c porn? The ultimate male fantasy of a tart besotted with her “amorous adventures”?  In an age of even more vicious commodification of women’s bodies, what can it give us? Absolute f——ing delight, thats what. Here’s a nonpareil of subtle feminism, a humane revisionism of pornified sexual politics. It is so rich in womanly scornfulness that at times I feared for the men at the matinee, surrounded by female hilarity.  Certainly the most raunchy depiction of a rampant phallus is given to a female forearm with a stocking on it, filched from the cowering bare leg of the nearest bloke.
     

De Angelis’ structure has old Fanny accosted by Spark, a Cleland figure (Mawgan Gyles) , who reckons there’s money in a book. But Fanny can remember little beyond “a blur of bedpans and blokes buttoning up”. So she recruits two younger tarts, the cynical Louisa (Phoebe Thomas ) and the demure little Swallow (a fabulous breakthrough by young Gwyneth Keyworth) . They act out her fantasy story, assisted by the mercilessly bulled Mr Dingle (Nick Barber), who is hanging round the docks after losing his money in shipping. Barber, who plays a series of clients, deserves a prize for willing abasement: the urgent absurdity of male desire has rarely been so pitilessly evoked.

So as Quentin scribbles, directs and plays various Madams, Swallow romanticizes and Louisa wearily cooperates. It is very, very funny at times: the author gleefully expands on Cleland’s terrible euphemisms for body parts – the “Sweet seat of exquisite sensation” having “sparks of desire tossed onto its kindling” as it accepts the “beloved guest, the love-truncheon, the Essential Specific” . There are assorted absurd alliterations of erotic execution (dammit, it’s catching). For as Fanny herself says exapseratedly of her ‘mincing metaphors” , repetition is inevitable. “Words like joys, ardour, ecstasies, flatten like an old mattress”.

Any fear that the play would do the same is unfounded. Hilarious as it is  to see Quentin deploying matter-of-fact matronliness as she ducks and dives round the edges of acceptability and makes the guys wriggle, the play is threaded through with solid sadness, thanks to Rosalind Steele’s onstage fiddle and pipe and the cast’s breaks into broadsheet ballads. And in the second act, after a remarkably choreographed marching-chanting-heaving orgy, the exploitative male ‘author’ reappears to meet the darker eroticism of Quentin going at him with a rope and stick and real anger. And when both her girl-puppets refuse to cooperate in the fantasy of the happy hooker , up come the real unmentionables. Rural starvation driving girls to city streets, pox, infanticide, hangings. And what seemed a retro romp delivers, sharply, the most topical of messages to our own trafficking, twerking, phone-porn century. Women are not toys for sale.

box office 0117 987 7877 bristololdvic.org.uk to 7 March
rating: four 4 Meece Rating

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February 17, 2015 · 11:16 pm

HARVEY Birmingham Repertory Theatre

DOWN WITH REALITY! UP WITH THE RABBIT!

“I’ve wrestled with reality for all of my life” says our hero roundly “and I’m happy to say that I’ve finally won out over it”.
It says a lot about the mood of 1945 that Mary Chase’s play won the Pulitzer. A time weary of wartime realities and needing a laugh, pixillated by the scientific mysteries of Einstein and the philosophical uncertainties of Matter, nervous of know-all psychiatry in the age of the lobotomy… The clues are all there in this featherlight charm of a cheer-up farce. And cheer it does in Lindsay Posner’s Birmingham production, lovingly staged a Peter McKintosh’s double-revolve set. The opulent library turns into a private psychiatric clinic and – most affectionately period-perfect of all – into Charlie’s Bar.

If the classic film passed you by – as it did me – the plot is simple to relate. Elwood P.Dowd, heir to an affluent house, lives with his socialite sister Veta and her discontented daughter Myrtle Mae, who she needs to launch on society. This plan is jeopardized by the embarrassing fact that Elwood goes everywhere with an invisible, 6ft 3 rabbit called Harvey, who he first hallucinated one night after a drinking session. Veta wants him committed to a private asylum; cross-purposes develop (beautifully done, just this side of incredibility) and she gets locked up instead. On her release a chase across the city culminates in the senior psychiatrist himself becoming unhinged, and Veta not far from it.

Given the utter benignity of the rabbit’s familiar, this is unsurprising . Why be sane when you can be a carefree radiator of innocent joy? James Dreyfus catches Elwood’s mixture of affable kindliness and potty conviction, sociably open to his family and random new friends (even matchmaking) while gesturing and chatting to Harvey with perfect ease . He’s a delight. But the central comedy engine of the piece is Veta – certainly when played , with perfect tittupping neurosis and fabulous comedic explosions, by Maureen Lipman. Her account of being manhandled by the beefy male nurse (Youssef Kerkour) has her quivering with outrage from dishevelled wig to ripped stocking. “He sat me in a tub of water.” Lipman says in her refined tones, then comes back with full-strength satisfaction “- BUT I FOUGHT!”. Her drop-dead timing wins even the simplest line. When the pompous judge (Desmond Barrit) says soothingly “This is your daughter and I am your lawyer” her snapped “I know which is which!” brings the house down. Magic.

Yet it isn’t laugh-a-line farce, and its real heart lies not only in Veta’s final conversion (again, Lipman convinces and delights) but in a gentle scene in Charlie’s bar where Ellwood expands with sweet smugness on his barfly lifestyle: enjoying the music, sinking highballs, introducing new people to Harvey. Just chillin’, as we say now. The echo of that yearning is in the last scene, when the once pompous psychiatrist (David Bamber) drunkenly begs Ellwood to ask Harvey for the life he really wants: a woodland in Akron, some cold beers and a last fling with a quiet woman. A weary, 1940 world’s dream.

box office 0121 236 4455 http://www.birmingham-rep.co.uk to 21 feb
then TOURING – London in March! Touring Mouse wide

rating: four
4 Meece Rating

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February 12, 2015 · 4:32 pm

JEFFERSON’S GARDEN Watford Palace Theatre

INDEPENDENCE AND SLAVERY: A TALE WORTH RETELLING

Christian is a Maryland Quaker, shoemaker son of immigrants who came to the New World for freedom to worship in peaceable ‘quietude’. But the 1770s were a time of indignation, colonial revolt against the distant British Parliament; “No taxation without representation!”. The young man joins the fight, falls in love with a slave, Susannah; betrays his family’s strict principle by joining the killing battles, gives his loyalty to a new father-figure, Thomas Jefferson, and finds himself at last caught in another betrayal. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s new play, premiered at this enterprising theatre under Bridget Larmour, is both history and intimate saga.

At its heart is the great fault-line in the American story: the fact that the 18th century revolutionary War of Independence, fought in the name of liberty, failed to abolish slavery in the South. The British colonial masters had promised liberty to any slave who fought on their side; that didn’t happen, because they lost. Among the victorious rebels, many idealists expected that the black plantation workers would enjoy the new republican democracy. They didn’t get that either. For all the idealism of Thomas Jefferson, the political need to keep the coalition of states together won; indeed he himself, author of that resounding declaration of self-evident truths and liberties, ran his beloved garden and plantation with slaves. Well-treated slaves, almost family: but not free. It was over a century before abolition. The bitterness and division in American society is felt to this day.

Wertenbaker’s play – sparely set, the cast unfussedly doubling and trebling roles, is not as great a piece as her “Our Country’s Good” (shortly to be revived at the National). The first act, the war, sometimes unrolls too slowly. But the second, where the contradiction and compromise of the political conclusion begins to erode the confidence and happiness of Christian and Susannah, is gripping and real. There are some superb performances: notably David Burnett as Christian himself and William Hope as his real father and as Jefferson himself. Julia St John is superb in dignity as the Quaker matriarch and very funny as Nelly Rose, ageing southern belle in Jefferson’s still-privileged household; Mimi Ndiweni as Susannah has a sharp, fresh anger. All nine cast sometimes form a historic chorus, speaking or singing, explaining or regretting; most movingly at the end they break into fragments of other liberty-songs – French, Greek, Arab, African, right up to today. We perhaps remember the Civil War better, in this country, courtesy of Gone with the Wind. But this is a tale worth telling.

box office 01923 225671 to 21 feb watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 10, 2015 · 4:35 pm

DI AND VIV AND ROSE Vaudeville, WC1

THE GIRLS ARE BACK…

There are not many all-woman plays around, nor many about female friendship; nor do many reflect the particular, unique long-term comradeship which begins in the cheerful domestic squalor of university sharers, and stretches over decades of fairly ordinary lives. Having known those things myself, I was thrilled by Amelia Bullmore’s play when it emerged at Hampstead, recognizing – from an age before Facebook – the intensity of same-sex student houses-shares when conversations were, mostly between those whose grimy mattresses were closest. My younger companion, interestingly, recognized it less. In the internet age they can, at least mentally, get out more without spending money…

The play takes us from larky beginnings as three girls share a house, to a downbeat end when only two remain as custodians of a common past. And actually it is highly refreshing (as is also the case in the new Stoppard) to see a diversity of young women presented not as types relative to men, nor as victims or campaigners. Just people, as likely to mess up their lives as men are. It is often funny, sometimes touching, clever in its staging. Tamzin Outhwaite reprises her fabulous Amazonian role as Di – gay, sporty, the noblest and most faithful and straightforward of the three. Jenna Russell is ditzy, sexy, larky maternal Rose, always making soup or love; Samantha Spiro the most ambitious, a feminist sociologist who “dresses like it was the war”, and dreams of working with a Paglia-esque New York academic on the oppressive history of the corset (it apparently “constricted women’s digestive tract so much that their faecal matter resembled that of rabbits”). Their cohabitation is lovingly drawn through arguments, launderette rotas, manic dancing comradeship and a catastrophe which drives them closer together.

In the second half, set more barely, time accelerates over 25 years and a series of meetings bringing news, attrition and conflict. There are some great lines – without spoiling it I can quote one character worrying that marriage is square while another responds “Marrying an Algerian gardener isn’t square, not if you’re a single mother with Japanese twins”. There are major jolts of fortune – one might, in the last ten minutes, argue that there is one too many – and the balance of friendship is tested. Anna Mackmin’s direction is fast and neat, with framed moments carrying the action on without scenic fuss. It deserved its West End transfer.

box office 0844 412 4663 to 23 May

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 7, 2015 · 2:06 pm

PROGRESS Avenue Theatre, Ipswich

MARTYRDOM, MONARCHY, AND MOVING ON

Summer1561. Queen Elizabeth is coming to town: feasts are prepared, the people excited, and Peter Moone the tailor is preparing a play with his fellow workmen from around the docks. The young monarch meanwhile flirts with Robert Dudley, keeps a necessary hauteur with her sycophantic chaplain, and admits “there is a jollity to be found outside London”.

This nimble play by Joanna Carrick (who also directs) launches the fine little theatre built by the Heritage Lottery fund for her Red Rose Chain, a company focused on local, community outreach and social concern. And I admit that given that context, and despite the success of her 2013 Ann Boleyn production at the Tower , I expected little more than a low-budget local diversion, a romp.

I was wrong. Although there is a wild Morris-dance and some larky exchanges, what Carrick delivers is more: an intimate, layered history-play, local and accessible indeed but (like the RSC’s Written on the Heart) engaging with seriousness and sorrow in the emotional cruelties of the Reformation. The cast of six each double – with sophisticated rapid open costume changes – between Ipswich locals and royal entourage, which in certain poignant moments adds a sense both of the gulf between them and their mutual dependence.

Pause for background history (my one criticism is that it could perhaps be made a tiny bit clearer , maybe in a prologue). Move on half a generation from Mantel’s Wolf Hall: Henry VIII’s Reformation was complete by his death in 1547, after a decade in which daily life and devotions changed radically. Protestantism was imposed by law and the sword, but undeniably many people adhered to it emotionally and patriotically. When in 1554 Queen Mary and her Spanish husband restored Catholicism, inquisition and compulsion saw around three hundred burnt alive for refusing to return to Romish ways. Famously Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley – but also dozens of ordinary men and women. Many were in Suffolk, nine burnings here in Ipswich.

So when the new, Protestant Queen Elizabeth made this “Progress” three years later, the memories were raw and hopes of stability fragile. Carrick uses real local figures of the time, including Moone, to express a community still scarred. Some had hid from the inquisitors, some like him lied to save their lives, many saw the burnings. Elsie Bennett’s sad silent Lizzie, the orphan seamstress, has the devastating line “I wish my mother had lied like you”. Bennett doubles, beautifully, as the spirited, playful, determined Queen. And there’s irony and hope in the title’s double meaning: these people, like us in any age, need to move forward. What’s past can’t be undone.

The players’ preparations and desire to celebrate mingle with an undercurrent of unhappiness: community rifts raw from this recent horror. They are interwoven with scenes between Elizabeth and her glorious Dudley (Daniel Abbott) and – in one dark and desperate lamplit scene – with the historic fact that during those Ipswich days Lady Catherine Grey, of the Queen’s entourage, was revealed to have made a treasonous marriage.

And it absolutely works. Moments of a-capella harmony and homely jokes bring the street people’s world to life; individual griefs and angers are pushed down in common purpose. All the cast – Bennett, Abbott, Robert Jackson, Tom McCarron, Lucy Telleck and David Redgrave – handle their double personae with ease (Suffolk accents immaculate, I can affirm). The movement is particularly good (Rachael McCormick choreographs). And while the playlet they finally perform is suitably rude-mechanical, hairs stand up on your neck at the culminating ballad remembering “When two women in Ipswich Town, in the fire did drown…”
As bigotries, beheadings and burnings return to the news, its force redoubles.

Box office http://www.redrosechain.com to 28 feb
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 6, 2015 · 10:27 am

THE LAST OF THE DEMULLINS Jermyn St, SW1

AN OLD FIGHT HONOURED

Sick of the patriarchy, girls? Take a safari to 1908 and visit the real thing. Witness the elephantine authority of Hugo deMullin, last of a line of beautifully pointless country squires, telling his 36-year-old daughter that “the only possible independence for a woman is that she should depend on her husband. Or nearest male relative”. Thrill to her refusal to come home and his brisk “My dear, that is not a decision that rests with you”. Peering into the tiger-enclosure and tremble at Harriet Thorpe’s Mrs Clouston, a figure who makes Lady Bracknell seem laid-back, excoriating the modern young woman’s taste for “Bye-Cycling” (God bless Edwardian pronunciation gags).

And here is Hester, the younger sister: Maya Wasowicz a slender streak of grey frock, her narrow pale face sorrowful as a lost lurcher, yearning for the curate’s embrace; and here is her elder sister Janet, Charlotte Powell sleek and frisky as a raccoon, returning with a sailor-suited child in tow eight years after escaping through a window and hi-tailing it to London to raise her illegitimate child and run a hat shop, outraging decent society by suing aristocratic debtors.

These splendid revivals do, at times, feel slightly like a trip to the zoo. But St John Hankin’s play about The Woman Problem, which was exercising the Ibsen generation, is well worth restaging for the first time in a century. Joshua Stamp-Simon as director wisely eschews traditional intervals and gallops through a highly entertaining 95 minutes, against one of those elaborate panelled drawing-room sets which the tiny Jermyn, with miraculous cheek, constructs against all odds. There is a great deal of hilarity, not least in a magnificently milked moment when a furious family row has to be suspended for an agonizingly long time while the maid rather slowly lights the lamps.

There’s nice sharp social horror moments as when the innocent child asks his grandfather what the ancestors in the portraits did for a living. And some fine performances, not least from Roberta Taylor as the poor mother, torn between keeping her choleric invalid husband from dropping dead from affront, and her touching affection for the prodigal daughter. But there are also some unexpected points. The lover, it turns out, was seven years younger than Janet in that romantic fling, and she scorned to “trap a schoolboy” into marriage. We learn that he too is trapped, by a domineering father and conventional duty.

It ends, as didactic comedies of the period often do (think Wilde or Shaw) with naturalistic dialogue receding as the heroine delivers a speech-cum- manifesto. Yet interestingly, that is not so much about the independent career she has established but about a different female right: the one denied to poor withering Hester who mustn’t marry the lowly curate because she is a deMullin. That final female right Janet declares is for a woman to be made love to before she fades, and win the pain and joy and fulfilment of motherhood. Not quite the 2015 feminist manifesto, but stirring stuff. And Janet still has the hat-shop, after all: a 1908 single mother with her own business. Result! I am rather falling for St John Hankin.

Box Office: 020 7287 2875 http://www.eticketing.co.uk/jermynstreettheatre
to 28 Feb
rating four
4 Meece Rating

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January 28, 2015 · 11:02 pm

THE HARD PROBLEM Dorfman, NT SE1

SIR TOM STOPPARD’S NEW PLAY. WOW.

 
Is there more to human beings than organic goo? Can brain imaging explain why we judge, reason, imagine, generate metaphor and language? That is the “hard problem’ of the title. To the evo-bio-psychology tutor Spike (Damian Molony) it is one to close down rapidly, with equations. To him science knows – or will know soon – every particle of what a person is. To his pupil Hilary, moving on to work at the Krohl Institute of brain science – the question is as open and deep as a particular wound her heart bears from six years before. No grey cells explain her inchoate need, shocking to Spike, to pray each night to something unknown.“Explain sorrow” she challenges, and takes her sorrow into her academic quest into consciousness and feeling. Challenging the arrogant Amal (Parth Thakerar) who says computers play chess undistinguishably from humans she asks “Can you make a computer that minds losing?“

 

 

Overhead hangs a tangle of neon, synapses and flashing connections, an abstract brain. Below it on a sparsely set stage, a hundred minutes see six years of conversation and career, encounters and arguments and funny lines (Sir Tom seems to know exactly how ambitious academics jockey for position) . Because the Institute is the toy of a hedge-fund billionaire Krohl, its research parallels neatly with the work of his ‘quants’. Terse phone calls suggest market jitters and crashes, since as Amal says, when predicting market unpredictables you just can’t make a computer as stupid as people are. Spike’s analyses of risk-behaviour through saliva tests at the world poker championships find great favour, though, as a way towards the goal of “Monetizing the hormonal state of your trading desk”. Nice.

 

 
But it is not ENRON, nor one of this author’s drier mind-games. The human connections are given precise, delicate weight: youthful brilliance is not necessarily balanced with emotional stability. And it is the weight of feeling at the play’s heart which makes it shine. For this premiere marks three occasions: Tom Stoppard’s first play in a decade and Nicholas Hytner’s last hurrah as NT Artistic director, but also the consolidating evidence that Olivia Vinall as Hilary is a proper, central, serious talent. Not just (though she is) a creature of pale ethereal beauty, but a force fit to hold a play together. She has been Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia: it is a revelation to see her playing a modern young professional woman with a fierce and troubled intelligence, dartingly sharp timing and a visible, unsentimentally profound private sorrow.

 

 
Which is resolved, because it is a proper story, taking a path through almost fairytale coincidence (another philosophical-mathematical puzzle). And beyond her luminous performance there are enjoyable ironies: the way that researchers’ own irrational altruisms skew their findings, and the sly demonstration that those who heartily believe that everything is materially explicable and that there is no altruism are the ones who – er – don’t personally seem able to display any. Whereas Hilary, and Jonathan Coy as her immediate boss, search for the invisible with varying degrees of human grace. That I like. Maybe it’s a girl thing.

 

 
So a fine hundred minutes. Near the end, at a revelatory dinner-party scene, the diagrammatic neon tangle overhead becomes a firework display. Not inapt for this last rocket of the Hytner NT Age of Gold.

 

 

Box Office 020 7452 3000 to April
NT LIVE in cinemas nationwide on 16th April.
Dorfman Partner: Neptune Investment Management

Rating Four  4 Meece Rating

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January 27, 2015 · 11:25 pm

DARA Lyttelton, SE1

THE MUGHAL EMPIRE:  MURDER, FAITH AND FAMILY  

 

OK, I admit it, I feared “Important and Worthy”. Or, possibly, important-worthy-yet-picturesque. A reasonable, if ungenerous fear, with the author Shaheed Nadeem of Ajoka theatre a Pakistani human-rights campaigner and prisoner of conscience, and his 17c history-play billed as politically relevant to the subcontinent’s history (including the irresponsible Partition of India and Pakistan, still tormenting South Asia) . I should have had more faith. Tanya Ronder was adapting, a Hytner-hunch had chosen it, and many of the cast are the splendid ensemble from BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS , also still running.

 

 

The early part of the play, dreamily attractive as it is – latticed screens, flowing veils, Mughal magnificence, turbans, peacock feathers, scimitars – did have me floating free for a while, though Nadia Fall directs with enough clarity – and the programme notes help – to explain the 1659 struggle between the sons of Shah Jahan (a choleric little Vincent Ebrahim) for the imperial throne. .  Spirited flashbacks, signalled in text projections, kept the characters distinct : the ultimately victorious Aurungzeb (Sargon Yelda) who never felt a favourite son, and Dara (Zubin Varla) the mystic and poet he defeats. Not least, in a nice folkloric detail, by bribing Dara’s general to persuade the leader to leave his elephant for a nippier horse, whereon his troops saw the empty howdah and panicked. The sisters, equally at odds, are spiritedly played by Nathalie Armin and Anneika Rose; a younger brother is recruited, then murdered, by Aurungzeb.

 
But suddenly, this set-up complete, we came to the showtrial of the captured Dara for apostasy from Islam. And wham! The play takes off, reveals its molten core as a demonstration of spiritual idealism and argument against authoritarian religious pedantry, with slamming echoes into our own century. It feels like seeing Tyndale in Written On the Heart, or More in A Man for All Seasons or St Joan: all who held to faith and died for it down the ages and the dramatic canon.

 

 

As Dara’s interest in Hindu scriptures is cited against him by the positively Cromwellian prosecutor – Prasanna Puwanarajah – Varla rises in dignity and energy in a riveting half-hour trial scene. “I did not know that being a Muslim meant being ignorant of other cultures…Who cares which door you open to come into the Light …at the centre of every blossom is honey, the rest is ritual. Allow all faiths to flourish!”. Even the detail strikes home hard today – “The Prophet never intended women should hide behind screens and veils’ he scoffs, it was a practical privacy in his busy house, but others copied it. Neither, he scoffs, is the death penalty for apostasy in the Koran, only the Hadiths – which are written by fallible humans.

 

 
No surprise that on tour in India and Pakistan it has been shocking, but welcomed, a blast of greathearted spirituality in an age of bigotry: dramatically safe in a distant past but urgent today. After that superbly balanced, long, mounting scene and the inevitable sentence, the shorter last act plays quieter. There is an under-tale of smaller lives (surprising , sad and complex,Chook Sibtain as the imperial eunuch has his moment). There is a brutality, and a solemn smoky haunting of ghosts gathered around Aurungzeb like those which torment Richard III at Bosworth. The final flash- forward to his deathbed is pure Shakespeare: remorse, longing for love, mortality, and acceptance of how fallible  are those whose willpower shapes nations.

 
Box Office: 020 7452 3000 to 5 March
Rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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January 23, 2015 · 11:42 pm

BAD JEWS St James’ Theatre, SW1

BRAVE, BARNSTORMING AND CERTAINLY NOT BAD

 

 

With Holocaust Memorial day imminent, the Paris murders fresh in mind and anti-Semitism rising across Europe, can you really put on a chokingly, shockingly hilarious comedy about a family at loggerheads over Judaism? Set on the evening after a Holocaust survivor’s funeral? Yes. Joshua Harmon’s wise, fearless 100-minute piece is built around lifestyle conflicts most modern Western Jews will ruefully acknowledge. But by its very intimacy it touches universal tensions: family, class, money, sexual envy, feminism, racism, self-righteousness, and pure bad temper. The kind which only simmers between warring relatives who will never in a million years, admit how similar they actually are.

 
It is set, and pacily directed by Michael Longhurst for the Theatre Royal Bath,, in a tiny New York apartment . Because of the funeral three cousins – college students – have to camp in one room after the funeral of the beloved grandfather. Daphna (Jenna Augen) is passionately observant, more than her parents indeed: they christened her Diana. She plans to move to Israel, join the army and study as a rabbi. Augen is perfect: a vulture of righteousness, she swoops around under a brilliantly unmanageable thatch of curly black hair which in itself enrages her older cousin Liam (christened Shlomo and keen to forget it).

 

 
Liam has a shiksa girlfriend, sweet blonde Melody (Gina Bramhill) and missed the funeral because “his iPhone fell off the ski-lift” during their Spring Break in Aspen. This provides another excuse for Daphna to berate him, though when he is out of the room she deploys equal efficiency in cross-examining the hapless girlfriend. Her gift for rapid offence means that within mere minutes she happily concludes that coming from a white family – Irish-Polish-German-Scottish American – Melody from Delaware is complicit in the genocide of Native Americans. Worse, she has a tattoo, enabling Daphna to say ominously that her grandfather had one too “but that was different”. Audience gasps. Poor Melody, a pitch-perfect innocent, is a failed opera student who, deliciously, works in charity admin “introducing underprivileged children to the City’s architectural past’ . She is conned into the worst rendering of “Summertime” ever heard on a stage. Bramhill , whose voice betrays that in real life she sings beautifully, wrecks it to perfection.

 

 
Secular, atheist Liam detests Daphna and Ilan Goodman delivers his rage with the ferocity of a velociraptor, his energy a mirror-image of her own, did they but know it. But in a curious, clever interlude the three cousins suddenly remember a family anecdote and fall into helpless shared hysterics, leaving the puzzled Melody looking on. The respite is brief. The issue is who inherits one small, significant object: a token whose story is from the Auschwitz years. Daphna feels entitled, as the only “real” Jew; Liam has it. His younger brother Jonah claims not to mind. That is a quietly important part: Joe Coen has to spend most of the play saying “Whatever” and “I don’t -“ or lurking miserably on the sofabed; but his body language expresses eloquent, important discomfort. He is the vital fourth wheel as this rattling, raging vehicle heads downhill to disaster.

 

 

There is ferocious, gasp-inducing language, up to and including lines like “Don’t you Holocaust me!” “Shiksa cunt!” and “barbed-wire-hopping, Uzi-toting superJew”. Yet it is not a cruel or cynical play. We are aware that the hellcat Daphna is privately unhappy, clinging to her racial and religious heritage like a liferaft; that Liam may want to marry out and embrace atheism but did truly, painfully love and pity the grandfather. We bite our lips wondering whether Melody’s sweet nature will survive in this family. And Jonah ? Ah, his final moment is beautiful, and both hurts and redeems.

 

 
box office  0844 264 2140  www.stjamestheatre.co.uk
Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

 

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January 20, 2015 · 11:04 pm

THE CHANGELING Wanamaker at Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

MURDER IN THE DARK 

 

 

The gorgeous giltwood brooding atmosphere of the new Wanamaker playhouse has seen comedy in its candlelight – the bonkers Knight of the Burning Pestle – and opera , and recitation. But it comes best into its own with these darkly morbid , claustrophobic Jacobean dramas. Closed in, the theatre itself becomes a crucible of menace.  Illuminated only by the great rising and falling chandeliers, or by candelabras held by actors whose uplit livid faces flicker with murderous hatred or tardy remorse, you are trapped in the box with them and their darkness. You cam laugh at the jokes – and these Jacobo-nasties have plenty of foolery in between the murders – but you laugh hollowly: stimulated, fearful. Dominic Dromgoole, always supertuned to the way the physical form of his theatres affects the mood, makes the most of this.

 
Webster’s Duchess of Malfi last year was a triumph here, but that has the advantage of a a shiningly good, sane central heroine to point up the wickedness of her enemies.  The Changeling – by Middleton and Rowley – is trickier, its heroine dodgy.  Beatrice-Joanna elicits a trickle of sympathy with her initial bewailing of an arranged marriage, but her contemptuous rudeness to ugly, clever de Flores is followed by her enlisting him to kill the unwanted fiancé and offering a derisory payment. Whereon he insists that what he wants is her virginity. I have seen deFlores played grotesque, sinister, as hideous as the words she describes him in: but there is real bite in Trystan Gravelle’s bluff, unexceptionable appearance (despite some kind of rash) and his downright workmanlike approach to murder and rape. As for that famous line where he takes her glove to “thrust my fingers into her sockets”…eugggghhh.

 
As Beatrice-Joanna, a “woman drenched in blood who speaks of honour” Hattie Morahan is as good as ever: her fragility and subtlety move from petulance to panic, by way of a hinted horrid attraction to de Flores, and at last to a genuinely pitiful tragic understanding of how arrogance led to blood, deceit, arson and another murder. Whose victim, the maid Diaphanta, is brilliantly pitched to contrast with her mistress: Thalissa Teixeira is lusty, lively, innocently sexual in a way her aristocratic lady is not; she has no dark side. Her testing of the virginity-test her mistress fears is hilarious (theres some real comic 17c flapdoodle about an apothecary’s.secret potions which makes you realize how self-denying Shakespeare was, not using magic bottles all the time) .

 
But a bigger problem with the play – in one brief production lately dispensed with entirely – is the subplot: set in a lunatic asylum, the inmates treated as bestial entertainment. Isabella (Sarah MacRae) is kept captive by her jealous old husband, and sought by two suitors who disguise themselves as madmen : Adam Lawrence violently so, Brian Ferguson more verbal. Pearce Quigley, what a treasure, is the awful warder Lollio, managing to be both funny and revolting. And Dromgoole brings out all the parallels between this squalid place and the court, especially in the women’s captivity.

It’s a hard one to hold together, but by the final “And now we are in hell”, the full Jacobean horror has been achieved. Brrr.

 

box office 020 7902 1400 to 1 March

rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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January 13, 2015 · 12:56 am

WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN Playhouse, SW1

A FABULOUS FANDANGO OF FEMALE FURY…

 
Sing to the lunatic moon: Hispanic hysteria, hilarity, tangled lives, 48 hours of Madrid madness. I had my doubts about this one, as did many others: Bartlett Sher’s musicalization of Pedro Almodovar’s wicked, witty tale of betrayal, coincidence and answerphones in 1960’s Madrid didn’t catch fire on Broadway. But now, with Jeffrey Lane’s book sharpened up and staged with simple elegance, rather marvellous songs from David Yazbek and a clutch of superb performances, it falls to London to propel it up and away into the stars. Maybe, too, it hits a particular British and European note: sunset sentimentality cut with sour-lime pragamatism, and real feeling for betrayed love delivered with dry acceptance that hey, even bitterness has a bounce to it. “Everyone’s a genius and everyone’s a fool; sometimes a raindrop is a tear, and sometimes a jewel”.

 

 
Lovers of the film will find the whole chaotic plot here. Pepa (Tamsin Greig, who it turns out can sing like a lark without losing any of her tragi-comedic subtlety) has been abandoned by her lover Ivan. 19 years earlier he also left his wife Lucia, who has been in a mental home (“very nunny, corridors smelling of soup”) and has emerged ferocious to sue him and terrify her wimpish son and his chilly bride . Almost more wonderful than Greig is Haydn Gwynne as Lucia: sometimes nutty as a fruitcake, sometimes utterly sincere and heartbreaking, she deploys a fierce raw mezzo aria about the invisibility of middle-age and wasted wifely life “I didn’t want the money I just want the time back”. In Sher’s pleasingly fluid, economically surreal direction she at one point haunts the younger women like a Miss Havisham in black manilla, growling and stalking. She’s a treat.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, of course, there is the scatty youngr Candela – Anna Skellern – who finds she is having a fling with a terrorist (very topical). “My boyfriend has an Uzi and he doesn’t clean the shower” is, so far, my favourite lyric of 2015. When Pepa asks “Do you have a lawyer?” “I did” wails the girl “But he went back to his wife”. Glorious. As for Ivan’s big number , averring that “love is eternal but the faces sometimes change”, my female companion, whose past is more colourful and Latino than mine, practically had a conniption recognizing it.

 

 
At which point I wondered whether this show is perhaps more of a girl thing, and ought to offer a nice calming creche in a nearby pub for women to park their menfolk in for the evening. But the men around were loving it too: maybe betrayal and mid-life irritability are genderless. Well, of course they are. So it won me right round, and I’d predict it the kind of gentle long-running success that met ONCE – another morphed movie with an eccentric loving heart. Rejoice in Gwynne acrobatic in a pink miniskirt on a Lambretta, in the erotic possibilities of drugged gazpacho, and some blissful gags and a cod flamenco moment from Ricard Afonso as the taxi driver. Olé!

 
box office 0844 871 7631. http://www.atgtickets.com to May

rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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December 15, 2014 · 11:52 pm

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Almeida, N1

THE MERCHANT OF VEGAS RIDES AGAIN 

 

Three years ago Rupert Goold reimagined Venice for the RSC, taking ‘casino capitalism’ literally, setting it amid decadent gilt arches and roulette-tables with Lancelot Gobbo as an Elvis impersonator. The casket choice became a TV reality game with Portia as a pouting Barbie whose transformation into a lawyer was pure Legally Blonde. So now in charge of the Almeida, how could he resist bringing it back as his Christmas spectacular, partly recast but glitzy as ever? It’s a Gooldian pound of flesh: Shakespeare as savage rom-com with Elvis numbers, Antonio strung up on a butcher’s hook in Guantanamo orange, and plenty of lurex and leg.

 

 
Most is as per Stratford – including the carnival costume jokes with Gratiano as Munch’s scream and Lorenzo as Batman eloping with Jessica as Robin. But in the smaller theatre both better and worse things emerge. Scott Handy’s morose Antonio droops with such intimate despair throughout that it becomes ever clearer that his devotion to Tom Weston-Jones’ pretty Bassanio is so homoerotic that once the ring-nonsense is over at the end, Portia has every reason to look depressed in her weird hobbling finale dance: there’s a sense that we are moving towards a Design for Living situation.

 

 
As before, Susannah Fielding’s Portia is the most artfully nuanced and difficult performance. She is required to simper, wriggle and pout like Daddy’s southern princess during the garish reality-show sections, become more real but still pouting and spoilt amid her girlfriends, and then convince in the courtroom transformation. But even before that, one of the most strikingly and honestly directed moments in the play comes when Bassanio chooses the lead casket, and instead of a blaring and flashing neon triumph the TV show lights dim and the “unlessoned girl” steps off her stilettos and ditches the big-hair blonde wig to avow serious love. Fielding does it superbly.

 

 
By then it is about time for some reality. The comedy accents began to get me down; standard American, jive-talk, Elvis gobbling from Gobbo, a hillbilly gambler, squeaky girlishness and of course the two failed suitors. Vinta Morgan’s Prince of Morocco is a preening Mohammed Ali in gold lurex shorts, and Vincenzo Nicoli does a Fawlty-Towers-Manuel in a luminous flamenco shirt as the Prince of Aragon. Funny, but recklessly chucking away the poetry. More troubling on the accent front is Ian McDiarmid’s Shylock. He is a marvellous actor, and Goold pulls no punches about his treatment by the contemptuous antisemitic Christians, or the brutality of the trial scene. But earlier, the decision to adopt an extreme caricatured Jewish voice works against the subtleties of his delivery and attitudes, ruining many of the most telling lines. We never get a sense of Shylock as a successful banking figure with real power: rather he emits a jerky cartoonish whimsy. Only in the trial itself is McDiarmid given a chance to project an emotion both real and disturbing.

 

 

 

But when he does it reminds me – if I may wander off-message for a moment – of something I found once in the letters of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. In 1880 he wrote in distress to Ellen Terry, having seen her play Portia to Irving’s Shylock. He begged her to ask the actor-manager to cut Antonio’s insistence in Act V that the defeated Shylock convert to Christianity. “It is a sentiment entirely horrible and revolting” cries Dodgson, an Anglican deacon.“The idea of forcing a man to abjure his religion may be simply horrible..a needless outrage on religious feeling…in the very fullness of our joy at the triumph of right, we see him as victim of a cruelty a thousand times worse than his own”.

 

 

This memory came back to me during the end of the trial scene, as McDiarmid’s Shylock crawls broken away, and a cleaner wanders on to the empty stage and throws the Jew’s discarded black coat and kippah into a binbag. That memory’s surfacing is what, for me, won this eccentric, often gimmicky production its fourth star.

 

 

box office 020 7359 4404 http://www.almeida.co.uk

to 14 Feb

rating: four     4 Meece Rating

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December 14, 2014 · 5:00 pm

BARBARA NICE’S CHRISTMAS CRACKER touring

MINCE PIES AND MIDLANDS MERRIMENT

 

 

I caught this in its heartland, at the MAC in Birmingham. Half of the audience were clearly experienced followers of Janice Connolly’s creation, Mrs Barbara Nice. They required no warm-up: no sooner had the star pranced onto the stage in her bargain-shop mac (“£ 9.99, WPM- Why-Pay-More?”) than we were cheering, raring to go, more than willing to start by putting up our hands to imaginary reins and swaying right and left, up and down to Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride music, as we followed a route through Birmingham described by a briskly grabbed audience volunteer.

 
Within minutes it was time for the inter-row balloon-batting race, the associated festive chaos kept under control by the smiling, bespectacled diva, always with her concertina-shaped novelty handbag firmly over one arm and ragged tinsel round her neck. We swear in chorus an oath “not to moan if the games get a bit unfair”. A patter of deceptively spontaneous one-line chatter accompanies this, on topics as homely and surreal as alternative uses for Greggs’ sausage rolls, picking up the perils of high-speed hand driers or picking up 5 Live on your Copper 7 IUD on the top of the 30 bus.

 
If you have not yet encountered Barbara Nice on her home Midlands turf, or in lightning appearances anywhere from Aldeburgh to Edinburgh, never seen a middle-aged woman in a sensible skirt hurling herself into crowdsurfing or offering instant uplift therapy, behold her now. Part dinner-lady, part Mum, part anarchic Asda goddess of misrule, she adopts as her own every random scrap of the culture, leading sudden bursts of singalong when a phrase tips her into it – Those Were the Days, Bohemian Rhapsody, whatever. “That’s lovely, yin and yang, feng and shui, Starsky and Hutch, are we having a great time?”

 

 

We are. Even without the local guest stars – at the MAC a memorable spot from the juggler Mat Ricardo and a slightly drunk front row, and a newcomer trainee standup called Lindsay with some ripe Jeremy Kyle references. But it’s Barbara we come for, and only she can be trusted to get the volunteers through the handsfree mince-pie eating contest in good order, and all the way to the legendary Christmas Raffle (we all get free tickets). Prizes range from a Fray Bentos pie to a bottle of Dettol (“the aromatic elixir of life, a dab behind each ear and you’re on the way.” ) And we did not, she assured us sternly, need any repetition of the previous night’s “Lambrini fight”. So no scrapping over the tin of marrowfat peas.

 
Ironic, iconic, homely and surreal, her shows are uniquely joyful. And yes, it is theatre not just standup: because here is control, identification, mood-altering moments, human connection. And a final dancing singalong to Fairytale of New York, with and the bells all ringing out for Christmas Day. I defy you not to love it. My husband – who normally has a morbid terror of audience participation – insisted on coming when he heard it was Barbara Nice, and loved every minute.
rating: four    4 Meece Rating
on tour now:   Touring Mouse wide

Tonight Komedia, Brighton 0845 293 8480.

Monday & Tuesday, 15th & 16th
Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford
£13. Tel: 01483 440000.

Friday 19th
Dancehouse Manchester, 0161 237 1413

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December 11, 2014 · 12:17 am

TREASURE ISLAND Olivier, SE1

YO HO HO –  PIRATES AND PARROTS ON A DEAD MAN’S CHEST
The first thing to say is that the sets are extraordinary: magnificent, nightmarish, romantic. Lizzie Clachan makes dramatic use of the Olivier’s great revolving, rising, falling drum.The stage becomes a cutaway three-tier ship, a bleak starlit ocean, a heaving volcanic swamp. And as in last year’s wonderful Emil and the Detectives, it is good to see all this top-flight theatre magic laid out for the young in a ‘family’ show, instead of shunting the kids into some low-budget folktale posh-panto round the back.
The second thing to say is that if you are taking children – or indeed, as I did, an baffled adult companion unfamiliar with Robert Louis Stevenson – you would be wise to bring them up to speed first. Bryony Lavery is a seasoned creator and adaptor, and Polly Findlay, on her second NT outing displays the same gift for shock and sincerity as in Antigone. But both seem to take for granted a universal familiarity with the tale of Treasure Island. Although Lavery often uses Jim Hawkins as a narrator, particularly in the first half the script fails to hammer home with sufficient vigour certain vital plot points, especially when the Hispaniola is being crewed by disguised ex-pirates and future mutineers.  I was fine with it, my companion less so.   HOWEVER – the pre-Christmas scramble meant that it was a penultimate preview I saw unofficially (bought own tickets)   and there have been improvements since: don’t trust me on that.  But do refresh the children’s minds about Treasure Island anyway.

 

 

Jim, by the way, is a girl: a bright-eyed urchin in britches (the excellent Patsy Ferran), and the gender-change is wittily handled in one of the best of the cod-18c lines.   Billy Bones staggers brutally to the Admiral Benbow and roars “Be you boy or be you girl?”. Jemima-Jim replies “That be my business!”. Very 21c . A good few of the pirates are female too, which is fine; though it is the men who, with roaring Roger Wilson and his fiddle leading,  fall into deep-toned, thrilling chanties from time to time. The parrot’s pretty good too, especially when it goes AWOL and flits, we genuinely believe, around our heads in the auditorium.

 
Arthur Darvill is a beguilingly slimy, dangerously likeable Long John Silver – an uncharacteristically quiet scene where he explains star navigation to Jim is magical – and among the pirates the one really good joke character is Tim Samuels as Grey, a rather Richard-Beanish figure whose problem is that nobody ever notices he’s there (shades of Mr Cellophane). On the island the pirates forget to tie him up, he’s so insignificant.That’s witty.

 
But for all that it is a remarkably dark show: literally – the lights are never bright, even in tropical sunshine, and the great looming ribs of the ship become part of the island’s ghostly nightmare as its very earth bubbles and swells horribly. Joshua James’ emaciated crazy Ben Gunn erupts from mud and dives down into filthy tunnels, moody half-heard music spreads unease. In one prolonged death scene a nervous child was led out, hands over his ears: the  lightness of the victim’s  “Thank you for the pies and the adventure” gasps the bloodied victim didn’t quite do it for that child. Indeed for all its tremendous physical spectacle – and final romantic beauty as the great ship flies homeward – the production seems unsure whether it is a ripping yarn or a meditation on brutality and nightmare. Actually, don’t listen to me. Children are better at blood-and-thunder than I am these days.   And it’s far better than an action movie.

 

 

box office 0207 452 3000 to 8 April
live relay in cinemas NT Live 22 Jan
Sponsor: Royal Bank of Canada

rating: hmmm….. 3 Meece Ratingbut maybe OK, design-mouse says four  Set Design Mouse resized

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December 4, 2014 · 12:27 pm

3 WINTERS National Theatre, SE1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI SPENDS THREE MOVING WINTERS IN WAR-TORN CROATIA

3 Winters takes us to the beautiful old Kos family house in Zagreb, Croatia, in three different years: 1945, 1990, and 2011. In a series of the slickest scene changes I have ever seen, different years are defined by different decor in the house, as the characters come and go, grow up and die, are born and get married, all while trying to come to terms with some terrible experiences and betrayals, personal and political. Štivičić, focusing on the house, is really telling two stories: the life of one family, and the history of Croatia’s bloody upheavals. As the play unfolds, we realise that the two are inextricably linked: that this family exists in spite of, but also because of, the war. In 1945, the house is requisitioned by Tito’s Communists and given (in part) to Rose King (a supremely poised Jo Herbert); by 2011, on the brink of joining the EU, capitalists like the unseen man soon to marry Lucia (an excellent Sophie Rundle) have amassed enough money to start buying others out, scrupulously or unscrupulously. Croatia has evolved; the family has evolved; and everybody’s identity is in crisis.

Amid all the hurly burly of a very busy plot, operating in three different time periods simultaneously while working towards a denouement which illuminates all three, a few superbly poignant moments stand out. One is a harrowing soliloquy from Alexander King (James Laurenson) telling how he had to abandon his horse in a vain attempt to escape Croatia in 1945, only to be marched helplessly past it two days later, captured by Partisans, as it stood starving. Allegorical or literal, it is shattering. Marko (Gerald Kyd) describes the agonising guilt of a soldier with PTSD in another tough, memorable moment which had the tears pouring down my cheeks. Štivičić can be uncompromisingly raw when occasion demands: elsewhere, her warm instinct for humour shines, particularly through Masha’s marriage to Vlado (a dynamic, endearing Adrian Rawlins) in their touchingly ironic exchanges (“I always admired you.” “Did you? Inconspicuously, I must say!”).

Štivičić’s characterisation is deft and clever. We have two very fine Karolinas: beautiful and troubled in her younger days (Hermione Gulliford), elegant and stately in later years (a fabulous Susan Engel). Alisa, soft and quiet in youth (Bebe Sanders) becomes spiky and defiant in later years (Jodie McKnee), though still lonely and confused. Masha, the dowdy matriarch (a nicely understated Siobhan Finneran) makes perhaps the most fascinating journey of all, realising that she has been put upon all her life, grieving, and finally accepting.

Director Howard Davies shapes all of this into a compelling drama, though his use of regional English accents for most characters (predominantly Yorkshire) tends to disorientate the piece, rather than locating it securely. Video projections (including some very shocking scenes of war) punctuate each scene: Štivičić’s ultimate message seems to be how we are human despite war, even though war can (and does) make us inhuman at times: the human journey of this family is, ultimately, what wins out.

– Charlotte Valori

Rating: four 4 Meece Rating

National Theatre, until 3 February. Box office: 020 7452 3000

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December 2, 2014 · 11:12 pm

HOPE Royal Court, SW1

SURE START ,  SPEED HUMPS,  SOLIDARITY AND SENTIMENT…

 
Sharp timing, the night before the Autumn Budget Statement! It’s about a Labour council in a post-industrial, working-class provincial town struggling with Government cuts of £ 22 million on top of three years’ previous austerities. After a fierce environmental lecture the other week and that Anders Lustgarten bore-in last year, you might well fear a hardish night in the People’s Republic of Sloane Square. But all is well. It’s by Jack Thorne – who did the spooky, poetic vampire adaptation LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. And while it could hardly be more rooted in prosaic modernity, it has the same skill and grip: funny, subtle, and in the broadest sense, balanced. If not politically, at least between recession gloom and the “Hope” of the title.

 
It is staged entirely within a gloomy public hall, whose stage rolls forward and back . A single, depressing local-authority desk and chairs are the only furnishings to represent the Council offices where the Labour group agonize , plus a couple of domestic interiors for the key protagonists. There is divorced, depressed Mark the Deputy Leader (a pleasingly angsty Paul Higgins), and his girlfriend Julie (Sharon Duncan-Brewster). Cuts are discussed between them and others – including Sarwan (Rudi Dharmalingham) and the hilariously realistic Council leader Hilary (Stella Gonet , who was so blissful as Old Thatcher in Handbagged). A nice antiphonal set-up has them doing random PE exercises while reminding us what diverse responsibilities councillors have – “Taps at graves. Taxi licensing – deciding who’ll have the licence to pick your teenage girls up at night. Allotments. Traffic lights. Speed cameras. Speed bumps. Welfare issues. Parking Charges…”

 

 
Soon Mark’s ex-wife Gina is enraged by the cutting of her day centre for people with learning difficulties – a clientele enchantingly brought to life by Jo Eastwood as Laura. Gina stages a showy demonstration which sparks a Twitterstorm and an e- petition – not difficult once they get Stephen Fry, since these days nobody needs to get off their bum and demonstrate but can just self-righteously click. This panics the national party, and risks getting the poor devils disowned by Ed Miliband. So they must cut elsewhere: four Sure Start centres in – gulp! – Muslim estates…

 

 
Well, you see where this is going. Farce , tragedy and emotional travails intertwine, as in life. The play’s mischievous superscription is from Otto von Bismarck “Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made”. But the seed of hope and humour flowers most beautifully in the hands of a wonderful Tommy Knight, playing the 16 year old son of sad Mark and stroppy Gina. Cocky and perceptive, cheeky and hesitant, bookish and determined, the quintessential teenager and the hope for the future, he steals every scene he is in. It was with difficulty that my young companion prevented herself from proposing to him during the curtain call.

 

 
In a gorgeous final scene with Julie’s dreadful, self-indulgent, sentimentally old-Labour Dad on a park bench, it is the lad who offers the only possible moral. “It’s possible I will have a better life than you. The world’s sort of pointless, if you don’t try”. Now there’s a Christmas message for the age of pessimism…

 

box office 020 7565 5000 to 10 Jan
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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November 28, 2014 · 4:43 pm

AN IDEAL HUSBAND Chichester Festival Theatre

MORALITY, MELODRAMA, AND MANSERVANTS…

 

 

“Suppose I drive down to some newspaper office” says the foxy blackmailerine Mrs Cheveley to the horrified MP Sir Robert Chiltern “And give them this scandal and the proofs of it! Think of their loathsome joy…of the hypocrite with his greasy smile, penning his leading article and arranging the foulness of the public placard!”. Ah, they did scandals with more style in 1894. None of this footling plebgate / paisley pajama / white van nonsense. Years ago as a minister’s secretary, Sir Robert sold a government secret to a foreign Baron, thus founding his personal wealth and career. Now Mrs C with her pussycat smile, has the letter down her heliotrope-silk cleavage…

 

 
Oscar Wilde’s play is often trimmed a lot, to focus on the melodramatically twisty triple-blackmail plot with its dramatico-farcical devices of misunderstanding, overhearings and a mysterious bracelet. Some directors take the red pen to numerous Wildeisms, and trim the rather long, indeed almost Shavian, discursive monologues about moral relativisim, hypocrisy and the uses of wealth, leading to the central message – poignant one given poor Oscar’s own imminent disgrace – that it is not perfect people but imperfect ones who need love and redemption. Here, however, director Rachel Kavanaugh lets it run its full wordy length (nearly three hours) taking in the various comic divertissements and epigrammatic loghorrea of the original.

 

 
So it does, at first, feel a bit like music being defiantly played on “authentic instruments”. The supple, subtle modern cast (led by Robert Bathurst dissolving in credible horror as the MP) sometimes seem to be curating rather than invigorating the text. Jemma Redgrave’s Mrs Cheveley seems positively uncomfortable in the almost Downtonesque stilted social chat of the first scenes. It’s easier, perhaps, for the virtuous wife – Laura Rogers – since Wilde intends her to be an awful prig at first, with her Women’s League do-goodery, grey frocks, and rash belief that her husband has no sin in him.

 

 

But fear not. Relax into it. And just as you’re wondering whether the main delight (no inconsiderable one) will be Simon Higlett’s gorgeous late-Victorian swags and furbelows, a recognizable human reality flowers and becomes properly touching. Even the evil Mrs Cheveley gets the very modern epitaph “She wore far too much rouge and not enough clothes. Always a sign of despair in a woman”. There is real fire and fun in Jamie Glover’s lively Lord Goring: the apparent hedonist, wit and timewaster based on Wilde himself, who works in his orientalesque bachelor rooms to save the day because “Life cannot be lived without much charity”.

 

 
And there’s even more joy to be had from the veterans. A more hurried production would give less acreage to the dowager Lady Markby and her theories of the world, and to Goring’s grandee of an old Dad, Sir Edward Caversham. But Kavanaugh has got Patricia Routledge and Edward Fox in the parts, and you don’t go wasting chances like that. Both are wonderful, a masterclass in aged stage-stealing: Routledge rattles on like a grand fin-de-siecle version of her turn as Victoria Wood’s “Kitty”, and there is timeless artistry in Fox’s pause before asking his flippant son, in heavy despairing tones “Do you always really understand what you say?”.

 

 
Wilde would adore them both. Neither Fox nor Routledge often got offstage on the first night without enduring a round of affectionate applause. But that’s fine. It’s 1894. And nearly Christmas. And Chichester has had its first season in a grand new theatre. Hurrah for everything.
box office 01243 781312 to 13 Dec
sponsor: Rathbone Investment Management and Covers Timber & Builders Merchant
rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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November 27, 2014 · 5:35 pm

FRANKIE AND JOHNNY IN THE CLAIR DE LUNE Minerva, Chichester

A MODERN DATE,  AN ANCIENT NEED…

 

 
You could say it starts with a happy ending. Well, of a sort. Certainly the blackout is riven by an exuberant sexual racket, and as the light slowly rises on a tiny NYC apartment the couple disengage from the sofa-bed and cackle with the laughter of relaxation.  Lovers, though, they are not. This is the modern way, the Saturday night of lonely urban singles reaching for a passing intimacy, She is a waitress, he the short-order cook they caught one another’s eye: a date, a movie-and- benefits . Both grownups with a history, ages either side of the big 5-0, nothing serious…

 

 
Or is it? Terrence McNally’s 1987 two-hander is a delicate, feignedly flippant and deadly serious exploration of human fear of – and need for – intimacy. Against convention he gives the role of romantic to Johnny, who within a jokey uproariousness expresses an earnest demand to be allowed to love, admire, worship and commit. Frankie, brittle and bruised and defensive, purports to be toughly pragmatic, reluctant to accept his exuberant sincerity. Which is sometimes gloriously expressed, sometimes with a kind of ferocity – “Wake up, Cinderella, your Prince Charming has come! It could be another thousand years…”. Sometimes, as they spar through the first act, the thought crosses your mind that someone falling in love with you can feel like an act of aggression.

 

 
Which is, of course, an ancient thought: the pressures and persuasions of courtly love run through a thousand years of art. McNally is well aware of this: both are momentarily transported by Bach on the radio and his autodidact Johnny is intermittently prone to quote Shakespeare, with the lovely observation that it’s all very difficult archaic language “and then he puts it all together clear and simple, and it’s nice”.

 

 

 

Success in such a fragile intimate piece depends heavily on the actors: Dervla Kirwan and Neil Stukecould hardly be better. Kirwan gives off the depth of Frankie’s defensive, damaged pain beneath the stiffness and petulance of her rejections; Stuke has an even harder task, because Johnny could be irritating – or, as she says, “too intense, gives me the creeps”. But behind his explosive declarations is something which he himself defines as courageous: a demand, in mid-life and however bitter your hinterland, to grab something or someone good when you see it, and to hell with caution. Which is rather beautiful.

 

box office 01243 781312 to 6 Dec
Rating: four

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November 17, 2014 · 11:52 pm

ACCOLADE St James Theatre, SW1

THE PRICE OF VICE…

 
The accolade is a knighthood: services to literature for the debonair Will Trenting, already a Nobel for his novels on the seamy side of life. The play is set in his elegant library (a rather shoestring-flimsy set, but that’s the only unclassy thing about this marvellous evening). The writer jokes with his wife Rona that he is not respectable enough; she laughs and retorts “Falstaff was a knight!”. For she broadmindedly tolerates his occasional binges with booze and tarts in a bedsit at the Blue Lion pub in Rotherhithe. Their bookish young schoolboy son doesn’t know; Albert the valet-secretary-chauffeur is at home in both sides of Trenting’s life, and even when Harold and Phyllis from the pub turn up, a wide boy and a cartoonishly tarty barmaid, Rona is cheerfully welcoming. Nothing rocks the family boat. Yet.

 

 

One of the remarkable things about Emlyn Williams’ 1950 play, with two quite superb performances from Alexander Hanson and Abigail Cruttenden, is that you believe in this marriage and menage. In the cunningly crafted early scenes – which director Blanche McIntyre wisely does not speed up – you are drawn by Trenting’s charm: Hanson (so recently both Stephen Ward and Guy Burgess onstage) deploys satanically-browed, peaky assurance and an undertone of beguiling sincerity when he says of his lowlife fictional characters “Are they any worse than couples who nag each other from twin beds every night and are cruel to their children?” He also offers, when forced to admit his Blue Lion life to his censorious publisher Thane, a classic literary-slummer’s apologia: describing a big prostitute Diane sitting topless on his frowsty pub bed drinking Guinness and talking about her mother’s death. He contrasts rowdy, consensual warmly proletarian promiscuity with the deadness of a literary lunch. It is a perennial form of bad-boy romanticism: suddenly reminiscent of Stephen Fry’s sentimentalizing over “incredibly decent” cocaine dealers….

 

 

But as the first act ends the author detonates his bomb. And if we have been lulled into a period-play mood, reflecting smugly on how different things were in 1950 (who’d care if a literary knight was a bit of a party animal? we’ve had Sir Mick Jagger for years) we are jolted into reality. The lovable libertine’s classic plea that his vices are victimless is exploded, on the eve of his investiture. For one of the girls in the last orgy was not what she seemed. Neither (rather shockingly) are Harold and Phyllis. A blackmailer arrives; a wave of police, press and public outrage rolls in.

 

No detailed spoilers, but quite apart from Hanson’s terrific evocation of shock and regret, the performance of Bruce Alexander as the blackmailer is fabulous, a study in menacing, devious humbugging black comedy which simmers tensely before crashing into unexpected passion. And as if all that wasn’t enough to justify this wonderful play’s revival, a final scene between the father and Sam Clemmett – splendid as the son – is at once truthful, moving, heartbreaking and shockingly funny. A real find. Once again, all credit to the Finborough for digging it up.

 

box office 0844 264 2140 to 13 Dec
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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November 13, 2014 · 6:55 pm

WHITE CHRISTMAS Dominion, W1

ALED AND TOM DO THE SHOW RIGHT HERE…
Aled Jones is wonderful. Honestly. He is. Won’t ever hear a word against him. This contentedly hokey stage revival of Irving Berlin’s 1954 seasonal heartwarmer is his West End debut, but you’d never know it: not only because he sings with a fluid insouciant ease which relaxes you into the classic songs with a sensation not unlike swimming with dolphins. He dances, not half badly though less spectacularly than the amazing Tom Chambers as his mate Phil . And – as Bob the WW2 veteran turned song-and-dance man – he exudes such industrial-strength, powerfully benign likeability that dammit, you can’t take your eyes off him. You feel safe.

 

And it’s a show about feeling safe, possibly the most unthreatening theatre experience on the planet right now.   It’s a rom-com two performers getting together to save their old General’s failing Vermont ski lodge with a pair of (highly respectable) showgirl sisters, a foghorn-voiced diva turned receptionist and a winsome stagestruck tot (Sophia Pettit, managing to play it both abominable and rather touching). The jeopardy is slight – Betty (a gorgeous Rachel Stanley) misunderstands Bob just as their awkward romance is blossoming, but not for long. The General, given genuine presence and personality by Graham Cole, resolves his yearning to get back to the army without undue stress. The slow farmhand in charge of the curtains more or less gets it right, the Vermont locals dance with improbable precision, and the show goes on, as it must.

 
It’s a relaxed enough pace to cause impatience in some – expect no great spectaculars, no emotional catharsis, no political swipes – and its success is mainly as a period piece. But that relaxation gives you an opportunity to reflect on that world of sixty years ago, and what it needed. America in this show is not questioning itself, but cosying down into domesticity, looking inward, putting its faith in sleigh-bells in the snow, acknowledging the war so lately past and wanting to forget it. The parallels in dialogue between war and showbiz are brief but noticeable: the men adore the General who “would have gone through hell for them” and make parallels with the solidarity of performers. It is as if they were saying “right, Eisenhower was what we needed then, but now it’s over to Ethel Merman…”

 
But enough of the social anthropology. In its terms – and they are, by modern musical theatre standards, limited – it works a treat. By the time the snow falls on us all and a prolonged curtain call of red-and-green, velvet-and-tinsel-and-fur-hat chorines has hoofed its last, we are ready for Christmas. Except hell, it’s only the 13th of November. But that, every year, is the lot of the theatre critic…
box office 0845 200 7982 to 3 Jan
rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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November 4, 2014 · 11:25 pm

Fitzrovia Radio Hour presents DRACULA – Mercury, Colchester

BRAM AT THE BBC: A FRIVOLOUS FORTIES FRIGHTENER

 

 

Ah, happy memories! As an unfledged BBC techie in the ‘70s, my favourite job was “Spot Effects” in radio drama studios: a technique then still requiring a visit to the huge Spot FX Store to sign for tin thunder-sheets, rattles, and Heath Robinson contraptions with titles like “No.3 Creak” and “Rustic latch”. I tramped in gravel-pits, scrunched up old tape to make “rustling forest floor, autumn”, and if it was a whodunnit might get to stab a cabbage and throw a sack to the floor while a member of the BBC Drama Rep cried “Ooof!”. My finest hour was when a director suddenly called “Libby daaarling, can we HEAR the Alsatian running downstairs?” and I achieved this with fingernails scrabbling claw-like on planks. I always wanted to have a go at “whimpering dog” or “gurgling baby”, but that counted as Professional Acting, and was generally supplied by a jolly lady from the rep called Olwen.

 

 
It is this world which the Fitzrovia Radio Hour company took to their nostalgic bosom, camping it up beautifully in shows recreating 1940’s radio drama (unlike ours it was done live, with the cast themselves often doing the props). Contemplating a piano-organ, a microphone and a tableful of apparently random junk, we are the studio audience as our heroes attempt Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The twist in this case is that the innocent BBC has cast a real Romanian aristocrat for verisimilitude, David Benson as Count Alucard . And he is, of course, a real vampire . You can tell by the cloak, Benson’s joyfully extreme coarse-acting mannerisms, and the fact that unlike the others he doesn’t clutch a script. Around him, reading their roles and bustling with props, are the announcer/van Helsing (Dan Starkey), the matinee idol Harker (a smooth towering Jon Edgley Bond) and the two women: Fiona Sheehan as Meena and other ingenues has a lovely cut-glass delivery which makes the word “Lucy” into “Lewsee”; and a hilarious Joanna Wake is the doddering veteran thespienne in a feathered toque who has worked for the BBC since it was founded. She plays not only Lucy but others including a gloriously overdone “Cockney Paper Boy”. They all do wolves too, when necessary.

 

 
Cal McCrystal directs this most ambitious of Fitzrovia’s productions, now planning to tour, and this sharpens it no end: he specializes in physical comedy and supervised that aspect of Hytner’s One Man Two Guvnors. It shows: visual jokes come thick and fast, nicely driven by the irritable unspoken relationships between the cast (they never speak off-script), and by the melon-stabbing, footstep-crunching, Marigold-glove flapping, orange-sucking, celery-crunching, flowerpot-as-sarcophagus-lid manoeuvres . These are constantly, frantically done in the corner by anyone not speaking. Wake’s struggle with the funeral bell chime is a joy. And there is a comic innocence in the evening dress and crisp 1940’s diction (“Braahm Stoker’s tale of tirror”), and in cloudy visions of Alvar Liddell encountering the vampire beyond the studio glass. The Old BBC-ness of it makes a lovely counterpoint to the absurdity of the whole exercise and the developing disaster. Proper, silly, polished pleasure.

 
box office 01206 573948 http://www.mercurytheatre.co.uk
to 15 Nov

rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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October 30, 2014 · 9:40 am

THE WITCH OF EDMONTON – Swan, Stratford upon Avon

DORAN CALLS UP DEMONS 

 

 

Devils! Not Hallowe’enily cosy at all. Obscenely beguiling, tenebrous creatures of evil, they lurk inside all human nature and they know it. Mother Sawyer’s derisive familiar “Dog” makes that clear, in one of the central couplets of this rural horror-story set in the reeds and fogs of ancient Middlesex:
“Let not the world witches or devils condemn;
They follow us, and then we follow them!”

 
This finale to the RSC’s “Roaring Girls” season is the oddest of the lot, and by no means the least. Gregory Doran directs the 1621 collaboration between “William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford&c” (who knows how many spoons in this dark pudding? ) It is a play with two centres, one supernatural and one human melodrama. Mother Sawyer is an impoverished, brutalized old woman regarded locally as a witch (common at the time, not least because of King James I’s obsession with the supernatural). She isn’t one, but in her resentment decides she might as well call up the Devil and serve her persecutors right. It is a marvellous role for an aged woman and Eileen Atkins gives it a brilliant, stroppy, beaky, sardonic presence, with just sufficient pathos to hold sympathy and enough spite to command respect.

 
The demon she calls up is “Dog” – Jay Simpson near-naked in black body paint, red eyes and a truly horrible tail beneath jagged vertebrae: a starveling rabid cur of a creature who appals and fascinates (worryingly sexy). She sends him to lame horses and ruin the butter of her main foes, but is irritated that he can’t kill the more virtuous.

 

 

Because in theology, devils can’t. They work from the inside. So the main tale of the play concerns human misdeeds: seduction, deceit, brutality, hypocrisy, eventually murder. Ian Bonar is the serving-man Frank who has secretly married Winnifride, herself pregnant by her employer. To get a dowry and please his father (Geoffrey Freshwater, all bonhomous bourgeoisie) Frank bigamously marries Susan. His journey from fool to villain is played out with tense, conflicted realism. All the performances are, as you’d expect, fine,: but Faye Castelow as Susan, in her debut RSC season emanates a calm, luminous intelligence, defying the mantra that it is hard to play straightforward goodness. Her scenes with Frank – and her death – are electrifying.

 

 

The collision of the two plots, and the local hysteria that “maids who fall” and murderers are being influenced by the Witch, makes it sometimes weirdly and rather excitingly unclear as to what the authors wanted us to believe. This is no CRUCIBLE, because Mother Sawyer does really have a horrid familiar. On the other hand, all her pet Satan can actually do is to upset horses , play tricks and lure poor Cuddy the Morris-man into a bog (nice pondweed on Dafydd Llyr Thomas’ head, I hope he has some good selfies) . Otherwise Dog merely lurks, relishing the natural wickedness of the mortals. Though in a showstopping moment at the end of the longer first act, he takes over the morris-dancers’ fiddle and causes a mass-hysterical diabolic St Vitus’ dance (respect to Paul Englishby’s terrifying score) . What with the skeleton hobbyhorse and the crazed choreography it is definitely one of the must-see sights of this Swan season.

 

 

It’s odd, it’s dark, often funny, sometimes touching, and above all it feels like a deep insight into a past moral sensibility: a post-Reformation superstitious unease. The last ten minutes of remorse, forgiveness and wordy justice disengage us, making it retreat into that past again. Unworthily, briefly, you think “Greg Doran could have cut some of that!” . But no. You then reflect that the Royal Shakespeare Company is not just there to give us barnstorming nights out and move us to tears at half the West End prices (both of which it pleasingly often does). It is also there to display, fully and respectfully, our common ancestral past. Demons, moralists and all.

 

box office 0844 800 1110 to 29 Nov http://www.rsc.org.uk

RATING   four  4 Meece Rating

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October 21, 2014 · 12:00 am

OUR TOWN – Almeida, N1

A STUNNING SIMPLICITY, A HUMAN HEART

 

 

Only the dead see life clearly.  In the last strange simple minutes of this undramatic drama, half of Thornton Wilder’s citizens become their own speaking tombstones, drifting towards oblivion or eternity but roused for a moment by a new arrival’s travails . “Wasn’t Life awful?” says a voice. – “And wonderful”. chimes another.  I think a third dim voice assents: or it might be one of us, sitting round and among the action in the never-dimmed auditorium, drawn in to the humdrum wonderfulness of daily doings, marriage, work, failure, success and suicide, birthdays, bereavements. Life.

 
The 1938  play won a Pulitzer and broke convention: a bare floor, a couple of tables, quotidian jobs mimed, New Hampshire small-town life, hills, homes, horsepower and starlight at the start of he 20c expressed only in description by a wry, wandering stage manager; but enacted by a cast who in fragmented scenes under his direction relive routine, a wedding and a loss. David Cromer’s production – in which he is our affable onstage narrator and guide – ran in New York, but here the universality of it is underlined by the British cast with British accents. Some have cavilled at this, because of Wilders’ US idioms and references – the ‘I declare’, the ‘ma’am’s, baseball and the rest. But after a few minutes I found any awkwardness fading into complete acceptance of character and situation.

 
That is part of the play’s low-key brilliance, because in its slight two-hour two -interval span there are no situations which a more traditional dramatist would be bothered with. Just small – yet immense – quotidian happenings: family breakfasts, kids growing up, middle aged weary parents, awkward courtship, stifled yearnings to get out of the hometown mixed with love of it. For all its dated, anchored detail – in attitudes and mores from a century ago – it evokes Everytown, every street .

 
Which feels like a magic trick, or perhaps just one of those moments of piercing universal vision, when you startle yourself by seeing in a flash humanity poised in eternity, and  the littleness and immensity of life.  It feels unlikely that something so unshowy can achieve that:  even with one brief scenic coup de theatre five minutes from the end.   But it is remarkable; and so are the core performances. Cromer himself is assured, anchored, dryly funny and unselfconsciously sincere. He draws the same quality from his cast. especially Anna Francolini as Mrs Gibbs and Kate DIckie as Mrs Webb, and David Walmsley and Laura Elsworthy as the young wedded pair. Elsworthy especially  holds the final scene with mesmeric natural intensity.

 
box office 0207 359 4404 to To 29 november

Rating.  Four.  4 Meece Rating

Supported by Aspen , Barrow Street Theatre and Jean Doumanian

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October 17, 2014 · 9:26 am

EAST IS EAST – Trafalgar, SW1

COMEDY, BRUTALITY, UNCERTAINTY IN  A BYGONE SALFORD

 

 

There is a telling moment at the end of Sam Yates’ production of Ayub Khan Din’s portrait of a Pakistani Muslim family in ‘70s Salford. Abdul, the eldest son, after a series of tragicomic brawls and conflicts, resolves to take over control from the bullying patriarch, defend his English mother and ensure that none of his siblings need marry by order or live under duress. Then over the cramped, bricky railside terrace (brilliantly realized by Tom Scutt) we hear an aeroplane. Bringing in another generation of migrants, to face the same challenges and confusions.

 

 

The play, first staged by Tamasha and subsequently a West End hit and film, is largely autobiographical: and here Khan Din himself plays the role of “George” the tyrannical father, creating alarming – often violent – authenticity with roars of “Why I tell you my business, Mrs?” at his English-born wife Ella. She is Jane Horrocks, returning to the stage with a drop-dead, pitch-perfect portrayal of long-suffering pragmatism and steely, competent maternal backbone. One son (like the author) has run off to be a hairdresser and is deemed dead (“He’s not dead, he’s in Eccles!” snaps Ella). To the rest the message is “I am your father! I don’t have to listen! You should show respect!”. Despite the cowed obedience of his children working in the family chip-shop and obeying at home, he gets nastier still when roused by his sons’ unwillingness to be married off, assaulting Ella with“Next time you talk to me like that I kill you and burn all your bastard family while you sleep!”.

 

 
It is a more uncompromising performance than anyone not directly, physically and authorially involved would dare, but Ayub Khan Din manages to infuse it with glimpses of insecurity and desperation. He is struggling for the status of what he thinks is a proper Muslim father, while loving an English wife and living in a suspicious white neighbourhood; on top of which there is the cheerfully jelloid Auntie Annie, forever off to lay out another corpse, and a pack of children bored with mosque, indifferent to Pakistan, feeling English. George is isolated.

 

 
The young cast are a joy, with lovely ensemble rowdiness: Abdul the sober worrier (Amit Shah), Maneer (Darren Kuppan) who wants to be a good Muslim, rebellious Tariq (Ashley Kumar), Saleem the art student whose father still thinks he’s doing engineering at college, and a wonderful blinking, troubled performance by Michael Karim as Sajit, the one they forgot to circumcise until his teens, who refuses to emerge from his parka hood and hides from rows in the coalshed. Among them dances Meenah (Taj Atwal) the only daughter, larkily tomboy, disgusted by being forced into a sari for the visit of the richer Shahs. That scene is a classic of social embarrassment, brilliantly done by all and culminating inevitably in the horror of Saleem’s art project. But beneath all the comedy throbs the reality: that this family can’t last in its present form, and must either revert to something alien, ancient and un-English, or fracture and lose the precious bits: the love which however erratically flows between them.

 

 

It would be a shame to take it as mere social history, a Pakistani Taste of Honey. There are modern parallels and contrasts. Much of George’s panic is fed by news bulletins about the Indo-Pakistan conflict and massacres; today plenty of immigrant communities endure similar tortures from the nightly news. Reflect too that in the mid-90s few would foresee that rather than flowering into English freedoms, too many British Muslims clench, close in, radicalize. When George roars that his daughter wears skirts “like a prostitute” Ella exasperatedly says “It’s her school uniform!”. Never would they have foreseen the burqa on the streets, the niqab defiance in British schools. Or the honour killings. Or the grooming scandals fed on contempt for white girls. East is East feels , dammit, almost cosy now.

 
box office 0844 871 7632 to 8 November     http://www.trafalgartransformed.com

Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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October 16, 2014 · 1:47 pm

LOVE’S LABOUR’S WON Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

IN WHICH YOUR CRITIC FALLS IN LOVE WITH A BENEDICK AND A DOG-BOWL

 

 

This is actually the one we know as Much Ado About Nothing – though some nifty Shakespeareology suggests that it may have had the other title, usually thought of as a “lost” play. The doubling with Love’s Labour’s Lost (reviewed below, well worth catching them in order, and reading them in the right order might help too) was inspired by AD Gregory Doran’s theory that the witty Berowne and spirited Rosaline from LLL should get together in the end, like Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado. Hence director Luscombe’s use of the same company, the same lovely Charlecote Park set, and (not least) the way that Nigel Hess’ fine score weaves through both, moving between Crown-Imperial heroics, subtle atmospherics, and sweetly sung ballads to pastiche Edwardian tunes.

 

 

The cross-casting is not all literal (you couldn’t turn Chris McCalphy’s magnificent monosyllabic Constable Dull into a yattering Dogberry, so Nick Haverson ramps up his hectic comedy still further , to the point of mania indeed, with high-speed pomposity, verbal confusion and an unforgettable tic of outrage. As we join them in 1918, as Charlecote Park is requisitioned by the returning army. David Horovitch, still pedantic and bufferish but less absurd, is now Leonato and gives the horrified father real power in the church scene; Michelle Terry is the striding, head-girlish, scornfully witty Beatrice, who like her more delicate cousin Hero (Flora Spencer-Longhurst) has been working as a VAD nurse. That, artfully, makes her air of cynical new toughness credible. And Edward Bennett, who was lively and fun enough as Berowne, now flowers into the most likeable, funniest and most genuinely touching Benedick since Charles Edwards’ fabulous Globe performance.

 

 

The Charlecote set comes even more into its own, as does the machinery. The stage has immense depths so that distant rooms glide forward, and far beneath the sliding floor unseen subterranean stagehands (take a bow) enable fine little rooms rooms to rise on that ever-surprising platform: a billiard-room, a boudoir , a bier, and most superbly poor Dogberry’s overcrowded scullery. It is serving as a police station, where Haverson tries to iron his shirt while interrogating, teapots get in everybody’s way, the washing-up is still in progress, and nobody can get out of the room because the towel-rail is jammed against the dishrack. Dogberry gets his foot stuck in a bowl marked DOG, which is particularly pleasing.

 

 

Once again, the anachronistic period setting serves the plot just fine: intrigues and jealousies are entirely credible in a regimental setting, all mess-dress and missed promotions. Sam Alexander is a sullenly malevolent Don John, Chris Nayak an over-willing Borachio (his remorseful moment near the end is more convincingly done than I’ve seen it, happy debut-season Mr Nayak). There’s real solemnity and horror in the church scene and the grieving; and broad, beautiful comedy in the eavesdropping. Especially the bit with Benedick and the giant Christmas tree. One of my more solemn colleagues felt that the near-electrocution moment was a bit over the top, but hey – some ideas are just too good to drop.

 
And that’s a moral which applies to the whole doubling, WW1-referring enterprise. So four each, but between them, they earn a fifth mouse.
box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk
(and the CD is now released, both plays)
Rating: four 4 Meece Rating
and a fifth director-mouse for  the double…  Director Mouse resized

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October 15, 2014 · 5:44 pm

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

BEFORE THE DAWN OF WAR…THE LAST LARKS 

 
This is the young Shakespeare: making his way, dazzling with wordplay, confecting improbable japes and charades, laughing at absurd elders, revelling in what his Lord Berowne calls “the kingly state of youth”. And in this improbable but finally triumphant treatment, Christopher Luscombe hijacks this lesser play to create one of the merriest, saddest, most unexpected centenary tributes to the 1914 generation.

 
He sets it in 1914, in a Simon Higlett set which is parquet-’n-portrait perfect , an artful faux-brick reconstruction of the Elizabethan manor at Charlecote Park, near Stratford. Shakespeare’s plot – in which the King of Navarre and his nobles swear a pact to fast, study and avoid the company of women for a period – fits surprisingly well with languid, earnest flannelled young Edwardians: it was, after all, the era of public school austerities, reading-parties, and cold baths to quell lust. And the lads are a delight: Sam Alexander as the slightly preachy leader, his mates Longaville (William Belchambers) and earnest Dumaine (Tunji Kasim), with Edward Bennett as the doubter Berowne, who finally agrees to sign the pact. But the Princess of France and her three gorgeous ladies are nearby, so the chaps obviously fall in love with them, and try to do their wooing without the others knowing. Light relief and confusion is added by John Hodgkinson as a comedy Spaniard with language difficulties (ramped up mercilessly with lines about “Men of Piss” ) various servants, notably a barmily rustic Nick Haverson as Costard, an even more comedy policeman Dull (Chris McCalphy, who scores two rounds of applause all for himself on his RSC debut, once for an inexplicable ballet moment) .

 

 

And there’s a wickedly mocked schoolmaster and parson, joyfully the butts of that young Shakespeare: David Horovitch is a harrumphinly, pedantically wonderful Holofernes, and Thomas Wheatley gets a particular moment as the curate which, dammit, brought tears to my eyes.

 

 
The plot – think Downton Abbey rewritten by PG Wodehouse with some terrible Elizabethan puns and sudden great poetry – is mainly driven by the men, not least when they dress up as Cossacks and attempt a Russian dance. There’s an absurd charade led by the Spaniard, and in a fabulous rooftop-eavesdropping session in Jaeger dressing-gowns which culminates in Berowne threatening to throw poor Dumaine’s teddy over the parapet. But the women get their moments too, forming a kind of white-satin-clad Girl Gang to torment their four lovers: Leah Whitaker, Michelle Terry, Flora Spencer-Longhurst and Frances McNamee sometimes moving in synchrony, sometimes breaking away to offer moments of real emotion near the end.

 

 

Which is – and this is another reason it all fits so well with 1914 – a downbeat end. In the play, the Princess of France’s father dies and they must all delay their happy endings. In the theatre – well, you only need to put the four young men in khaki, and have the civilians left behind singing to Nigel Hess’ lovely score, and you’ve made the point with gentle, appropriate sorrow. Edwardian certainties and jokes, gone forever with the kingly state of youth. Never glad confident morning again.

 

 

box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk
(and the CD of speech and music is released: for this and its companion-piece, Love’s Labour’s Won, aka Much Ado. Whose review will follow tomorrow…)

Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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October 13, 2014 · 9:45 pm

HERE LIES LOVE NT Dorfman, SE1

DORFMAN DOES DISCO, HURRAH

 

 

Oh, fabulous! Nicholas Hytner could have done lots of traditional things to launch the recreated third auditorium, the jewel of “NT Future” with its great glass walls and grand public walkway over the scenery and props shops. Instead, the Dorf rocks into life with a surging, dancing, jumping, shimmying and shimmering immersive event: joyful yet serious, youthful and historical, throwing its arms out with glee and grace.

 

 
On paper, the idea might startle: a political history of the Philippines from the 1950’s to the peaceful and long-overdue 1986 People’s Revolution which sent that corrupt, extravagant, murderously brutal couple Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos packing. It centres on Imelda herself, and started life as a concept album by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim (it was first done at the NY Public Theater). All of this might suggest parallels with EVITA – another chronicle of an ordinary girl who used her beauty to marry a dictatorial leader, became obsessed with wealth and prestige, and maintained a conviction that the poor people loved her and that she loved them back, even when milking the exchequer dry. Imelda’s great cry of “Why don’t you love me?” could have been Eva Peron’s, had she lived.

 

 

But this show makes EVITA feel thoroughly old hat. It is pretty much sung-through and staged as a club night: a third of the audience on foot used as the People, on a wide and ever-changing floor down below (respeck to Times, Observer, Standard, and The Stage crits, not to mention boppin’ Baz Bamigboye of the Mail). The rest of us are galleried above, but drawn in emotionally by the racket, the wonderful catchy songs . Here Lies Love, Imelda’s anthem, stormed out by Natalie Mendoza, is tremendous, but even better is her bewildered friend Estrella (Gia Macuja Atchison) with “When she passed by”, and a solemnly beautiful lament for her son by the mother (Li-Tong Hsu) of the brave opposition leader Nino Aqino after his murder: singing how as a child he said “I wanna be a drummer” to bring people together, with the beat.

 

 

Which jerks the heart, because that is exactly what it does; this rowdy, life-affirming, fascinatingly detailed, newsreel-flashing, full-hearted tribute to a people abused and dignified and finally freed – well, nothing’s final in politics, but impressive nonetheless is the moment when the now diabolic, shrieking Imelda is drowned by helicopter sounds and the DJ – Martin Sarreal – comes down from his eyrie and quietly, with a simple guitar, sings the actual words of Filipinos on that day, with the refrain “God draws straight with crooked lines”.

 
And then as we wipe our eyes the ensemble dance – many Filipino in reality – dance crazily for us again. And we in the gallery slightly wish we’d opted for the floor tickets. But then I wouldn’t have had a notebook, to tell you about it properly.
Box Office 020 7452 3000 to 8 Jan
rating: four   4 Meece Rating and a Meece with mask tiny compressed salute to the new auditorium

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October 8, 2014 · 11:58 pm

SEMINAR – Hampstead Theatre, NW3

THE INTERIORITY OF EXTERIORITY EXAMINED..ER..

 
Theresa Rebeck’s play about a creative-writing seminar in New York, directed with pace and flair by Terry Johnson, has met some sniffy reviews. Well, I may be out on my own here, but I thought it was hilarious, touching, and sharp as a tack. Maybe it doesn’t reveal any eternal truths, but then neither do creative writing classes. Perhaps it revels too joyfully in verbal pyrotechnics and has characters in danger of vanishing up their own back-references, but that too is horribly faithful to the subject-matter . Oh yes. Having published twelve novels and then stopped, and struggled through a year’s worth of overwritten literary splodge as a Booker judge, I frankly revelled in Ms Rebeck’s crueller moments. And maybe the fact that the characters are American (though home-grown actors) distances it enough to ease the pain of recognition.

 

 
The youngsters paying $5000 for ten weekly sessions include Kate, a child of affluence who after six years of writing-classes perfecting a novel about a girl obsessed with Jane Austen, remains unable to speak plainly her love for her friend Martin. He is an earnest scruff who believes that “constructing a universe out of language is a sacred and reverential act”. There’s Izzy, who plans to write sexy novels and flash her breasts on the cover, and Douglas, who has literary connections and likes to describe “the interiority of exteriority” and “trees so present, you can feel them growing”.

 
Enter Leonard the tutor: Roger Allam, swagger-perfect in jeans and a tormented scowl. He is a magnificently bad-tempered, pretentious bully enjoying the humiliation of the young, bragging in a style all too recognizable from Vanity Fair and New Yorker journos that he “ate cabbage with a Chechen psychopath” and received confidences from Rwandan amputees, because as a Writer he is charged with the “relevant” and can despise everyone else for being insufficiently “muscular” and unlike Kerouac. Who Izzy admires and feminist Kate despises. Lovely.

 

 

 
The play has no distinct message – why should it? – but for me the intertwined hostilities, subterfuges and bafflements of the five characters (and their sex lives) create a satisfying pattern. Kate (Charity Wakefield) is particularly well-drawn, furiously consuming cookie-dough and Doritos to console herself, and succumbing to silent despair as Martin (Bryan Dick) gets off with the insouciantly vampy Izzy (Rebecca Grant) . Oliver Hembrough’s Douglas is first overconfident, then flattened, then vengeful. And Allam’s great bitter peroration about the life cycle of a literary novelist is showstopping: that hit first novel, the agony of the second, the painful achievement of the third, then the decline into editing or teaching writing-classes to “overprivileged droning children” . Meanwhile the private despair, with no skin left…

 

 
It’s a memento mori for those who trap themselves in self-regarding style, vain literary ambition and terrible metaphors (“nail polish bottles like lost and terrified soldiers”). Rather than just, for God’s sake, sitting down and writing a story they want to tell. I rather loved it.

 
box office 0207 722 9301 to 1 November

rating: four  4 Meece Rating

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October 4, 2014 · 12:12 am

EVITA – Dominion Theatre, W1

SWEET SEDUCTION,  OLD CORRUPTION

 

 

In 1978 as a Today reporter the day editor hustled me off to the Prince Edward theatre where this chap Lloyd-Webber (“He did that Joseph thing, and the Jesus one”) was to open a show about Eva Peron (“some 1940s dictator’s moll”). I remember little about the tea-break interview, but as the rehearsal resumed, an immense dramatic voice thrilled through the stalls. “Who’s that?” “She’s called Elaine Paige” said the composer proudly. And so she was, and the rest is history.

 

 

Now EVITA is back up West again, honed by a national tour and a reminder of how very good Andrew Lloyd-Webber already was, even before Phantom and Cats. It’s operatic, sung-through, musically urgent , dramatically tight, and studded with tunes so wonderful that they have stuck in our heads ever since. A reminder too of what a lyricist Tim Rice has been in his prime: not a word out of place. Those of us whose romantic disasters of the ‘70s were accompanied by endless mournful singing of “Another suitcase in another hall” are patsies for it.

 

 
Having said that, the show’s an oddity. It prefigures the stubborn determination of the Lloyd-Webber who plunged recklessly into celebration of Stephen Ward and the Profumo scandal. There is certainly romance in the tale of Eva Duarte, the low-born actress who slept, wheedled, performed and battled through to be the wife of Argentina’s leader Peron and a national “saint” despite the cruelties and corruptions of their regime. But as a heroine any “dictator’s moll” is problematical, at times downright repellent; nor do many popular musicals attempt to make a big Act 2 number out of an international diplomatic mission by a leader’s wife. But hey, it’s all about the music, and that is still tremendous.

 

 
This production is co-directed by Bob Tomson and producer Bill Kenwright himself, with a new star, Maddalena Alberto. She is beyond fabulous: a voice like honey and rosewater which can rise to an acid scream, become breathy or belting, wild or caressing, always under perfect control. Can act, too: whether as the firecracker teen forcing her cabaret-hack boyfriend to take her to Buenos Aires, the ruthless discarder of lovers (flinging their suitcases and pants at them over the banisters), or the artful seducer of Peron (“I would be good for you”). Whether as steely power bitch salting away money, or returning to idealism on her early deathbed, she convinces all the way.

 

 

Actually, once the last hysteria about another divisive figure has died down and someone dares write it, this mistress of both breathy charm and ferocious blast-furnace numbers must absolutely star in “Thatcher The Musical: from Grantham To Glory”. You could even recycle Rice’s great lyric as the cream of Argentine society scorns her: “The shooting-sticks of the upper class/ Aren’t supporting a single arse / That would rise for the girl”. It is pleasing to think that the wincing ladies and snobbish generals here (beautifully choreographed) predate the 1979 Thatcher win by just one year. And then you can ironize all you like about the Falklands war…

 
Thus for all the vigour and tunefulness of the music, it proved impossible not to entertain wandering historic thoughts. I actually felt an (even less fair) pre-echo of another blonde people’s princess when Alberto stands in her glittering yet virginally white ballgown pledging her love of the common people in “`Don’t cry for me”.

 
The narrator – Marti Pellow of Wet Wet Wet as Che Guevara – is a bit of a problem, though his fans cheered him to the echo: the lyrics of the part need a drier, more cynical throwaway style than his over-amped, pop-starry delivery. At the start it really grates, especially next to the lovely honeyed tones of Ben Forster’s Magaldi and Matthew Cammelle’s booming bass Peron. By the second act, though, it works better. But our eyes and ears are generally on Maddalena Alberto…

 
box office 0845 200 7982 http://www.dominiontheatre.com to 1 Nov
rating: four    4 Meece Rating

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