Category Archives: Theatre

June 7, 2018 · 11:28 pm

JULIE Lyttelton, SE1

STRINDBERG MEETS STENHAM, BIRD MEETS BLENDER

 
We’re in a Hampstead mansion. The daughter of the house is whooping it up at her birthday party, a deafening, purple-lit rave where tight-buttocked androgynes and glittering hair-flickers writhe and shriek. Below them in a bland grand kitchen the help – Ghanaian chauffeur John (Eric Kofi Abrefa) and his girlfriend Kristin the maid (Thalissa Teixeira) tidy up, take a swig of the absent Daddy’s Chateau Latour and comment on the chaos. Down comes the birthday girl Julie, leaping around barefoot on the worktops flashing ever more thigh at Jean. And so the trouble begins.

 

 

The scenario is familiar, you say? Indeed. It’s a Strindberg update by Polly Stenham,  who at 19 famously wrote “That Face” , brilliant on the damage of growing up in a boho, addiction-addled posh family. A few years later she gave us No Quarter, which was frankly just annoying, since rather than any relatable pain it exuded a tiresome conviction that rich decadent bohemians are somehow more interesting than other people . Which is an attitude you can only get away with if you’re Noel Coward, and capable of lightening it up a bit. Which Stenham, as yet, is not.
But this time she joins the endless line of adaptors and updaters of August Strindberg’s toughly nasty, misogynistic Miss Julie: a play soaked in such fin-de-siecle Nordic hopelessness that it makes Ibsen look like PG Wodehouse.

 

It is hard to see why – apart from the obvious marketing reason – Stenham would need to borrow the classic. There are other ways to tackle the hypocrisies and inequalities of rich London versus its immigrant servitor class – the stated intention here – without piggybacking on the miserable old Swede. Stenham’s Julie is not an 1888 ingenue for whom sex with Jean would be momentous , but a 33-year-old trust-fund waster, returned home to live with her affluent father, party, and self-medicate with everything from Xanax to cocaine. The gang upstairs is not Strindberg’s estate peasantry but the usual upmarket druggy ravers; the heroine’s degenerate behaviour and distress has less to do with social pressures than with the fact that she’s off her face and with a bolted-on back-story about her mother’s death.

 

 

Only the character of Jean with his hard-edged ambition and eye for the main chance feels close to the original, and he is a man for all ages. Stenham’s social-outrage intention is clear enough, especially when the chauffeur (good line) exasperatedly tells the wealthy messed-up Julie “We don’t have the luxury of being sad like you”. And again when Kristina the maid is given a very un-Strindbergian speech of indignation near the end about how she has washed our heroine’s blood-stained underwear , picked her up from abortion clinics, listened to her endlessly but despises the faux-liberal pretence that they were ever any kind of friends.

 

But with the glossy visual values (Tom Scutt design, amazing) and some remarkably directed movement by the ensemble of non-speaking partygoers (Ann Yee clearly should be booked for your next rave), the howling flaw is that Carrie Cracknell’s production feels more like a zoo – “see the rich posh ravers!” – than any sort of polemic exposure. There is one particularly enjoyable moment when – in what may be a dream sequence – the dancers creep down from above with cockroach-like crawling movements and vanish into the mysteriously changed kitchen appliances. It’s not often you encounter the stage-direction “Exit through the dishwasher”.

 

And there’s the extreme audience giggle when (back to Strindberg’s detail again) our modern Julie rather improbably insists on taking her pet canary with her on the fantasy flight to Cape Verde with Jean. When told to kill it, she puts it in the Magimix. Vanessa Kirby’s Julie (a tremendous performance, as one would expect) then collapses in sobbing grief about her terrible traumatic past experience. But the Magimix giggle ’n groan has spoilt that. So we feel nothing. What a waste.

 

box office 020 7452 3000 To to 8 Sept
Travelex season. NB in cinemas 6 Sept, NT Live

rating  three 3 Meece Rating

1

Comments Off on JULIE Lyttelton, SE1

Filed under Theatre, Three Mice

Tagged as

June 7, 2018 · 5:38 pm

TWO NOBLE KINSMEN Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

THE RUMBUSTIOUS AFFAIR OF THE CLOGS IN THE NIGHT TIME

 

 

Barrie Rutter and the Globe are made for each other:. Fresh out of his storming leadership (and frequent personal performances) with Northern Broadsides, he returns here under the new regime, merrily reminiscing in the programme about 1996 , when none of the costumes arrived from the airport until the interval. This time he is director of a pretty ridiculous Shakespeare collaboration with John Fletcher, loosely based on Chaucer. Palamon and Arcite, in prison after a defeat, vow eternal bromance but promptly drop that when they sight King Theseus’ sister Emilia (Ellora Torchia) , and both want her. Arcite is banished and Palamon is released by the jailer’s daughter (just like Mr Toad ,though with an even more preposterous disguise) . So on it goes, with some storming rustic dances and shouting, to the point when the King decides to solve it all with a fight.

 

For when you’ve got a medieval English tale based on an Italian romance from the classical canon, the obvious thing is to introduce a great deal of clog-dancing, morris , stave-clashing, barmy multicoloured ragwear, a Green Man, and some symbolic straw animals on sticks. Add some fine over-the-top acting, with King Theseus irritably baffled about the whole thing (favorite line – “What ignorant and mad malicious traitors ARE you?”). Second favourite : “Emilia, if one of them were dead, would you take the other to your husband?” “I cannot! They’re both too excellent!”. And there’s even a comedy Ophelia. Jude Akuwondike is a grand Theseu, and the rival knights are splendid, Paul Stocker and Bryan Dick going it large like a couple of gap-yah lads, but the one who walks away with every scene she’s in (not least when dancing insanely with the cloggers, driven nuts by thwarted love) is Franesca Mills as the tiny, vigorous, sweetly naive and rompingly mischievous jailer’s daughter . She loves Palamon and gets persuaded by a very dodgy doctor to settle for Jon Trenchard in custard-coloured harem pants instead.

 

She has a special quality: an expressive, innocent face combined with a crazy determined fire in performance which makes everyone else look vanilla. She was last a hoot in Northern Broadsides’ touring Cyrano, and I wrote then that she stole the show “Not because she is of “restricted growth” but because in athleticism, comic timing, clarity and utterly credible sincerity of reaction she’d be a treasure at any height, in any company” . I say that again.

 

Oh, and the poetry? Yes, that’s there too, not top-rank Shakespeare but some lovely lines. And the moral (given that the final twist is hardly down to any conventional tragic flaw, but rather to an offstage stallion) is soothing enough. Poor Theseus resignedly hands over his sister to an unexpected winner and says “Let us be thankful for that which IS”.

Dear Barrie Rutter. Come again to the Globe, do. Next time let’s get you out there roaring at the groundlings yourself, where you belong.

 

box office 020 7902 1400 to 30 June
rating four   4 Meece Rating

 

 

Comments Off on TWO NOBLE KINSMEN Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

June 7, 2018 · 8:32 am

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON Bridge, SE1

A WRITER, A MOTHER, A LIFE

 

The elegant new Bridge continues to demonstrate – firmly — that it is uniquely versatile. After one traditional tragicomedy (Young Marx) we had a swirling mob-riot immersive Caesar , then an intimate pastoral quartet , and now the 900-seat space offers a bare square of light, thrust forward for intimacy. And ninety minutes of sparse projections, artful lighting, a single hospital bed and chair and one narrator talking about a not particularly exceptional life.

 

Risky? On the other hand, the performer is Laura Linney, fiercely intelligent star of screen and Broadway, the source bestseller is by the Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout, the adaptor Rona Munro who dazzled us with the James Plays at Nicholas Hytner’s NT. And the director is no less than Richard Eyre. So, not such a risk.

 

And if you have a taste for this particular tone of intense, forensic emotional autobiography with a strong tang of the creative-writing course, it’s top of the genre. And it isn’t entirely fair o say “not particularly exceptional’, because Strout’s novel sets her heroine – a successful writer – at a moment of private crisis . She is remembering nine weeks in hospital with some undiagnosed serious condition, apart from her rather unengaged husband and two small daughters. But to her surprise her mother, long estranged, turns up and sits by her bed relating nicely sour stories of old neighbours. It reignites the writer’s memories of a fairly grim and lonely childhood in the Illinois croplands, in an isolated house without books, television or friends, and a father emotionally war-damaged and difficult. The twist is that Lucy Barton, rather than being a bit irritated and wanting to get the hell out, finds immense solace in her mother’s undemonstrative but positive presence. A slow catharsis takes place.

 

Linney is brilliant, evoking in turn both Lucy and the twanging, tough-nut mother. Elegant projections give us the Chrysler building outside the window, memories of wide fields , of her first married apartment and of the louche , alarming but stimulating freedom of New York and its people during the AIDS crisis. The strongest aspect is her evocation of childhood loneliness and a sense of never quite identifying and belonging, even in marriage. It tips over, though, typical of its post-Salinger genre, into a righteous affirmation of writerliness and its “ruthless” need to centre on itself and tell its “only story”.

 

And sometimes that can wear you down a bit. Make you feel a bit – well, I dunno, British. Suddenly the spell breaks and you wish she’d talk about something else. I would pay a lot to see the wonderful Linney, in a space and production like this, telling any number of other stories. But maybe not this Strout one. But it’s a class act, and could well be absolutely for you.

 

Box office: 0843-208 1846. to 23 June
rating three  3 Meece Rating

Comments Off on MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON Bridge, SE1

Filed under Theatre, Three Mice

Tagged as

June 2, 2018 · 6:28 pm

STITCHERS Jermyn St theatre WC1

A TAPESTRY OF HOPE

 

 

         Lady Anne Tree was the Duke of Devonshire’s daughter, sister in law of Kathleen Kennedy and Debo Mitford:   grand as they come.   Kept from school,   like the Mitford girls she grew a maverick streak  and learned from the bereavements of war to think for herself.    She was a lifelong prison visitor , and at home she found artistic and meditative relief in fine needlework,  so it occurred to her there was one group who had a lot of time to fill…  So twenty years ago she founded Fine Cell Work.  It teaches prisoners fine needlepoint  and quilting and sells it in the top shops. So the men (and some women, but most prisoners are men) can build up a modest fund for when they are freed.  

 

         Full disclosure: I am a patron of it, and have watched a group as ladies from the Royal School of Needlework taught, advised and provided materials (but not scissors..) to the most unlikely of seamsters for the next week’s in-cell work.  It is extraordinary and inspiring, and hard to believe that getting approval took Lady Anne thirty years of being treated as a “tiresome woman”. 

 

 

        Esther Freud’s debut play, drawn from the foundress’ letters and diaries and from observing today’s groups,  is an impression of those early trials and, in the background,  her struggles with the Home Office (where junior staff framed her increasingly furious letters: it’s not every day a Duke’s daughter calls you a load of shits).  At last, under John Major, permission was given. The rest is history, and a great deal of beautiful work.  Because as the redoubtable Lady said,  it had to be “top notch, none of this church hall nonsense” .

 

      Sinead Cusack is dream casting, with her strong humorous face,  drop-dead timing and ability to convey personal stress and frustration behind the gung-ho, matter-of-fact manner of the old aristocracy.  She’s got you,  from the moment when she first appears in a sensible brown coat and solid hat in front of Liz Cooke’s layered  set of wire mesh and bars. This set is  tough enough for vigorous chin-ups,  and rings often with the frustrated, angry prison percussion of banging and echoic shouting.  Director Gaby Dellal (better known for film work)  punctuates and underlines the action this way;  the tiny theatre easily creates the sense of a claustrophobic cell and bleak corridors behind.  

       Around Cusack we have Michael Nardone as  Lukasz the Pole,”strongest man in the prison”  and his scared new cellmate Tommy (Frankie Wilson),  in denial about his conviction.  There is Trevor Laird as tough Len,  the wheelchair- bound Busby,   and Victoria Elizabeth as the troubled trans “Denise” . One by one they succumb to the project and become its cheerleaders.  Freud treats the process carefully, using the reality of things actual inmates have said down the years.

  

  At times in the first half I had (being partisan) an  uneasy fear that it was not growing  enough narrative energy,  but becoming ironically imprisoned in its novelistic desire to show gradual personal change.   But there is fascination in that too,  and the physicality of the situation is especially striking:   brawls and chin-ups and thrown punches are set against the fine, fiddly  motor skills of the needleworkers’ hands .  You don’t need to be a neuroscientist to see how benign that could be to the scrambled angry brains in a macho environment.  The perfectionism of Lady Anne is entertainingly set against the  well-evoked grim squalor of the cells.  When Len snarls angrily “I made a pig’s ear of it!”   rather than cooing encouragingly she trills “Oh, dear, so you did. Unpick!”.    When he  man refuses to help a newcomer she says “Oh come on!” like any schoolmistress.   

        The unprisonerlike virtues of neatness and patience grow, and the sense  that it is worth – in embroidery or in life – being willing to start again.   The names of colours shine out against the grey-green dreariness:  emerald, cinnamon, Aquamarine, burnt umber, scarlet.. The sense of an outside world’s appreciation grows too. Busby gets the first letter since his mother died,  from a customer who cannot know his name.   And when the prison officer sceptically asks “How many embroidery-loving, criminal-sympathising, letter-writing people are out there, do you think?”  Lady Anne replies “Legions!”.  

 

       And so there  have proved to be.   It is quite hard to review this play  simply as drama without just succumbing, dazzled, to  the fineness of its late heroine and her charity.   Sometimes I did wonder just how useful it was of the author to appliqué on little bits of Lady Anne’s travel diaries and the loss of her dog: Cusack can create a real and rounded character without that obvious kind of help.    But it does find dramatic catharsis, in the second short half,  and leave you both triumphant, and thinking harder about prison than most people do.  Result. 

 

box office http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

to 23 june      Rating Four     4 Meece Rating

   

Comments Off on STITCHERS Jermyn St theatre WC1

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

May 25, 2018 · 9:21 am

PETER PAN. Open Air, Regents Park

LUKE JONES FALLS FOR TINKERBELL…
Peter Pan has now flown into every medium possible. He is a play, novel, pantomime, musical, television programme, cartoon and a Kate Bush single. This version, at the leafy, fairy light-twinkly and on this night, bone dry and sunny Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, is another twist. 
Directors Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel have melded World War One and circus. Despite the play being written a full 10 years before Franz Ferdinand took a ride through Sarajevo, the allegory is snug. Neverland is the escape, the idea of adventure and derring-do which Barrie himself peddled during the war, alongside many famous authors, in the War Propaganda Bureau. 
This production opens in a field hospital outside the trenches. Wendy is nurse, soldiers are limping in. Their suffering soon slips into the dream of Neverland. The device may be snug, but this is where the play is weakest. 
Give it ropes, give it flight and fight; that’s where things get cooking. When Sam Angell’s Panto Pan clambers through the window and into this scene, it’s as if someone has dropped a tea tray. Why is it so broad, so camp and so green? I slumped into my squeaky outdoor chair and prepared to lose an evening. But as the sun dipped behind the park, and the spotlights clicked on, things mightily picked up.  Dennis Herdman’s Captain Cook and his catalogue of tunes and gurns had us all chuckling, Tinkerbell (in the hands of the brilliant Elisa de Grey) had grown men cooing and even the Lost boys (who had a strong whiff of mid-morning kids TV) made sense. Cora Kirk as Wendy, (with a corking Hull accent we need to hear more of) was a solid attempt at the kind of generically defiant female lead of a musical, although this wasn’t one. Once everyone accepted it as just a very well-executed panto, things clicked.

 

 

The clutter of props, carried from wartime England, were transformed. Hospital beds were fireplaces, islands and boats. Curtains became fish. A briefcase and collection of hankies became a gull. Most importantly, the tick tock tick tock of the crocodile cumulated in a beast made of beady lanterns, a swishing tail of corrugated iron and a snapping jaw of deckchair. The entire evening is owed to puppet designer Rachael Canning. Her creations somewhat save the night from the concept. 
Even when Peter exclaimed that “to die would be a great adventure”, I was thinking pirates and canon, not soldiers and trenches. Which is why the war is nodded to, or when finally the lost boys return to the army uniform they started the night in, it all falls to pieces. They make a serious point; about lives being lost and wasted. But the performances are still loud, the dialogue still basic and cliches abound.
At the end of the war, in what’s described as Barrie’s first and last public appearance, he spoke of the war and of how they had told the “youth, who had to get us out of it, tall tales of what it really is and the clover beds to which it leads.”.
Box Office  0844 826 4242 
rating.  Three.   3 Meece Rating

Comments Off on PETER PAN. Open Air, Regents Park

Filed under Theatre, Three Mice

Tagged as

May 22, 2018 · 9:50 pm

THE GRONHOLM METHOD Menier, SE1

MULTINATIONAL MENACE

 
It is always a dilemma, for those of us who despise star-ratings as a measuring device, when a 90 minute play seems set fair to earn three, or three-and-a-bit, trundling along amusingly but not life-changing or extremely hilarious, and then zaps you in the last few minutes. With a twist, a reverse-ferret U-turn on the twist, and then a bravura final line which throws doubt on the whole lot.

 

This pleasing trick is pulled off by Jordi Galceran in a play born in Barcelona and translated by Anne-Garcia Romero with later tweaks, some from the Broadway director BT McNicholl. It’s been in 60 countries in 20 languages. It has struck a note. Which, among other things, cheeringly displays how widely in the corporate working world people fear and despise human-resources psychologists and tricksy interview techniques…

 

For the setting of the play is a small conference room, against skyscraper windows, in a Fortune 500 company in New York. Four candidates wait for a group interview. It’s a high-powered sales job and they’re all ambitious. Three are men, which just about reflects the 25% presence of women in such posts. Frank, the first arrival, is a rangy, arrogant alpha male (Jonathan Cake), followed by cherubic Carl (Greg McHugh) who happens to know Melanie (Laura Pitt-Pulford) from college days. And there’s Rick (John Gordon Sinclair) who tries to be friendly with the impassive, grumpy Frank and offers Tic-Tacs all round.

 

But no interviewer comes. Instead, a robotic filing drawer in the corner opens and delivers them “challenges” to test their interaction, role-play, reaction to stress and strategic reasoning. Galceran assures us that all the increasingly preposterous manoeuvres perpetrated by this multinational HR psych department are drawn from life. Though maybe not all at once. Being a serious researcher-critic I took along a friend , a scarred veteran of several companies, Harvard Business School and the Institute of Directors,. With a gulp she assures me this is how it is. Manipulative, often infantile, and profoundly disrespectful of the human workforce .

 

But it is for that reason often very funny, with spoutings of corporate jargon (“Profit is everything. But people are everything too”) and fine bursts of ill-tempered distrustfulness (Cake is wonderfully aggressive ,with nice comic timing). Pitt-Pulford as the only woman shakes out some of of the sexist prejudices but other more arcane ones start to emerge as bits of personal live are exacted by the challenges. No spoilers, but there’s a lot of lying going on. |And over the whole operation hovers the question as to whether such a company really wants “a good man who looks like a sonofabitch or a sonofabitch who looks like a good man”? Don’t answer that…

 

After a slight slowing-down it roars forward into U-turns , revelations and one very strong and nicely nasty scene between Cake and Pitt-Pulford. And the fourth mouse, shudderingly pleased to be too much of a rodent even for the corporate world, staggers towards the prize..

 

box office 0207 378 1713 to 7 july
rating four  4 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on THE GRONHOLM METHOD Menier, SE1

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

May 18, 2018 · 1:01 pm

HAMLET                 Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

THE NEW ERA BEGINS…

   

 

Here’s a vulnerable Hamlet:  a lonely lad in proper tearful grief and disappointment at his mother’s remarriage.    A Hamlet who, in feigning madness,  loses his grip for a while on sense and kindness;  whose treatment of Ophelia we can wince at but understand.  Above all it is a Hamlet whose progress through the switchback of grief and anger and self-doubt and superstition and affection is diamond-precise,  driven by the text.  His final brief adult nobility where “readiness is all” is all the more effective for that.  I have seen more spectacular Hamlets and more arresting ones, but few with such intimate, credible accuracy in the arc of his suffering and resolution.

 

 

This Hamlet is a woman, Michelle Terry.    Horatio is female too, as is Marcellus, and Laertes is the tiny, sparky Bettrys Jones. On the other hand Ophelia is a man:  Shubham Saraf,  with a delicate and touching  performance but also an uncompromisingly schoolboy short-back-and-sides above the ballgown, standing a head taller than her brother or Hamlet.   Rosencrantz – looking a bit old to be a schoolmate -is a conventionally bearded Pearce Quigley, but Guildenstern is  Nadia Nadarajah , who is Deaf : she communicates with sprightly good humour in BSL -British Sign Language – to which Hamlet responds skilfully and Rosencrantz sometimes translates.

 

 

This production is a key moment in Michelle Terry’s new role as Artistic Director of the Globe, after the less than happy departure of Emma Rice. And power to her:  not only kicking off with two plays (often running  on the same day, as yesterday) but using a hefted, identical company for both,  and in the second playing Hamlet.  I call that leading from the front. 

 

 

         I missed the As You Like It, in which she took a smaller part. But towards dusk saw Hamlet. Terry has made it clear that in  casting she plans 50:50 gender equality and greater diversity; she also  runs rehearsals more startlingly open to outsiders than most actors have ever known.  The actors,  composer, choreographer,  two directors ( Federay Holmes and Elle While)   and the designer Ellan Parry are equal partners, she says,  and use rehearsal as a “test tube” of experimentation.  With Parry by the way we are instructed to use only the pronoun “they”, though there is only one of they. Fine but confusing: I prefer “xi” myself.. 

     

           Do not flinch. Gender politics are in the air, women do need a better break in theatre, and there is a place for free thinking collaboration.  As a fine and seasoned actor and scholarly Shakespearean  – but not a director  – Michelle Terry  might as well rattle the cages of the old school “auteur-director”  with a personal vision of  a classic. That, after all, has lately led to a couple of quite tiresome  Macbeths.   But  as an  audience we too are in the experiment and collaboration.  And for all the engagement and skill, for all the leader’s strong Hamlet, the fine blaring trumpets and stellar performances like Helen Schlesinger’s Gertrude,  Colin Hurley’s Ghost  and a wonderful, slyly funny Poloniusn from Richard Katz,   there are moments which jar.  

 

 

     For, this  humbly collaborative audience member ventures to say,  it jars when the physical casting and mixed costumes impede the storytelling, slow us down, make the watcher  think “ah, another 21c sensibility there!” rather than feeling the line of the tragedy.    Honestly,  get rid of that bobble hat in the battlement scene, tone down the clown suit sooner,  restrict some of the BSL moments.   We need to be transported and the Globe, with the pulsing energy of the groundlings , can do that better than many.    Interestingly, there was far less interaction with the groundlings than we are used to here, and that matters  ( Terry’s Hamlet is better at it than anyone else. She knows how to Globe-it from earlier performances). 

 

 

  And  one should not have to feel sheer relief when the gravedigger is not another modishly diverse gesture but just Colin Hurley again,   curmudgeonly male in  a hi-vis vest, 100% proof traditional as Shakespeare would remember.     Terry does no arms-length skull-work but just  hops into the new-dug muddy grave beside him.  The prince’s memories of Yorick are properly affecting. Moments like that stay with you as strongly as the jerky 21c devices.  May there be many more .

 

box office 0207 401 9919    

 to 26 aug

rating   three  

The Bard Mouse width fixedHamlet Mouse width fixedThe Bard Mouse width fixed

Comments Off on HAMLET                 Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

Filed under Theatre, Three Mice

Tagged as

May 15, 2018 · 10:18 pm

RED Wyndhams, WC2

THE SHINE AND THE TERROR

 

 

It is no bad thing to have your stage hero effectively co-designing the set. Christopher Oram’s recreation of Mark Rothko’s 1950’s studio is a bleak box with a cluttered workbench and frames and pulleys for his vast canvases. It is dominated by the overbearing, majestic, mysteriously edgeless, tragic and challengine reds and blacks of his Seagram- project canvases. Neil Austin’s lighting design, a miracle in itself, makes them glow and threaten, palpate and shiver in just the way the artist eloquently insists in John Logan’s astonishing play. (on which subject, sign the petition now to save stage lighting from a disastrous new regulation, https://tinyurl.com/yafaaqaz , this matters).

 

 

Michael Grandage brought it first eight years ago to the Donmar, since when it has enthralled Broadway and the world. To general joy Alfred Molina reprises the part of Rothko, more than ably partnered this time with Alfred Enoch as the skinny, intense, thoughtful young assistant Ken who is his awed skivvy. And finally, after the two years covered in this sharp 90 minutes, his conscience. It is an eloquently entertaining duologue stretching from Nietzsche, Jung, Hamlet , Rembrandt and Turner to the emotional and spiritual point of art, its evolution from figurative to abstract, its inheritance and what Rothko calls the moment when “the child must bash the father” as his abstract-impressionists crushed the Cubists (he feels this until young Ken tells him that the pop-art movement is about “this moment and a little bit tomorrow” so he too must give way. Gracelessly.)

 
So it could be overtalky, were it not so electrically theatrical and visual as Ken darts around stretching canvases and mixing paints. At one point the pair of them – wild in separate energy and then strangely, balletically together – prime a huge red canvas at speed to an rising operatic theme. Its emotional shape is intensely satisfying too: clashes, revelations, arguments, absurdities , passions and the perennial joyful mystery of genius. Of the way that a terrible self-absorbed curmudgeon can turn his own restless depressions and terrors into something which feeds the world’s spirit for centuries after.

 

 

“Not everyone wants art that actually hurts” protests Ken in his great diatribe against the master late on, but sometimes we need it. And it is Ken who persuades Rothko in the end to refuse the swanky, lucrative, fashionable Seagram-building money and keep the pictures – which he did, in 1959. Rothko explains why in one of the smaller but most enjoyable soliloquies in which Molina describes, with pitiless detail, the utter ghastliness – the timelessly pretentious horrific Tina-Brownery – of the smart New York restaurant for which they were commissioned.
Perfect. It is a play of fire and poetry, laughter and rage. An imagined colloquy with its own kind of genius.

 

box office https://tickets.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/index.asp?ShoID=2420
to 28 July
rating five (extra thematic mouse  dedicated to design and lighting. Sorry no lighting mouse, will get Roger to draw one..)

5 Meece Rating Set Design Mouse resized

 

Comments Off on RED Wyndhams, WC2

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

May 11, 2018 · 12:55 pm

PUT OUT THE LIGHTS Avenue Theatre, Ipswich

CLEAR YOUNG VOICES FROM A DISTANT PAST

 

 

   Three children in the 1540’s play in a hay-barn,  built fragrant and real in the tiny theatre.   One has  found a pilgrim medal and they  argue about grown-up matters like the “Popish trash” who might have dropped it, and the famous local statue of “Our Lady Gracious” which has been rightly  (in the view of the censoriously new-Protestant boy Alexander ) rightly sent to London to be burnt .  “The cult of saints is OVER!” he cries. “No one’s is ever allowed a pilgrimage no more”.  The other lad, Edward, rather liked the statue.   There is a fleeting mention of Ann Boleyn, executed four years earlier :    “a whore, but -“  one argues  “no friend to the Pope”. The girl Alice is as engaged as the boys, a forthright and confident farm kid.  

 

 

           The clever thing is that in this short, lively opening scene we easily believe that bright 16c children talked of these things: just as now they talk of global warming, refugees,  Corbyn or – a dark parallel to come later – of jihadi martyrdom. The  three  local youth-theatre children carry the opening with conviction, and Joanna Carrick’s dialogue  is faultless:  naturalistic to a modern ear but with proper Suffolk accents riding archaic idioms and rhythms with ease.   Thus when moments later their young adult selves are before us, we are aware both of their characters and their times. 

 

 

     For  Protestantism caught light rapidly  in these Eastern counties.  Alexander, planning a weaver’s career and Flanders travels, has brought an English Testament to read scripture with them: the youngsters are enthralled by the new  technology and the sense of holding the real original Word, not tired Catholic “superstition” of  statues and ritual.   Contempt for Popery has conspiracies being talked of even on the poorest farm.  The seafaring town has heard a  rumour that the statue of “Mary Gracious” was smuggled to Papist Italy (it’s still there! in Nettuno! Carrick as author-director went to visit it..).   

 

         The trio are increasingly at odds.  Gentle Ed challenges the ever-fiercer Protestantism of his friend with “Why must you be so heartfelt about everything?”.   When Alice’s father dies her grief  is lightened by pious Alex’s “Be strong in faith, be not bowed in spirit!”  but rather more by Ed’s proposal.   At which point I should mention that Isabel Della-Porta, Oliver Cudbill and Ricky Oakley deliver some of the strongest and most honest youthful performances I have seen.    Della-Porta in particular carries the centrally tragic role of the real Alice Driver with remarkable dignity and fire. 

 

        The young pair work together, laugh and joke and matchmake (a very funny scene)  for the earnest Alex.  But the wider story is darkening.    The boy-king Edward dies in 1553,  Jane Grey lasts nine days, then Catholic Mary, Bloody Mary,   has her five years’ terror.  It  bore very heavily on this region with its staunchly stubborn protestants.   When the happy couple come in exhausted and covered in black soot from the stubble-burning,  it is a brief ironic prefiguring of Alice’s end.    For despite electric, passionate scenes where her husband tries to persuade her to take the sacrament,  she will not do so, and finally in 1558 will stand alongside Alexander at the stake in 1558, her ears cut off and her living body burned for calling  Queen Mary a “Jezebel! Papal whore!”.    

 

 

        The political is the personal.   Ed’s cry to his friend Alexander is “leave us, with your liking of danger and darkness!”  and to his wife “Alice, the fire will be hot and the terror great and the pain extreme. And life is sweet…”.  She only says “We love God, that’s all..but do we love him enough?”  .   The heroism of it shakes you rigid:   Alice Driver in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is recorded as saying of the chain holding her to the pyre “Here is a goodly neckerchief, blessed by God for it”.   Della-Porta in her final prison scene makes that seem credible. 

 

 

      I think I will be haunted by this play.  I was by Joanna Carrick’s last one, PROGRESS,  and this is even better.  That was about  the aftermath for  local people caught up in the intellectual thrill and dark savagery of the Reformation. – set in 1561, when Queen Elizabeth visited Ipswich and a fragile peace came to a nation so bitterly, dangerously  divided that our current flouncing irritations over Brexit look like a nursery huff.  What Carrick has done in both is tremendous: no Wolf-Hall aristocracies and political gaming, simply a sense of clear young voices speaking to us from a distant past, suffering and relishing seismic changes in the way a whole western world thought and believed.  The ending has a quietly intense religious and personal force which leaves you silent.   

 

Box office         www.redrosechain.com     to to 27 May

rating  five

Comments Off on PUT OUT THE LIGHTS Avenue Theatre, Ipswich

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

May 8, 2018 · 11:39 pm

NIGHTFALL Bridge Theatre, SE1

ROUGH, RURAL, A NEGLECTED ALBION

 

 

An immense intrusive pipe bisects the stage, a rusty oil tank below it with part of a tractor one side and a cheerless Victorian brick farmhouse indicated on the other. It is dusk, stars emerging behind; brighter starbursts from a welding-torch behind the pipe meet laughing enthusiasm from two lads in overalls. Anyone accustomed to rural dodges will grasp that they are tapping one of the ugly oil-pipes from the coast which – for a useful few quid – a farmer will allow across his Hampshire land. Ryan and Pete, gleeful in matehood, complete the job; Ryan’s sister Lou looks on with resigned scorn. Earlier than expected home, their mother Jenny strides up onto the stage and is not pleased at the felony. Even though, by this time, it is becoming clear that the farm is on its uppers and every little helps.

 

 

Thus the brand-new Bridge continues to defy predictability: after the serio-comic-historic Young Marx and the riotous immersive Julius Caesar here is a plaintive, conversational four-hander by Barney Norris. His marvellous earlier works (Visitors, https://tinyurl.com/ycz2qajc ) and Eventide (https://tinyurl.com/ycxjdw4j ) have been in more intimate fringe theatres. And there are not many 900+ unsubsidized houses which would take a punt like this, on a slice of 21c rural life in decline. Not even after Jerusalem, not even for a short run.

But it worked for me. With a fine-tuned cast, Rae Smith’s immense and atmospheric set and Laurie Sansom’s direction, Norris’ intense personal and social observation command attention: from a dangerously slow-burn start it proves to be not only an engrossing play but quite an important one.

 

It is on the surface a portrait of grief: the family’s father died of cancer a year or so back, and they are stuck in awkward irritable love, and also stuck with a heavily indebted farm which Ryan can hardly cope with and whose financial disaster Jenny, in her nostalgic resentful grief, denies. . Back into their lives comes Lou’s former boyfriend Pete, a childhood friend of both siblings , not a farmer but a council-estate lad fresh out of prison (we learn more, in dramatic second act revelations, about this). He is the skilled welder who has the bright idea about the pipe, his lifetime motto being “as long as you get away with it”.

 

But it is also a play about forgotten lives. A fierce essay in the programme has Norris reminding us that “We live in a country stolen from its people..by a political class, a monopoly capitalism that locks us into wage brackets while leaving the lost of living to go wherever the wind blows; stolen by the swamping homogeniety of middle class white western taste“. These are probably, despite EU agricultural subsidies, Brexit people. Which is another good reason for the Bridge to kick the subject about , however obliquely.

 

The interweaving of the personal stories with that social observation has real power, just as Miller’s did in Death of a Salesman. The humanity of the four is to the forefront: Clare Skinner’s Jenny infuriating, needy, controlling, unhappy, trying to play normal and resolutely middle-class with her M & S nibbles and whatever wine the TV show says is fashionable, her Fevertree tonic and tea-lights. These distractions serve her nothing: “I’m never all right, that’s the trouble”. Ophelia Lovibond as her daughter is equally caught in grief, but more clear-eyed about the missing father’s shortcomings, and has suffered in other ways from the debacle. Ryan, saddest case of the four, struggles under the burden of the farm and of his mother : a terrific Sion Daniel Young, big-eyed, skinnily desperate, struggles on with forced optimism, irritated by the romanticization of his mother (“I chuck chemicals on wheat, Mum, I’m not a tree hugger. I make money, I make food, we’re not Druids living off roots”. Pete is Ukweli Roach, who from the laddish wide-boy of the opening scene reveals himself by stages in a tough, touching decency.

 

They are all, in their way, fascinating. Their diverse grief is part of them, an overarching reason to be stuck; but they are stuck anyway. A lot of people in rural Britain are, but they are not often put into focus, not in the most fashionable and chic of London theatres. There is mischief and usefulness in programming it just as the urban second-homers  return from their  May holiday in the pretty hills and fields, blind to the minimum-wage hinterland …

 

Box office: 0843-208 1846. to 26 May

rating  four  4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on NIGHTFALL Bridge Theatre, SE1

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

May 4, 2018 · 12:58 am

AN IDEAL HUSBAND Vaudeville, WC1

OSCAR AT HIS MOST EARNEST

 

Worth going to Jonathan Church’s  latest Wilde “Classic Spring”revival if only for a feast of Foxes: patriarch Edward as  old Lord Caversham and his real  youngest son Freddie as his stage son Lord Goring. They do not disappoint, octogenarian Edward doddering for England, a testy dinosaur but sharp as a tack on the Earl’s exasperated lines.   Freddie – lately so memorable as Wilde’s nemesis Bosie in The Judas Kiss – is perfect too as the dandyish heart-of-gold. Which is crucial, as Goring speaks for Wilde himself in both his flippant epigrammatism and his genuine plea for a life lived more by charity and affection than by impossible moral pieties, “pitiless in perfection”.

 

They’re a treat, those two, with on the press night an extra gale of affection for Fox junior when he strides across the gilded  apartment to burn the blackmailer’s letter on a candle. Perhaps  due to over enthusiastic  elf ‘n safety fireproofing,  it failed to catch. And failed again,  and nearly dowsed  the candle. As  he improvised “nobody can read it now”over the barely charred remains, he and Frances Barber’s malevolent Mrs Cheveley gallantly resisted corpsing.  Almost.

But enough Fox-worship. More urgent in its Wildean philosophy than the earlier, larkier ones in the season, this is a fascinating and heartfelt play.  It is serious, despite  all the beloved absurdities, preenings, and wicked satires on high society prattle (Susan Hampshire’s monologue on modern dreadfulness is another veteran treat, showing the kids how it’s done) .  It is not mere social reputation at odds here, but the career of Sir Robert Chiltern: a  rising politician who years ago founded his wealth and career (political careers cost money then) on leaking a Cabinet secret for money.

The adventuress Mrs Cheveley can expose him and wreck career and marriage unless he compounds the dishonesty by praising her South American investment which he knows  to be a swindle.  Nathaniel Parker carries the torment of capitulation and regret well, and Barber is a rattlesnake foe.  Their encounter in the first act is electric,  and the villainess’  confrontation with the wife -Sally Bretton -equally so. It is assisted by the way that Cheveley wears immense and truly menacing puff sleeves and the pious Liberal-Ladies-Club wife  the demurest of white scalloped  collarettes: Simon Higlett’s design  is sumptuous but unfussy under a gilded dome, every detail elegant.

A bravo too  for the melodramatic entr’acte fiddler  Samuel Martin and the suavely intimidating Phipps the Butler (Sam Waller).And above all  Faith Omole’s West End debut as Chiltern’s sister: she handles Wilde’s Benedict-and-Beatrice sparring with Fox beautifully, with an edge of defiant mischief he’d have liked.

 

Box office 0330 333 4814. To 14July

Rating four  4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on AN IDEAL HUSBAND Vaudeville, WC1

Filed under Theatre

May 2, 2018 · 9:55 am

ROMEO AND JULIET Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

FAST, FINE  STREETWISE SHAKESPEARE 

  

 

    Running and scuffling, a crowd of kids in  black scatter across the stark stage under an open-sided, distressedly concrete-looking box. They fizz with energy, insult and partisan gang loyalty. And they all have knives.  This young community chorus  share the  opening : Erica Whyman’s take on “fair Verona” and the feud of Montague and Capulet is contemporary,  its lethal blade  culture all too topical.

 

 

     So is the casting of  “Prince” Escalus,   Beth Cordingley striding exasperatedly in a swishing smart coat to stop the latest melée:   a woman in power despairing at immature male aggression.   In another intelligent gender-switch,  the Prince’s  cousin is one of two tough girls as combative as their male peers. Mercutio, normally just one of the most irritating, punning  hyper characters in Shakespeare, is  the quicksilver performer Charlotte Josephine:  androgynous, crop-haired, mocking, a far tougher cookie than Josh Finan’s gentle, lovingly homo-affectionate Benvolio.  

 

 

      But it is not a tiresomely gimmicky ‘now’ production, but one marked all through by that  close-worked RSC concentration on the text which always prompts interesting new thoughts about a play we know well.   Bally Gill’s Romeo is excitable, daft in his mooning for Rosaline ;  but in the freeze-frame moment at Capulet’s wild disco party he grows into a thunderstruck sincerity which, for all continuing puppyish and impulsive moments ,  gives him an enduring open-eyed  dignity.    Though the one bit of textual meddling that raised my eyebrow was when he sees  bright Juliet hanging on the cheek of night “like some rich jewel on an Ethiop’s ear”.   This Romeo says “ebony ear”.  Which just sounds weird, and in a relaxedly diverse cast, more prissily PC than is necessary.

  

      Otherwise it’s wonderful.  Karen Fishwick’s Juliet is fresh, brave,  growing through the play from childlike simplicity to reckless and honourable love.  Her Scottish tones give the lines the poetry they need;   yet the hot reality of the coup-de-foudre affair enables the pair,  without strain,   to get unexpected moments of comedy out of the often overswoony balcony scene.  His attempt to depart is every besotted couple’s “no, you ring off” “No, you..”  The Nurse, Ishia Bennison, is wonderfully funny, cackling about her nursing years, earthy and interfering,   not an “ancient” though she seems so to the young but full of knowing middle-aged familiarity and self-importance.  A small bouquet here too to Raif Clarke as her fed-up attendant Peter: he scores several of his own laughs.  The nurse’s first scenes with Juliet are telling, the girl flopping on her lap and giggling at her feet while the  seeming at times a decent pragmatist,  but suddenly terrifying, a proto-Lear when  he curses his rebellious daughter “Hang, beg, ie in the streets!”.   Again, a thought arises:  this man  feels his status and authority crumbling,  see how he sucks up to Count Paris…

 

 

        And the fighting?  Tybalt is a thuggish Raphael Sowole, knife-happy and aggressive;  when the mocking, slender Mercutio provokes him you sense layers of private animosity.  And for me a new reflection arises: the lazy truism is that it was the feud of the elders that caused the tragedy, of which the young lovers were victims.  But the text makes it clear that the elders are wearying of the old battle – when Romeo has crashed the party,  Capulet restrains young Tybalt with “be patient, take no note of him, he shall be endured”.     Both sets of parents are more than ready to listen to Escalus by the end, blaming nobody, reformed by sorrow as we all wish enemies would be.   It is the young, the impetuous kids in black, who keep the feud alive:  thumb-biting idiots Gregory and Sampson,   swaggering Tybalt defying his uncle in his determination to  punish the outrage of Romeo invading his ‘hood.    And not least Mercutio:   who for all Romeo’s pleading is spoiling for a fight with knife and insult, and won’t let up.  That it should be swagger, stupidity and verbal defiance that  lights the fuse of  disaster  for the lovers is as topical as it always was. 

 

box office  rsc.org.uk  to 19 Jan

rating  four  4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on ROMEO AND JULIET Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

May 1, 2018 · 12:12 pm

NINE NIGHT Dorfman SE1

GUEST CRITIC MICHAEL ADAIR  FINDS  KINSHIP IN  A FAMILY SORROW 

 

 

Well, this is timely. In the shadow of Windrush, a play  immerses us in the colourful traditions of Caribbean funeral culture,   but unites even the uninitiated in a shared understanding of grief and family.

 

Nine Night is a sensational debut written by Natasha Gordon and directed by Roy Alexander Weise. We meet Lorraine and her daughter Anita as they are taking care of Gloria, Lorraine’s dying mother. Gloria is of the Windrush generation who came to the UK 70 years ago, looking for work and opportunity. When Gloria passes, the dark and quiet household is transformed into an explosion of light, colour, food and music. You can smell supper simmering on the hob as the family dances into the kitchen, the table soon covered in bottles of rum, flowers and a feast as they begin the traditional Jamaican Nine Night wake where family and friends drink, dance and eat to share condolences and celebrate the life of their departed loved one.

 

 

The play takes place in Gloria’s kitchen, a set by Rajha Shakiry which pays hugely satisfying attention to detail – from the tropical yellow wallpaper to the rickety kitchen drawers, it all feels real;  it has been lived in by this family. From the kitchen we hear music from the adjacent sitting room, the throbbing bass of reggae music and the busy chatter of voices. We are told the house is full of strangers, all here to join in the festivities. We are introduced to Great Aunt Maggie and Uncle Vince; the former an utterly glorious performance from Cecilia Noble, a domineering matriarch, defiantly rooted in her Jamaican traditions as she criticises and irritates her family relentlessly. Her sassy patois serves up many of the funniest lines of the evening as she boasts that her bush tea recipe can cure diabetes and that her cousin simply must be buried in a new wig, or else she’ll ‘frighten Jesus’.

 

 

But whilst there is much to amuse in this very funny play, it is ultimately a reflection on grief. The loss of Gloria brings about fissures in an already dysfunctional and disparate family unit. Franc Ashman is superb as Lorraine – tensing and shuddering with annoyance at the cringe-inducing insensitivities uttered by her family; not least by her brother, Robert, another terrific performance by Oliver Alvin-Wilson. Robert is coping with his mother’s death in the way that men do best: by bottling up his emotions until they explode as anger and frustration, antagonising his niece and being cruel to his sister. His grief can also be glimpsed behind the veils of a drunken joke shared with the only other man in the play, Uncle Vince, played by Ricky Fearon.

 

It is Gordon’s mastery of the family dynamic and relationships that makes this play such a spell-binding experience. There is a sense that this is what all families are like: an assortment of disparate personalities, everyone rolling their eyes and attempting to get along whilst having been steamrollered by their grief. This becomes all the more poignant when set against the most contradictory of backgrounds – all of these people are suffering, yet the music is still blaring and the rum is still flowing. It’s breath-taking.

  There simply isn’t enough theatre like this. Poignant, authentic, stunning.

nationaltheatre.org.uk   to 12 may

rating: five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on NINE NIGHT Dorfman SE1

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

April 25, 2018 · 12:04 am

THE WRITER Almeida, N1

REBEL WITHOUT AN ARGUMENT

 

It is a curiosity of the age that young British women seem to be far angrier about The Patriarchy than their mothers , even though law, language, women’s accomplishments, education, and domestic social conventions are infinitely more on their side , and their struggle is far less. None of our ‘60s victories counts: one wrong pass or incautious phrase and they cry outrage. Every global cruelty and disaster from war and capitalism to environmental disaster is men’s fault too – even when a woman sends the bombers, runs the shops or uses the microbead lotions. Odd

 

In this show the bastards are also in charge of the arts: ruining creative women’s holy myths by mentioning squalid things like the need to sell tickets for the Sacred Space that is Theatre. Ella Hickson’s meta-theatrical play opens with a bracing encounter between a male director (Sam West,) and a truculent, furious young woman (Lara Rossi, brilliant at it) . She has seen a play and informs him that it was unreal,“saying lines..fake hair and new shoes and famous people doing things badly”, that he’s just a “good night out sort of guy” (ugh!) and that old men with flaking skin “tell THEIR truth” and don’t change the world with holy fire. So he offers her a writing commission, but it turns out that when they met before he tried to kiss her, so that invalidates everything, hashtag MeToo !

 

 

The patriarchal idea of logical narrative is obviously out of the question, so it jerks on to a quite funny sketch of a panel – adding Romola Garai and Michael Gould to the first two – discussing a work in progress. There’s one great exchange where the elder man sneers that drama can’t be “just one person’s self-involved perspective on their own anguish” and the woman writer replies “Hamlet!”.

 

Hence to a half-finished playlet (Anna Fleischle’s set nicely built in moments onstage) in which Garai and West are a couple. He (after a quick shag) serves her supper and wishes she would accept a £ 40K film offer for her play. She says it would be like mutilating an unborn child, that she is “broken” in agonizing pain by his love of sofas and Waitrose, and that Picasso didn’t do anything he didn’t want to , so why should she? A real baby is briefly brought on, to prove she doesn’t want one, and next thing we know the set has vanished and she is having an IUD fitted. Which brings on a mythic monologue about being in a tribe with the goddess Semele and having lesbian sex under rippling lighting effects, which is better than the “semi devastated feeling that follows sex with men” because you negotiate your own sameness…
The producer comes on and mutters that though she is frighteningly gifted the play would be better without this “tribal shit” and with an actual ending. So despite her affront (“writers need to be safe”) we move to that ending. Which consists of a ritzier set, the two women eating a takeaway and having sex, once without a huge vivid purple dildo and once with it. Which upsets them, because just as in the end of Animal Farm. the power-game panting of the topmost one means that she has become one of the oppressive pigs. Dicks are evil, see?

 

I get it. I see why this means to break boundaries and change the world, know why the real male boss-class put it on, and why some uneasy middle-aged men – with and without flaky skin – will give it an approving nod. And the cast are all excellent. But I’m a woman, and a fiction writer, and frankly, if this is feminism and a plea for creativity I am a banana. It speaks only for the narrowest of demographics: a notional angry , unloving, sexually militant mythoholic 24-year-old riddled with humourless artistic vanity and self-pity. That Ella Hickson gives her male characters occasional sharp funny lines to puncture this monstrous kid’s balloon is to her credit. But as a play, it is pretty awful.

 

box office almeida.co.uk to 26 May
rating two   2 meece rating

Comments Off on THE WRITER Almeida, N1

Filed under Theatre, Two Mice

Tagged as

April 21, 2018 · 9:37 pm

THE MODERATE SOPRANO returns; Duke of York’s , WC1

MORE THAN A PICNIC

 

 

  I could tell you that it is worth going up West for the transfer of Hampstead’s fine play just to see Roger Allam (his fine quiff sadly suppressed under a bald wig) as John Christie, founder-owner of Glyndebourne’s opera house on the Sussex Downs, issuing one particular indignant horrified nod at the word “Mozart”.  The resulting explosion – absorbed with sphinx-like placidity by his German-Austrian musical hirelings  –  is one to cherish.  Christie, a small determined almost P.G.Wodehouse character,  has tasted the sublime in Wagner’s great unwieldy Parsifal.  So he finds Mozart “samey..bit jngly…no sense of the spirituaul..intrigue, silly girls and giggling and big wigs… it’s like playing cricket with a soft ball”. 

 

 

      I loved it at Hampstead,  found it a  “ heart-soaring, joyful and sad and humane piece” ,  its vindication of the picnic-rug and black-tie world of high class opera ws gorgeously unexpected from David Hare.   It was after he dramatized his jaundiced memories of a constipated 1962 public-school in  “South Downs” that the producer, Byam Shaw, suggested he take on the story of how John Christie, an eccentric wartime soldier and Eton science master, inherited the estate in the early ‘30s and decided to build an opera house and a festival. 

 

 

     The “moderate soprano” of the title is his wife, the singer Audrey Mildmay, who Christie  besieged with gifts and flowers until she married him: he was already fifty.   She died before him, leaving him bereft: her decline, and his nursing, book-end the play.     For the festival seasons he recruited Rudolf Bing, Fritz Busch and Carl Ebert: its a memory-play of the interaction of those five determined characters.  

 

 

      Sometimes  it is very funny, at times profoundly sad.  For what Hare makes of John Christie’s story is not “heritage theatre” but a hymn to art and its ambiguities, an elegy for the  passing of life  and a portrait of a man self-willed,  choleric, impassioned.  Sometimes Captain Mainwaring, sometimes almost Eric Morecambe,  he is absurd but awe-inspiring,  a “character’ but also a deep and needy personality.    Roger Allam  is perfection: chubbed-up, in a bald wig, he becomes the bluff reckless middle-aged soldier who one night in Bayreuth discovered “the sublime – until I heard that music I had no idea who I was”.   Line upon line he delights:  “Hate music-lovers, awful people, do nothing but complain – but I love music!”. 

 

 

 With his team assembled and the first season coming,  Christie reacts with explosive horror to Bing and Busch telling him it can’t be Wagner – “you’ve built a jewel box, not an epic theatre”.    As for his furious insistence that opera-goers must wear boiled shirts and get on a train to  deep Sussex on a working day, it is superb, and nobody could deliver it like Allam.  These damn people  must, he says, not just fiddle around with “ telephones and whatever they do in offices” then ‘take in a show’.  They must accept “It’s their lives that are the sideshow!  Opera’s the thing! And if it uses up their time and wipes out their savings so be it!”.     

       Nancy Carroll is a perfect foil as Audrey, sinking her identity and her art in his explosive will, loving him,  her postwar decline tragic.  Paul Jesson and Anthony Calf react wonderfully as Busch and Ebert, and  this time round Jacob Fortune-Lloyd is a sinuous,  sardonic Viennese smoothie Rudolf Bing, the maestro who spent  war years working in Peter Jones, enjoying the hair salon because its febrile atmosphere was most like opera – “I love hysteria…Nietzsche said, for art there must be frenzy”.  

 

      The frenzy of a tubby, determined man with a yearning for sublimity receives, in this lovely play, the respect that it should.  And on a second viewing, with the same reservation as at Hampstead – which is simply about a slightly too slow first half –  other thoughts occur.  The elegiac quality seems stronger: Audrey’s last moments, and his late sadness, are truly wrenching.   And it makes sense at last that David Hare, never knowingly under-socialist, should have written it.  Art has no politics, and while opera  needs the money of the rich,  it is in essence not upper-class:   just sublimely human.

box office   atgtickets.com  0844 871 7627

to 30 June

rating four    4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE MODERATE SOPRANO returns; Duke of York’s , WC1

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

April 20, 2018 · 4:17 pm

BAT OUT OF HELL Dominion, W1

BAT’S BACK…

 

     In a remarkably quick return after its Coliseum outing , Jim Steinman’s barmy musical is storming onto the Tottenham Court Road, rocking on.  Few cast changes – we still have the rockstarry Polec, a fair curly-headed manic figure  looking like Fotherington-Thomas gone to the dark side,   and Christina Bennington as the rebellious Raven;  we still  the choreography by Emma Portner and the rowdy, explosive, shape-shifting set by Jon Bausor.   And it’s even louder than at the Coliseum.

      I still love it.  I stand by my earlier review here – on a very hot summer night I still offer it my throat, as per wolf.  

     https://theatrecat.com/2017/06/21/bat-out-of-hell-london-coliseum-wc1/

Even though chaos on the trains on press night  meant I had to flee before the second half…

    

     But it has been brought to my notice that some critical voices I respect really don’t like it.  So here are a few reasons I do..

  • Because Rob Fowler and Sharon Sexton are hilarious as the heroine’s parents , first in their furious “Who needs the Young” song,  then unforgettably in the onstage Cadillac rendering of “Paradise by Dashboard light”.  Surely you gotta love a youthy rock gig where the middle-aged steal the scene?
  • Because Danielle Steers delivers : “I won’t do that”  in something approximating a solid gold blues baritone
  • Because of the bit where the motorbike explodes
  • Because Jim Steinman’s lyrics are among the best expressions of rock’n’roll rebellion ever written,  while managing to be ironic with it
  • Because of the ensemble movement.   Wild yet daft.
  • And the plot:   plain daft, based on Peter Pan while remaining the least J.M.Barrie show imaginable
  • Because come on –  if you’re going to do a ridiculous jukebox musical,  the city which has embraced the vapidly ghastly Mamma Mia for years on end deserves a better break.  

Comments Off on BAT OUT OF HELL Dominion, W1

Filed under Theatre

Tagged as

April 17, 2018 · 3:15 pm

TITANIC  THE MUSICAL              Mayflower, Southampton and touring

A LATE NIGHT TO REMEMBER 

 

         At twenty to midnight, 106 years to the day after the collision,  an audience gathered in this big theatre to mark and remember the disaster.    All credit to cast and crew for doing a full production ending at 0230, its last curtain call followed by a sober minute’s silence for the seafaring city.  Cast and audience together stood facing  the memorial to the 1500 people, passengers and (mainly local) working crew, who died that night.     It was a genuinely and gently moving moment.

 

 

    So after the fascinating Shadow Factory , Southampton gets a second theatrical take on its history with the touring revival of Thom Southerland’s marvellous production of Moury Yeston’s musical..  It could hardly have a more resonant launch than this midnight performance on Saturday.   I admired the show two years ago at the little Charing Cross Theatre,  surprised at the modesty of its outing (it won Tonys in the US).   Now in the big Mayflower, with an expanded but still simple version of David Woodhead’s two-level, white-railinged set and a slightly bigger ensemble,  it more than fills the space and emotion of the moment.

 

           I wrote at the time “Stirring, decent, strong”, and that still applies.  Yeston uses the human power of a chorale,  and Peter Stone’s book wisely keeps the devised personal stories – aspirational, ambitious, ambiguous – brief and impressionistic.  The choruses intensify the awareness  that all classes, roles and responsibilities were,  literally,   in the same boat.   There is a fidelity to the period’s Edwardian style, and also to its vaulting ambition and belief in a new world of engineering and opportunity, and to the simple fact that on a sea voyage however firm the class distinctions every individual has a right to hopes and dreams.

 

 

      The pride and astonishment of creating “the biggest moving object on earth” is shared, from the scuttling stewards loading 1100lb of marmalade and countless potatoes,  to the sixty-shilling Irish in third class dreaming of grander lives in the US, the aspirational second-class Alice (Claire Machin, again) determined to stand next to an Astor or Guggenheim if it kills her, the first-class passengers who are also given their humanity, and the labouring stokers in the engine-room.    Philip Rham again is the Captain, and  Greg Castiglioni takes over as the designer Andrews from Harland and Wolf ,  passionately scribbling bulkhead changes which might have saved them, even as he knows it is the end.    Simon Green is the arrogant, legend-chasing Ismay from White Star, urging reckless speed, nagging the Captain, never admitting his share of the blame.

 

         Some arias stand out intensely, like the wireless-operator’s hymn to the magical new connection which could have saved them; but it is the choruses,  the swirling strings under Mark Aspinall’s direction  and the simple honesty of the whole cast’s  performances  that create – unforgettably on that late night performance – a sense of taking part in what is as much a meditation as a drama.    Catch the tour if you can.  

box office 02380 711811  to 21st

touring : titanicthemusical.co.uk   to August.   Touring Mouse wide

rating Five  5 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on TITANIC  THE MUSICAL              Mayflower, Southampton and touring

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

April 16, 2018 · 9:35 am

INSTRUCTIONS FOR CORRECT ASSEMBLY Royal Court, SW1

SCI-FI AND SORROW

 
We begin with a tiny proscenium box, an almost Punch-and-Judy window, framing Harry and his wife Max: nice middle-aged people, evoked to sitcom perfection by a bearded, tinkeringly-engineerish Mark Bonnar and a bright Jane Horrocks. They are ordering a DIY kit for Prime next-day delivery, and starting to fuss over it. Meanwhile neighbours at a dinner party boast of their Oxford daughter and brilliant younger siblings. We gather that Max and Harry had one son, Nick. And what to him happened could be – well, could happen to anyone. Neighbour’s brilliant daughter was sorry to miss the funeral.

 

So far, so middle-class observational. But the first bit of the kit completed, as they prattle on, is a foot. Then a leg.. We guess that the little screen will widen, and widen again, and so does the significance of this arresting, original sci-fi domestic tale. They are building a robot, specification “white and polite”. A young man. It keeps them busy. It looks, the uneasy neighours notice, rather like the late Nick. Indeed it and Nick are both played by Brian Vernel, who in a series of flashbacks shows us how the living boy ran off the rails, stole to buy drugs, ran away…

 

The robot will give no such trouble, though for a while it is both creepy and funny as the couple struggle to programme it to their values, nervously zapping the remote to correct “his”’ attitudes and language. Young Vernel is quite superb, an arresting and technically intensely skilful performer zapping in and out of malfunction as the robot and teenage rebellion as Nick,  often confusing us into thinking Nick reformed before he died (“I’m gonna do it this time Mum”) , until a malfunction reveals it as a delusion programmed by the sad parents. Hilariously he flicks between speaking as an ideal, ambitious, nice-minded perfect son and a complete horror picked up from trash TV, as the parents dive for the remote-control. Sometimes there is an eerie sense that the robot’s AI is picking up the resentments each partner has against the other over the dead son.

 

Yet it is a profoundly compassionate, intelligent, heartbreaking play: about parenthood and grief, self-delusion, and the commodification and competitiveness surrounding the idea of an ideal family (Horrocks is happiest when her son seems to be enjoying ironing) . It is about the unintentional wrongs we all do, the terrible sorrow of love, the dogged need to carry on and seem cosy after a climactic disaster, and the painful empty-nest longing to have young hopeful life around the house.

 

It is terrific, and a delight to see the development of Thomas Eccleshare (I loved his PASTORAL at Hightide years ago). Vernel is a talent to watch, and Hamish PIrie’s direction is sharp and sure-footed, handling the deliberate confusions well. It does not need the interludes of robotic, stylized ensemble movement between scenes, which feel as if Pirie thinks we’re too dim to grasp the idea. But that is the tiniest of flaws in the most thoughtful sci-fi since THE NETHER.

 

box office 0207 565 5000

Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on INSTRUCTIONS FOR CORRECT ASSEMBLY Royal Court, SW1

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

April 12, 2018 · 9:35 am

CHICAGO Phoenix, WC2

   THE JOINT IS JUMPING!  AGAIN…

 

 

    Openings are running in themed  sets – three Restoration comedies coming along like No.11 buses, and now  two nights running we have  trials as showbiz and showbiz ending in court.  After the neon ITV world of QUIZ , comes the unmatchable razzle-dazzle of Kander  and Ebb’s 1975 shocker,  under its Broadway director and with Anne Reinking and Gary Chryst giving it a loving update of that jerky, threateningly exhilarating Bob Fosse choreography.  Here are the murderous snarls and artful smiles,  supple cynicism on endless sheer  black-stockinged legs, and a hot hot band. Which lives as usual onstage, 1920’s jazz culture itself a character in the telling of the story of Roxie, Velma and the merry murderesses of Cook County , competing for the flourish and finagle of Billy Flynn the lawyer…

 

 

This time round our Billy is the Oscar-winning Cuba Gooding Jr, no less, looking happy as a sandboy on the West End stage.  He’s a workaday basic singer but that doesn’t matter when you’re  a slinky mover,  delivering deadpan comic contempt,  and always an exuberant stage presence  whether smothered in fan-dancers or giving ‘em the old razzle dazzle in a rain of sparkles.   Paul Rider is the best Amos I have ever seen:  his Mr Cellophane  brings the house down in that slyly calculated momentary quietening of pace:  Mr Decent Ordinary Sap lost in the predominant whirl of perfect limbs,  stumping bravely puzzled in contrast to that graceful subversive sexy grotesquery of dances which you never forget.

 

 

      The  London cast is glorious:  Sarah Soetaert as Roxie Is a curly blonde doll, a platinum minx vith a voice of honey : Josefina Gabrielle Velma Kelly , venomously acrobatic (O,the cartwheels!).  Our own Ruthie Henshall is a svelte, sharp -suitedly new interpretation of  Mama Morton  (she’s played  both Roxie and Velma in the past, a record triple).  Her voice is glorious, and mingling with Gabrielle’s in the fabulous “Nobody’s got no class” moment, a proper treat. Others get their moment too, notably Nicola Coates as Go-to-hell-Kitty doing an impressive banister slide. Indeed all the movement is well thought of, down to the single drunk juror who manages to feel up both Billy Flynn and Roxie. 

 

     Oh, and cheers to every last member of the band under Ian Townsend, hitting show-off solos and pumping ensembles with authentic jazzman glee.

 

www.atgtickets.com      to 6 october

rating  five5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on CHICAGO Phoenix, WC2

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

April 10, 2018 · 10:39 pm

QUIZ Noel Coward Theatre, WC1

SWOTS OR SWINDLERS, VILLAINS OR VICTIMS?

 

 

Sometimes a West End transfer serves a play royally. At Chichester last year I enjoyed James Graham’s playful, thoughtfully mischievous treatment of the case of Major Charles Ingram, his wife Diana and the geeky Tecwen Whittock: the trio convicted of cheating-by-cough-code on ITV’s triumphantly tacky quiz Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. But some overdone pub-quizzery in the first half slowed it down (we have to answer questions like a studio audience, and vitally get to vote electronically at the end on their guilt). And I only gave it four. Here’s the original review, with the bones of it:

https://tinyurl.com/ybwhkmbz

But now in the West End it’s actually better, a real five-star piece. With some audience seats onstage and a hellish neon TV studio set, it makes a great gig: continually entertaining, with a shape-shifting cast conjuring up barristers, ITV executives and every popular hero from Hilda Ogden to Craig David, led by Keir Charles becoming bygone peaktime horrors like Jim Bowen, Leslie Crowther and Des O”Connor. And who is frankly and joyfully beyond-wicked as Chris Tarrant the host – mugging and squirming, a blond writhe of showy self-importance.

It has been tightened a bit, with the result that the two central characters, once more Gavin Spokes and Stephanie Street, emerge still clearer . Spokes is a marvel as Ingram, James Graham’s delicate writing establishing him from the start as a bit bumbling, a dutiful middle-aged military chap who cares for his job and his family; Street evokes quiz-mad Diana in her .restless but kindly ambition (this is a service wife, remember: hampered by a lifetime of moves and postings and absences and economies). Their love story, a stick-to-it marriage, is a tribute; if they ever see the show, I cannot see them minding much.

 

And Graham’s serious points emerge still clearer too: the rise of “emo-tainment”, the class-conscious manipulation of the masses for profit, and above all the age – then evolving as the century turned, now extreme – of nosey, lipsmacking knee-jerk judgment of strangers: the age of Twitterstorms and whining, hostile identity-politics. Though you laugh aloud every few minutes, it’s a damn serious piece.

 

And yes, once again the audience voted guilty after the first act, paid attention to a fiery performance by Sarah Woodward as the defence barrister in the second – and voted not guilty. We chose to believe the hapless Ingrams over a vindictive and seemingly manipulative TV company. Apparently that happens most nights. Good.

 

box office 0844 482 5140 http://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk
rating five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on QUIZ Noel Coward Theatre, WC1

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

April 10, 2018 · 10:53 am

CATHY Soho Theatre and touring

CATHY, STILL NOT HOME AFTER FIFTY YEARS

 
Homeless charities like to remind us of the mantra: we are all just two bad decisions away from the pavement. The trajectory of our heroine Cathy’s decline is carefully drawn. A zero-hours contract as a cleaner keeps her short of money, rent arrears build up. The owners of the building want to take away her home of ten years anyway, at 14 days notice, so as to rent or sell it to “young professionals”. Affordable private rents are beyond her and the arrears put her at risk of being “voluntarily homeless”. But she has a dependent daughter, Danielle, moving towards her GCSEs, so the Council must help. It does so by sending them to a temporary b & b room in a grubby tower in Luton,. Danielle has to spend £20 a week and on trains in to school and get bullied as a “pikey” by local girls. Cathy has to find another lavatory-cleaning job.

 

 

The “temporary” placement stretches to months, until an offer of a 2-bed maisonette comes through. In Gateshead. Cathy panics: when you have very little, your neighbourhood and community are precious, and what about Danielle’s exams next month?. She is told it could be seven years before East London finds her home again. The mechanical, helpless council responses “this is our offer” and “You are at liberty to arrange an alternative” are a blank wall. Sofa-surfing with a sister in Braintree ends sharply; she is now 497th on a list, and fears contact with the Council as Danielle could be taken into care. So to the streets, the night buses, a desperate pick-up, a refuge.

 

 

Fifty years after Cathy Come Home, Ken Loach’s impassioned film about homelessness, the anniversary was marked by the campaigning theatre group Cardboard Citizens with this play, a fictional demonstration – with occasional verbatim recordings – of how clunkingly hopeless our public housing system is. And how woefully underresourced. Two years on, after the horror of Grenfell it returns for an eight week tour. Which is a particularly bitter irony, since if you think about it the council tenants in Grenfell flats were luckier than Cathy: they had flats. The piece has been played f at the House of Lords, where a series of audience suggestions for palliative laws were handed over. Audiences are asked for solutions, public and personal. It is a moving, unsentimental moment.

 

 

The strength of Ali Taylor’s play, directed by Adrian Jackson, is that there is enough credible, flawed, troublesome humanity in it to convince. Cathy Owen as the central figure is decent, hardworking, and at first just unlucky, but the streak of stubbornness which keeps her going contributes to her downfall. Ironically, the things which accelerate her fall (apart from lousy national housing policy) are “bad decisions” which might in a wealthier woman be praised as good feisty qualities. She has refused to try and make her estranged gambling ex-husband contribute, and keeps her daughter away from him; she visits her old Dad once a week, backs her daughter’s education with pride, and cherishes her community. Hence the horror at the blank-wall Gateshead offer.

 

 

As Danielle, Hayley Wareham is heartbreakingly true to teenage temperament and desperation. as her path to upward social mobility is blocked by the struggle even to get to school; Amy Loughton plays a series of council officers, a Latvian fellow-cleaner, and most movingly a kind Arriva lady at the bus station who lets Cathy use her phone , gives her tea and accepts the night-bus sleepers with gentle resignation. Alex Jones is the men: horribly chirpy rent collector, hopeless father, bullying supervisor.
It is set brilliantly against a set of giant Jenga blocks – which of course look like a council building and which get gradually demolished as Cathy’s life is. It reminds us how sharply urgent is the public housing crisis; but also how crushingly unfair it is, in an age of mass immigration and an overcrowded capital, to disregard the needs of the old white working-class. Needs not only for roofs and safe beds, but for a known neighbourhood and extended family.

It will be a great day when this play no longer needs to tour. But for the moment, it is an essential.

 

https://www.cardboardcitizens.org.uk/Cathy2018
Soho to 14th April, touring to 5 May
rating four   4 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on CATHY Soho Theatre and touring

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

April 9, 2018 · 3:03 pm

INK  FESTIVAL            Halesworth Cut – Tour starting…

SHORT, SHARP, STIMULATING

  

  The INK  new writing festival (http://inkfestival.org) is a phenomenon: a space where writers of any experience or none  can submit short plays (most under 15 minutes)   or radio plays or indeed musicals in miniature,   and – this is the important  bit  –  see their work professionally acted and directed.  As a source of seed-corn for new dramatists, or diversification for existing writers, it is unique. 

 

 

       This was its fourth year and undoubtedly its strongest yet:  I saw 18 of  26 plays, and left only one with a shrug.  It now gets hundreds of submissions, and its artistic direction led by Julia Sowerbutts (who has previously transferred productions to the Pleasance) manages to avoid the dour “new-writing” trap of issue-led portentous doominess,  without shying away from tough or shocking subjects when they are well handled.

 

    So cheers to INK 2018:  and here’s to its short  tour of a few picked plays, starting next week.  I’d want, though, to give other hon. mentions to several not on the tour:  not least Martha Loader’s  angry HUMBUG, a skilful crescendo from banality to rage, and a mischievous BLOOD PRESSURE by Jan Etherington in which  an A&E patient demanding a transfusion turns out to be a 147-year-old vampire too diffident about intimacy to get his blood the proper way.  Bien imaginé, as the French say. 

   

       As to the tour , it is led by The Inkredible Five,   brief six-minute plays by local known writers Sowerbutts challenged to write around a pile of antique suitcases.  Full disclosure: I am one, but frankly wholly eclipsed in anyone’s terms by squibs like Richard Curtis’  furious diva being misdirected through Evita, and Blake Morrison’s Cold War spooks trying to exchange suitcases.   To complete the set there’s a poignant Esther Freud piece, and Steve Waters (who wrote the wonderful Temple for the Donmar)  with a strange epiphany at port security.   

 

       But the real meat is in the longer, 15-minute or so,  submissions.   Madeleine Accalia’s WHITE GIRLS is stunning: clever, nuanced , moving from social comedy to anger, naïveté to embarrassment,  tones perfectly caught by Molly McGeachin and Amber Muldoon (a young actress who seems to me a serious find).   They are gap- yah daughters of privilege and insouciance, ignorance and goodwill.  But they are relating their trip – so cool in their shades and Timberlands! – to volunteer at the Calais jungle camp. They moan amusedly in the warehouse and kitchens but then are struck by the Glastonbury-turned-Hell that was the camp at its peak, by the children and the danger and the hopelessness and the incomprehensibility of it being in civilized Europe.   With a bare stage and a coat stand, their bouncy confessional becomes well- caught voices of refugees, a braggart Aussie, wearily seasoned helpers, press, instagramming fellow teens, and of course posh Mum at home urging them not to get filthy and grow lesbian armpit hair and vote Corbyn…   Not a word is wasted, not an emotion or observation false.

 

      Next to it THE KISS by Millie Martin is set in the days when chivalry dictated that a divorcing man hired a private investigator and   faked an encounter with a prostitute : a Labour MP, quivering in distaste, removes his bowler and suit in a hotel room and in an unexpected moment of pure theatrical fantasy the action moves deeper inside the protagonists.  And there’s Ross Dunsmore’s COLD CALL, as a pair of callcentre workers fall out.  Which was sharp and funny enough to make me recant mygrumpy middle-aged fatwa on  plays about doomed romances between whining millennials.   

      So there it is: some of these are plays that could grow to full length; some are just perfect as they are, like short stories or really good songs.  The world should pay attention to INK.   

 Touring East Anglia 12-22 April 

  http://inkfestival.org/ink-festival-2018/ink-on-the-road/

rating:  oh,  a whole festival of fast-breeding mice to share around

Touring Mouse wideMeece with mask tiny compressedMeece with mask tiny compressedPreview Mouse

Comments Off on INK  FESTIVAL            Halesworth Cut – Tour starting…

Filed under Theatre

Tagged as

April 6, 2018 · 9:44 am

THE WAY OF THE WORLD Donmar, WC1

KNAVES AND FOOLS, BRAIDED COATS AND BASTARDRY

 

 

It’s suddenly a wig-and-fan season, with Mrs Rich at the RSC and now Congreve’s sour, witty classic revived by James MacDonald. There’s even The Country Wife at the Southwark (though apparently fan-free, will report next week). Maybe we need the high-society rogues , dupes and posers of Restoration comedy to distract us from our own set.
This is a full period-dress production, executed immaculately but probably needing another few cuts to be unalloyed joy. The plot is labyrinthine, with a wordy torrent of finely honed wit and derision, fuelled by greed more than love. Congreve is the angriest of the Restoration dramatists. While the lovers, Mirabell and Millamant, end by both admitting their love and winning one another, there can be an Arctic chill of cynical despair at human nature. Knaves and fools, gulls and grabbers are everywhere, adulteries and insincerities part of the game. And to be honest, some of the witticisms have dated too much to resonate in an age without formal manners.

 

 

So the first part at 90 minutes, can occasionally drag and baffle, though alleviated by the truly astonishing costumes. Here’s Witwould in a crazy floral coat: Fisayo Akinade, lately St Joan’s camp Dauphin here thoroughly releasing his inner camp dandy ;he is the funniest thing in Act 1 by far. Here’s Millamant in pistachio frills like a giant toilet-roll cover, and of course the men with tumbling hair fabulously breeched , weskited and braided in their gilt frock coatings. Except of course for Christian Patterson giving it large in check tweeds as the drunken squire Sir Wilful.

 

 

And of course there’s Haydn Gwynne as Lady Wishfort: controller of the money and marital permissions they’re all after but not of her own plaintive ageing desires. This magnificent, towering figure evolves from a mirror-fearing deshabilée in a dressing gown to a glorious spectacle , beflowered, frilled, netted, petticoated , bustled and topped with half a rose-garden. We do not see her for the first fifty minutes, but just as we grow a little weary of the dandies and plotters and disentangling which discontented belle is sleeping with which scheming beau, Gwynne breaks on us like a tsunami. Hard to remember that she was a late booking after a drop-out: she is born for it, magnificent, tall and angular and quivering with eagerness and vanity; nicely contrasted with a brisk Sarah Hadland as the motherly little Foible as her foil ,dresser and secret member of the conspiracy to cheat her.

 

 

 

The great set-piece where Wishfort tries to decide how to be found lolling when her “lover” arrives will never date – “nothing is so alluring as a levée from a couch in some confusion”. Equally grand is her encounter with the fake “Sir Rowland” – Alex Beckett with a faux posh accent and tragedian manner, the impression of Primark-sale Olivier reinforced by the black wig. The scene is both very funny and touched, as it must be, with pathos – Wishfort is, after all, only silly and lonely for love, not an out and out bastard like Fainall, or an opportunist like Geoffrey Streatfeild’s complicated Mirabell.

 

 
As for the lovers, Streatfeild and Justine Mitchell’s brittle, damaged, confined Millamant lay down their conditions about marriage and “dwindling into a wife” with enough sudden seriousness to hold us silent between laughs. And the final showdown at last lets us properly feel for them, and for Wishfort and indeed Foible. But goodness, it is a harsh comedy still. Which is, I suppose, its greatness.

 

 

box office 0203 282 3808 to 26 may
rating four  4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE WAY OF THE WORLD Donmar, WC1

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

April 5, 2018 · 12:48 am

THE FANTASTIC FOLLIES OF MRS RICH Swan, Stratford

FROTHING OVER WITH FEMALE HILARITY

 

 

A pre-curtain ensemble  of one harpsichord and a quartet of periwigged lady saxophonists, playing Mozart with a touch of oompah, is always a good sign. The RSC’s Artistic Director Gregory Doran has a kindly sense of balance, so the dourly modern, blokey, bleak and inevitably joyless Macbeth just down the corridor is offset by this merry bit of Restoration fluff and female scorn, by the largely forgotten 17c writer Mary Pix. Good move, Mr D. Bring on the ridiculous crinolines, insane wigs, good-natured romantic cynicism, absurd fights and outrageous social caricature . Add a pair of huge hairy lurchers lunging for a sniff of the front row (British audiences always smell faintly of dog-biscuits) . And there you are. Fun.

 

 

Pix’s play is intensely and typically complicated: in brief, it centres on the ambition of Mrs Rich, a banker’s widow, played with endearing gusto by Sophie Stanton as a prototype Hyacinth Bucket with a dash of Mrs Slocombe. She is desperate to be one of The Quality, having in the opening scene arrived with her crinoline askew after being “disrespected in the open street” by a passing duchess, even though “I spoke with the mien and tone proportionable to my équipage”.  Her staid grey brother in law (Michael Simkins keeping a nobly straight face) entreats her not to make a fool of herself , while she dreams of netting a title – the absurdly fey, pink-pantalooned and curlicued Sir John – and gets cheated at cards by her posher friends. Notably Lady Trickwell : Sandy Foster, who manages to distort her fine features throughout into a constant sourly discontented snoot, and in the second act hurls herself into some unexpected sword-fighting in ballooning underdrawers.

 

 

Plot and subplot intertwine: the maid Betty conspires with Lady Landsworth (Daisy Badger) in series of ill-advised tests of virtue on a disinherited yet virtuous lad whose elder brother is a rumbustious squire from Yorkshire, hallooing and singing rude hunting songs with two hairy dogs and an assistant, artfully gender-swopped to be Amanda Hadingue in a tweed skirt and raucous she-baritone. Tangles of deceit and misapprehensions are enhanced by background jokes you might just miss (I love the dust cloud in Mrs Fidget’s flophouse , and the squire drinking out of his saucer).

 

 

What director Jo Davies has done, pacing it up , camping along and adding new music-hall style songs by Grant Olding, is to create a perfect showcase for a dozen wonderful stage comediennes: it is a masterclass for fearlessly funny women. The men, a minority for once, are pretty wonderful too , notably Leo Wringer as the appalling squire and Solomon Israel as his brother, both plunging joyfully into the necessary self-parody. Indeed Israel is given, by the wicked pen of Ms Pix, an opportunity to send up every soliloquizing, self-pitying hero of Jacobean tragedy. And a fascinating aspect of the play is how much at home this woman writer , wife of a merchant in the 1690s, was in mocking not only theatre itself but every layer of society: parvenue socialites, starchy bankers, indigent aristocracy, cheating gamesters, hunting gentry, rooming-house landladies . She was up for a lark, was Mary Pix. She’d have no truck with this new idea that women are too sweet and banter-phobic to go on Have I Got News…

 

 

box office 0844 800 1110 to 14 June
rating four  4 Meece Rating

 

 

Comments Off on THE FANTASTIC FOLLIES OF MRS RICH Swan, Stratford

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 24, 2018 · 2:02 pm

MISS NIGHTINGALE Hippodrome, Leicester Square WC2

IT’S THAT SHOW AGAIN, AND VERY WELCOME TOO

 

It’s WW2 themed. Gas masks, posters, programmes in an ARP fire-bucket and rude songs to cheer the troops on leave and show Hitler that Britain can take it. Our rorty show is upstairs while below on the broad casino floor black-tie gamblers – the real 2018 ones at the Hippodrome, serving unknowingly as atmospheric decor – rake the chips and spin the wheels as in frenzied semi-legal blackout London dive. For Matthew Bugg – creator, director producer of this spirited musical – has found the ideal glam-louche  venue for his tale of cabaret and illicit love. I always knew it would work even better at tables with drinks on them.

 

 

I feel inappropriately maternal, or auntly, about this show because I welcomed it first in 2011 at the Kings Head, writing that “Its theatrical roots spread from Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret to new burlesque, with a dash of Design for Living, touches of Rattigan angst and echoes of many a nightclubby, Blitzy, wartime-blackout romance of gin, gents and garter belts”. It was only 90 minutes then, with Ilan Goodman as the male lead; later I caught it on tour in Ipswich, all-grown-up and full length, and here it is again: tweaked and polished with a group of six versatile actor-musicians including the author himself and a hero who can play the kazoo and concertina simultaneously while his character’s heart is breaking. Lauren Chinery, brings to the title role of Maggie, the Lancashire nurse breaking into cabaret by night , a tough sturdiness which does fishnet glamour or comedy character songs with equal relish,  but gives the emotional, heartfelt numbers a real pindrop quietness.  When she reads a telegram about her soldier brother and sings , “They promised there’d be bluebirds” , it is a strong, sudden mood-changer.

 
For this is the balance the show has to strike, between Bugg’s  gorgeous pastiche ,comic-daring  patter songs and the emotional engine of a plot set against the serious miseries and social clashes of wartime. Maggie took into her lodgings George the Polish-Jewish exile , who now writes songs to launch her night job and falls in love with Sir Frank, the war hero and club impresario . This, remember, at a time when homosexuals were illogically arrested as presumed spies, “the enemy within” ; when fleeing into a sham marriage with a girl pregnant by a caddish blackmailing black-marketeer might be a way out of trouble. A time when George, as a gay Jew who fled Berlin, can say with ironic bitterness of gay arrests “This is how it begins…I have seen it”.

 
The show works a treat here, assisted by the Hippodrome ’s own echoes of Judy Garland . I still think Bugg’s first half is hampered by slowing the development of the plot and the tricky three-way relationship by indulging in one too many big cabaret numbers. But hey, we liked the songs for themselves. And there are some very different, seriously plot-developing emotional songs too. Matthew Floyd Jones is a find,  perfect casting as a waspish, pallidly troubled, camp and reckless George.  He is homesick for love and for Weimar freedoms:  his Meine Liebe Berlin (“fount of original sin..”) is unbeatable. Oliver Mawdsley’s Frank catches the awkward public-school-toff dread of scandal and exposure, and grows convincingly through cowardice to courage. Both acts  have  tremendous, complex trios as the three of them express their unachievable crossed desires.  And Chinery’s ability to change costume at lightning speed and storm through rude character sons about sausages, joysticks etc brings the house down. Welcome to Meine Liebe Hippodrome.     Not bad prices, either.

 

missnightingale.co.uk to 6 may
raating four  4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on MISS NIGHTINGALE Hippodrome, Leicester Square WC2

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 22, 2018 · 8:21 pm

SOLDIER ON Playground, W10

HARD HOMECOMINGS FOR THE DOGS OF WAR

 

Boots, boots, boots, boots: stamping out the immemorial rhythm of army discipline, nineteen men and women move as one, expressionless, freed for a time from the burden of individuality .Then, a moment later, there is just one lone figure surrounded by empty boots. In the first of the strong visual metaphors in Jonathan Lewis’ play about ex-servicemen with PTSD devising a play together, a cleaner briskly sweeps the empty , useless boots away. There have been so many deaths.

 
That ensemble movement is echoed at times during the absorbing, sometimes violent, often funny, always engaging piece: Lily Hawkins’ movement direction is stunning, at times exploding into unexpected violent encounters, at others abruptly bringing the fractured , fractious group together in something beautiful. The first-half closing moment in particular sees a dignified officer crippled by MS and memory (played by Mark Kitto, ex Welsh-Guards). Ashamed of his deterioration in that most physical of environments, HM Royal Marines base at Lympstone he admits his tears and is supported by reaching hands, and lifted flying by an ensemble singing Coldplay’s “Fix You” . The heart lifts too.

Lewis – an actor and playwright now but formerly serving in the Army, is known for his west end success Our Boys, but in creating and directing this he focuses on PTSD: the disorder driving too many veterans of our recent wars to the divorce courts, streets and prisons. It is set in what the reluctant Sgt Major (Thomas Craig) calls a “rehabilitation exercise” – he would prefer some healthy Invictus sport. It is David Solomon as an eager director who has to entice a motley group into drama school improv and “sharing” stories which are still real and troublesome to them. A few are wives or mothers , struggling with their men’s impossible behaviour; one is a nurse from the Afghan front line who cannot forget one trembling, mutilated child.

 

The edge here is that Lewis is mixing professional long-term actors with veterans, only a few of whom have previous stage experience. Or in the case of Cassidy Little who plays “Woody”, subsequent experience: we remember him and his prosthetic leg as the star of the successful ex-soldiers play Charlie F, and he has worked widely on screen since. Not hampered, I must say, by rock-star looks and a certain risky energy. In this role, Lewis makes bountiful and aggressive use of that: . you really wouldn’t relax in a drama-school trust exercise with Woody in a bad temper. But then Jacko, Flaps, Hoarse and the rest are not peaceable or predictable either, and the pain and reluctance of real experience of horror is no easy fit with the (sometimes very entertaining) theatricality of the director.

 

Role-play of their real lives melts in and out of rehearsal arguments, army banter, a few sly jokes at the expense of theatre people and explosions (usually from Woody). A mother greets her returning soldier son: a wife tries to hear a precious five minute satphone call from the Indian Ocean while her children bicker in the kitchen, a squaddie with PTSD breaches an injunction to visit his alarmed wife and plead that it was his medication that had made him violent. And the real experience of the personnel from Soldiers’ Arts Academy melts seamlessly into the professionalism of staging and script. Theatre of war, theatre of theatre. Hard to beat.

 

 

box office 020 8960 0110 theplaygroundtheatre.london to 31 March
Planned transfer to York and Oxford. Keep raising the money. It’s worth it.
rating four   4 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on SOLDIER ON Playground, W10

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 22, 2018 · 12:32 pm

GOOD GIRL Trafalgar Studios SW1

A SOLO REFLECTION ON PUBERTY AND AFTER.

 

 

Naomi Sheldon’s solo, semi-autobiographical hour comes from Edinburgh crowned with plaudits, though cunningly in the programme she does an “alternative poster” of rude things people have said about it. Like “Posh bird talks about women’s ‘hardships’”, and “stereotypical vagina talk”. Crafty, that. And indeed there is much to like in a well-crafted monologue, delivered with considerable physical and verbal agility as she comically manoeuvres as a sub-teen worrying about her lady-bits, or takes on the persona of Laura the Cool Schoolfriend who is less intensely bovvered about everything.

 

 

She also knowingly laces it with references which delighted the audience (mainly women, nearly all her own age). Patrick Swayze in Ghost, the Spice Girls, potato waffles, LIam Gallagher, Michael Jackson (one of her teenage pinups alongside Henry VIII). And, of course, that cliché of a self-help question so utterly baffling and faintly repellent to my generation, “What would Madonna do?|”. Her evocation of Sheffield schooldays is one of the best bits, the boys forever drawing dicks on “any flat surface” including her art project, the conspiratorial conversations about what sex might be, the amateur witch-coven round a dying hamster.

 

 

So I can see why it shone in the frenzied Fringe environment. And I would very much like to see this actress – sweet-faced, dungareed child of the millenim, in a play interacting with others. And, to be frank, with more gripping issues. I know I am older, raised in a culture more restrained and more broadly idealistic about love, honour and faith; , but I have vivid teenage memories too, and do not entirely believe in the utter fixation on sexual physicality which is the core theme, diluted only with repeated confessions of “rage”, not against anything specific, and with her metaphor of feeling that her body had no edges.

 

Certainly it is clear that sexual developing for some of her generation has often been an utterly joyless, mechanistic, impersonal affair, improved only by a short-lived obsession with lonely vibrator sessions so intense that even the sight of an AA battery could set her off. Similar female angst was better done in the solo version of FLEABAG, which was more bitterly honest about the damage of a sexually obsessive culture. But here, there is no sense of search for an actual lover or actual love – beyond the all-girls-together school gang . Nor do I entirely believe the narrative about the character selling herself at a masked sex-party, or fully buy her conclusion that it is good to be like her, full of passionate vague self-absorbed rage, one of the “people who burst at the seams” ; as against the “good girls with tidy little emotions and tidy little vaginas”.

 

www atgtickers.com to 31 April
rating three   3 Meece Rating

Comments Off on GOOD GIRL Trafalgar Studios SW1

Filed under Theatre, Three Mice

Tagged as

March 22, 2018 · 11:35 am

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN Menier SE1

FOR ONCE IN A LIFETIME THE DEAR MENIER DOES NOT MAKE GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES HAPPY. NOT HAPPY AT ALL.  EXCEPT AT THE PROJECTIONS. 

 

 

Two prisoners are locked in an Argentinian cell. Hungry, tired, nauseous, bored out of their minds…this critic jots down a handy metaphor for the whole evening. Kiss of the Spider Woman has had many lives (a novel, a play, a film) but one wonders how it passed the high bar of the Menier for another outing.

 

Sat in this dark, muddy cell is one man jailed for his gay life and another for his political life. Brightly drawn for us are chalk and cheese; gay and straight. This play wants to discuss masculinity…so two cartoon men have been wheeled in to discuss it for an hour and half. Laurie Sansom’s panto direction doesn’t help.

 

This adaptation (by José Rivera & Allan Baker) is a difficult watch; in that it’s hard to concentrate on trite themes being explored with flat dialogue. It is a rambling sentence with no chance of bail or an interval. The plot, despite a twist, is loose and fails to grip and a suddenly blossoming romance which fails to convince. Someone frequently making reference to “the resistance” and how they love it, believe in it and miss it isn’t dramatic. It’s a classic failing of show me,  don’t tell me.  It was one of those theatrical evenings where, out of desperate boredom, I lost myself so deeply in my own thoughts and mental wanderings I was almost entertained.

 

 

Both Sam Barnett and Declan Bennett are fine actors but their camp and macho double act here felt more at home in unfunny sketch comedy. Some cheap gags landed with those around me but for the most part it just felt like they were both just furiously punching flat lines hoping for a bit of life. The only reprieve and the only place these broad voices, dancing expressions and loud gestures made sense, were Sam Barnett’s character’s monologue retellings of his favourite romantic, melodramatic films. Jon Bausor’s wonderfully dank cell comes alive with some really impressive projections by Andrzej Goulding. Silhouetted figures from the tales come alive on the wall, dancing round the bricks and across the cell doors.  But pretty projections can’t raise this wreck.

 

Until 5th May

Box Office 020 7378 1713  to 5  May

rating  one  1 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN Menier SE1

Filed under One Mouse, Theatre

Tagged as

March 20, 2018 · 11:16 pm

MACBETH Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

IT’S THAT MAN AGAIN…

 
It is awkward that two major new productions of the Scottish Play, by two determinedly auteurish directors, open in the same month. Rufus Norris’ bleak “post-Brexit” apocalyptica at the National Theatre came first, and now Polly Findlay’s RSC version takes the Stratford stage. Double, double, toil and – yes – trouble.

 

 

Impossible not to compare the two: both modern dress, both strongly directorial in concept,  both led by eminent actors – the seasoned Rory Kinnear at the NT, and here Christopher Eccleston, far newer to major Shakespeare. Both productions also share a taste for plastic baby dolls: at the NT dismembered and fixed to witches’ tummies, here carried by three witches who are for some reason small girls in pajamas and pom-pom bootees . The creepy chants become nursery impertinence, competently , but short on impact.

 
But if the Norris NT version was a graffiti Macbeth , scrawled on a pee-stained blockhouse, Findlay’s is more like one written in bold block capitals (which indeed are projected overhead, echoing significant lines). Its pace is unrelentingly staccato, emphatic, and with little variety of pace.  Where Norris’s was all swagger and bash, this one is strut and fret.   Violence is largely offstage till the end, and it is mercifully free of decapitations. But there hangs about both productions a sort of dismayed ambition: a desire for modern relevance at all costs and resentment of tradition and of verse. Wrong to compare, I suppose, but I yearned back to the Michael Boyd production which launched this RSC theatre . With less fear of “historic” trappings, ironically it hit home with stronger human power.

 

Findlay has some interesting ideas: she picks up the play’s repeated mention of time, with a digital clock running inexorably backwards like a bomb timer on SPOOKS, from the moment of Duncan’s murder to the death of Macbeth. The flash-freeze LATER moments give impetus to the final battle. One very sharp perception too is that Lady Macbeth’s emotional deterioration is triggered by hearing the cries of Macduff’s murdered children relayed to her mobile phone (one can sometimes wonder why she loses it so abruptly).

 

But those are consolations. Mostly, the production suffers from one-note, race-the-clock vigour; Ecclestone’s delivery (with the sole exception of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) is a real problem: jerky, seeming actively hostile to the idea that it is a verse play. Even in soliloquy he seems to be fighting to prevent us recognising the familiar words or reflecting on their extraordinary painful depth : more The Bill than the Bard.  Niamh Cusack is more at home with the text but plays Lady Macbeth hectic: an ambitious Rotary wife who  never got over being captain of games. As a scold to her husband she is good, and the sleepwalking is finely done. But like her husband she is rarely allowed to express any of the the interiority  of feeling, horror, determination and remorse which make the play so disturbing .

 

The only frisson of real feeling and arresting, affecting delivery is from Edward Bennett’s Macduff: the only one of the classic scenes which strikes properly home is his receiving the news of his family’s murder – his “What, all..?” is superbly shocking, with Luke Newberry’s fine public-schoolboy Malcolm crassly interrupting his grief to urge revenge.

 

As to Fly Davis’ set, it might be a concrete hall in a brutalist 1960’s college of further education, with a sharp rectangular gallery.  You don’t feel that Macbeth wins any kingdom worth murdering for. The porter is an all-purpose janitor in white socks (Michael Hodgson does get a couple of laughs) and sits gloomily at the side throughout, delivering odd messenger lines or wandering round with a Bex-Bissel carpet sweeper.

 

Polly Findlay is an excellent director – BEGINNING, LIMEHOUSE, TREASURE ISLAND in London, an inventive Merchant of Venice in the big house here, two very good Renaissance plays in the Swan. But this is not her finest hour. And between them, the two March-beth openings make me cry “Hold, enough!” and hope that soon the pendulum will swing. And directors stop being scared of the Scottish Play and return to more reflective and respectful renderings . Meanwhile, the unfortunate A level set-book class of 2018 are at risk of associating it only with concrete, gaffer-tape, plastic dollies and carpet-sweepers.

 

box office 0844 800 1110 to
rating, three.  Just. 3 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on MACBETH Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

Filed under Theatre, Three Mice

Tagged as

March 20, 2018 · 4:43 pm

CAROLINE OR CHANGE Hampstead, NW3

GUEST CRITIC J.N.  BENJAMIN FINDS WHAT MATTERS

 

Lights up. A confederate statue. A blackout. And it disappears. It’s November 1963 and we’re in Lake Charles, Louisiana. JFK has just been assassinated. There’s a rumble of a shift of something in the air but for Caroline Thibodeaux, nothing ever changes in Louisiana. She’s 39, divorced, and has four children. For twenty-two of her thirty-nine years she has worked as a maid for a wealthy white Jewish family. She dreams of being kissed by Nat King Cole. 

Musicals rarely get to be this important. And important this one is. The Chichester revival of this play was performed in the wake of the Charleston Church shooting by then 21-year-old white supremacist Dylan Roof. Shortly after the end of the run came the Charlottesville Rally – a rally organised in protest at the proposed removal of a bronze statue of Confederate General, Robert E Lee. It is sobering to think that though more than 50 years have passed since the time of this somewhat autobiographical Kushner piece, black Americans still are still fighting the same fight, still in all the same places.
The state of our world increasingly forces those who live in it to face the conundrum of trying to reconcile diametrically opposed philosophical ideals. It’s a recurring quandary in this play: Should we love the men who abuse us? Is an ally really an ally if they promise change but act in a complacence that perpetuates the status quo? Who is right in the conflict of the elder who just wants a quiet life and the younger who is ready for a revolution? Is it ever OK to use immoral means to attain moral ends? Can we justify the use of moral means to preserve immoral ends? In Caroline’s final solo number she calls to God for an answer, but there are no simple ones.
The power of the 17-strong ensemble produced the the kind of chemistry that draws you to the edge of your seat. I saw much of my younger self in Abiona Omonua’s portrayal of Emmie Thibodeaux, the sixteen-year-old ‘high-spirited’ daughter of Caroline, who doesn’t believe in the idea of unquestionable respect and spoke back to the adults around her accordingly. Similarly relatable was Naana Agyei-Ampadu as Dotty Moffett, the bobby sock and saddle shoe wearing black woman who was using education as a means to a better life. The Radio trio that was T’Shan Williams, Carole Stennett and Sharon Rose gave TLC mixed with The Supremes vibes. It was special. In fact, all of The Objects deserve a shout out: Me’sha Bryan as the Washing Machine, Angela Caesar as The Moon, Ako Mitchell as The Dryer and The Bus. inanimate by name, but definitely not by nature. And of course, there was Sharon D Clarke. There are places deep inside us that only song can reach; when her – sometimes mellifluous, sometimes scorching – tones reach that place, they shake your soul and awaken your spirit.
The two-and-a-half hour performance is visually gorgeous thanks to stage and costume design by Fly Davis and Ann Yee’s choreography. Jeanine Tesori’s music teamed with Tony Kushner’s book and lyrics were made for each other. Add to that the direction by Michael Longhurst – the man who brought us the five star spectacle that is Amadeus, currently on at the National Theatre – and it is a recipe for a perfect production. It is impossible to fathom how this musical was a Broadway flop; those Americans clearly don’t know a good thing when they see one.
il
Box office 020 7722 9301  TO 21 APRIL
£10 tickets for under 30s
RATING  FIVE
5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on CAROLINE OR CHANGE Hampstead, NW3

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 18, 2018 · 4:13 pm

THE FOUR SEASONS – A REIMAGINING Wanamaker, SE1

SILENT, SIGNIFICANT CREATURES

 

The candlelit Wanamaker has proved its worth as a music-room, notably with All The Angels and the divine Farinelli. This takes it further with the first wordless performance: Finn Caldwell and Toby Olié of Gyre and Gimble the master-puppeteers create a silent story with half-sized, fully-jointed physically expressive but undecorated hard-foam “bunraku” puppets. Five expert puppeteers control them, one or two at a time in perfect concord so human and object blend into something other. Their narrative is an expression of Max Richter’s “recomposition” of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. A six-piece orchestra plays overhead: baroque violins, viola, ‘cello and harpsichord/synthesizer.

 

 

Which all sounds a bit recherché: could be a tough hour, you’re thinking, since anything drawn from Japanese theatrical tradition can be an acquired taste . Actually, it is a beautiful and accessible performance, somewhere between mime, dance and theatrical epic. Sometimes, indeed, you are so bound up in the emotional lives of the pale puppets that you suddenly think “hang on, what’s that stuck on his foot?” before realizing that it is the fingers of the puppeteer, and that every movement of this seemingly vivid being is being controlled by humans you have somehow stopped noticing…

 

 

It is a story they tell – of lovers and their child, of ordeals, travels, death and loss and discovery. But as the creators teasingly insist, it is one onto which we project our own interpretations. However, there is certainly folktale in there, because the puppet figures are sometimes physically literal – walking, running, falling, struggling, fighting their handlers or slumped in wrenching despair – but they can also fly and float surreally as if becoming their own dreams. In one extraordinary sequence near the end the central figure relives the events of a whole life.

 

 

The story begins with a sweetly awkward park-bench courtship, and a breathless pause when father kneels before mother as she holds her belly. There is a suitcase and a parting, one parent gone far from a child-puppet who crawls, stumbles, takes first steps with the other. Separation, obstacles, struggle; deaths, a trek home, a graveyard or mortuary of strange gnarled shapes like old bark , weeping desolation. Once mother and child fight together through great hard shapes, leap a ravine. A river, swimming, a corpse…any of it could be a dream, or a real refugee journey, or both.

 

 

Late on a lonely figure fights for life, or maybe just sanity, against a cloud of blue flapping inchoate cloths which become ghost figures. You’re engrossed, the music sharp in your head, every note and move significant, very human. By the way, there are a couple of “relaxed performances”: for some, it may form an even stronger connection than it does to us “neurotypicals”. And that is overwhelming enough…

 

 

box office https://tickets.shakespearesglobe.com/
to 21 April
rating four  4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE FOUR SEASONS – A REIMAGINING Wanamaker, SE1

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 16, 2018 · 11:52 am

PRESSURE TR Bath & TOURING

 DANGEROUS DAYS AND COURAGEOUS SCIENCE

 

 

This terrific meteorological thriller, set in the crucial days before D-Day, is written by – and stars – David Haig. In 2014 at Chichester a lot of us predicted (nay, demanded) a West End transfer, and were thwarted. It has been touring, under the banner of Cambridge Arts and the Touring Consortium, and to catch it in Bath was more than a treat. Capital city, you now have your chance. Don’t blow it…

 

 

Directed by John Dove with sure, sharp concentration, it is a beautifully researched and immaculately pitched piece about the British meteorologist Dr Stagg (adept in spotting temperamental weather here) who had to defy Eisenhower’s own met-man and tell the vulnerable expeditionary force first not to go on D-Day – and then, even more audaciously, to take a run at it in the 8-hour lull between storms the next day. It should outlast the actor-writer who made it, and become part of the canon of WW2 dramatic chronicles, like Flare Path or The River Line. My 2014 review is here – and gives you the bones of the story:
https://theatrecat.com/tag/pressure/
But I would now add to that that Haig’s performance is even more refined, a scientist under terrible pressure to tell his truth to power, sometimes tremblingly afraid of being wrong, passionately calling in more and more information. To create an edge-of-the-seat thriller in which minutes on end have to consist of people taking down figures off the telephone is achievement enough: to humanize it like this, even better.
The casting is spot-on too: Malcolm Sinclair was born to be Eisenhower, snarlingly charming, towering over valiant little Stagg, softening in his encounters with his lover Lt Summersby (Laura Rogers, also excellent). And honour to Michael Mackenzie’s facial expression as Admiral Ramsay when – in charge of those flat-bottomed landing-craft and cumbersome concrete floating harbours – he hears Stagg speak of possible 10ft waves. Which would have drowned thousands, had Ike not believed the Briton.
And Mackenzie also turns up in one of the useful moments of light relief, as an electrician, one of the craftsmen drafted in to the D Day HQ at Southwich House. And not allowed to go home, because once you knew the immense secret of Operation Overlord, you were sequestered.
As I say, I stand by my original review https://theatrecat.com/tag/pressure/ and every last mouse of it.

https://touringconsortium.co.uk/show/pressure/Touring: Richmond next week, then Park Theatre NW
rating five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on PRESSURE TR Bath & TOURING

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre, Touring Mouse

Tagged as

March 14, 2018 · 2:15 pm

BRIEF ENCOUNTER Empire, Haymarket

FREE HANKY WITH EVERY PROGRAMME (honest..!)

 

Ten years ago Emma Rice and her Kneehigh group brought this adaptation of Noel Coward’s heartrending film to the stage – to a cinema stage, artfully and merrily referencing the golden age of cinemagoing . And we all found it utterly adorable. Irresistible. On the far side of her brief unhappy tenure at the Globe, here it comes again, with a few fine tweaks, to remind us what Rice does best, and how playful, inventive, sincere and inspiring Kneehigh can be when it beats its own path through the woods.

 

 

Especially when bouncing off beloved classics (their Rebecca was terrific). Indeed this revamped version of Alec and Laura’s story is even better, now with all its songs from Noel Coward himself (I’d forgotten Go Slow Johnny.. you’re no Brando, rallentando..). It’s a little classic in its own right, from the breathtaking moment when the real guilty lovers are sitting in the audience with us in the Empire, and Laura’s husband calls her from the black and white screen… and she plunges through it, away from the living passionate Alec and back into her monochrome home life.

 

 

, My daughter hadn’t even known the film, and she loved it: for those who do, there is no jarring in the vaudevillian opening-out of the action with larky refreshment-room and station staff ,(Dean Nolan as Godby is a right caution, as we’d have said in the ‘50s) . The live band onstage and the songs , especially from Jos Slovick, take nothing at all away from the simple doomed romance but actually add to it. Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson are not traduced here but worthily reborn in Jim Surgeon and Isabel Pollen, not stilted but delicately in period, respectable folk of the 1930’s swept up in the crashing waves of the Warsaw Concerto. But the layering of the three romances is perfect as a counterpoint to the exalted impossibility of their great non-affair. Stanley and Beryl (Beverly Rudd in all her glorious cartoon performances is another caution) are free to slap-and-tickle with the insouciance of fresh youth, Nolan and Kieve represent a middle-aged, battered kind of freedom. Love is all around, but only the principals can get nowhere.

 

The staging is even more fun than last time, with no fewer than four ways of making trains pass the station: entire cast juddering in time for the Express, once a toy train, once Beryl dashing through with a smoke-canister, and two kinds of projection, large and small. It’s Kneehigh , sky-high. Glorious.

 

 

0844 8717628; briefencounterwestend.com  to Sept
rating five  5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on BRIEF ENCOUNTER Empire, Haymarket

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 13, 2018 · 10:40 am

BRIGHTON ROCK Touring

A DARK SEASIDE PARABLE

 

 

If there is one stumbling block for lovers of Graham Greene’s darkly thrilling gangster novel, it is the elegance of Gloria Onitiri. She is Ida; and Greene’s redoubtable warrior for justice is in the book a large Cockney with a beery laugh and a market-trader’s sharpness: her pursuit of the murderous young Pinkie for the sake of the “Fred” he killed is fuelled by righteousness, but of an indeterminate old-fashioned variety . She stands for a sense – so restful to the tormented Catholicism of Greene – that “right and wrong” are very different to sexual sin and virtue. She’s big and bonny and maternal and blessedly common. But in Esther Richardson’s otherwise faithful production of Bryony Lavery’s thoughtful adaptation, for all her excellence as an actor Onitiri is more cocktail-and-torch-song than beery, matey singalong. She just is.

 

 

So I stumbled a bit. But in every other way Greene is beautifully served, and not just in Sara Perks’ fabulous dark design – a fraction of iron pier towering overhead, steps which move and swirl and through which once, unforgettably, the skinny villain squirms between the steps to grab his quarry. As Pinkie Jacob James Beswick is physically perfect- scrawny, starveling child of the slums, he has a hard young face and a restless, jerky teenage insolence in every move. HIs moment of arrogant defensive pathos when he is beaten up, his sexual terror and his cowed moment when confronted with the (gender-switched) Colleoni are well-judged: you can’t take your eyes off him: the boy gone wrong. Sarah Middleton is equally perfect as the waitress Rose, catching both her naiveté and the sharp simple intelligence that threatens Pinkie’s alibi. She also makes credible that terrifying Catholic belief that she will “burn” and will be glad to, for love. The extreme youth of the pair is there in all its pathos, extremism and perennial warning. Their story holds you solidly , especially in the second half once the inter-gangster stuff is fading from the foreground.

 

 

 

The latter iswell enough done, though I would plead one cause with all directors who cast inescapably male characters as women (Spicer is Angela Bain) . Just pay more attention to small physicalities, like hair. If Cubitt, Dallow and Pinkie have unforgiving 1950’s cuts you get distracted by female hair under the hoodlum hat. You just do. Which is a shame when such immense care has gone into everything else visual, into beautifully fast, fluid staging moves and a loving creation of that dark 1950’s seaside underworld complete with its slang (lesser adaptors would have given up “buer” and “milky”, but not this one. But the two young principals are more than worth seeing. It tours on.

 
http://pilot-theatre.com/performance/brighton-rock

touring to 26 May. COLCHESTER Mercury theatre this week
rating four   4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on BRIGHTON ROCK Touring

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 10, 2018 · 1:41 pm

GREAT EXPECTATIONS Bury st Edmnds Theatre Royal, and TOURING

DICKENS EXCEEDING  EXPECTATIONS

 

 

Putting great literary masterpieces onstage is an erratic business. Within the same week we see the Artistic Director of the National Theatre buggering up Macbeth – despite a stellar cast and centuries of interpretation to draw on – while elsewhere in our unpredictable theatrical jungle a shoestring company tours a respectfully inventive, pretty much perfect version of something which far harder to stage: Dickens’ Great Expectations with its knotty, preposterous interwoven plots.

 

 

But Tilted Wig, co-producing with Malvern Theatres, have done just that. Ken Bentley’s adaptation (relevantly, he is a radio drama veteran) makes unfussed use of Dickens’ narration, enabling him to include some of the author’s sarcastic asides on matters such as lawyers. It is picked up by different cast members as the scenes flow naturally into one another : some have to achieve instant changes from deep-involved character and accent to calm RP narration. Which is particularly striking in that it never actually strikes you at all – the story just goes on.

 

 

James Turner’s set is perfect: an iron-framed box on two levels, both refuge and cage, evoking just enough Victoriana. This elegant device (with Ollie King overhead on the concertina and some really classy sound and light design) contains with panache the set-piece moments – from the shock on the bleak marshes to the smithy, the filmy-draped world of mad Miss Havisham, with a dead rat in her jewel-box, the storm, the fire and the desperate moments by the steamer on the dark Thames tideway. Lantern-light, a trap and rapid-folding doors do it all.

 

 

So easy is it to relax into the story, and so neat and credible are the characters (nine actors for the 27 characters plus ensemble) , that it is surprisingly easy to pick up modern echoes : Estella (Isla Carter) after all is a trafficked child, stolen from the underclass by Jaggers and deliberately radicalized by Miss Havisham in her personal jihad against men. The theme of class barriers is more obvious, Sean Aydon beautifully carrying Pip’s yearning to be an educated gentleman , the overwhelming his decent nature by teenage cockiness, an his final taming to gentle regret at the sourness of his elevation. The heartbreaking division between him and Joe Gargery strikes home when that decent blacksmith gently but firmly refuses to dine with him in London because it wouldn’t be fitting . Actually, I have long regarded Joe Gargery as one of the most beautiful characters in fiction, and the performance by curly-haired, open-faced Edward Ferrow had me in tears several times. Actually, blast him, he rather set me off when he was Wemmick as well. Oh, and so did Daniel Goode’s Magwitch.

 

 

And I haven’t even mentioned the big-name star, the Olivier name: Nicola McAuliffe is Miss Havisham. Wow. A tower of lacy off-white netting, a vulturous, wearily ironic frilly tragedienne, she towers over Pip and Estella like a puppetteer. Her final emotional meltdown and immolation could bring Dickens himself applauding from the other side. Only my beloved Joe Gargery stands up to her with dignity: I nearly cheered.

 

So terrific. And while the fifth star or mouse is often supposed by tradition to belong only to life-changing innovation, in awarding it now I must make it clear that for me the fifth one is often more fitly represented by a heart. I loved the production. A thrill to see it in Bury’s Georgian theatre, but it will be a delight to Dickensians everywhere, and a means of conversion to others. Bravo.

 

https://www.tiltedwigproductions.com/productions
touring to 23 June nationwide, Richmond next!   Touring Mouse wide

rating five   5 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on GREAT EXPECTATIONS Bury st Edmnds Theatre Royal, and TOURING

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 8, 2018 · 7:19 pm

SUMMER AND SMOKE Almeida, N1

SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE

 

 

Is love a Gothic Cathedral, a yearning for a permanent, holy, respectful connection to the best in our nature? Or is it lust and fun, animal attraction, a reckless erotic adventure? Well, at its best it is both: but when Alma the minister’s daughter interprets her liking for John the medical student as part of her yearning for eternity, he meets it with impatient brutal words, makes her look hard at the ugliness of an anatomical diagram . She decries his gambling, even his pose – “Don’t sit like that, you look so indolent and worthless”, he shrugs and turns to Roza the casino-owner’s daughter. Who, in Alma’s view , is part of the distressing, threatening deeper south which alarms and fascinates anyone striving to be a Southern Lady – “all the Latinos dream in the sun and indulge their senses..”

 

 

And the sadness of their story, played out in a sultry MIssissippi summer when a disastrous gunshot is never far away, is that each converts the other , but too late. Four years ago I saw Rebecca Frecknell’s production of this rarely seen, elegiac Tennessee Williams play in the Southwark Playhouse tunnel: I called it a jewel. It is fine to see that her directorial passion for the piece endured, for this is the same director’s grander production. In the smart Almeida it is set with remarkable expressionist symbolism, Tom Scutt’s set a shallow ellipse of nine pianos on, behind, around and upon which assorted characters not necessarily in the scene are placed; sometimes playing an obbligato to keep the mood or giving a few notes to represent the coming of the cool Gulf Wind or a doorbell. Sometimes they light up. Composition is by Angus MacRae, musical direction by Mark Dickman.

 

And it is clever, but for me sometimes a little to the detriment of the play’s beauty. For Tennessee Williams’ world of yearning, damaged, misbehaving, disappointed, painfully lovable characters, hanging on to hope and life by their fingernails, is expressed as always in lyrical language and emotional images so heartbreakingly poetic that you resent missing even a single word due to murmured moments of extreme naturalism; or indeed having an agonised significant pause accompanied by a mere theatrical bit of cleverness. Williams doesn’t need that: the heart beats too strong for any of the modish tropes of modern productions to matter.

 

But oh, it is a lovely piece, and the performances at its heart honest and finely drawn. Patsy Ferran is beyond superb as Alma the preacher’s daughter, pious and ladylike, prone to hyperventilating, and changing before our eyes, with painful growth, to the moment when she says too late that wrenching line “The girl who said no doesn’t exist, She died last summer” and comes ironically to understand what courtship is after years of condemning the kind of woman who known for “making the acquaintance of travelling salesmen”.

 

Matthew Needham is equally strong, equally heartbreaking in the end. Their connection, despite his (very Tennessee-Williams) tendency to bully and mock her beliefs, is intense. With economical simplicity other parts are doubled or more, Anjana Vasan particularly impressive (with a fierce torch-song) as Rosa the Latina, the dark sensuous angel, and milder as Nellie. Nothing is wasted, no irony or brief sad laugh unmarked. At times the selfconscious staging irritated me, a little. But the beauty shone through, and honour to Frecknall for championing this gorgeous, gentle play.

 

 

box office 0207 359 4404
rating four  4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on SUMMER AND SMOKE Almeida, N1

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 7, 2018 · 10:32 pm

MACBETH Olivier, SE1

THE SCOTTISH PLAY, DARK AND DANK

 

 

You don’t expect robes and battlements these days. This is a shaven-head-and-machete Macbeth, its theme an indeterminate, timeless squalor: possibly a feral modern war, possibly post-apocalyptic. The murder of Duncan, set thus, is hard to see as regicidal sacrilege – ‘his silver skin laced with his golden blood”. Though the always fine Stephen Boxer as the short-lived monarch does, with characteristic subtlety, manage to express something I had never really noticed: that his betrayal by the original Cawdor , who he had t,rusted, distressed and unbalanced him into over-trusting the tricky Macbeths. The problem, however, is that the world Rufus Norris directs in Rae Smith’s tenebrous, crumpled-binbag-and-blockhouse set with its dark steep trundling ramp ,towering diseased trees, disorderly roistering and makeshift armour fastened on with rolls of duct-tape, seems as if it never had any place for loyalty, moral codes or civilized reflection. Indeed the only times we glimpse any furniture that isn’t plastic or a folding old camping-table are in the home of Lady Macduff and the English refuge of young Donald (it may be that the presence of a carpet and sofa and tidier clothes is code for higher moral virtue). Though Lady Macbeth does eventually get out of her vest and pleather jeans into a ragged ,sub-Oscar, sequinned raspberry frock once she is Queen.

 

 

The bleak, smoky, savage setting makes Rory Kinnear’s task as the racked, tempted, murderous, hesitant, panicking Macbeth harder than it need be. Of course he is as ever a great Shakespearian, each word and gesture achieved with intelligence and feeling. His relationship with the equally remarkable Anne Marie Duff as his sexy, tricky, maternally hungry and tormented wife is as good as I have seen it. Their first eye-meet, when each knows that the other is thinking murder, is riveting, as is the moment when he holds her dead body in his arms for “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…” Norris’ technique of creating action-freezes for soliloquies helps in the first half too, detaching Kinnear for a merciful moment from the thuggish hopeless scene.

 

 

Yet somehow, I’m not quite buying it. We are used to gore and nasty things hung on trees and lots beheadings, ever since the technology for reproducing actors’ heads improved. Fine. But unlike the Hytner Othello – set in a modern army camp – or his Hamlet in a recognizable police-state, the misery-world evoked here gives no sense that there ever were nobilities to be breached by the Macbeths. It’s just chaos, and you expect no better. There are excellent Norris touches – the always problematic “comedy’ porter (Trevor Fox) is allowed to have seen into Duncan’s death-room, and weaves into his ramblings bits of Lady Macbeth’s speech about boneless gums and nipples. That absolutely works. So does Alana Ramsey as a cross-gendered Second Murderer, giving it large as a furious slaggy blonde in fishnets , fur boots and machete: the character’s claim that life has treated her so badly that she’ll do anything has a MeToo feeling about it, and Ramsey is superbly vicious, presenting Lady Macduff with her slaughtered babies in plastic bags like a nightmare Ocado delivery. Kevin Harvey’s Banquo is excellent too, with a dry civilized air about him which makes his return as a bloodstained lurching zombie ghost all the more effective.

 

 

Oh, and the witches? They’re OK: shamanic, acrobatic, eerie, one wearing what looks like entrails outside her body but which turn out to be bits of dismembered baby dolls. Or possibly actual babies, it’s that sort of show. But on the whole, by the time the three main zombie victims return to watch the final fight (King Duncan endearingly finding a plastic chair to settle down and watch from) there is no sense of a tragic fall. Just of another thuggish gang war,  an East End brawl with no sense to it and not much hope for young Donald.

 

 

box office 020 7452 3000 to 23 june
in cinemas NT LIVE on 10 May
and touring nationwide from Sept 2018
rating three  3 Meece Rating

Comments Off on MACBETH Olivier, SE1

Filed under Theatre, Three Mice

Tagged as

March 6, 2018 · 6:06 pm

THE YORK REALIST Donmar, WC2

LOVE AND THE NOT-FOR-MARRYING MAN

 

Love stories take many forms. Here – electric, understated, unmistakeable and timeless – the erotic connection is between Ben Batt’s George , farm labourer in a tied cottage in the 1960s, and Jonathan Bailey as the assistant director of the York Passion plays. George has been recruited as an authentic local voice, urged on despite his rugged modesty by the sweet chapel-going Doreen (Katie West a quiet delight) who takes his old Mum to Meetings and knows, deep down, that he is “not for marrying”.

 

 

Still illegal, though quietly tolerated by the farm family, the affair is also doomed by the utter divergence of their habitats, lifestyles, and a sense of distance between town and country which today feels both authentic and, mercifully, dated. TV would by now have rubbed some of the rugged chapel-and-calving simplicities off Mother , neighbour Doreen, and the delightfully gormless teenage nephew Jack; fast communication might have held the lads together for longer. Even though John won’t give up his advancing southern career to live in a leaky nearby cottage, while George makes it clear that London and its attractions were fine for visiting but “I live here”! With some sorrow he rejects John’s faith that he could actually have an acting career “I’m past that”. Today, God willing, he would be working in Sheffield Theatre, co-producer of this production.

 

 

For Peter Gill’s 2002 play, which won plaudits but not universal acclaim at first (Charles Spencer was entertainingly rude) is rendered in the Donmar’s intimacy by director Robert Hastie as something perfect: delicate, clear and natural as an upland upland brook. It can be earthy – George is the seducer , and has a startling admission of how he found out that he was gay after chasing girls unsuccessfully one evening and then saying to his mate “Better be you, then..”. John, more fey and puppyishly shyer, rises to passionate declaration and thwarted anger only later, after the death of old Mum (a fine Lesley Nicol, ringing utterly true to anyone with Yorkshire relatives of a certain age).

 

 

It is full of glancing, important themes, and not just about odd-couple love (it rather helps that the lovers are gay: in a 1960s heterosexual tale the girl would almost certainly have gone to live where and how the man chose). It also reflects on how an urban middle-class had colonized the world of “culture”, as the locals are given their own heritage of mystery plays by directorial incomers. Yet where that’s concerned, the most heartening scene is after the interval as the whole family, including lumpen Arthur the brother-in-law and teenage Jack, get back exhilarated from the show to exclaim about how grand it was, and how swept up they were by the old story and how George, as a tormentor, was “that cruel!”.

 

box office 0203 282 3808 to 24 March
BUT GOING TO SHEFFIELD NEXT https://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk 27 March-10 April

RATING four 4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE YORK REALIST Donmar, WC2

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 3, 2018 · 2:03 pm

A PRINCESS UNDONE Park Theatre N4

MA’AM , THE MINION AND THE MACHO MAN

 

 

“I never boasted an education. I learned tricks” says Princess Margaret, bitterly, at a late point in Richard Stirling’s interesting but frustrating new play. For a moment you think – yes, that’s it! if a wilful, lively, pretty young woman learns nothing of science, history, and the deeper nobility of history and literature, but all she is given is that Princess status, things will go sour for her. And they did. Between the impertinent imaginations of The Crown on Netflix , and the brilliant “99 glimpses” collected from memoirs by Craig Brown in his book Ma’am Darling, there is a resurgence of interest in the Queen’s late sister. So Stirling’s play is well placed to attract interest.

 

 

And with more refinement, it could be genuinely worthwhile. It encounters the Princess in lateish middle age and the royal family’s Annus Horribilis: she’s divorced from Snowdon , resenting Diana (“Golden Girl”) and bitching about the “rentaKents” next door. Separated for the moment from her young lover Roddy, she is engaged in a curious incident, based on reality, when she burned a number of potentially damaging letters and papers from the Queen Mother’s Clarence House.

 

 

Stirling himself plays the QM’s ‘page” Backstairs Billy, with rather more camp than is strictly necessary, assisting her and keeping the drinks coming. A fictional young chancer turns up, to indicate the general hunger for royal gossip and leaks, and in the second and more interesting half the thuggish ex-con Bindon (in real life one of her Mustique pals) turns up, terminally ill, to challenge her.

 

 

That bit is interesting, touching at times. And Felicity Dean is brilliant as Margaret, catching – whenever the script allows – a confusion between being posh and frozenly Princessy and being slangy and matey: a problem widely observed by those who perceived her best. Patrick Toomey’s Bindon is strong too, and between them we get some real chemistry. Though I doubt he’d have rough-housed her as readily with staff in the next room, ex-lover or not.

 

But the terrible slow-burn of the first half merely exasperates: the witty one-liners are placed too obviously from real memoirs, and you get no real sense of the mixed hauteur and familiarity in her rather overlong dealings with Billy. I really want this to be a better play, and it may grow into one. But too much misfires. The best line is when Bindon threatens her saying “If you were a man – “ and she snaps “If I were a man, I’d be king”. That hits home.

 

 

Parktheatre.co.uk to 17 March
rating two  2 meece rating

PS    By the way, the excellent co-production of A Passage to India is still running in the bigger space at the Park…till the 24th.  This is my Northampton review of it:  https://tinyurl.com/yaog4m92

 

 

 

Comments Off on A PRINCESS UNDONE Park Theatre N4

Filed under Theatre, Two Mice

Tagged as

March 2, 2018 · 3:48 pm

FROZEN Theatre Royal, Haymarket

SIN OR SYMPTOM? A HUMAN TURNED TO A HORROR

 

 

Last time I encountered a monologue written for a paedophile abuser, it was by Alan Bennett in a remarkable – and I think unrepeated – TV Talking Heads . That was a brave and haunting performance by David Haig as a tempted, succumbing, park-keeper with an edge of virtuous prissiness about other people’s behaviour. Braver still, because ineffably nastier, but with that same edge of prissiness we have here Jason Watkins’ rendering of “Ralph”. Bryony Lavery’s multiply disturbing play is about a mother’s experience when her 10 year old daughter has been first missing, then confirmed dead ,dismembered and stored in a lock-up shed by a man with a stash of “Lesbian Lolitas” videos who is capable of saying petulantly to a psychiatrist “The only thing I”m sorry about is that it’s not legal. Killing girls”. He got seven of them, over 21 years .

 

 

There are three stunning performances – Jason Watkins’ knock-kneed, lame- footed, hunchedly amiable and incurable selfpitying killer shows off his tattoos and brags about his gift for organisation. Suranne Jones is the dead child’s mother, assuredly moving between mundane Midlands practicality beneath her fine ironic eyebrows and the deepest, angriest of griefs before reaching a strange resolution. And you believe in every step. The third, the wild card, is Nina Sosanya as an American-Icelandic psychologist , KCL lecturer and author of a paper entitled “Serial killing – a forgivable act?”  She is of the school that considers atrocities as symptoms, not sins.

 

 
Which took Lavery – early on the curve –  into the now-modish dramatic territory of neuroscience and theories about frontal lobe deficiencies, early influence on empathetic connection, bangs on the head leading to irresistible criminal impulses, etc. It all feels very up to date, though the play first aired over a decade ago.   Additional dramatic interest – and a bit of artful internal sabotage – is added because the psychiatrist is a bit of a horror herself. Our first glimpses of Sosanya, in the sequence craftsmanlike initial monologues, shows the learned scientist having the screaming abdabs over leaving New York, then sitting on a plane writing vengeful messages to her illicit lover and research colleague while necking brandy,  insulting the stewardess and greeting the seat-belt sign with a shriek of “We’re all going to die” .Nor are her “boundaries” in a series or prison interviews with Ralph very convincingly set, given that her own self -pity and self-importance are almost as marked as his.

 

 

But maybe that’s the point: certainly in the electric, even more uncomfortable second act when against the bossy shrink’s recommendation the mother confronts the killer in a restorative-justice meeting. Rapidly (God, Suranne Jones is good, and Watkins a brave actor!) she reaches more important depths than the expert ever did.  Lavery is never a simplistic writer, so I hope she will forgive a certain bracing conclusion which any of us may make as we shiver in the stalls: that when it comes to understanding the depth, strangeness, redeemability and motivation of human beings you will get more insight from a tough ordinary mother with life-experience than from any self-regarding American psychiatrist who calls herself a “voyager in the frozen wastes of the criminal mind.”

 

 

You could also reflect that forgiveness is the best revenge. It certainly turns out that way in the agonizing final scenes. It’s a terrific play, actually. And on a frozen snow-day on the Haymarket, I should record that instinctively most of a middling-thin matinee audience rose to its feet to applaud the three principals. Oh, and turning up late post-holiday, I bought my own stalls ticket and don’t regret it for a moment.

 

box office 020 7930 8800 to 5 May
rating four   4 Meece Rating

 

 

Comments Off on FROZEN Theatre Royal, Haymarket

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

March 1, 2018 · 12:08 pm

IOLANTHE ENO Coliseum, WC1

FAIRY DUST AND PHYSICAL COMEDY

 

I am happy to say that in the second act there is some inappropriate sexual harassment. By garishly clad fairies, deploying weaponized soprano trills and terrorism-by-tutu as they move in crazed by desire for the middle aged, timidly bachelorly members of the House of Lords. That their Queen and their faery laws forbid marriage to mortals means nothing to the reckless, trippingly St-Trinian chorus: Iolanthe got away with it and bore a camp demi-fairy son Strephon after all. And any minute now, assisted by some legislative sleight of hand, their Queen too will succumb to a philosophically minded mortal guardsman and give him instant wings.

 

 

I was not always a devotee of Gilbert-and-Sullivan , having been depressed by too much D’Oyly Cartery in youth. But newer productions – notably the hilarious all-male ones – have drawn me back, and this completes it. For English National Opera to recruit Cal McCrystal – our most precise and inventive creator of physical comedy – to direct this feyest of politico-legal satires from 1882 is a masterstroke.

 

 

Musically of course it is splendid, under Timothy Henty and with the ENO chorus and seasoned soloists (Samantha Price as Iolanthe is, wisely, allowed the show’s one un-comical and genuinely moving operatic moment as she pleads for her son near the end). Paul Brown’s design, with pretty Pollock-theatrey cutouts and a very nice wheel-on House of Lords, is beautifully Victorian , with added nonsense when the peers crash through the paper backdrop aboard Stephenson’s Rocket . Several fairies (and one peer) do fly. But McCrystal’s touch, and comic vision, is what makes it special.

 

 

From the first moment when the fairies, of all shapes and sizes, trip into their opening chorus in dazzling chaotic outfits, acorn-capped or daffodil-daffy, and move like a determined keep-fit class for mature Lacroix fashion-victims, you have to laugh. At the dances, the moves, the drink-dispensing unicorn, the gloriously absurd puppetry going wrong. The director has brought in three of his regular performers for the extreme physicality – notably Richard Leeming as the Chancellor’s page is hurled around almost distressingly and emerges gamely every time. But the operatic regulars are more than up for it, stomping and tripping and milking every good joke. When Marcus Farnsworth’s amiable nitwit Strephon sings his lovely duet with Ellie Laugharne’s Phyllis, they gamely ignore the fact that the black-masked puppeteers manoeuvring sheep behind them can’t see through their masks, and bump into one another as helplessly they search for the wings. Which feels, delightfully, like a nod of acknowledgement to the hundreds of am-dram productions of G &S down the years which kept the flame alive..

 

 

Anyway, it’s a delight. Really is. The new jokes – notably the fireman one – are a pleasure, but not too much is done to modernize it. And surtitles, if you can tear your eye away from the mayhem on stage, remind us of the utter brilliance, the absurdism, mad rhymes, unexpected neatness and damn sharp satire which WS Gilbert flung out like a literary Catherine-wheel. Gorgeous. I recant. I regret the years of avoiding G&S.

 

box office 0333 023 1550 to 7 April
rating five  5 Meece Rating

 

 

 

Comments Off on IOLANTHE ENO Coliseum, WC1

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

February 15, 2018 · 4:25 pm

THE SHADOW FACTORY Nuffield City, Southampton

A CITY’S MEMORY

 

Two girls on the Downs in 1940 giggle over a spot of rabbit-poaching on Lady Cooper’s land. A roar, Junkers overhead. Figures emerge from smoke and darkness as a chanting urgent chorus,: “Over the river – Woolston way – Quick, this one’s for real , bolt the shutters, fill up the bath, fill up the sinks, water if there’s fire, change of clothes, candles, soap, photo album – Cos if..cos if…come the all-clear and your house has gone…”.

 

 

We read and reconstruct a lot about the London Blitz, but this Southampton story deserves telling too: Howard Brenton, a clear eye and eloquent historical storyteller, has immersed himself in the facts about it and found an imaginative intuition. The story of the Spitfires is itself extraordinary: in eight weeks of that year 489 planes were damaged, 785 lost; the Supermarine factory in Southampton was key, and they were constantly in production through the war years with constant improvements in design. When the factory was bombed – as happens at the start of this play – machine tools were saved and other trade premises in the city and beyond were requisitioned under draconian wartime rules. They built components to be assembled at Eastleigh: the fight continued.

 

 

Brenton has taken real characters – Beaverbrook, the bombastic newspaper-owner and minister for aircraft production, and the heroic works engineer Len Gooch – but imagined a family business as the heart of his story: a laundry. Avoiding the cliché of a brave united mustn’t-grumble wartime Britain, he acknowledges not only the steadfastness but the wobble, the anger, the fear, the resentment of government.

 
If there is a faultless wartime hero it is Daniel York’s Gooch; a heroine, Shala Nyx as a young woman thrilled and inspired by her design job at the factory. David Birrell’s laundry-owner Fred meanwhile is pessimistic, indignant at the requisition, hostile and defensive, afraid. His daughter Jackie (Lorna Fitzgerald) is embittered on losing her soldier lover and has to grope her way towards understanding and finding a role. HIs mother, made splendidly terrifying by Anita Dobson who doubles as the aristocratic chatelaine, is as tough an egg in her way as Hilton McRae’s swaggering Beaverbrook.

 

 

So the play does not echo that tone of compulsory their-finest-hour heartwarming which marked the patriotic films of the period (which in some ways it does resemble). The differences resolve, and Southampton was heroic in many ways; but the story has variety and bite and human failings. So under Samuel Hodges’ direction and Leo Warner’s inspired design, it takes off. I had to catch an early preview, but nothing faltered. Brenton allows his characters sharp poetry too: when the factory is bombed you need no pictures beyond Jackie’s gasped “The look of it – dust in the air – snakes, no not snakes, fire hoses… everywhere sopping wet…grey – shapes of things that are all wrong…and you see, but don’t see, lying in bricks half a person, no legs..”

 

 

It’s the first production in this new space, and what they have done is to set it on a vast thrust stage, blank as concrete, so that the community chorus can come and go and scenes change instantly; projections turn the floor into the grassy Common where terrified householders would “trek out” and camp during bombing raids, or into Whitehall, or the grand house with its carpets and long graceful windows which becomes the design studio and sees its mistress banished to the attics. Above the stage, moving light-bars become roofs high or low . And – spectacularly at last – turn into the graceful, miraculous, moving forms of aeroplane wings.
Oh, and there’s a good surprise at the end, in a sack.

 

box office nstheatres.co.uk to 3 march
rating four   4 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on THE SHADOW FACTORY Nuffield City, Southampton

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

February 8, 2018 · 11:08 am

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Wyndham’s, WC2

A WATCHFUL SORROW

 

 

There are some evenings when, as the cast take their bow with that half-relaxed half-smile, you are shocked: you feel you have not been watching a performance but witnessing a great human ordeal. Eugene O’Neill’s best play, a three-and-a-half hour fugue of unhappiness and love, is both exhausting and strangely invigorating. Maybe it is as simple as “they survived, so we can”. But more likely it is that in its acknowledgement of vast insoluble human pain, it becomes a hand reaching out across time to take yours. Whether you believe like the morphine-addled Mary that the Virgin Mary is still up there, or like her tubercular son Edmund that Nietzsche was right and God is dead, the point is that others have felt it all before you. And as Mary says “None of us can help the things life has done to us..”.

 

 

Lesley Manville, whose wrenching, delicately controlled pain scorched through Richard Eyre’s unforgettable production of Ibsen’s GHOSTS a while back, now shines in an extraordinary performance under the same director . The immense, intimate epic of addiction and love is set in Rob Howell’s blue-glass, skewed imagination of a summer house by the sea. She is in turns flirty, scared, angry, manic, cooing, sly, spiteful, querulous, loving, dangerous, excited, resentful: changing within seconds. She is the Tyrone family’s madonna, their fount of love, their toxic time-bomb: the eternal addict who is the enemy of ease because of what is (for a long time) not spoken of: the hypodermic, the stash upstairs.

 
The long day unfurls into nightmare from the initial family banter, breakfast-time prattling as if nothing was wrong except the patriarch’s snoring, Edmund’s “summer cold” and Jamie’s dissipation. But Eyre’s meticulous detailing shows the opening of cracks which will widen to chasms. Jeremy Irons is the retired actor, growlingly affectionate, exasperated by his sons then suddenly lovingly amused, pulling his beloved wife onto his lap. But he betrays an anxious need for control in sudden tidiness, picking up Jamie’s cup off the sofa and fussily plumping cushions. His Mary is too bright, to chatty for comfort; elder son Jamie is watchful, his brother Edmund aware of his own illness but being constantly pulled back to share in the observation of his mother. For after the bright hope of her return from the sanatorium, she is relapsing. Dare they believe it ? Jamie explicitly does; his father attempts denial. Through that first act the most telling (and truthful) detail is often just a stillness: anyone who has lived with an addict, a relapsing alcoholic, or self-harming depressive will recognize that nervous stillness: everyone watching, hoping this isn’t the bad thing back again, knowing it probably is.

 

 

Every one of them must find refuge: old Tyrone in memories of the great Shakespearian he thinks he might have been, Edmund in Swinburne and Schopenhauer and Ibsen (“filth and degenerates” says his father), Jamie in drinking and whoring. Every ordinary weakness is magnified by the central, demonic thing in their midst. The fog comes down, swirls beyond the glass walls. Back-story emerges: a nomadic theatrical life, bare hotel rooms and dirty trains, her babies born on the road, his near-miserly fear of poverty and absurd land deals, the baby who died, the doctor who hooked her on morphine when Edmund was newborn, the social gulf between the couple when they married. But as most of this comes through Mary’s rattling monologues and resentful mood-swings, you are never quite sure what to count.

 

 

Absurdity runs alongside the tragedy, horribly funny moments always a second away from a lethal shaft of pain. Later, when the morphine is openly spoken of, Manville’s prattling insistence that when Edmund is better and things are easier she will definitely beat it, Matthew Beard’s Edmund stares sideways out at us, hollow-eyed, defeated by her denial. When Rory Keenan’s Jamie comes home drunk and obscene, baiting a tipsy father and brother, it cannot be long before the restless footsteps upstairs bring the dreaded, loved mother into their midst, drifting farther away from them than ever. The poetry is in the pity. I have rarely seen anything more delicately, honestly, skilfully sorrowful.

 

http://www.wyndhamstheatre.co.uk to 7 april

RATING five 5 Meece Rating

Comments Off on LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Wyndham’s, WC2

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

February 7, 2018 · 9:47 am

THE CULTURE – a farce in two acts Hull Truck

CELEBRATION FOR A CITY

 

Right place, right time, a last flurry of fireworks by the Humber. The hottest of young playwrights, James Graham, lovingly teases the city where he was a student : a place more joked-about than celebrated, but in an unexpectedly enthusiastic mood about itself. He reimagines and larkily mocks the end of its City of Culture year, as a manically overenthusiastic team prepares to hand the baton to Coventry the C of C for 2021.

 

 

It’s a great idea, and studded with good jokes both about Hull itself, the wackier events of the year, local authority ploddery and – principally – the absurdity of bureaucrats trying to evaluate the point of art through statistics and surveys. On one side big fat folders and prattle about outcomes and targetation, metrics, amalgamated workstreams and data-capture; on the other the kind of artist who pitches up with equally loopy jargon and a “Transportational Touch Exhibit” involving a blindfold , a caseful of objects and a chanted commentary through a distant microphone.

 

The inciting incident of the plot itself is the kind of modernism which brings  the aggrieved Dennis the sign-maker to turn up and accidentally disrupt the big day. He put an old fridge and sofa out for the Council refuse collectors, all correct, and it immediately got elected as an artwork, surrounded by keen art students and attracting respectful coachloads from Leeds.

 

 

All ll great stuff. And Andrew Dunn as Dennis is, as ever, a gem of grumpy, eloquent, dryly bluff blokeishness.  To get the idea, remember him as Tony in Dinnerladies on TV. Indeed quite often this play feels like James Graham channelling Victoria Wood: and once Ab-Fab too, as Janice the overkeen volunteer is played by Nicola Reynolds (in one of three fast-changing roles ) as pure Bubble.   So we’re rather at an angle from the familiar Graham of tightly researched, purposeful and beautifully structured recent-history plays – This House, Ink, Labour of Love. And he is not a natural farceur, though there are some intricate misunderstandings, crossed lines, redial-jokes and a lot of dashing about through doors.

 
It comes to life best when the people are more credible than merely comic: shrieking Janice is far too broad, and Amelia Donkor as Lizzie, the manic statistician who is trying to organize the handover and presentation is far too hectic.   There is no sense of how she really is, still less of how she ended up in Hull.   Mark Babych, otherwise directing with pace and farce-door ingenuity, would have done better to slow down her gabble-and-shriek, which  blurs into incomprehension some of Graham’s fine parodic jokes about her trade.

 

 

But the second half in particular is full of strong laughs, some nicely smutty, some manic, and many particularly fun for Hull people (I came with my husband, a former Radio Humberside man, who got them all).   Short cameo characters are great – especially Nicola Reynolds as a smugly self-assured DCMS minister, and Matt Sutton doubling as a furious Labour council chief in a red tie and a bored lawyer, who has a late artistic catharsis brought on by blue cake-icing (don’t ask). There are two nice phone events with local heroes Tom Courtenay and Maureen Lipman, and a nicely thrown-away reference to them both melting down in pique later.

 

 

Martin Hyder is terrific as both the baffled Coventry council chief (“I thought you just toss some cash to some artists and they do some art?”) and later as another volunteer, an ageing ex-deckie off the trawlers of long ago. He is glowing with pride at having done masterclasses in both CPR and LGBT “so I can both save lives and talk to gay people’. He gets, near the end, a moment of truth when he admits that as the year ends he’ll miss it, the sense of belonging that vanished when the fishing declined. Dunn too speaks for Hull’s pride and insecurity too, in the final moments. And it is in those moments that we’re back with the Graham we know, humane and perceptive.

 

So not one of his best plays, though the arguments about measuring art are sharp and useful. But at this moment, in this place, it’s a lovely thing. I’m glad to have been there.

 

hulltrucktheatre.org.uk to 17 February

rating three.  3 Meece Rating

Comments Off on THE CULTURE – a farce in two acts Hull Truck

Filed under Theatre, Three Mice

Tagged as

February 3, 2018 · 5:36 pm

ROTHSCHILD & SONS Park, NW11

BANKERS AS LIBERATORS 

 

 

The first recitative line in this one-act musical, as the little band sounds curfew, is chilling: a Town Crier from the 1760’s :
“Jews and aliens of Frankfurt. Return to your homes. The Ghetto is closed”.
The shopkeeper Meyer Rothschild, yellow star on his sleeve, is baited by local oafs – “Jew, do your duty!” and made to bow. Officialdom cheats him of twelve krone. Returning to his affianced wife Gutele, he speaks ambition and dreams of sons who will “extend a man’s reach!” once the repressive laws controlling Jews allow them to marry. He resolves to build wealth, brushing off the Biblical camel-and-needles’s-eye rule with “when you’re rich enough, you find tiny camels and enormous needles”.

 

It is one of the very few jokes in the show. Our hero, played by Robert Guccioli with vigorous charm turning gradually to patriarchal authority, strikes banking deals with incompetent courtiers in the kingdom of Hesse. Five sons are born, trained up and spread across European capitals to found the immense House of Rothschild. They are fawned on by desperate and prodigal governments in the Napoleonic Wars. Their unbreakable family network of information and prediction makes them unbeatable.

 

The one-act, two-hour musical is – with Sherman Yellen’s book – by Bock and Sheldon: who of course wrote Fiddler on the Roof, so gloriously played lately at Chichester with Omid Djalili . Some have expressed disappointment that Rothschild is no Tevye: rather than lovable, traditional and downtrodden, this time the hero is the diaspora Jew as winner. His sons take after him: black-suited, relentless, careful, riding the hard fact that their success and cleverness make them suspect and despised in their chosen nations. Leaflets on the “international Jewish conspiracy” are already circulating. But there’s a lovely, lightly choreographed, sequence when Gary Trainor as Nathan – the family hothead – is being watched by envious London Stock Market top-hats, trying to guess if the angle of his cigar or a gesture of his sleeve means ‘buy’ or “sell’ some commodity.

 

 

It is Nathan who first suggests that an offer to fund the Grand Alliance against Napoleon could persuade Britain to put pressure on the arrogant Metternich to abolish the ghetto laws across the Austrian Empire. It is a risk to everything they own ; after some conflict they all agree it, twice over, putting serious fiscal pressure on the brocaded , duplicitous Christian leader.

 

It may seem an odd moment for a paean to investment-banking and the way that giant fundholders can wield political influence. With nice irony, a few hours after I saw it I watched DRY POWDER (below) about another kind of banking altogether. On the other hand, with Hamilton in town, what better moment to portray pompous royals in brocade and periwigs being outwitted by clever, energetic nobodies from the wrong side of the tracks? And in an time of Holocaust memory and an uneasy sense of reanimated antisemitism, it does no harm to be reminded, from the age of Waterloo, of the troubled, talented, vigorous history of the Jewish diaspora in Europe.

 

And though the first third of the show is unaccountably slow, and some of the dealings with the Hesse court unengaging, when the father-son conflicts begin it gets peppery and satisfying. The songs improve too; especially “In my own LIfetime” and “Everything”. Cuccioli is tremendous, but so are Gary Trainor as Nathan and the other sons. Glory Crampton, though she is often just background, is moving and melodious when her moments do come. Like Cuccioli she is a personality who can fill far bigger stages than this . It isn’t one of the great musicals, but I left it feeling moved, and thoughtful, and a bit more educated about the diaspora’s journey.

 

 

box office 020 7870 6876 to 17 FEb
rating three.   3 Meece Rating

Comments Off on ROTHSCHILD & SONS Park, NW11

Filed under Theatre, Three Mice

Tagged as

February 1, 2018 · 10:39 pm

DRY POWDER Hampstead NW3

YOU HAVE TO LAUGH OR YOU WOULD WEEP..

 

 

The most arresting new character I’ve met this year is the magnificent Hayley Atwell as Jenny; star of a New York private equity investment firm .  Jenny is a high-concept calculating machine-cum-psychopath, as staccato in her statements as the click of her spike heels. She deploys a superb blank does-not-compute’ stare when confronted with some concept like “relating to people”. Even her ruthless boss Rick (Aidan McArdle) is a bit more capable of worrying what people think. Slumped depressedly by his glass desk with his middle suit button defiantly and uncomfortably done up,  he is bothered that the firm’s latest manoeuvre  laid hundreds of workers off to turn a quick profit, and got exposed in the New York Times just as he was throwing a million-dollar engagement party.   Jenny scorns such weakness. “Do we work in- “ she drips with scorn at the words – “public relations? Anyway who takes the New York Times seriously?”
“The entire world” replies a colleague.
“I mean in OUR world!’ says Jenny.

 

 

Sarah Burgess’ slyly wicked comedy – she’s a rising US writer – is indeed a porthole into a murky parallel world whose doings , though legal, make McMafia look like Little Women. At least in that, the Russian tribes drip with tearful family loyalty even when commissioning car-bombs. Here, the privateers are driven entirely by the logic of percentage profit: they are piratical asset strippers, experts of the forked tongue and slippery promise.  Newcomers will give three minutes to the programme’s quick guide to leveraged buyouts, LPs, debt-to-capital ratios and the vital “Dry Powder” which a fund holds ready for a quick buy-in ; but in fact with skilful clarity Burgess makes the action clear from the start.

 

 

Rick is planning to invest heavily in a luggage manufacturer in California, urged by Seth (Tom Riley) who has been enthused by its ideas about expanding into online bespoke suitcases for middle-management business travellers “No one has harnessed that force”. Jenny sets her team of analysts (one of whom ends up in hospital, overdosed on wake-up pills) to work out that the way to the best fast profits is to close down the Sacramento factory , manufacture cheaply in Bangladesh for an emerging Chinese middle-class market, and rapidly sell on. Rick is still worried that their investors – secretive high net worth individuals and any pension fund with a conscience – will hate the loss of American jobs. Seth agrees. “If you make too many people too mad, they can change things” nervously citing the French Revolution. From Jenny drips icy staccato incomprehension .

 

 

Scenes change: it is all elegantly set in front of revolving mirrors reflecting either cold corporate offices ,a warmer California or finally Hong Kong. We meet Jeff the suitcase CEO (Joseph Balderama), enthusing Seth and only slowly suspecting the harsher intentions of Rick and Jenny. The plot thickens, with panic for the fund, an unsavoury rescue, a deal, and from Aidan McArdle the most chilling snorted laugh I have heard onstage for years.

 

It is barkingly funny, played with quartet precision under Anna Ledwich’s direction, and has at its heart not some jejune fury at “fatcats” but a serious observation: it is about the distinction between the warm breath of business – creating objects, services, value – and the icy mathematical chill of those who finance it. The hard-edged contemptuous purity of Jenny will haunt me for days. Not that she’ll care. As she says to Seth3 ‘ Allow less intelligent people to hate you. It’s their destiny, and it costs you nothing”.
A lesser writer, by the way, might have been tempted to draw the relationship between the two warring colleagues as Benedick and Beatrice, or at least throw in a sex scene. Not this one. Just pitiless mirth and Swiftian wit.

 

box office 020 7722 9301 to 3 march
rating four  4 Meece Rating

Comments Off on DRY POWDER Hampstead NW3

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

January 31, 2018 · 1:47 pm

JULIUS CAESAR Bridge Theatre, SE1

AVE HYTNER IMPERATOR!    THE BRIDGE AS ARENA

 

 

Before the start, singing along with Eye of the Tiger in the melée and enjoying the red flags, baseball hats and beercans,  we of the 1968 generation felt  quite at home in the standing pit crowd: half gig, half demo, Glasto meets Grosvenor Square, been there before.

 

But, ringed by the balconies of more conventional seats in this new and thrillingly flexible theatre , this is a Caesar for today.   Nicholas Hytner, with pace and humour and a most dramatic immersive design by Bunny Christie, throws it all at Shakespeare’s timeless cautionary tale. Tyrants, beware conspirators: conspirators, beware that out of the chaos you create may rise another tyranny.   Julius Caesar is becoming godlike sole ruler of a newly unstable republic. The assassins who see that this must end are envious and resentful, not all their motives pure: they need to recruit the thoughtful , liberal Brutus. So they do, and in their moment of bloody  achievement the demagogue Mark Antony – in that most artful of speeches to friends, Romans, and countrymen – makes himself the heir, swaying the crowd with sentimental grief for dead Caesar and headshakingly offering that fatal line of  faint praise – “but Brutus is an honourable man… “ . And soon the elected senators are butchered and a new regime rises, whose name is not freedom.

 

Hytner, who over  a decade ago gave us a Henry V for the Iraq war age, has pointed up the current  parallels – populism, fake news, regime changes  – and gleefully  refashioned his new theatre to allow some 200 of us, on foot in the pit, to represent the Roman mob. In the starry hot-ticket  scramble for the first night I decided quietly to buy a 25 quid ticket to eschew seating and get down with the kids (and a few of my own age, some of us visibly creaking at the knees) It was worth it. You’ll have a grand night in a seat, for it is a classy production . Ben Whishaw is a marvellous cerebral, bookish worried liberal Brutus, David Morrissey a striding, masterful Antony,  and every other part is drawn with gorgeous, often funny delicacy. Notably Michelle Fairley’s  earnestly focused Cassius (gender changes work well, after all women do politics too) and Adjoa Andoh  as a smoothly humorous, elegantly camp Casca: a sort of female Roman Peter Mandelson. Not a word falls flat, not a scene drags.

 

 

And wow, the action! Down in the pit you don’t stand still: the crowd moves, has to reshape, change mood from celebration to fear to confusion, cower.  The raised floor proves to be studded with baffling platform sections rising and falling in new conficurations as scenes change,  so that eventually a real sense of national upheaval takes you over. You’re helpless, sometimes thrillingly near the action sometimes jostled far back, glad of the occasional chest-level sill to lean on before it suddenly sinks away and another rises behind you , and unbelievably well-drilled stage management hands and voices get you moving back, sideways, out of the way, quick, here come the soldiers, here comes Caesar, quic.k… And the world is rebuilt round you, sometimes in near darkness.  Promenade performances can be both boring and  hell on the feet, but two hours flashed by in anxious tense  silences, rousing speeches, eavesdropping on conspiracy , fleeing through the smoke of battle.
 

So at last, as I brushed the last of the falling ash from my hair and staggered out past the barbed wire, barricades and ammo  boxes  of noble  Brutus’ final battle,   I felt smugly   sorry for the poor static comfy lumps  in the balconies, glorious though their view no doubt was.  We got to cheer Caesar, crouch in terror at the gunshots,  suddenly find our noses two feet from Morrissey’s  brogues as he cast aside his microphone and spoke from the cunning heart of Antony. I nearly got caught up in the dismemberment of poor Cinna the poet, too   ,As  Henry V  would put it, gentlemen in posh seats up aloft should think themselves  accursed they were not here, to mob with us upon the Ides of March. And travel, delighted and warned, through the urgency and desperation of every era’s upheavals.

 

. Box office: 0843-208 1846. to 15 april Broadcast in cinemas on NT Live on 22 March
rating: five  5 Meece Rating
And here is the rare Stage Management Mouse for the guys who kept us on the move…

Stage Management Mouse resizedSet Design Mouse resizedand a design mouse for Bunny Christie.

Comments Off on JULIUS CAESAR Bridge Theatre, SE1

Filed under Five Mice, Theatre

Tagged as

January 31, 2018 · 12:50 am

JULIUS CAESAR Bridge Theatre, SE1

AVE HYTNER IMPERATOR!    THE BRIDGE AS ARENA

 

 

Before the start, singing along with Eye of the Tiger in the melée and enjoying the red flags, baseball hats and beercans,  we of the 1968 generation felt  quite at home in the standing pit crowd: half gig, half demo, Glasto meets Grosvenor Square, been there before.

 

But, ringed by the balconies of more conventional seats in this new and thrillingly flexible theatre , this is a Caesar for today.   Nicholas Hytner, with pace and humour and a most dramatic immersive design by Bunny Christie, throws it all at Shakespeare’s timeless cautionary tale. Tyrants, beware conspirators: conspirators, beware that out of the chaos you create may rise another tyranny.   Julius Caesar is becoming godlike sole ruler of a newly unstable republic. The assassins who see that this must end are envious and resentful, not all their motives pure: they need to recruit the thoughtful , liberal Brutus. So they do, and in their moment of bloody  achievement the demagogue Mark Antony – in that most artful of speeches to friends, Romans, and countrymen – makes himself the heir, swaying the crowd with sentimental grief for dead Caesar and headshakingly offering that fatal line of  faint praise – “but Brutus is an honourable man… “ . And soon the elected senators are butchered and a new regime rises, whose name is not freedom.

 

 

Hytner, who over  a decade ago gave us a Henry V for the Iraq war age, has pointed up the current  parallels – populism, fake news, regime changes  – and gleefully  refashioned his new theatre to allow some 400 of us, on foot in the pit, to represent the Roman mob. In the starry hot-ticket  scramble for the first night I decided quietly to buy a 25 quid ticket to eschew seating and get down with the kids (and a few of my own age, some of us visibly creaking at the knees) It was worth it. You’ll have a grand night in a seat, for it is a classy production . Ben Whishaw is a marvellous cerebral, bookish worried liberal Brutus, David Morrissey a striding, masterful Antony,  and every other part is drawn with gorgeous, often funny delicacy. Notably Michelle Fairley’s  earnestly focused Cassius (gender changes work well, after all women do politics too) and Adjoa Andoh  as a smoothly humorous, elegantly camp Casca: a sort of female Roman Peter Mandelson. Not a word falls flat, not a scene drags.

 

 

And wow, the action! Down in the pit you don’t stand still: the crowd moves, has to reshape, change mood from celebration to fear to confusion, cower.  The raised floor proves to be studded with baffling platform sections rising and falling in new conficurations as scenes change,  so that eventually a real sense of national upheaval takes you over. You’re helpless, sometimes thrillingly near the action sometimes jostled far back, glad of the occasional chest-level sill to lean on before it suddenly sinks away and another rises behind you , and unbelievably well-drilled stage management hands and voices get you moving back, sideways, out of the way, quick, here come the soldiers, here comes Caesar, quic.k… And the world is rebuilt round you, sometimes in near darkness.  Promenade performances can be both boring and  hell on the feet, but two hours flashed by in anxious tense  silences, rousing speeches, eavesdropping on conspiracy , fleeing through the smoke of battle.

 

 

So at last, as I brushed the last of the falling ash from my hair and staggered out past the barbed wire, barricades and ammo  boxes  of noble  Brutus’ final battle,   I felt smugly   sorry for the poor static comfy lumps  in the balconies, glorious though their view no doubt was.  We got to cheer Caesar, crouch in terror at the gunshots,  suddenly find our noses two feet from Morrissey’s  brogues as he cast aside his microphone and spoke from the cunning heart of Antony. I nearly got caught up in the dismemberment of poor Cinna the poet, too   ,As  Henry V  would put it, gentlemen in posh seats up aloft should think themselves  accursed they were not here, to mob with us upon the Ides of March. And travel, delighted and warned, through the urgency and desperation of every era’s upheavals.

 

. Box office: 0843-208 1846. to 15 april Broadcast in cinemas on NT Live on 22 March
rating: five  5 Meece Rating
And here is the rare Stage Management Mouse for the guys who kept us on the move…

Stage Management Mouse resizedSet Design Mouse resizedand a design mouse for Bunny Christie.

Comments Offon JULIUS CAESAR Bridge Theatre, SE1

Filed under Five Mice, Uncategorized

Tagged as

Comments Off on JULIUS CAESAR Bridge Theatre, SE1

Filed under Theatre

January 30, 2018 · 1:06 am

MARY STUART Duke of York’s, WC2

TWO QUEENS, TWO FATES

 

Who shall be whom? In Robert Icke’s arresting adaptation of Schiller’s play, the scene opens with a sober-suited group of men watching two women in identical black velvet suits and white shirts, while a coin is spun to see which will be Queen Elizabeth I, which her third-cousin Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots and rival for the throne. One is Juliet Stevenson, one Lia Williams. They know no more than we do; they will obey the coin.

 

 

It is more than a gimmick, though you do catch your breath at the audacity and expertise of the actors, each knowing every heartbeat of the other’s part and prepared to play it. It sets the theme which Icke picks out of the play: the fact that both women are trapped. Mary is imprisoned at Fotheringhay, accused and convicted – dubiously – of fomenting Catholic uprisings against Henry VIII’s daughter the Queen. Elizabeth is unwillingly engaged in marital negotiations with the French prince, and tainted by accusations of bastardy after her mother was executed and her father disowned her. She must decide whether to sign the death warrant of a kinswoman, or risk Mary continuing as a martyred focus for revolt and assassination. Around the two women – who only meet once, with electric tension, in the third act of five – there swirl arguing, cajoling, threatening, sometimes treacherous courtiers. Only in the gentle last moments of Mary does the stage fill with women, her ladies returned to her at last.

 

 

On the night I went, Juliet Stevenson was the Protestant Queen, Lia Williams Mary. It felt in their first scenes entirely right: Stevenson a sharp commanding figure and Williams more vulnerable, softer. But those who have seen it both ways round assure me that this is right too: indeed gradually a vulnerability in Elizabeth and bursts of spitting passionate fury in Mary narrow the gap: each can fight and scorn, each can be brought low by doubt and the need for love. And each, spectacularly, is wooed by the sexy, unnervingly convincing Leicester (John Light) whose real loyalties remain a touch obscure. Each too is trusted by the impassioned Mortimer (Rudi Dharmalingam) who is fanatically of the Catholic party.

 

 

It is political dynamite, emotional and cerebral catnip. Icke’s text – his own translation, in loose verse – is rather wonderful, unobtrusively poetic but with the iambic thrust and energy which drives and heightens otherwise straightforward argument and emotion. Only passingly does he seek ‘poetic’ diction: more of it is as straight as Elizabeth’s cry “I don’t like wisdom when it’s smeared with blood!” as she listens to Elliot Levey’ s marvellously smooth Burleigh, the ultimate politician, advocating a quick kill (the phrase “never trust a Cecil” seems to have echoed down centuries since).

 

It is consistently exciting, whether in the court circle or in the cell with Mary ; the set is simple, the curved brick back wall of the Almeida where it began is reproduced with just a revolve enabling several outbreaks of catlike, furious circling and a final coup de theatre with Elizabeth’s transformation into the terrifying portrait of her later years. The evening’s tone throughout is – in the best possible way – on a note of sustained political and fanatical hysteria, rarely and barely suppressed.
So, quite often, is your breath.

 

box office 0844 871 7627 http://www.atgtickets.com to 31 March
rating four  4 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on MARY STUART Duke of York’s, WC2

Filed under Theatre

January 26, 2018 · 9:06 am

LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN Vaudeville, WC2

A WILDE RIDE WITH A BOLTER

 

 

Beneath the artful fan-shapes of the set, gloriously coloured bustles and ruffles flit between black tailcoats and epigrams ping around the room like flicked rubber-bands. The real delight, though, is in the detail: as the Oscar Wilde season rolls elegantly on it is Kathy Burke’s mischievous, witty direction (and wise pruning of some overlong Wilde persiflage) which brings this tale back to life. There’s a wonderful fleeting portrait gag, a priceless unexpected hereditary snort, once a cheeky glimpse of homoerotic flirtation almost out of sight on the terrace and a cherishable entr’acte music-hall number which Burke has lovingly written for Jennifer Saunders’ matriarchal monster . In which Ami Metcalfe in a maid’s outfit doing percussion offers the most suggestive deployment of a triangle yet seen in the West End.

 

 

It is fun, for all the melodramatic seriousness of the tale, and Wilde’s banked-down fury at the hypocrisy of his time. The lightness of touch keeps a modern audience enchanted, and enables us to suspend mere gawps of absurdity at the Edwardian concepts of female “ruin” (caught visiting a Man!) and the need for a once-fallen woman to claw her way back into the “society” of the frankly idle rich. Tiresomely virtuous young Lady Windermere (Grace Molony) sees everything in black and white and is made suspicious of her husband’s calls on the elegantly cougarish Mrs Erlynne, little suspecting that the lady is in fact the mother she had presumed dead but who was in fact that shocking thing, a bolter. Lord W – a nicely geeky Joshua James – is actually trying to save his wife from this fearful knowledge.

 
But it is Mrs E herself who, at the expense of her own social and economic ambitions, saves the naive young woman from repeating her error and running off with one of WIlde’s identikit, epigrammatic young lordlings. Who are, by the way, in the late night all-men scene, hilarious.

 

Key to the play’s success is of course the fallen woman, and Samantha Spiro is as magnetic as ever: sometimes brittle, a knowing cynic who has dyed her hair and made the best of her disgrace, sometimes defensive, but in the big, desperate scene with her daughter lets it all fall away from her to reveal naked, passionate self-sacrificing honesty. Her plea for the silly girl to go back to her baby silences the theatre. And one perhaps remembers that Wilde had a wife and children, and was to suffer the loss of them.

 

http://www.nimaxtheatres.com to 7 April

RATING   four  4 Meece Rating

 

Comments Off on LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN Vaudeville, WC2

Filed under Four Mice, Theatre

Tagged as