Category Archives: Theatre

September 12, 2017 · 10:54 pm

THE BLINDING LIGHT Jermyn St Theatre SW1

A PSYCHOTIC SAMSON AND HIS WOMEN

 

“There is no such thing as the imagination” says August Strindberg indignantly. “Things are real or they are not.”. Right now, holed up in a shabby hotel room in Paris in 1896 the exiled Swedish playwright is grappling with reality and illusion , his dignity gone, green-speckled feet poking from grimy long-johns beneath an alchemist’s leather apron. He converses angrily with a strange sharp insulting voice he himself utters – “my anti-me” which lives in the wall and is in league with unseen electrical forces trying to thwart his mission to find the Philosophers’ Stone and turn base metals into gold in the hotel bath. And now on top of these unseen forces, the poor man is being hounded by women.

 

 

First a pert and scornful maid (Laura Morgan, very sharp) invades the room, then one after another his two wives turn up, indignantly recounting, re-living and reanimating their turbulent past. Issues range from mere infidelities to crimes like his putting the first one – Siri – insultingly into a plays and a novel, and as his scientific mania grew, going round the park injecting the flowers with morphine to prove they have nervous systems. And sending his children recipes for levitation involving crushed ants and vinegar, which upset their stomachs. Ah yes, it was not only our millennium angst that spawned barmy New-Ageism: there was another one a century earlier.

 

 

This is a terrific coup for director Tom Littler’s debut as AD of the little Jermyn, now becoming a full producing-house. He commissioned this extraordinary 90-minuter from no less a writer than Howard Brenton, whose thoughtful but light-handed gift for historical reimagining goes back to The Romans In Britain, and more recently such hits as Anne Boleyn and Dr Scroggy’s War at the Globe, 55 Days and Ai Wei Wei at Hampstead. The preoccupation with Strindberg’s mysterious breakdown of Strindberg is well-researched but, as importantly, dazzlingly imagined. Against screens of iridescent fiery colour, real conversations with the women are abruptly blue-lit as interludes of delusion, their voices and tones changing accordingly; they rail and insult or seduce. Susannah Harker’s wonderful matronly, irritated Siri drips wifely scorn with lines like “Don’t let this slide into your suicide thingy!” and he rails right back, accusing her of a lesbian affair with a woman he detests – “that freethinking horror!” . When Gala Gordon as the slinkier Frida (for whom he left Siri) appears in turn, he is most furious that she slept with Frank Wedekind, though she protests that the fling was merely a quick beer compared to the champagne of Strindberg. Indeed neatly in passing Brenton evokes that rich troubled period: Freud and Munch and l Ibsen, Swedenborg and Schopenhauer, and the couples’ time in louche Berlin and Paris, respectable Stockholm and dreary Gravesend. (Yep, he went there with Frida in 1893, I looked it up – 12 Pelham Road, Frida was seasick and he hated the double bed).

 

 

 

It is altogether a great treat. And Jasper Britton as the crumbling colossus, the psychotic Samson at its heart, is perfect. There is real pain and buoyant playfulness, and beneath the maddest moments a sense of a poet and thinker so avid for change and experiment that on hitting a creative and personal wall, he had to reinvent himself through this crazy psychosis in order to emerge and make something fresh..

 

And there’s a grandeur, beyond the vigour and earthiness and jokes and shocks of this tumbling ninety-minute journey through madness. Brenton’s Strindberg expresses what all artists seek: “The transformation of what was base and dull and compromised, ambiguous, into incorruptible gold”. Fabulous. Gold or not, this one will last.

 

Box office 0207 287 2875 http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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September 12, 2017 · 7:56 am

THE KNOWLEDGE Charing Cross theatre SW1

THE CABMAN’S PROGRESS

 

It couldn’t be better placed, here in the arches below Charing Cross station. Under the venerable rules of London licensed cabs – dating back to the 1843 Act – “The Knowledge” that cabbies must have is centred right here. Fifteen thousand streets, within a six-mile radius of this very spot, must be memorized, along with hotels, public buildings and amenities thereon. Then on it goes to the suburbs. Only three in ten succeed in winning their badge; some take years, riding mopeds on the 468 prescribed runs (often at night or in the bleak dawn, around a day job). It is unique in the world.

 

 

So here at its centre, and in a year when the cheapskate, exploitative dark empire of Uber is fast eroding it, this is the place for a double act of commemoration. Jack Rosenthal’s well-loved film, set in 1979, has been adapted by Simon Black into theatrical shape and retains all the dry gentle wit, empathy and humane sweetness of the man. His widow, Maureen Lipman, directs it. So that’s one commemoration; the other is of the cabbies themselves. Who are still with us, surviving the age of vampiric digital minicabs and the customer parsimony which insouciantly drives costs and lesser incomes down. . It isn’t a storming, life-changing play, but it is an honest slice of life and in the second hour, surprisingly satisfying.

 

 

 

Nicolai Hart-Hansen’s nicely conceived set has traffic-lights, street signs, and three sparse domestic interiors below the high terrifying platform of the examiner Mr Burgess’ office, complete with the legendary toy parrot and bonsai tree. Up there Steven Pacey presides as an infuriating, whimsically bullying, ferretily- schoolmasterly figure (no surprise that the interval music includes PInk Floysd The Wall , with its “dark sarcasms”) .At the end of Act 1 Lipman gives us a nice coup de theatre as the cast’s voices become an echoing cacophony of streets, squares, turnings, fire stations , tunnels and warnings while the third candidate panics on the stairs. The evocation of mental stress jars your very teeth.

 

 

 

We are following the candidates, each with their domestic setting, some more finely drawn than others but all given typical Rosenthal sympathy. There’s James Alexandrou’s swaggering Gordon with his fed-up wife, Ben Caplan’s Ted, from a dynasty of Jewish cabbies, Louise Callagnan as a pioneering , tough-edged young woman candidate (this is 1979, remember) . Above all there’s young Fabian Frankel, fresh out of Lamda, as the feckless, jobless, unconfident Chris whose girlfriend (Alice Felgate) buys him a moped and nags him to do The Knowledge and make something of himself.

 

 

Their trajectory is the most interesting, as Chris, at first despairing of himself, gradually finds steely resolve until his girl, dismayed, realizes that as her role vanishes their relationship no longer works. Frankel does this butterfly emergence very well indeed, moving from petulance to resolve and finally to a warm self-amazement which turns your heart over. Ben Caplan and Jenna Augen as the Jewish pair carry their trajectory particularly well too.

 

 

And even Burgess – after enraging us and the candidates equally with his distraction techniques and evocation of awful punters during the bruising examinations – has a moment of sweet humanity. He was a cabbie too, and knows the horror of ”people..they mumble, can’t hear you, don’t know where they’re going..” But as Callagnan’s Miss Staveley says, struggling with her rage at Burgess’ demonstration of the sexual baiting she will get, “I always have to be the better man, Sir”. That, and young Frankel,  and long gratitude to our unique cabbies, won the fourth mouse.

I was going to take the Tube afterwards, but took a cab instead. In tribute.

 

 

box office 020 7930 5868 to 11 Nov
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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September 8, 2017 · 10:22 pm

DOUBT – A PARABLE Southwark Playhouse, SE1

HARRIDAN OR HEROINE..?

 

 

The feminist “Bechdel Test” for fiction says that there must be conversations between two women which are not about men. John Patrick Shanley’s tight Pulitzer winner (2005) passes spectacularly, being set in a small convent school in the Bronx in 1964. An innocent hopeful young Sister James faces up stern Sister Aloysius : a principal so fiercely doctrinal that she thinks Frosty the Snowman is heretical paganism. But once updates about Class 8 are done with, they actually are discussing a man, though not romantically. This is the priest, dashing young Father Flynn who plays basketball with the kids and delivers daring sermons about the need for doubt in faith.

 

 

Sister Aloysius doesn’t like him: when the young teacher confides that he has befriended a vulnerable 12 year old, the only black child in the school and seen him alone, she suspects what, with real-life retrospection, we all do. In a tight 90 minutes, on an elegantly simple stained-glass floor with us ranged around as if at a boxing-match, doubt and suspicion play out in a duel between the sour, savvy old nun and the priest. Who may or may not be guilty – Shanley wants us not to know. Certainly his cuddlier, informal, post-Vatican-2 approach makes him appeal strongly to the younger nun, warning “There are people who will go after your humanity, kill kindness in the name of virtue”.

 

 

 

With a very sharp Stella Gonet as the merciless, but personally tormented principal, Che Walker’s production is often breath-holdingly tense, more indeed than the film with Meryl Streep was. The first spontaneous exit-round of applause was for Jo Martin as the black boy’s mother, a bulwark of dignity just glad to have him “safe” in a decent school with prospects and flatly refusing to help rock the boat . The authentic voice of 1960’s minority pragmatism speaks in her shocking words “You accept what you gotta accept and you work with it…maybe my son IS that way..Let him have him then. It’s just till June”.

 

 

 

That plays ironically against Sr.Aloysius’ refusal to accept the limitations of her own status, all too familiar to us 1960s convent girls who well remember how in rigid Catholic authority the callowest young priest held patriarchal authority over even the wisest veteran Mother Superior. “There are parameters” says the principal bitterly “which protect him and hinder me”. After the real abuses uncovered in Boston, Ireland and elsewhere over past decades, many a Catholic nun who didn’t blow the whistle will wince at that. Yet in Gonet’s uncompromising performance the curmudgeonly, bitter Sister Aloysius is no saint herself.

 

 

So is he guilty? It is by disingenuous manoeuvre that the nun finds victory, and we are not permitted to know. But Jonathan Chambers as the priest offers enough clues to make us uneasy. It is not just in choleric outbursts and Shanley’s lines (who, in full innocence, answers a straight accusatory question with “Did YOU never do anything wrong?”) but also in a certain flirtatiousness in his basketball training scene. But maybe he is just suffering from the now endemic suspicion caused by real priestly abusers. It feels timely, uncomfortable, and riveting: a worthy revival. So much sanctimony has veiled horrible crimes that for all our distaste we’re right alongside  Gonet when he pleads “Where is your compassion?” and she snaps, a heroic harridan “Nowhere YOU can get at it!”.

 

 

 

box office 020 7407 0234 southwarkplayhouse.co.uk to 30 Sept
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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September 7, 2017 · 12:26 am

FOLLIES Olivier, SE1

BROADWAY BABIES IN A BITTER LOVELAND

 

Last time the Olivier stage was this populous was for AMADEUS, with the entire Southbank Sinfonia clambering, flowing and sliding around the stage, shaping and re-forming to play celestial Mozart harmonies on the move. This time it is full of feathers and fans, satin and sequins and spectacular hoofing (choreography by Bill Deamer, brilliant both in precision and character moments – Tracie Bennett, take a faux-hobbling bow. . The music is stunningly directed by Nigel Lilley, and a highly decorative ensemble surrounds four principals and standout cameos. It’s a showbiz dream and nightmare performed, under Dominic Cooke’s bold direction, without an interval in two hours 15 minutes flat.

 

 

 

Not a harsh word can be uttered about any of the big Sondheim numbers, or against the stellar cast – especially the women. Imelda Staunton, Janie Dee, Tracie Bennett , Josephine Barstow – be still my beating heart! Nor can you not fall heavily for Di Botcher doing Broadway Baby in an Angela Merkel pant-suit, or fail to nod approval at the inclulsion of a high-kicking Strallen (Zizi this time, gotta have one at least: and her reaction acting as a younger Phyllis is outstanding). And never regret seeing Peter Forbes as the maritally disappointed Buddy, acing both his numbers: a heartbreaking The Right Girl and a final hypervaudeville patter-pastiche complete with a BennyHill chase.

 

 

 

Yet it’s a curious beast, this show. To this devoted Sondheimista who had never seen it perfomed but wept at the attrition of lives in Merrily We Roll Along, gasped at Assassins and Sweeney Todd and thrice worshipped Gypsy with Imelda Staunton, it struck a curiously chill, almost bland note. Which is not the fault of the conception – an artful game of duality between past and present, naturalism and pastiche- nor of the production, because any chance of real transmission of feeling is taken seriously: notably by an endearing Staunton and a waspish Dee. Maybe it just feels chilly because that is its theme: the ruins and regrets of mid-life, the attrition of age, the way that feather-helmeted showbiz glamour fades to middle age, a metaphor for the universal loss of youth’s sheen and ambition. And there are nice swipes of disgust at the roles life throws at women getting older: “You’re a wide-eyed vamp, then someone’s mother, then you’re camp..” sings the ineffably funny Tracie Bennett as Carlotta, briefly stealing the show with “I’m still here”.

 

 

 

It’s not a complicated idea. Under a nicely half-demolished, backstage-cluttered set of the Weinstock Follies (“Celebrating the American Girl”) a final reunion of the old “girls” sees a meeting of two old flatmates: Staunton’s effervescent awkward Sally and Dee’s cool, queenly Phyllis. Their respective husbands, successful Ben (Philip Quast, terrific) and salesman Buddy have come reluctantly. They know it’ll be trouble, and it is, as the foursome’s middle-aged interactions interlace with their young selves, wandering through memory, dancing the old dance of emotional entanglement which saw Sally and Ben marrying the wrong ones. Mature dishonesties and delusions melt as the evening gets drunker (a bold and wise stroke from Cooke to run it without an interval: we’re at that party). It culminates in a spectacular eightsome-riot melting into four great “Loveland”  set-pieces,  mocking vaudeville parodies of real and tearing emotions.

 

It is all done brilliantly, as well as it could be, and yet does not quite move the heart. Even – no, especially – in the redemptive moments at the end. So a grand entertaining evening, and some of the showiest showbiz in town. But the eyes stay dry.

 

box office box office 020 7452 3333 http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk to 3 Jan

On screens nationwide 16 nov http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk
rating four  4 Meece Rating

 

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August 26, 2017 · 8:48 am

LOOT Park Theatre, N4

 

THE BAD BOY WE NEEDED ONCE , AND STILL DO

 

 

The corpse is the talking point and to some extent the star. Certainly Anah Ruddin, hopping out of the coffin spry as a fox for the curtain call, is rightly given centre stage: well deserved for her preternatural ability to keep still and flop with horrid corpsy helplessness, even when being s propped upside down in a cupboard. Or stripped butt-naked of her WRVS uniform while half-straddled by Sinead Matthews,,  parcelled in sheeting and old tights, and generally manoeuvred mercilessly by Sam Frenchum as her panicking son and Calvin Demba as his bisexual boyfriend and fellow-robber Dennis.

 

Yes, it’s Joe Orton’s LOOT back for the 50th anniversary of his violent and premature end. And Michael Fentiman’s production not only reverses the Lord Chamberlain’s ban on using a real and visible actress as the dead body, but reinserts certain banned lines , apropos Jesus Christ being framed. Which, of course, He was, if you come to think about it. It’s in the gospels. But as Inspector Truscott piously says, “the Authorities no doubt had good reason for framing him”.

 

 

I sometimes feel a wobble in seeing Orton again, with his rhetorical flights and superbly absurd one-liners . In this caper about a bank robbery’s takings being stashed in a coffin, there are plenty of both -“But what will you do when you’re old?” “I shall die”. But early in the first act, the banter between the robbers did for a moment feel stilted, out of time: it was wise of Fentiman to play a bit of Mary Whitehouse sententiousness in voiceover at the start, to put us in period.

 

 

But the play picks up fast. Sinead Matthews as the murderous nurse is fabulous, never missing as she fires off Orton’s drop-dead lines with pinpoint timing and a nice air of disdainful confidence. Christopher Fulford’s Truscott shouts a lot, but that is what he is there for .   Ian Redford as the grieving husband , a simpleton finally rising to indignation just as the rest of the rogues finally shaft him, is memorable, providing the moments of real pathos which make us indignant.

 

 

And that’s the point. Orton doesn’t want us shocked at what the censor called his “repellent atmosphere”, but at institutions and hypocrisies: the overbearing, incomprehensible, patriarchal domineering, unquestionable and nit-picking authority represented by Truscott. “If I ever hear you accusing the police of brutality, I’ll take you down the station and beat the eyes out of you”. And “How dare you involve me in a situation for which no memo has been issued?” .

 

 

 

This is real indignation, from the Orton who with Kenneth Halliwell was imprisoned for longer than mere defacing of library books could ever merit (see how one catches the intricate pomposities he loved to write). The play is a kick, a howl, a demand for things to be different, less restrictive and hypocritical. Even if that means a lot of wreckage and extreme taboo-breaking. One critic felt the play had dated, but some things are worth saying – shouting, jeering – in every generation. Thus, daft as it is, it endures a lot better than the far less enjoyable iconoclasm of Look Back In Anger.

 

 

box office 0207 870 6876 to 24 Sept
then Watermill, Newbury from 28th Sept
rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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August 25, 2017 · 1:11 am

LATE COMPANY Trafalgar Studios SW1

SUICIDE, SADNESS, SNIPING  AND SUPPER

 

It often puzzles me why sharp little stage gems like this don’t get pounced on by TV, – notably the BBC – instead of commissioners wasting our eyesight on gloopy dramas custom-built to challenge nobodyYT6YT.  Here it is, a neat 75 minutes, bang-on topical and sharply written by Jordan Tannahill, then only 23. There’s a frugal cast of five and one set, a dinner table.  OK, it is Canadian, but the host of the painfully awkward supper is a soft-right politician and the wife an artist, their guests Michael and Tamara a salesman and a homemaker. All easy to relate to and translate. And the visitors’ son, at the centre of the dark situation, is anybody’s 16 year old. It would be riveting telly.
 

 

But never mind. On stage, transferred from the tiny Finborough to the slightly less tiny Traf 2, the intimacy and force of Michael Yale’s production is riveting anyway.  Deb (Lucy Robinson) and the politician Michael (Todd Boyce) have lost their son to suicide after he was taunted online and had his locker defaced for being gay. We only gradually learn that he was theatrical about his differentness, what with the eyeliner and vlogs. “He was just weird. He tried to be.…we did it to be funny” says the visitors’ son, his chief tormentor Curtis.

 

 

So months after the disaster and attendant publicity Michael and Deb have invited the boy and his parents, Bill (Alex Lowe) and Tamara (Lisa Stevenson, round. The plan is for some home-made ‘restorative justice’ with formal letters from each side and that modern ideal – “ closure.” Actually, neither of the fathers really believe in that. Michael couldn’t bring himself to write an “open your hearts’ letter like Deb’s, and Bill says in a moment of exasperation that grief can’t be shared around, “it’s yours ,and you carry it all your life”. The party develops into small explosions and rumbles of danger, the two sets of parents rubbing against one another’s small class differences as well as the immense central issue ( one remembers Yasmina Reza’s less dark but equally furious God of Carnage). In the middle, speaking little but always devastatingly to the point, is the boy Curtis: glowering, embarrassed, but with a deep sullen honesty which exposes the adults’ flaws and the inadequacy of the peacemaking mantras to which Deb clings. Until she snaps.

 

Robinson brings a real sense of danger to the bereaved mother, brittle and over-poised. At one point – just as I was expecting a redemptive moment, she becomes a vengeful Greek Fury. Tamara’s wittering – “Art must be a source of comfort to you” is met by a chilly “I find it devastating” from this determinedly unhealed mother. The two men are hating the whole event.

 
And I must say that the degrees of delusion in the two women in particular are treated by the young author with a clear and hard, though not wholly pitiless, eye. It emerges in moments of comedy (when Tamara gushes that her own mother was an artist, Bill snaps “sleeping with Leonard Cohen doesn’t make her an artist”). But is seen far more grievously in Deb’s intense focus on her own unchallengeable right to grief and vengeance, at the expense of any real understanding of her lost son, or of the complication and mess of any teenage life.

 

Of Leopold, fresh out of drama school, I can’t speak too highly: as Curtis he must carry a part which moves him from surly embarrassed irritablity (my God, how teenagers do see through our psychobabble) to a devastatingly open and perfectly delivered expression of nightmare guilt. Tannahill thus confronts us with a spectrum of sensibilities: airbrushed female make-it-all-nice-again sweetness, real pain clutched and corroding into self-pity, inarticulate honest grief, and an impatient “shit-happens-kids-are-cruel” resignation. But it is in Curtis, the boy, that we see a raw, proper, painful clarity and responsibility. He stands ironically closer, if the disaster had not happened, to the wayward and troubled Joel himself. That’s the pity. In the last minute we glimpse it.

 

box office 0844 871 7615 to 16 Sept
rating five  5 Meece Rating

 

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August 22, 2017 · 10:13 pm

KNIVES IN HENS Donmar, WC1

A PRIMITIVE AWAKENING 

 

 

It is dark. An earth floor, plank stable door ,  murky pond. Sometimes a candle is lit, but Soutra Gilmour’s set remains tenebrous , primitive. A woman sits plucking a chicken, legs apart, with sullen concentration . A man comes and throws her to the ground for sex so urgent you wonder if it is rape. But no, they talk amicably, if in short rather contemptuous basic sentences. “I”m not a field” she says. He demurs, says she is LIKE a field, a fertile one he likes, flat and wet. She says she is not because after all, “the moon is like cheese, but it’s not IT”.

 

 

We are in some indeterminate, pre-industrial rural village society. Both are groping for more expressive language, words for things. “The wind blows. The sun shines. The crops grow. The bird flies. The rabbit runs” she says, then looking upward “the clouds..er.. run?” The matter of God – indeterminate, universal – comes up soon. And alongside the primal , slowly awakening urge for words and knowledge in the woman, so do still more basic conflicts and dark deeds.

 

 

 

The fierce Yael Farber gave us a profound, five-star, smoky dark and physically intense Crucible at the Old Vic. It is not surprising that this director’s vision should now be drawn to David Harrower’s uncompromising, superstitious primitive portrait. But Miller’s language is poetic and his Salem setting precise. This is harder work to appreciate: gruelling, indeed even at 90 minutes and even with a blazingly effective, courageous and committed performance by Judith Roddy as the woman. She is, we gradually see, married to the ploughman Pony William (Christian Cooke) and envious of his love of his horses, notably his pregnant mare. He sends her to drag their sacks of grain to the mill, where the widowed Miller (Matt Ryan) is feared and disliked for his “magic” tendency to read and his ownership of an actual pen (“Them’s an evil stick!” cries the woman).

 

 

 

She fears, defies him, says she “lives under a different sky” and defends her village world: all in short, harsh, limited sentences. But the fascination grows, and back with William her dreams (hauntingly staged) fill with visions of his sprinkling the fine flour onto her heaving body. There is an obvious metaphor, I think: crude basic grain is refined by the miller’s hard stone into something finer, just as her thoughts refine. In one of the play’s few rhetorical moments she begins to write: “This is me. I live now. Others have, more will. God put me here..each day I want to know more”. But the new knowledge, as in Eden, leads to a dramatic sin. Again, compellingly staged.It’s a very large millstone.

 

 

 

But I would be lying if I said that it made the time fly by. The indeterminate setting hampers it: when, where are these people? How evolved is their religion, with all this talk of God? William has horses, not oxen, which puts them into the 18th century at least, but the ceremony of rolling a new millstone seems importantly primitive. They appear to have a glass milk bottle, the Miller has books on shelves, and the woman rather startlingly beneath her coarse homespun robe has a neat modern bra and pants. The unclear setting kept bothering me, making the simple speech seem mannered. Once the words “Cold Comfort Farm” ran through my mind.

 

 

But its meaning and message about the birth of language and awakening of choice may move some deeply, and it was hailed as a classic in its original Traverse production. The cast are very fine , and Farber and Gilmour can certainly build an atmosphere: that it was one I was glad to get out of may reflect more on me than them.

 

 

Box Office 0844 871 7624 to 7 October
rating  three   3 Meece Rating
Principal Sponsor: Barclays

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August 19, 2017 · 7:20 am

AGAINST Almeida, N1

GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES HUNGERS BUT DOESN’T GET A BYTE

 

I’ll give them this; it’s timely. After the violence in Charlottesville, we’ve all been asking what on earth is happening with American society. Christopher Shinn’s Against has a silicon valley billionaire asking the same question, and has the cash and the sense of entitlement to march round the country trying to find out.

 

 

 

The Almeida – almost certainly the best stage in Zones 1 or 2 – has given way to the shiny wooden floor and fashionably dusty brick wall of an Apple Store in 2009.  Ben Whishaw is Luke; a nondescript standard tech billionaire preoccupied with what we’d expect. Artificial Intelligence, , transport, medicine, whatever.  He talks in platitudes, but I think the playwright doesn’t recognise them as such. He has that strange evangelical streak we increasingly see in tech leaders, but this is more than a bubbling sense of social justice or philanthropy. Strangely for this godless valley, Luke has been talking to the Man Upstairs.  “Go to violence”, God tells him, so Luke starts a “project”, a website (the details of which are always glossed over).

 

 

 

He sets out on a tour of the USA to hear from people, chronicle their experiences of violence and generally stare at them like a puppy. The issue? There are too many issues. A play is never going to drill down to recognisable truth if it takes wild shots at the conscience of the tech industry, gun violence at schools, sex, sex work, addiction, prisons, workers’ rights, wealth, and family. Each is given a glib going over, and that’s the only meat on offer. The first (a school shooting) starts well. It even had the early tinglings of a thriller. But we are quickly moved on, and it’s not mentioned again.

 

 

 

The thread which supposedly weaves all this together, Luke ’s curious relationship with a colleague, is frustratingly flat. None of this is lifted by Ian Rickson’s direction. A final shootout flits between huddles and stories we’ve followed, and is quite snappy. But the rest is stodgy. As if they’ve had a jolly good time tossing all 15,000 ideas around in the rehearsal room, but come up with little. There are flashes of humanity: the play quite refreshingly wears it’s sexual impulses on its sleeve and some of the incidental characters (Elliot Barnes-Worrell as a manual worker fan of Luke’s, Kevin Harvey as the most outrageously camp lefty University tutor and Naomi Wirthner as the tormented mother of a student shooter), but these glimpses don’t exactly make 2hrs 50 fly by.

 

 

Whishaw himself suits the mellow manners of a humble billionaire; uncomfortable away from a computer, stumbling through life. But where’s the range? There’s as much character in his crisp polo and bright white trainers as in his face. His charisma supposedly draws the masses of smalltown America (a touch of Jesus) and makes them divulge their lives to him. But none of that allure reaches the stalls.

 
This is clearly one of the most fruitful subject areas of our time. There’s been some incredible writing on the social responsibility of the tech world (not least from Jamie Bartlett) and how it’s possibly waking up to it. The motives of people like Mark Zuckerberg, who actually has toured the country to listen to people, are ripe for artistic investigation.
This play talks a lot about the difference between knowing and feeling, and journalism, when these people are so cagey, can take us only so far. A play could burrow further. Annoyingly, after this one neither knows nor feels.

 

Box Office 020 7359 4404 Until 30th September
rating two   2 meece rating

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August 18, 2017 · 7:11 am

THE STEPMOTHER Minerva, Chichester

A DELICATE TREASURE

 

 

Rarely seen, half-forgotten, Githa Sowerby’s 1924 play is sharp, entertaining, truthful and elegant: Richard Eyre’s direction respects it with delicate precision. It’s altogether a treat, and makes you wail with sadness that – though her better-known Rutherford And Son was a big success – Sowerby never wrote enough to stand known amid acknowledged classics. She is socially as hard-hitting as Priestley, more sharply economical than Shaw, with as good an ear for suppressed emotion as Rattigan. And at moments can be both as agonizing and as humorous as Chekhov.

 

 

 

The story is fuelled by a righteous, exasperated and perceptive anger about the position of women in England either side of WW1. Remarkably, it offers broad human sympathy even to the most appalling character: Eustace Gaydon. He is a marvellous case-study, rendered with (among other qualities) great physical brilliance by Will Keen. Every hunch, every swagger, every snakelike wriggle, reveals almost as much stupidity and deviousness in the man as the script.

 

 

 

Eustace is a middle-aged widower with two young daughters and a taste for vainglorious duff investments. He discovers that he is left nothing by his late sister (who wisely kept her fortune under her own control) . Moreover, she has left the lot to a 19-year-old protegée, the sweetly grieving and grateful Lois (Ophelia Lovibond), In a brief first scene in 1911, he begins a wooing which – as we find on the far side of an elegantly designed time-lapse – results in her marrying him. And devoting herself to his daughters. And finally funding his household by working very hard and setting up a fashion business.

 

 

 

The 1921 scenes are tremendous, as the eldest flapper daughter Monica (a spirited Eve Ponsonby) is in love with a boy back from the war whose father knows how financially flaky Eustace is, and demands a settlement; Lois lovingly promises it from her capital, but we can guess what has happened to that…

 

 

Let there be no spoilers, but the brilliance of the play, revelation after revelation and shock after shock, is served neatly and gorgeously by Lovibond as the now matured, businesslike Lois, by Keen as Awful Eustace and by David Bark-Jones as Peter, the man she should have been with. The audience gasps sometimes, moans sometimes. At one point three of us in our row clapped our hand over our mouths. That’s when Eustace arrives at the fashion shop, his ruined uncertainty buoyed by delusional vanity, and pronounces “I’m our husband, I look after your wealth” . It was all we could do not to shout “O No You DONT!” panto-style.

 

Yet the play’s heart is warm: sharply written lines from the blustering Eustace are balanced by a remarkable tolerance of sexual temptation and some gentle, very womanly wisdoms: not least Peter’s warning to the devoted stepmother not to strip herself of everything for the young. “Life has taken hold of Monica..she’ll have children. Children make everything else a memory”.

 

It is terrific. And I have hardly space to mention that Joanna David, playing far older than usual as Great-Aunt Charlotte, gives it another layer of warmth and a pivotal moment of real sadness, and of awareness of where female self-sacrifice can lead. . The final , expected lines from Eve Ponsonby as the suddenly matured Monica are superb. Eustace’s final firework of spite fizzles, as well it should. We leave happy.

 

 

http://www.cft.org.uk or 01243 781312 to 9 Sept
rating: blimey, it’s another five for the new regime’s first season!

5 Meece Rating

 

 

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August 8, 2017 · 11:31 am

APOLOGIA Trafalgar Studios SW1

GUEST CRITIC TOM HOLLOWAY WISHES FOR AN UPDATE..

 

 

 

Originally debuting eight years ago at the Bush Theatre, Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Apologia is a story of intergenerational conflict. Matriarch Kristin (Stockard Channing) squares off against her sons’ partners over the course of an evening. After Brexit and a contentious general election, Jamie Lloyd’s revival lands at a time of intense relevancy, as millennials and baby boomers engage in their own game of political civil war.

 

 

But despite being slickly designed, Campbell’s script can’t hold the scope of this promising parallel. Set in the great theatrical tradition of the disastrous dinner party, It is a stimulating, but limp, insight into the choices three women have made in the face of social and economic adversity. His cast of characters is cleverly composed, forcing a proverbial battlefield where they can’t help but question each other’s political and personal ideologies.

 

 

Campbell chooses simultaneously to admonish and sympathise with their perspectives. bringing weight to his exploration of the complex web of political movements that inform identity. So it serves quite nicely as a companion piece to his breakout hit The Pride, which contrasted the closeted gay lives of the Fifties with the liberated but melancholic present.

 

 

However, much of the play seems a bit of a wasted opportunity. He never harnesses a strong enough perspective, making it feel somewhat inconsequential, and radically affecting the pace. It explodes in an electrifying, but unearned, denouement at the end of the first act, whilst the second act ponders slowly into an overlong conclusion. The characters never seem to learn anything, robbing the piece of much needed tension.

 

 

The actors give their all. The definitive highlight is Channing, one of the masters of her craft. She has a superb understanding of the caustic matriarch Kristin: the gaze of her powerful large eyes as acerbic as Campbell’s words, and also elicits great sympathy for the character’s questionable motivations. She is greatly supported by her two foils: soap star Claire (Freema Agyeman) and religious physiotherapist Trudi (Laura Carmichael). Agyeman has a magnetic presence, and is thoroughly convincing in communicating Claire’s artistic sacrifices for financial survival. Carmichael demonstrates fine comic timing, while seamlessly slipping more vulnerable moments. Desmond Barrit delivers a delectable performance, though his character is made somewhat redundant by being only there to administer campy one liners. Joseph Millson in his dual role as the two brothers distinguishes between lost soul Simon and banker Peter so effectively that my companion thought they were two different people.

 

 

Soutra Gilmour’s production design is spectacular, an oversized picture frame, vivid use of colour giving every scene a Hockney quality; Jon Clark’s lighting is similarly effective.

 

BOX OFFICE  0844 871 7632   to 18 nov

rating  three  .   LP seeing this week, might add reflections from Channing’s generation!3 Meece Rating

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August 2, 2017 · 11:52 am

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK Vaudeville, WC1

PRETTY MUCH A BOOJUM

 

I must admit I yearned towards this production – for 4 years old upwards, though there were some younger infants having a hell of a good time, even without booster seats (Vaudeville, please note that need). It is a favourite Lewis Carroll poem, and I did rather hope for a few of the boldly scanned rumbustious quartets and images, especially the bowsprit getting “mixed with the rudder sometimes” and the Bellman landing his crew with care, with a finger entwined in their hair.. But despite one final softly-and-silently-vanished-away, Alice House Theatre merely take the notion as an inspiration for a song-studded adventure of their own.

 

 

 

One day I want the poem itself, possibly rendered by McKellen, Russell Beale and Olivia Coleman. But hey, no complaints about this interpretation. Annabel Wigoder’s take is framing it with a schoolboy stowing away on the adventure funded by his negligent, money-obsessed Mr-Banks type father (Simon Turner) , and led by a splendid Bellman explorer in full 1920s RGS outfit of breeches, leather jerkin and mad gadgets. Gareth Cooper’s songs are fun, sometimes nicely startling (especially the father’s one about how money is all anyone can ever need).

 

 

There are Carroll snark-hunters in it: the Beaver is an enchanting puppet, knitting furiously, the dim-witted Baker is Will Bryant, who is also (there are other Carroll characters introduced) a quite magnificently camp Bandersnatch in Madame Jojo ruffles and shiny lurex tights, and the villainous butcher is Polly Smith (I do like a scary woman). I am not sure which of them plays the Jub-Jub bird, stealing the Banker’s trousers so the Beaver has to knit him a skirt, but I have to say its moment was the highlight for me on Snark Island, being pleasingly reminiscent of the time Rod Hull and Emu assaulted Michael Parkinson.

 

 
Around me very small children gasped and oohed from the moment the theatre darkened, especially in the very noisy shipwreck; deep concentration met the silliness, and real sympathy the marooning of the boy and beaver, unsure (as per The Tempest) whether anyone else was alive. It felt like a proper introduction to theatre, which is the important thing. Though the small boy in front who demanded to see it through again – a true child of the video age – will have to go home, get some ruffles and feathers and soft toys, and re-enact it for himself. Hope he does.

 

 

box office 0330 333 4814 to 2 Sept
rating four

4 Meece Rating

 

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July 27, 2017 · 12:56 pm

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ Menier, SE1

MICHAEL ADAIR, 25  ¾ ,  APPROPRIATELY TAKES OVER AND WRITES..

 

 

Before The Inbetweeners, the most accurate reflection of the total embarrassment of teenage life in Britain was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾. Nearly 35 years on from publication, Adrian, who recently turned 50, has featured in 7 further books and stage radio and TV adaptations. Now Sue Townsend’s aspiring intellectual makes his way to the Menier Chocolate Factor with a musical rendition of his journey into adolescence by composer Pippa Cleary and lyricist Jake Brunger.

 

 

 

It’s set in 1981 . Adrian, played on this particular evening with some wonderful facial expressions by Benjamin Lewis, is a touch more confident and self aware than his literary template. He doesn’t need his grandmother to stand up to the school bully for him and his famous red socks are made to be much more of a deliberate act of political defiance. We are also given a greater insight into the adult relationships than our oblivious protagonist was able to share in his diary. Pauline Mole, played by Kelly Price, is at first quite troubled by the advances of John Hopkins’s suave Mr Lucas who slithers into the family kitchen, his booming baritone backed by a sultry clarinet. It is, however, in these moments of tenderness that the show loses its way. The ballads and flashes of poignancy are instead drowned out by rousing ensemble pieces and swooping moments of nostalgia and fun. We see a school disco complete with dry ice and utterly euphoric synth pop , and an amusing dream sequence where Adrian melodramatically foresees his own death from a bout of tonsillitis whilst accompanied by jiving doctors, funky basslines and an appearance from God himself.

 

 

 

The source material is lovingly adhered to, with many of the book’s most memorable lines given plenty of breathing space and still raising laughs and audible smirks of recognition. Sue Townsend’s sense of mischief is all too apparent in Barry James’s Bert Baxter, who is seen waving a lone Soviet flag amidst a sea of Union Jacks at the wedding of Prince Charles and ‘a virgin named Diana’. The knowing social satire at the heart of Townsend’s work remains, with the outstanding Asha Banks, playing 13 year old feminist Pandora Braithwaite declaring to her classmates ‘Inequality ends from today! We’ll get equal pay!’

 

 

 

The set by Tom Rogers is reminiscent of a 1980s toy advertisement. Cast members stream out of cupboards and wardrobes, manipulating the furniture like a game of Jenga, we see tattered editions of classic board games, a poster of Princess Leia, and Orville the duck amidst the various clutter. Patches of damp cover the walls of the cramped family home and the colour palette is both spectacularly naff and remarkably stylish.

 

 

 

In a world of reboots, relaunches and remasters, the return of Adrian Mole is entirely welcome. It’s a funny and enjoyable show, fresh and relevant and perfectly placed to take advantage of today’s market for nostalgia. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of its whip-smart peer Matilda, sometimes the singing sounded strained and the more serious scenes felt incidental – but it perfectly captures the spirit of a cult figure. One we can all relate to, probably more than we’d care to admit.

 

 

Box Office – +44 (0)20 7378 1713  TO 9 SEPT

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RATING    3 ¾   3 Meece Rating1 Meece Rating

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July 27, 2017 · 12:59 am

GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY Old Vic, SE1

BOB AND CONOR: A NEW DIRECTION HOME…

 

 

Bob Dylan songs – from each of six decades – woven into a musical by Conor McPherson? At Dylan’s own suggestion? What? But here it is: moody and heartfelt as an old movie, a tale harsh as Miller or Tennessee Williams, storytelling resonant and drawing deep.

 

 

 

It is actually an inspired match, for Dylan’s songs share the playwright’s Irish sensibility. Apart from the obvious folk and hymn roots there is a particular melancholy, a dry regret, a sense of poverty knowing itself impotent but maintaining an irony, the consolation of a dance step or a late-night lock-in. Dylan and Irish song both tend to a melodic, poetic yearning which taps at the heart’s door with emotional authority and transcends time and circumstance. You can listen alone to It Ain’t Me, Babe even twenty years into a happy marriage; or weep in exile for The Old Bog Road even if you are at home.

 

 
Wisely, Matthew Warchus of the Old Vic left it to the writer to direct, and Rae Smith’s setting is sparse, unpretending, with microphones and onstage instruments as if the story was being told by buskers , as well as lived before us. Simon Hale’s arrangements and musical direction allow for a slight roughness, an air of spontaneity. The setting is a cheap lodging-house in Duluth, in 1934. The players are a community living on the edge. Ironically, just as the sunny Annie is playing just across the river with its orphan chirruping advice to the President, this is the second musical play about FDR’s Depression America to open this summer. But there is no New Deal for Duluth here. As its hero says, “We ain’t go no nets to catch us”.

 

In early film style, the local doctor (Ron Cook) narrates posthumously at beginning and end, adding to the sense of distance.   Nick (Ciaran Hinds) is the solid, striving host , on he last three weeks before  foreclosure on his house. One hope is his mistress and  lodger, widowed Mrs Neilson, with whom he has a fragile plan to start another hotel. His care for his wife continues, through the hopelessness of her dementia: there is a basic decency in the big beaten man, understated,  sometimes immensely moving, feeding her chicken stew as she berates him.  Their foundling negro daughter Marianne (a magnificent, dignified Shiela Atim, towering over her tiny adoptive mother) is pregnant: Nick hopes to marry her off to the only affluent man they know, a widower thrice  her age.

 

 

 

In from the Minnesota storm come two more to drive and aggravate the plot: Michael Shaeffer as a smoothly nasty Bible salesman, Arinze Kene as as an ex-convict boxer. Whose first welcome , in that racist age, is being called “Boy” and taunted by the son of the house, a drunken would-be writer Gene (Sam Reid). In the house too are the Burkes, failed in business, and their feebleminded, threateningly strong son Elias who is growing beyond safe control.

 

 

 

It is a big cast to manage, each with depths of hurt and failure and disappointment; but the songs knit them together in a poetic weave as powerful as the stormbound austerity itself. All the actor- musicians sing, superbly, resonantly, from depths of feeling,  with a particularly astonishing, mould-breaking performance by Shirley Henderson as Nick’s wife Elizabeth. Every line of her slight, skinny body is expressive of dementia, disinhibition and disillusion. Sometimes she is cowering like a scared animal, coaxed towards food or restrained from violence  by Nick and Marianne: sometimes dancing, unsettlingly wild, a mad Maenad parting her legs at any man, speaking inappropriate truths. But sometimes she comes to a stillness, and in an immense bluesy voice sings the wisdoms , sorrows and strangeness of some half-forgotten Dylan song.

 

 

 

I say forgotten, because drawn from fifteen different albums, only two or three are familiar anthems like Slow Train. Under McPherson’s guidance they simply grow almost miraculously from the unfolding story, from the desires and despairing secrets of these people on their various edges. Here is lost love, compromised love, failure, weakness, loneliness, endurance. Solos become duets, lines are handed from one to another, sometimes choruses form: women group round a microphone in 1930s radio-hour style, or echo the gospel roots with tambourines.  Some solos are beyond electrifying: Elizabeth’s Like a Rolling Stone, or her final, heartshaking Forever Young, an anthem of hope in the dark, a hand held to humanity. Which comes right out of one of the bleakest speeches on any stage. Duquesne Whistle makes your hair stand on end; Is Your Love In Vain, from the Burkes in their darkest moments, stuns.

 

 

Dylan and McPherson are both poets. Here they meld, mesh, converse. The roughness is necessary. It’s a privilege to watch.

 

 

box office 0844 871 7628 to 7 oct
Principal partner: ROyal Bank of Canada
rating four   4 Meece Rating

 

 

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July 26, 2017 · 11:14 am

MOSQUITOES Dorfman, SE1

A COSMIC CLASH OF PHYSICS AND FAMILY

 

Ah, now this is what the National Theatre is for1 A great reckless sprawl of a brand-new play, with spectacular technology, extraordinary design (Katrina Lindsay!) and the very best of actors: all thrown at it, and directed with wit, clarity and humanity by Rufus Norris . It’s not perfect, but it’s not afraid of anything. That is to love. That wins the fifth mouse.

 

 
For Lucy Kirkwood’s latest is a Catherine-wheel run amok, hurling out ideas and themes , questions and feelings and paradoxes and jokes. It is about cutting-edge physics, cosmology, grief, adolescence, pregnancy, sisterhood, sexting, psychosis, exasperation, the limitations of intelligence , and sad physical decay. It is set amid scientists on the Great Hadron Collider , with added Toblerone and three very funny jokes about Switzerland.

 
Possibly there are too many themes in it, streaming out and colliding like the proton chaos far below, sometimes threatening that there won’t be enough gravity to hold the play’s atoms together, or creating a Black Hole too dense to comprehend (see how dizzy atomic physics makes us laymen, and that indeed is part of the point). But Kirkwood it fetches you back, generally with a snort of laughter. Not least from Amanda Boxer as Granny Karen, mother of the two ill-assorted sisters at its heart, who steals every scene she stumps into. She isn’t quite its centre, but has a doll of a part as the matriarch who once nearly won a Nobel prize and has no illusions left. “Love! Everyone thinks love is the greatest force i the cosmos and it isn’t, you know. The greatesr force in the cosmos is the Nuclear Strong Force. Love’s about twelve things down the list, after gravity and superglue..”

 

 

At its heart, though, displaying the complexities and infuriations of family love with pitiless admiration, are two tremendous performances: Olivia Williams as Alice, a brilliant atomic physicist working on the Great Hadron Collider at Cern, and her sister – the matchlessly funny, subtle, nuanced Olivia Colman as her dimmer but sparkier sister Jenny. In the opening scene clever Alice is on a flying visit to her sister, who after eleven years and IVF is pregnant and anxious, Googling too much and refusing an ultrasound because she read it causes dyslexia (in rats!) she provokes Alice’s cry of “Just because you have access to information doesn’t mean you’re equipped to use it!” . Ah, that speaks for many exasperated experts in the age of the Internet.

 
Then we are in Geneva, where the physicist’s son Luke, a wonderful portrayal by Joseph Quinn as a mass of teenage hormones, anxiety and goodwill, is online with a minx called Natalie. Overbright, underconfident, lonely at his international school, at odds with his mother, infuriated by the merry illogicality of his aunt Jenny, he careers towards a tiny personal collision which, in the moment, is cosmic to him. His father by the way has disappeared, becoming a strange wandering narrator and scientific expatiator who wanders throughout around the edge or occasionally takes the centre of the round stage in a whirl of projected atoms to explain the beginning and end of all matter: in the cast list he is”The Boson” (Paul Hilton) but the part has is a human resonance and importance to the others which is intensely moving.

 

 

 

The family dynamic, driven by a real and ordinary sadness, is as unpredictable and potentially disastrous as the rumours about the great machine beneath them. The GHC is switched on with fabulous sounds and lights, on the very day that Jenny and the troublesome old mother Karen turn up on a visit to a too-small apartment. No spoilers, but as particles collide so do sisters, parents and children. A black hole of despair is swallowing Jenny. The perils and glories of ignorance are nicely counterbalanced by those attached to intense, brain-frying intelligence. It is an intimate family story and a chalice of familiar bitterness , capable in its fearless author’s hands of lurching into a sci-fi-future and back into a messy redemption. Love it.

 

 

At the Dorfman to 28 September
rating five atomic mice  5 Meece Rating

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July 21, 2017 · 12:51 pm

DESSERT Southwark Playhouse SE1

FINE DINING AND FINANCIAL FURY

 

Piquant idea, to open Oliver Cotton’s play about financial inequality in BBC Salary Embarrassment Week.  While the inequity between multi-million popinjays and mere 149k losers in the weird world of showbiz is perhaps not especially  worth angsting about, there were nice resonances.

 

For it’s a good subject: Cotton is having a spirited pop at the Philip Green fatcat amassers of money, and especially the asset-strippers who leave investors broke like the antihero Hugh – who is Michael Simkins, always a treat. Trevor Nunn’s production (so soon after his latest Rattigan) wins another lovely drawing-room-play design – all Farrow& Ballish with old masters which are part of the plot tastefully framed in elegant white mouldings against fashionably duckshit-green walls. At a selfconsciously posh dinner table we meet two couples – Hugh and lady Gill (Alexandra Gilbreath) entertaining American friends, who are played by Stuart Milligan and Teresa Banham with a nice annoying edge. They are contacts in the murky world of enormous investments . Milligan has less to do, but as the trophy-wife Meredith, Ms Banham navigates hilariously from being a defiant ignorama droning on about some ridiculous Blairish spiritual healing in South America, through a brief hysteria to display in the crisis an unexpected rather likeable solidity. Which is more than can be said for Graham Turner, who does a splendid turn as a burnt-out City maths genius turned herb-cookery nut and butler. He has become Hugh’s loyal factotum and has, as it turns out, a remarkable gift for making disasters even worse.

 

 

 

For a disaster is what the evening rapidly becomes. One hesitates to offer spoilers, but you should at least know that “Dessert” is a joke: they never get to the pudding because a young man in camo gear breaks in with a gun to lecture them on the evils of undeserved wealth (desert, geddit?) .  He has come make threats and demands which fatcat Hugh (Simkins rather splendidly drawing a tiny bit of sympathy from some of us) won’t meet.

 

 

 

It certainly keeps you watching, Nunn’s direction is sharp, and gunshots and other surprises come just when you aren’t quite expecting them. But Cotton’s play has one serious flaw: it puts an unreasonable weight on the tough young intruder Eddie, played as well as he could be by Stephen Hagan. It is an unusual, if not incredible, portrait of a self-educated, art-fancying, justice-seeking young soldier; but it is plain unfair to bestow such immense, Guardian-leader sprawls of angry egalitarian and ethical argument on one character. There is – certainly at first – far too little interruption and dialogue with the others to sharpen it. Eddie, frankly, goes on and on in a way few characters have been allowed since the days of George Bernard Shaw. It slows the play and detaches you.

 

 

 

With some cuts, it could be sharp indeed. And is certainly topical. And Eddie is morally quite right. But it’s not good being right if you’re boring, and even a Rylance would be hard put to make some of the character’s scenes anything else. Cotton has done this ranting before, in DAYTONA: looking back, I notice I wrote about “long, emotionally charged narrative monologues demanding from the other [cast members] the equally difficult art of listening and reacting.” But I did enjoy the dénouement. I hope for more Cotton, because he’s a great plot-maker. All it needs is a bit less of the GBS speechifying .

 

 

box office 0207 407 0234 southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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July 20, 2017 · 9:37 am

INK – more thoughts

With the news of its West End transfer in autumn – well deserved –  I  finally caught up with INK (reviewed here on opening night by Luke.

 

I agree with his rating of five, and am as ever dazzled by James Graham’s remarkable ability to recreate a past world and a half-forgotten crisis which still matters, and above all to do it  without tiresome message-signalling or caricature.

It is a remarkably humane and thoughtful piece. And Goold and designer Bunny Christie make marvellous dramatic use both of newspaper office mess and hot-metal drama, now almost forgotten as the grey screens flip silently before dazed eyes in quiet offices or the bedrooms and cafes of freelancers.

A few fresh observations:
,
– Carvel’s body language as Murdoch is clever: shoulders round, somehow both slouching and looming. I like the the gentle upscale Aussie accent, so far from the cruder “Aussie hooligan” caricatures of satirists. Graham’s script also catches the chip on the shoulder and the underreported but well-attested Murdoch primness: an instinctive recoil at the more knickery end of pop journalism.

 
– I wondered whether the story – though true – of Muriel MacKay’s horrible fate would feel bolted-on, but Graham has used it to make the darkening of the play a Faustus legend, a story of fun turning to decay as Larry Lamb chases the chimera of beating his old paper, the Mirror, with any weapons to hand.

 
– The fun itself, the defiant Fleet Street romance and cheek, quite brilliantly done. I had forgotten about the tinned knickers and the Southend werewolf…

 
– In this age of stripped red carpet celebs waving their sideboobs, and innumerable online and lad-mag titshows , it hard to believe now that a nipple could cause such outrage and panic. Even from Cardinals and Downing Street and Mary Whitehouse. And the first page 3 girl disgraced,  told not to come back to her drama school..today she’d be summa cum laude.

 
– But above all, it was mesmerising to find so much of our own age foreshadowed – The understaffed new Sun was getting readers to supply stories ,long before citizen journalism was coined and social media dreamed of.   And beyond that there’s the populism, exuberantly crass, so dismaying to the sober Cudlipp and the broadsheets. A sense of angry insouciant mass feeling and reckless appetite prefigures both   Brexit and Momentum.

Or, at least, the  chinstroking liberal establishment reaction to them…plenty of Cudlipps out there..

 

So, still five enthusiastic press mice.    No point battering down the doors of the Almeida now, it will transfer quite beautifully to the Duke of York’s…

 

5 Meece Rating

 

 

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July 20, 2017 · 1:14 am

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Chichester Festival Theatre

FROM HIS MOUTH TO GOD’S EAR…

 

 

We know Omid Djalili best as a comedian: one of our few Iranian standups. Great timing and great heart, a good Fagin but comparatively new to the stage (he improved before our very eyes in What the Butler Saw). Yet he is dream casting here as our hero Tevye the milkman: Ashkenazi Jewish, heart and butt of a 1905 shtetl, a precarious community in Imperial Russia. To lead in this Stein/ Bock/Harnick musical is a challenge: Tevye has been beloved these forty years, and even I have seen both Topol (in distant youth ) and Henry Goodman (recently). But Djalili’s Tevye is, in its freshness, humour and commitment, once again one to love.

 

Beneath his permanent hat there is a grin and a disgruntlement, patriarchal pride and husbandly henpeck and asides of puzzlement shared with us as he reasons with God and neighbours. There are the quips – “Money is a curse? God smite me with it!”. Under the jerkin and woollen prayer-shawl a warm heart beats; on clumping feet Djalili joins the occasional dance, graceful as a Disney hippo and camp as ninepence. Joyful.

 

 

I say “camp” advisedly, by the way, for camp is not exclusive to gayness but a presentation merely rueful, self-mocking, ironic , fluently expressive (even in the wedding-dance with a bottle on his hat). His scenes with Tracy-Ann Oberman as his wearily dominant wife Golde are suitably gold; so are all his interactions, warm and nimble. Whether deploying drop-dead for necessary laughs, becoming suddenly earnest in solemn Hebrew prayer, or flashing into a genuine horror of Faith at his youngest daughter’s defiant marrying-out, he feels quite simply right and real.
Ah, faith. Living in an regime as dangerous and unwelcoming as Tsarist Russia under the pogroms, Faith and community becomes something to cling to. So is a apt and necessary that Daniel Evans’ direction – as in all his work – is joyfully and solidly ensemble. The daughters are excellent – especially Simbi Akande’s   Tzeitel, who longs for Motl the tailor, and Emma Kingston’s Hodel who follows the revolutionary student to Siberia (Louis Maskell is a quietly impressive Perchik) to Siberia. Liza Sadovy is wickedly funny as the appalling matchmaker, and there is some very classy spitting. But there is nobody on that stage who is not heartfelt: part of the picture, more than a stereotype even in the lightest moments. Even the most briefly drawn romance, Fyedka the Russian and the bookish shy Chava, moves the heart almost inexplicably. So do quintessentially Jewish moments: as when Tevye gives bread to the hungry Perchik with a grumpy “to give is a blessing” and Perchik as he leaves the stage, gives a piece of it to Nachum the beggar. For the Talmud lays down that the beggar who receives charity must give a part in turn to a hungrier one.

 

 

The whole production shines as much in such tiny moments as in big showpieces. There is a real fiddler on the roof outside near the car park, safely tethered by a safety-harness as he plays into the rising summer wind, and inside the theatre, perched vertiginously overhead below the orchestra, agaiin here he is: an emblem of defiant fragility . For as Tevye says they all just “trying to scratch out a pleasant simple tune without breaking our necks”.

 

 

 

No need to enumerate the laughs and the reflective poignancies in this flawless revival: but by programming it Evans’ Chichester is on particularly sure ground anyway. It feels as sharp as a news bulletin. Consider that Ashkenazi Jewish settlement of Anatevka on the verge of persecution, family-rooted and patriarchal , suspicious of a new and puzzling world of women’s choice . It speaks all too clearly of our own communities which stand aside , poor, wary of the mainstream, loving in families but hopelessly clinging to patriarchal authority as Tevye tries (and fails) to do as his daughters step into a new century. Reflect that perhaps for our own Muslim communities tradition is, as for Tevye, a security blanket: “Everyone knows who is is and what God expects him to to”.

 
And among us too too are refugees from villages flattened with just the same brutality as Anatevka in the last act. Weary processions of men and headscarved women trudge nightly through the ten o’clock news with cases and bags echoing the handcarts and bundles of the past (much of the set’s furniture, significantly, is suitcases). From Syria to Stockport, Fiddler has messages for us. About how a community can be a choking restriction or a defiant victim, but at the same time be security and shelter , a rumbustious family joke and a cherished memory.
Impossible not to reflect on all this as you watch this glorious production.

 

 

But even if reflection and tears for the past and present are not your thing, just go for fun This is, after all, a Daniel Evans production, and stage machinery must not be ignored. Tevye’s dream and Grandma’s ghost will knock your socks off. Oh yes. Send it up West soon. Please.

 

http://www.cft.org.uk or 01243 781312 to 2 September
rating five  5 Meece Rating

 

 

 

We know Omid Djalili best as a comedian: one of our few Iranian standups. Great timing and great heart, a good Fagin but comparatively new to the stage (he improved before our very eyes in What the Butler Saw). Yet he is dream casting here as our hero Tevye the milkman: Ashkenazi Jewish, heart and butt of a 1905 shtetl, a precarious community in Imperial Russia. To lead in this Stein/ Bock/Harnick musical is a challenge: Tevye has been beloved these forty years, and even I have seen both Topol (in distant youth ) and Henry Goodman (recently). But Djalili’s Tevye is, in its freshness, humour and commitment, once again one to love.

 

Beneath his permanent hat there is a grin and a disgruntlement, patriarchal pride and husbandly henpeck and asides of puzzlement shared with us as he reasons with God and neighbours. There are the quips – “Money is a curse? God smite me with it!”. Under the jerkin and woollen prayer-shawl a warm heart beats; on clumping feet Djalili joins the occasional dance, graceful as a Disney hippo and camp as ninepence. Joyful.

 

I say “camp” advisedly, by the way, for camp is not exclusive to gayness but a presentation merely rueful, self-mocking, ironic , fluently expressive (even in the wedding-dance with a bottle on his hat). His scenes with Tracy-Ann Oberman as his wearily dominant wife Golde are suitably gold; so are all his interactions, warm and nimble. Whether deploying drop-dead for necessary laughs, becoming suddenly earnest in solemn Hebrew prayer, or flashing into a genuine horror of Faith at his youngest daughter’s defiant marrying-out, he feels quite simply right and real.

Ah, faith. Living in an regime as dangerous and unwelcoming as Tsarist Russia under the pogroms, Faith and community becomes something to cling to. So is a apt and necessary that Daniel Evans’ direction – as in all his work – is joyfully and solidly ensemble. The daughters are excellent – especially Emma Kingston’s Tzeitel, who longs for Motl the tailor, and Hodel who follows the revolutionary student to Siberia (Louis Maskell is a quietly impressive Perchik) to Siberia. Liza Sadovy is wickedly funny as the appalling matchmaker, and there is some very classy spitting. But there is nobody on that stage who is not heartfelt: part of the picture, more than a stereotype even in the lightest moments. Even the most briefly drawn romance, Fyedka the Russian and the bookish shy Chava, moves the heart almost inexplicably. So do quintessentially Jewish moments: as when Tevye gives bread to the hungry Perchik with a grumpy “to give is a blessing” and Perchik as he leaves the stage, gives a piece of it to Nachum the beggar. For the Talmud lays down that the beggar who receives charity must give a part in turn to a hungrier one.

The whole production shines as much in such tiny moments as in big showpieces. There is a real fiddler on the roof outside near the car park, safely tethered by a safety-harness as he plays into the rising summer wind, and inside the theatre, perched vertiginously overhead below the orchestra, agaiin here he is: an emblem of defiant fragility . For as Tevye says they all just “trying to scratch out a pleasant simple tune without breaking our necks”.

 

No need to enumerate the laughs and the reflective poignancies in this flawless revival: but by programming it Evans’ Chichester is on particularly sure ground anyway. It feels as sharp as a news bulletin. Consider that Ashkenazi Jewish settlement of Anatevka on the verge of persecution, family-rooted and patriarchal , suspicious of a new and puzzling world of women’s choice . It speaks all too clearly of our own communities which stand aside , poor, wary of the mainstream, loving in families but hopelessly clinging to patriarchal authority as Tevye tries (and fails) to do as his daughters step into a new century. Reflect that perhaps for our own Muslim communities tradition is, as for Tevye, a security blanket: “Everyone knows who is is and what God expects him to to”.

And among us too too are refugees from villages flattened with just the same brutality as Anatevka in the last act. Weary processions of men and headscarved women trudge nightly through the ten o’clock news with cases and bags echoing the handcarts and bundles of the past (much of the set’s furniture, significantly, is suitcases). From Syria to Stockport, Fiddler has messages for us. About how a community can be a choking restriction or a defiant victim, but at the same time be security and shelter , a rumbustious family joke and a cherished memory.
Impossible not to reflect on all this as you watch this glorious production.

 

But even if reflection and tears for the past and present are not your thing, just go for fun This is, after all, a Daniel Evans production, and stage machinery must not be ignored. Tevye’s dream and Grandma’s ghost will knock your socks off. Oh yes. Send it up West soon. Please.

 

http://www.cft.org.uk or 01243 781312 to 2 September
rating five
 

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July 12, 2017 · 8:43 am

YANK! Charing Cross Theatre, SW1

NEW GUEST CRITIC THOMAS HOLLOWAY FINDS A NEW MUSICAL

 

 

Arriving at the Charing Cross Theatre this weekend, in the wake of London’s Pride weekend, is this transfer from the enterprising new Hope Mill Theatre.Inspired by the musical traditions of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Yank! was written by Joseph and David Zellnik: in this Pride week it tells a tale those veterans could not have dared to: the story of Stu and Mitch, two soldiers who fall in love whilst in the US Army. Dressed in the drag of the old MGM musicals Yank! becomes both a homage to 1940’s Hollywood glamour and a testament to the bravery of the gay American men and women who fought on the front lines during World War II.

 

 

It’s a fascinating concept: it feels as though this is a lost musical from the era’s canon, recovered and reinserted into history. This seems to be exactly the Zellnik Brothers aim: they have reclaimed a pivotal moment of gay history which has been lost to the record, by using the very iconography with which the gay identity found itself.

 

 

However, the execution seems slightly unfocused. Incorporating an overabundance of themes, David Zellnik’s book never concentrates on the beats it truly wants to explore, playing erratically with plots and motifs, not awarding the themes the complexity they deserve. There is too much extraneous fluff built into it, which combined with some of the show’s anachronistic humour muddies what it has to say about sexuality and gender.

 

 

This extends to his characters, which are mostly stereotypical tropes, many of whom who do little to serve the narrative. The two lovers are very much of the masculine protector/feminine protected type seen in a lot of queer media, and despite the World War II setting that feels a little tired. This is particularly a shame, as the play makes it clear that this is a crucial moment of history where the concepts of gender and sexuality are being discovered, so it seems somewhat of a missed opportunity.

 

 

This is to not slight the performances, which are all exceptional. Scott Hunter is incredibly affecting as Stu, masterfully guiding his character’s subtle transition from nervous youngster to brave freedom fighter. He is supported wonderfully by Andy Coxon’s Mitch (whose honeyed voice is nothing short of excellent), who excellently conveys his character’s internal struggle with the expectations of masculinity, and Chris Kiely’s Artie, who gives the show a much needed comic flourish.

 

 

However, best in show is Sarah-Louise Young, whose smoky vocals and bold character turns makes her a wonderful ode to both the struggle of women throughout the war and the glamorous old Hollywood starlets who occupy queer iconography to this day. All of the company’s tight vocals and choreography are up to any West End performer’s: it’s just that some of the characters get lost in the mix.

 

 

But this is definitely worth seeing, and a great insight into American queer culture during the Second World War. The Zellnik brothers produce a score of fantastic tunes, conveying both the vibrant hope and suffocating loss of the era. Victoria Hinton’s set uses the space well, and has a wonderful sliding door element revealing a wide array of characters, musicians or obstacles, meaning you never know what awaits our protagonists next. Particularly fantastic is Aaron J. Dootson’s lighting design, a wonderful spectrum of scenes and moods, all the way from the horror of war to the glamour of the silver screen.

 

 
So Yank! is definitely a much-needed, and charming, ode to the courage of these lost heroes – it just gets a little distracted along the way.

 

 

box office 08444 930 650 http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk to 19 August
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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July 10, 2017 · 10:37 pm

QUEEN ANNE Theatre Royal, Haymarket WC1

A MODERN WORLD GROWING, BENEATH THE PERIWIGS

 

 

I saw Helen Edmundson’s marvellous RSC history-play about Anne’s short reign some eighteen months ago; the review is here – http://tinyurl.com/y7u6ydas – a gurgle of pleasure and interest, background sketched in, and five mice-worth concluding with a plea for a transfer.

 

 

So here it is: some cast changes to note, though all more than up to standard. Natalie Abrahami’s cast again centres on Emma Cunniffe’s Anne, touchingly needy then increasingly determined, a woman of sorrows growing into wisdom and a matriarchal affection for the people tormented by war and poverty. Romola Garai becomes the schemingly glamorous Sarah Churchill, Chu Omanbala the great, flawed General Churchill, and Jonny Glynn Swift leading the tavern mob. Hywel Morgan takes over as the endearingly hopeless Prince George, but Carl Prekopp is back as Defoe, and Beth Park reprises her role as the strong, plain, skinny, scornful and decent Abigail.

 

 

 

But I return to it fascinated, because it feels different, stronger even, on this second viewing – in the capital, and in a country which since the first production has become more startlingly riven and confused . Although the personal relationships and court struggles are as fascinating, and the riotous satirical interludes among tavern wags still make our own satirists seem restrainedly wet, I found that the politics resonated far more strongly.

 

 

Wars in Europe, plotters and spinners surrounding power, uneasy alliances and a borderline superstitious horror of religious fanatics at the door (Catholics in this case). There is even a stock market crash scare, and a looming budget deficit, and peculation and bribery in high places, and a tendency in a male hierarchy to feel suspicious and thwarted at any display of “rampant femininity”. Edmundson’s delicate rhythm and powerful bursts of monosyllable (“What mean the Scots? What irks them now?”) are as fresh and sharp as ever. Seek out the bargains. Don’t miss it.

 

 

 

Box Office   020 7930 8800 trh.co.uk to 30 September

rating: still five  5 Meece Rating

 

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July 5, 2017 · 6:31 pm

LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR AND GRILL Wyndham’s , WC1

A GREAT HEART AND TALENT,  REMEMBERED WITH LOVE

 

O my days! If you have any feeling for jazz and blues, for women, music or the historic trials and triumphs of black America, don’t think of missing this. Fight your way in. In ninety intense, absorbing minutes is distilled a troubled spirit and a half-century of change. As a performance it is unique, electric: as a tribute to a great performer it more than equals Tracie Bennett’s remarkable evocation of Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow.

 

 

This time the subject is Billie Holiday, in the last year of her life: high and drunk and needing to tell her stories in the womblike, midnight world of a run-down Philadelphia jazz club. Tables are scattered on stage and in front of the stalls; the reality of the lamplit setting has a jazz trio playing moodily onstage before the start, with Neville Malcolm astonishing on the bass and Frankie Tontoh jokey and slick on the drums. It draws you into a world.

 

 

Audra McDonald is the real thing. As a singer of course: she catches Holiday’s strength and vulnerability, high moments, delicate phrasing and despairing growl. But equally her acting is shatteringly real: intense, sincere, witty, troubling. Lanie Robertson’s play is rather a marvel too: never a false note. It was written after hearing a friend’s account of a real day in 1959 when, at just such a club, washed-up and unreliable the Lady staggered in with her little dog and performed a handful of songs to half a dozen patrons. She did not have long to live with a weak heart, a heroin habit, a year in jail for possession, a long humiliation by the US colour bar, and a constantly refilled glass. But she was a legend. And the legend is served here with heart-stopping sincerity.
McDonald staggers, giggles, growls, but suddenly straightens, lets herself be carried by the music, a true Lady in white ballgown. She remembers the wonder of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, her mother “the duchess” at the cat-house, the no-good husband who got her onto heroin and her friend the sax player Prez who tried to get her off it. A hard wit condemns Philadelphia as a “ratsass” place , especially its white police who “after dey freed coloured people, dont know what to do with them, so dey lock us up again”. She jibes cheerfully at white people – “like us, only meaner” – but tearfully remembers how Artie Shaw’s white band would eat with her in the kitchen -paying double – when “coloureds” were not allowed in a restaurant, and how when refused use of the lavatory she took revenge.

 

 

She barracks her pianist Jimmy (Shelton Becton) as he visibly tries to coax her out of rambling and into each new number. There’s real tension in that: the drama (directed by Lonny Price with tight attention) rises with some flare of temper, evoking the real uncertainty of a failing maverick talent. Late in the show “Strange Fruit” carries real shock, as it always has done; but is followed by her vanishing offstage, awkward apologies and claims of medical problems from the pianist, and a sudden return of the diva, happily clutching a real chihuaha which licks her face as she belts out “T’aint nobody’s business”.
Go if you can. You’ll not forget it.

 

 

box office https://tickets.delfontmackintosh.co.uk to 9 Sept.
rating five   5 Meece Rating

 

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July 3, 2017 · 10:27 pm

COMMITTEE Donmar, WC1

THE MIRACLE THAT FAILED

 

 

The subtitle is “The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee Takes Oral Evidence on Whitehall’s Relationship with Kids’ Company”. Josie Rourke, with Hadley Fraser and Tom Deering’s music, has made a sort of opera from the verbatim public record of that day in October 2015, when the most normally “un-sexy” of Select Committees, under Bernard Jenkin MP, interrogated Camila Batmanghelidjh, who founded and led the charity for two decades, and her Chairman Alan Yentob.

 

 

 

It had gone broke, salaries unpaid, and abruptly closed after accepting over the years £ 42m of public subsidy including a final, desperate £3m emergency bung. Indeed the rather cruel payoff is Batmanghelidh’s indignant “On what basis have you decided this is a failing charity?” and Jenkin’s “Because it’s gone bust!”. She, however, is allowed one last majestic aria about poor and abused children failed by the state.

 

 

 

Which, of course, they often are. And that derogation of social duty, erosion of social services and lack of trust in public organization is one reason that KidsCo lasted so long, a refuge and succour to its “self-referred” young clients. It impressed many ministers and donors, ticked the box for Cameron’s ‘big society’, and was allowed to suck up public money with little oversight by its puffed-up, self-satisfied networking-freak of a chairman. Who, in a rare descent into plain speaking, replied to the question of why they didn’t “restructure” with the words “We believed the government was going to give us more money”.

 

 

It is a fascinating and still unresolved story, not least because of the exuberant, eccentric figure of Camila herself; and the way a select committee works is actually not undramatic, especially when made surreal as the panel rise up, sing choruses (“We want to learn! This is not a show trial, we want to learn!” ) or read written statements from outside witnesses. The interrogators are all pitch-perfect, with that characteristic MP-mixture of earnest administrator and “showbiz-for-ugly-people”. Notably there is Alexander Hanson’s urbanely civil Jenkin, Liz Robertson’s sarky Cheryl Gillan, Rosemary Ashe as the maverick Kate Hoey and the Welsh terrier Paul Flynn (Anthony O’Donnell).

 

 

 

But of course the focus is on the odd couple who sit before them (and are seen up on screens, and occasionally rise to pace the floor, singing) . Sandra Marvin is unnervingly like Camila in multicoloured dress and turban, gait, high-pitched speech, and unnerving smile: when she sings the sincerity of both the woman’s good intentions and her dangerous self-belief are gloriously magnified. As Yentob, Omar Ebrahim is not quite the cornered-rat one remembers from the TV relay (possibly because he’s a splendid baritone, which gives a Verdiesque dignity even to his absurdities, like the notorious claim he signed off that without more money London would see “riots and looting”) . But he does often catch the pompous worry of a man addicted to citing powerful friends and colleagues who approve of him: the PM, Michael Gove, the “Chairman of WH Smith”, big banks, whoever….
 

 

So it’s all there: the Camila flakiness, the Chairman’s complacency, the dark unseen hinterland of tragic young lives, and the clash between idealism and safe administrative procedure. You reflect, watching and listening to Batmanghelidjh,, that giving – financially and emotionally – is a satisfying addiction, and can if imprudent bring you down. As for Yentob, the reflection is that thinking well of yourself and collecting plaudits from grand friends is probably another addictive behaviour. So what we had here was a kind of folie-a-deux. If the Chair had been some tough, clever, unimpressable terrier of a manager, we might still have the charity.

 

 

But is this good drama? Not really. The sense of going round in circles of irritable mutual misunderstanding – which that hearing of course did – means it feels unresolved, even sometimes dull. Despite the pair’s arias, you get little sense of the diverse realities of these unseen children. None of the outside written submissions , for instance, reflect the large number of clients (one of whom, a friend, was sitting next to me) who saw it close up. Especially those who were initially helped and grateful, owe KidsCo a lot and give it thanks, yet had firmly to disentangle themselves from the therapeutic emotionalism of the increasingly dominant foundress as they grew up. There’s a whole other play there. But this one may, in going off at half-cock, have stopped that happening for a few years at least.

 

 

box office 0844 871 7624 to February 2017
Principal Sponsor Barclays.
Rating two  2 meece rating

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June 29, 2017 · 5:11 pm

BARBER SHOP CHRONICLES – another view

WE DON’T OFTEN REVIEW TWICE, BUT THE SHORTAGE OF YOUNGER AND DIVERSE VOICES MATTERS…SO (ON HER OWN TICKET)  J.N. BENJAMIN,  A YOUNG LONDONER WHOSE OWN HERITAGE IS NIGERIAN,  SPEAKS NOW OF THIS MARVELLOUS STUDY OF AFRICAN MANHOOD…

 

 

The thing that was, to me, most striking about Barber Shop Chronicles, was the familiarity of it all. From that specifically african sound made in the back of one’s throat (usually to express disapproval), right the way to Prince Nico Mbarga’s Sweet Mother softly playing in the background, via the playful rivalry between the Black Carribbean community and the Black African community. Yes, it all felt very familiar.

 

And indeed the play is about family. About the surrogate families we form and come to rely on when our biological ones are – for whatever reason – unable to give us what we need. All families need a home and the home here is the humble barber shop. The set is truthfully designed by Rae Smith; the intricacies of her work create yet more familiarity. The rickety mis-matched waiting chairs – some covered in kente cloth, the hand-painted shop front signs, even the hair products on the grooming stations – blue Dax! – much reminded me of a childhood well spent hanging around on Walworth Road, in south London. For those of us who have spent long summers in tiny African villages the imposing generator in the corner was instantly recognisable.

 

The action takes place across London, Lagos, Accra, Kampala, Joburg and Harare – and is based on often hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking real life conversations witnessed by Ellams on his visit to each.This is a novelty for me. It’s a novelty for me because I am a black and, like the writer of this play, Inua Ellams, of Nigerian heritage. The stories from our community are seldom given such prominence on the theatre stage.

 

Themes abound throughout the 105 minute show, but the most prominent is that of masculinity; and black masculinity, to be specific. It explores the difficulty faced by boys and young men of finding relatable and accessible role models in their local communities and how trying to compare themselves to ‘legends, titans, country sized men’ like Mandela, Martin, Malcolm and Marcus, can be overwhelming. It asks the big questions: am I still a man if I pluck my eyebrows? Will the mandem still accept me if I want to talk about my feelings? Can I claim to be a man if I don’t like pushing weights at the gym? Now, full disclosure: I am a woman. But it is because of this that I am all too aware of the damage that toxic masculinity can cause.

 

There are philosophically burdensome elements of this play and it sure does get emotional – Kwami Odoom’s final scene as Ethan, made my heart feel heavy; I recognised that boy in many I have known in real life – but these moments are well balanced by the razor sharp comedic performances of the cast. The thirty characters were split between twelve actors and I loved them all. Cyril Nri – whom I’ll always remember as Supt. Adam Okaro from The Bill – was the perfectly imperfect father figure Emmanuel, whose Dad Humour was a highlight. I cackled at Patrice Naiambana and his accidental flashing as Old Tokunbo, was charmed by Simon Manyonda as Tanaka The HipsterGeek and I fell in love with Winston, played by Anthony Welsh (I am sure that wink-of-the-eye was aimed in my direction). But the stand out performance for me was given by Hammed Animashaun who took on four characters but his Muhammed, a 30-something, diamante-wearing, woman-Loving, London-living Nigerian man, was particularly special. Just like in the 2Pac song, all eyez were on him as he stole the show.

 

It is in experiencing the highs, the lows, the tensions followed by release into the heady heights of uncontrollable snort-laughter that one comes to truly appreciate the supreme union of Ellams’ writing and Bijan Sheibani’s direction.

 

Of course you could not have a celebration of Mother Africa and all her ways without the inclusion of song. It is in this area kudos is due to the music director Michael Henry whose barber shop quartet style voice arrangements that swept us from city to city inspired delight. Meanwhile, the soundtrack has proved so popular with audiences there is now a Spotify playlist featuring D’Banj, Fuse ODG and Skales as well as Shakka, Giggs, Ghetts and Jme. Song is nothing without dance and movement director Aline David’s paso-doble-esque choreography was a real treat. The urge to get out of my seat and join them was almost to much to contain. Almost.

 

The play offers a masterclass in the myriad of ways there is to be a 21st century man. It’s an Ode to the Barber Shop, a place for talking, where many of these men are made.

 

 

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June 22, 2017 · 8:33 am

HIR Bush, W12

MILLENIAL  LUKE JONES TIRES OF THIS GENDER AGENDA

 

 

There aren’t many issues in life that haven’t been solved, rationalised or  helpfully knocked about by plays. ‘What to do when you lose your identical twin and feel the urge to cross-dress and a random lady falls in love with you’ being one of the trickier knots: Will managed it. But the modern gender revolution, with its own thesaurus and code of conduct, has yet to trouble the mainstream London stage in an effective way.

 

 

So I understand the effort here. But Taylor Mac’s play HIR doesn’t get us any closer to an intelligent, insightful or useful theatrical outing (pun intended). The Bush’s traverse stage is a filthy American house. The aircon is blasting, dirty clothes outnumber visible floor-tiles and Arthur Darvil’s Isaac has returned from war to find his father in a dress (massive stroke), his sister with a beard (transitioning) and his previously beaten-down mum alive with the excitement of gender debate.
Nothing is how he left it. I rubbed my hands ready for a ride through identity, home, belonging, family. I got sitcom. Loud conversation, with little to say.

 

 

Characters have ‘a thing’ and they stick to that. Anything we slowly learn about them (the Dad was horrible, the Mum now humiliates him in his infirmity), just slides off, leaving little impression. And because the characters don’t move, neither does the dialogue. Every conversation fits the formula ‘indignant person explains being transgender to shocked person’. There are occasional laughs (Noah and the Ark being transphobic) but the debate isn’t up to the fight, and the performances are far from fit enough to save it. Arthur Darvil just shouts every line in surprise, Ashley McGuire as the mum delivers speeches as the primary-school explanations they are, and Griffyn Gilligan (Max, Darvill’s transgender sibling) fails to make anything convincing of what should be the most emotionally engaging part.

 

 

It’s clear the playwright is excited by the topic. Rightly so, it’s fertile ground. But for us to care as well, there needs to be some soul, some humanity beneath the debate .

 

 

Box Office: 020 8743 5050 to 22 July
rating: one  Costume design mouse resized

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June 22, 2017 · 12:59 am

GLORIA Hampstead, NW3

WHEN SHOCK BECOMES A SALES PITCH

 

 

There are three acts: the first long, expressing an enervatingly pointless world and ending in a sharp shock. The second is competitively cynical and rises to another kind of shock, the sort with disgust in it. The last is shorter still, offering a nicely vicious resolution. Some characters in the first act return as new but related people; others as their psychologically damaged selves, which adds to the unsettling atmosphere . This play won Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins a Pulitzer last year: it is clever and angry, though its rage is overlaid with a detachment reminiscent of Neil Simon: a sense of the author standing back with “Lord, what fools these mortals be” rather than suffering alongside them.

 

 

It is also, in its theme, horribly topical when Britain has just suffered four murderous shocks and must accept that we may see parallels to the devil’s-dance of aftermath that this play demonstrates. For Jacobs-Jenkins’ theme is “the commodification of the witness or victim: the marketability of the survivor-story. We do not initially know this: the first scenes, set in the junior assistants’ cubicles of a glossy magazine office , are intermittently funny, dense with embittered office banter by a group of millennials. They seem to be focusing on quite other things. Perhaps generational rivalry – Kae Alexander is appositely recognizable as the fashion-blogging, brittle Kendra ranting against bed-blocking babyboomers; so is Colin Morgan as Dean, who yearns to get the hell out and pen a memoir of his so far uneventful life. Bayo Gbadamosi as the still younger intern looks on, and is darkly suspected of wanting to get their jobs. Fury rises further in the young at the news that an invisible older writer is getting the gig of doing a profile of a dead pop star of their era. Meanwhile a comparative veteran fact-checker has a sort of existential breakdown, and the unpopular office geek dashes through, glaring.
The point, nicely made, is that in this ‘glamorous’ job, all the interesting power stuff is always happening in another room. We all remember the feeling.

 
Then comes the disaster. Never mind what. The succeeding acts move us by stages from New York to LA, from real fear and facts to the stage where it matters more who gets their account in print most lucratively, and whether there’s a mini-series in it. And, indeed, how much the publishing industry cares who was actually in the room, once “great angles” , “personal catharsis” and “beautifully written” accounts are weighed up.

 

 

 

This distortion happens. There is no point hoping that right now, out in our own city, there are not publishers and film-makers sniffing with careful, hopeful tact and chequebooks around the survivors of Grenfell Tower and the London and Manchester attacks.

 

 

Michael Longhurst’s production is not quite perfect, or not yet. Kendra’s brittle lines in the first act sometimes defy full comprehensibity to the untuned ear, though Kae Alexander gets the hair-flicking horror of her character absolutely pat. Some scenes could be trimmed down. But it is fascinating and timely, and sometimes horribly funny (the IT guy in the final scene is pure joy). And of the performances, Bo Poraj’s and and Morgan’s in particular stand out as fully-inhabited and memorably troubling. Not every survivor has a story he wants to tell in public, or should be encouraged to.

 

 

box office 020 7722 9301 to 22 July
rating three  3 Meece Rating

 

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June 21, 2017 · 1:21 am

BAT OUT OF HELL           London Coliseum WC1

WHERE ROCK ‘ N ROLL DREAMS COME TRUE

 

“On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?”
Or in this case, a red carpet  lined with Hells Angels and three generations of fans. Would you? Swelteringly, yes!. On this hot summer night, the howling, raw-rocking, Fender-bashing wolf can have us, throats and all.

 

 

Jim Steinman’s astonishing rock ballads, brought to our hearts (and my car stereo, pretty well daily)  by Meat Loaf, were originally meant for the stage, rather than just that immortal album. So this isn’t some limp jukebox musical, with a thin storyline by some dreary Ben-Eltonish  hack. They were already storytelling songs, all soul and muscle and poetry and the innocent violence of  teenage yearning: “the flesh and the fantasy, the mystery and the muscle of love”.

 

 

So of course they should be onstage: and now they gloriously are, with exploding bikes and flames and a car, and guns and multicoloured smoke and somersaults and projections.    And, at their heart not just  burning jealousies but the sudden  jokes which bubble up in the deadliest of times if you are young, as they have done ever since Mercutio punned on his deathbed.

 

 

 

Jay Scheib’s production is a technical spectacular, Jon Bausor leading the design, and wild exuberant choreography by Emma Portner – the ensemble are unbelievable, both in song (Michael Reed is musical director) and in the street-wild movement. But  its chief glory is narrative and emotional. It is set in a scifi  urban dystopia where a  tribe of the  “Lost”‘ ,permanently mutated to be forever eighteen, live in tunnels under the rule of Falc, the rich property landlord. Nicely topical for London: he  rules  in his tower with his discontented wife Sloane . But Falco’s daughter Raven is loved by the gang leader Strat, who comes to her  bedroom as if in a dream (shades of Keats’ Eve of St Agnes, and rather more of Peter Pan and Wendy, since Strat can’t grow older and has a jealous best friend called, er, Tink, who hates Raven).

 

 

 

Andrew Polec, a rising US star, is a powerful intense Strat in both snarling and sentimental rock mode. Christina is Bennington an enchanting Raven:  a Juliet sometimes hesitant, sometimes headlong.  Both have great rock voices, but equalling them , often cripplingly funny and occasionally touching, are Rob Fowler’s Falco and Sharon Sexton as his wife Sloane. The joy of Steinman’s construction is that the beloved songs are parcelled out to different characters, often  with a chorus and other subplots joining in. So Fowler and Sexton’s rendering of Paradise by the Dashboard Light, (“we were barely seventeen, we were barely dressed”) may, in its wicked hilarity get me back there. Danielle Steers’ bluesy Zahara gets the heartbreak of “One outa three aint bad”, , and – when imprisoned and beaten by Falco –  the gang members in Guantanamo orange jumpsuits get to break your heart with memories of those objects in the rear view mirror: (“So many threats and fears, so many wasted years, before my life became my own..life is just a highway and the soul is just a car..”
 

 

I keep quoting, and call on Keats and Shakespeare,  for good reason. For Steinman is a real poet: an emotionally intense balladeer of thrilled new love, when electricity runs through a beloveds  very hair, and bodies seem to rhyme:  of doubt and desire and daring and regret and absurdity, and longing for sex to be more than the moment. As an expression of eroticism it is the antithesis of porn; as a bard of biker bravura and rebellion Steinman is refreshingly uncynical.
 

 

And the music! Real rock, melodious and violent, ragingly operatic. Generations gather round it like a fire: I went with my daughter; one fan group had been over twenty times, and not all were anywhere near young. Actually, the middle aged even have a new song in which to laugh at ourselves and be laughed: Falco and Sloane’s  furious number “Who needs the young? when all WE have is traces – of the faces we once were..”

 

In short, it’s three kinds of bliss. Only those now locked impenetrably into their middle age will resist it.

 

box office   020 7845 9300        to 5 August     Off to Toronto in autumn.
Rating. Five.  5 Meece Rating

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June 16, 2017 · 1:48 pm

BARBER SHOP CHRONICLES Dorfman, SE1

FOLLICLES, FOLLY, FATHERHOOD

 

It’s fun down in the Dorfman pit. Under exuberant African barbershop posters from Lagos, Harare, Accra – and London – a cast of barbers and customers-to be josh and wander, dance a few steps and accost the front row. Their territory is a mongrel assembly of garden chairs, sofas, much-used equipment, lanterns and one ancient generator. Overhead a wire globe rotates among chaotic drooping wires and lights. We will live for a hundred and five minutes in this raggedy low-rent masculine world, amid the men of the African diaspora. Seamlessly, at showtime a television on the far side summons them all to an Oh! and a “no!” and a final cheer for the football. And we’re off.

 

 

Hopes and fears and preoccupations are filtered through one long day in the barber-shops, which can be as one wise South African clipper says near the end, “beacons”: the heart of communities . Places where troubled male hearts find a truce, and ask themselves and one another about what is it to be a black man? A strong black man with pride and purpose, groping in a world where national father-figures – and real fathers – so often let you down?

 

 

Inua Ellams, Nigerian poet and playwright, was last in this space with his BLACK T SHIRT COLLECTION, and sparked sharp mischievous delight with his show AN EVENING WITH AN IMMIGRANT. This is a fuller and more satisfying play, though there are times when you wonder if it will complete itself and become a play indeed, or remain a run of sketches linked only by the rattling-castored, dancing swirl of movement from one country, one group of men to the next. There are sly linking themes – a joke about three men in a bar which appears to be universal, or the young men noting the proverb that “the older a man gets, the faster he ran as a boy”. Often it comes back to that theme of fatherhood. There are wonderful one-liners: a few probably lost in patois on some of us, but many direct hits.. There is a furious political debate about whether pidgin is a language which must be preserved, and a knockabout over whether Mugabe is a national hero or a thug.

 

 

. But as Bijan Sheibani’s fast-moving direction steers it towards resolution , a wider theme grows: solidified in a superb rant by an old, desperate south African drunk expressing something which – as a former appalled schoolgirl in apartheid south Africa – I have long expected to hear. That is an expression of the stark anger which must rise in poor black South Africans now: rage even at Mandela himself for his benignity and rainbow words, because the white masters were not driven out, not annihilated and exiled, not belittled and humiliated in return. They still hold most of the wealth and power. The calm old barber beside the angry old man talks of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the need to move on. And then through a rapid swirl and rattle of castors, we are back in the London barbershop where a more personal truth and reconciliation has to take place.

 

 

And, in a quiet falling coda, an 18 year old comes in after hours for a trim because he is an actor due at an audition . It’s a neat trick, as the play began in Lagos with someone turning up at 6 a.m. desperate for an “aerodynamic” cut for a job interview. This lad, well-spoken and shy and a little camp, is going for a part as “a black man ..a strong black man” . But his own father left when he was six, and he plucks his eyebrows and is an actor doesn’t know what a strong black man is any more, because the Mandelas and Luther Kings are “continent sized’ and he is only a small island…

 

 

And so the play, the scruffy barbershop world, in its last phases becomes itself more of a continent than a quirky island. What makes a good man?

 

box office 020 7452 3000 http://www.nationaltheatre.org.ukto 8 July
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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June 15, 2017 · 9:17 am

TRISTAN & YSEULT Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

WHAT BECOMES OF THE BROKEN-HEARTED?

 

 

This is a famously significant piece of theatre: created in 2003 in a Cornish field , it was one of the first successes of Emma Rice’s Kneehigh, precursor of wild successes like Brief Encounter, Rebecca and The Wild Bride. Her idiosyncratic, joyful style of course led her to her short-lived tenure in charge of the Globe. But this adaptation was the genesis of it all: its larky, irreverent, vaudevillian style at the time revolutionary. It ran at the NT Cottesloe, toured two hemispheres, and now returns re-cast , but with the same spirit and the most of the original Bill Mitchell design and rope-hauling aerialism. Here in the Globe – currently still in the Emma Rice it’s-a-gig mode, with amplification and fancy lights – the tempo is turned up more than Cottesloe audiences remember. To the extent, indeed, that sometimes the broad jokes, asides , urgings of the groundlings and bursts of pop singalong (“Up all night to get lucky”) could make a newcomer feel a bit as if he had wandered into Butlins.

 

 
Especially since the story, or the core of it, is the mythic medieval-Arthurian tragedy of Tristan – born in sorrow to a broken heart – and his love for King Mark of Cornwall’s bride Yseult. You do get a couple of bursts of Wagner’s Liebestod – one at the start, one at the finale – but in between there are comedy kick-fights and goolie-grabbing, and a musically unWagnerian diversity from Nick Cave to tango. As to the spoken text – by Anna Maria Murphy and Carl Grose – some of it is strikingly poetic, even profound; some is not. King Mark – Mike Shepherd, one of the few accorded some dark dignity – has loose iambics which often work; Kirsty Woodward, narrating from the point of view of Tristan’s eventual wife, delivers dry sharp storytelling in strict 1950’s ladieswear; only occasionally is there a line truly bathetic, like Kyle Lima as the Iago-ish betrayer Frocin lamenting “I’ve been nothing but your loyal servant, my King / Don’t say Ive ruined everything”… Luckily, Lima’s physical brilliance and bonkers fight-dancing carries him along for most of the evening.

 

 

But actually the whole shebang carries you along: as Yseult Hannah Vassallo is light, touching and lovely, and Dominic Marsh a goodly glamorous Tristan. THe play is short (two hours five including the interval), vigorous, and above all rather interestingly framed. For Rice’s perception is that while lovers are interesting, most of us have had periods, or indeed lives, in “The Club of the Unloved”, who can only look on. They are represented here by a chorus of anoraked, bespectacled, balaclava-wearing figures with birders’ binoculars (a bit unfair, surely some anoraks have lovers too?).

 

 

 

This chorus , often musicians as well, can test the patience slightly with their miming, larking and asides; sometimes, as can happen in a Rice production, there is an uneasy sense that every flash of sincere emotion must be sent up as fast as possible. Still, there are moments she does not undermine. Niall Ashdown as the maid Brangian is very funny indeed in his cross-dressed, anxious bridal moment, yet genuinely poignant in its aftermath. And as the sky darkens over London and the reality of love, betrayal, separation and death swells before us, the sad cry of Iseult White-hands, on behalf of all the unglamorous unloved, suddenly grows real power.

 

 

It is – the director says – possibly its last outing, and probably one of its noisiest. But because of its history and the theatrical style is pioneered and spread,  it is a show for anyone interested in theatre to see. And for the young hilarious groundlings and many singing and cheering from the galleries, clearly just pure pleasure.

 

 

box office 020 7902 1400 to 25 July
rating three  3 Meece Rating

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June 13, 2017 · 11:20 am

KISS ME Trafalgar studio 2 SW1

 

ANOTHER KIND OF ETERNAL TRIANGLE

 

 

I have a taste for plays about the years between the wars. The WW1 anniversary saw some fascinating contemporaneous ones, often at the Jermyn. There is rich material in it: the weight of grief, survivor-guilt, the shadow of the next war only 21 years later, and not least the new awareness and independence of women who had done tough wartime jobs in munitions or nursing, but then found that the great toll of young male deaths left them as “surplus women” with no family future. So it was irresistible to see how Richard Bean, in our own time and best known for sharp comedy, would deal with it in this two-hander set in 1929, as strangers meet in a bedroom with all this weight of history and sadness still heavy upon them ten years after the Armistice.

 

 

It succeeds, in the most curious of ways beyond both its comedy and its setting, creating by the end a perennial meditation on the triangular relationship between love, sexual desire, and procreation. In an age when so much fiction centres on zipless hookups which try to avoid both emotional entanglement and pregnancy, what we have here is a fictional – but not improbable – situation where a rogue Dr Trollope (unseen) arranges insemination by anonymous sex for women esperate for babies, whether widowed or with damaged husbands.

 

 

Our young woman (Claire Lams) is an independent widow of ten years who drives a munitions lorry. She waits in her lodgings for the appointment, nervous, checking the mirror, smoothing the eiderdown. The man (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) is youngish, bowler-hatted, with an umbrella over his arm. He prissily removes his tiepin, lays down the doctor’s rules about no-kissing and no-real-names. The woman is the brighter spirit, chatting and bantering; he, a sober and at first unreadable veteran of these excruciating encounters, wants less talk. But he has to explain why he was not enlisted, is not dead… his very survival proves too much, at first, for her to carry on.
 
Yet they do, because to separate feelings from sex is never as easy as moderns like to think. We see a development over months of encounters: the back-story of her lost husband and brief teenage marriage, a weird, unsettling glimpse into the man’s motivation and his damage. It is alternately touching, absurd, thoughtful, painful and poignant . Anna Ledwich directs, drawing a whole reality from the two characters. You can laugh with the banter – Lams is superb in her evocation of spirited, awakened, hurt womanhood – and wince at the psychological scars on both of them, and on the reflection that no war is every really over. The angel of death has long, dark wings.
It is a curiosity of a play, unexpected and impossible to forget. I’m glad I went.

 

box office http://www.atgtickets.com to 8 July
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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June 5, 2017 · 11:13 pm

ANNIE Piccadilly theatre, W1

BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR ON IT…

 
If Nikolai Foster’s production of Annie came in a tin, it would prove to be exactly what the label promised. Feelgood, joyful, corny, gorgeous. Ruby Stokes’ chirpy first-night Annie manages to deliver a flawless first “Tomorrow” even while having her face licked by a large hairy dog (a labradoodle, anachronistic for 1934 but hey, who cares?). The orphans are choreographed with ferocious playfulness and naturalism – no eyes ’n teeth artificiality and some cracking good bucket-and-mop percussion work in “It’s a hard Knock Life. The natural mode of adult group emotional expression is,, of course, the tap-dance, both in and out of natty sailor-suits. The set, framed in jigsaw pieces of the old NY street map, turns featly from orphanage to Hooverville shanty to mansion, radio station and cabinet room without wasting a minute.

 
And as the tin promised, the first entry of the villainous oppressor Miss Hannigan is met with a deafening cheer from stalls and circles. For it’s Miranda Hart: a national TV treasure too long absent from both singleton horseplay and retro midwifery. She’s back, storming a West End debut as beneath the part’s entertainingly drunken malevolence there bubbles the familiar gleeful larkiness. This is a pratfalling, artfully hapless comedienne whose every gawk and absurdity is calculated with the professional finesse of a Chaplin.  She can put across a song, too, at times swooping down to a near- baritone range which dips below even Alex Bourne’s sonorous Daddy Warbucks.

 

 
The show (for whose London debut in 1978 I was sent to interview an endless line of auditioning tots outside the VIctoria Palace) is of course a fairytale, a fond imagining of childish gallantry in the Great Depression. Who does not sigh with nostalgia at the idea that a lonely unmarried billionaire could innocently summon up an orphan to share his fifth avenue Christmas, even specifying hair colour? Who knew that Roosevelt’s New Deal was inspired by the optimism of a pigtailed ginger orphan carolling “The sun’ll be out tomorrow!” in the Cabinet room? Or that a Republican billionaire would soften towards FDR (“Find out what Democrats eat!”) until together America , orphans and all, could walk to the sunlit uplands. While, of course, foiling a plot by Hannigan and her crooked brother (Jonny Fines is a fine Rooster, Djalenga Scott a perfect bad-broad).

 

 

Actually, so entangled are we today with the absurdities of US politics that I found myself nodding in relief at the way Bourne is playing Daddy WArbucks shaven-headed,not a blond lock real or fake in sight, presumably in order to stop us musing about parallels between another billionaire businessman who can “summon up the FBI” and call detectives off the Capone case when he has a personal issue to resolve…

 
Perish the thought. Such dark cynicisms are unfit for an Annie audience. Stick with the joyfulness, the crazy optimism, the triumph of simple goodness and the leaping exuberant orphans. Stokes is a lovely Annie, and I am sure the other two alternates are as well, and the orphan ensemble are terrific. But you’ll be in particular luck if you hit on a night when a mop-headed Nicole Subebe,on a professional debut, is playing Molly the smallest orphan with extreme pizzazz, drop-dead timing and glee. Every time she and the mob spill onto the stage the energy rises. The child is yeast.

 

 
Box office http://www.anniewestend.com 0844 871 7630 to Jan 2018 (Miranda Hart until 17 Sept)
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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June 5, 2017 · 10:25 am

GIFFORD’S CIRCUS Touring

MOLTO SPLENDIDO

 
From caravans in little greens and fields, Velasquez figures emerge into the hastily erected big Top in silks and plackets, ruffs and feathers and frilled pantaloons and cloth-of-gold cloaks: more Renaissance costumes than you’ll see in a week of modern Stratford. This classiest of village-green circuses always likes to have a theme, and this year it is called ANY PORT IN A STORM, and something to do with “a lost kingdom of the sea” melded with “the dark, closed and highly formal world of the Spanish court”.

 
Not that you’d think there was a sea theme, unless you buy a nicely eloquent and colourful programme – where they’re all posed chiaroscuro as portraits – and invent some mad sea-story to fit the various acts. It isn’t as literal as it was when a few years back Nell Gifford decided to turn the entire show into a retelling of War and Peace, complete with a marching goose. This is just very classy circus, international acts directed by Cal McCrystal with minimal ringmastering from David Pillukat, some stamping flamenco interludes and a comic heart in the great Tweedy the clown (sometimes looking unnervingly like Mark Rylance in one of his nuttier parts).

 

 

Oh, and interventions from some remarkably well-trained chickens. Especially the fluffy white one which between acts marches disdainfully all alone round the velvet rim of the entire ring, ignoring small children holding out their hands towards it.

McCrystal, master of physical theatre direction, keeps it sharp and fast-paced : sometimes the acrobatics are comic, sometimes startling (a swing act in particular). One is gently beautiful: Sergii Poliakov, “Acrobata Celestial” in renaissance silks strikes graceful poses on a harpsichord while a baroque soprano sings alongside.

 

 

The clowning, let me reassure coulrophobes, is un-traditionally theatrical (Tweedy’s attempted escapology is memorable). A highspot in the second half is when he, with the acrobatic Mustache Brothers and Pillukat, perform a “tribute” to all the other acts so far: hobby-horses, desperately failed acrobatics and a wicked drag parody of the traditionally pole-dancery poses of circus girls. That is quite brilliant. But the whole show ensures that there will never be a dull moment in its two hours, and that your candyfloss sugar-rush endures.

 

 

http://www.giffordscircus.com – touring on to Blenheim, Oxford, Chiswick and points west till 24 Sept

rating   four diverse mice Meece with mask tiny compressedTouring Mouse widelibby, christmas catComedy Mouse

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June 3, 2017 · 11:16 am

THE ISLAND Southwark Playhouse , SE1

PITY, TERROR, TRIUMPH

 

 

For the first fifteen of the hundred minutes no word is spoken by the two men in ragged prison cottons: Edward Dede as the younger Winston, Mark Springer a powerful monolithic figure as John. As we sit around silent, almost awkward,they mime intense labour. Muscles gleam, sweat breaks, as they lift and shovel and push and strain with harsh breaths. It becomes oppressive. It is meant to. John Terry’s direction does not spare us because nothing spared these prisoners. Athol Fugard’s play about Robben Island, where Mandela spent 27years to 1988, needs to make it clear that what the political internees endured was not only imprisonment but enslavement.

 

 
He wrote the play in collaboration with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, the originals of these two characters, who performed it for many years (and several arrests) during the years when the island was still in use, its very name forbidden. It has become a modern classic, a hard and dour and ultimately redemptive vision of endurance and imagination. The two men, once released (and releasing us) from the day’s labour sit with their bedrolls and single cell bucket and begin to talk, to plan, to become the humans they are and no longer labouring beasts. In a moment of sudden piercing pathos John says of the sweltering beach they work on “same old sea sand I used to play with when I was young..”.

 

 

They are to perform a version of the trial of Antigone at a prison concert (this happened) and there is humour and no small conflict as John, the more educated, nags Winston about his part; they bring out the pathetic props – Creon’s tin-lid medallion, Antigone’s daft rope-ringleted wig and necklace of nails. It seems as if Winston won’t do it: but their bond is strong, built on their shared, consoling fantasies: of phone calls home or acted-out nights at the “bioscope”. Tha word jolted me with familiarity: I hadn’t heard cinema called that since I was a child in Johannesburg, a diplo-brat as aghast as my parents during the apartheid years .

 

 

The simple account – jolted again by the agony of both after hearing that John will be released in three months. Winston agonizes because he has years to run; John – in a way only prisoners can understand – because the very act of counting days, fearing and hoping, is a new and strange kind of pain in itself. Winston overcomes his fear of mockery in the daft wig as John teaches him the great theatrical lesson “behind all this rubbish is me…if they laugh at the beginning and listen at the end…”. Antigone’s trial is performed. One of the oldest stories of law, power, injustice and rightfulness in the world, yet still we hold our breath. Southwark is its last point on the tour: it is a co-production with Chipping Norton and The Dukes Lancaster. It has lost none of its pity and terror.
 

box office     www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk 020 7407 0234 to 24 June
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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June 1, 2017 · 11:03 pm

TWITSTORM Park Theatre, N4

THE PERILS OF PC, THE TERROR OF TWITTER

 
This little  theatre is on a roll, catching topicalities as they fly. After David Henry Hwang’s wonderful CHINGLISH. about trade with China, this play by Chris England is the ultimate British mediaclass, middleclass, middle-aged nightmare. As such it is, of course, enjoyably vicious on every level. It was time that both social media pieties and the snarky, jokes-are-sacred comedi-ocracy both got a good slapping-about, and here it is. England’s tale, performed with frighteningly recognizable accuracy and directed with glee by Jonathan Guy Lewis, is about a Twitterstorm: the contumely that falls with tedious regularity on public figures who step out of line in a world whose hobby is taking offence.

 
Screens overhead give us arch or vapid tweets, and then a blast of “Arguing the Toss”, a TV comedy chat-show halfway between Piers Morgan and Charlie Brooker: all sarky superiority and scripted gags. Below it, in a smart urban kitchen, meet its host Guy, our pleasingly dislikeable hero. Jason Merrells gets him to the last detail: a man forever hovering between sincerely felt grumpiness and tiresome auto-banter (he’s the kind of man who calls his patio barbie “the Klaus”). His sweet-natured charity-supporting wife Bex writes chick-lit novels he despises, and has a direct debit to sponsor a “Child 4 Africa”. They are suppressing their post-Christian smugness to schmooze their child into a faith school . Oh yes: the only thing missing on Anthony Lamble’s set is an unread Guardian.

 

 

Like all propsperous bien-pensants they have serfs. Lumbering amongst them in Lycra, having cycled miles every day to write Guy’s jokes for him, is Justin Edwards as Guy’s old pal Neil, who the star and his manager secretly plan to dump. The pair used to do fringe shows together as “The Potato People” – very Edinburgh – and now Neil just writes Guy’s endearing daily tweets to reinforce the brand. But a stranger comes to the door, a cuckoo in the nest not unconnected to Bex’s charitable direct-debit. And a chain of events, driven largely by Guy’s own smug comedic persona, leads towards comeuppance.

 

 

Never mind exactly how. I won’t spoil a fun plot which tips over at the end into eventful improbability. . And which also reminds us, among other things, how thin the partitions are these days between comfy middle England and Africa’s failing states. There are masses of one-line jokes of suitable tastelessness, an artful navigation round the n-word (never spoken) and a rare banana-skin moment which does not even involve taking the skin off the banana. There is also a nice moral turnaround, as PC rage implodes and eats its own backside. And there’s a beautiful, deadpan, deliciously hateable star turn by Ben Kavanagh as a gender-fluid ponytailed PC smugatron with a video blog.

 

 

The performances are beautifully judged all round: whether in the moment when Guy’s cool-dude persona slips into unadmitted middle age as he has to peer, without reading-glasses, at the unfolding twitstorm on someone else’s phone, or in the body language of Justin Edwards’ amiably hapless Neil or Claire Goose’s patient appalled Bex. The author himself plays the horrified agent.

 

 

But most of all I loved Tom Moutchi as Ike the interloper, all African openness and an impoverished dignity calculated to spread unease. It is necessary that we should never be quite sure whether his innocence is real or not: Moutchi carries this manner off with delicate mischief. Apparently he is an instagram star himself among under-25s, but I don’t see why they should get all the fun. So I am looking him up.

 

 

box office 0207 870 6876 to 1 July
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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May 25, 2017 · 8:31 am

TWELFTH NIGHT Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

GUEST REVIEWER MICHAEL ADAIR ROCKS ALONG WITH RICE AT THE GLOBE…

 
“In Love We Trust” – is the motto of the SS Unity, the ship that swiftly sinks moments into Emma Rice’s take on Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre. Yet there is nothing to trust about love in a play where each of our hapless character’s affections are so easily and inexplicably won.

 

 

Set on a Scottish island in 1979, this Twelfth Night has all of the hallmarks that has made Rice’s tenure at the Globe so controversial, and so, well…fun. We have the music of Sister Sledge, we have sequins and we have a show-stopping performance from acclaimed cabaret performer, Le Gateau Chocolat as Feste. The whole performance is caught somewhere between campy 70s sitcom and full blown-pantomime – and it is wonderful.

 

 

As Joshua Lacey sweeps to the stage as Orsino, complete with trench coat and mullet a la John Cusack in Say Anything, there isn’t the faintest whiff of a suggestion that Rice has sought to appease her critics and opt for the more ‘traditional’ staging of the Bard that some feel is more befitting of the Globe’s unique setting – and more power to her. Fusing the 400 year old language of Shakespeare seamlessly with Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” is startling, amusing and just one way of freshening up an ancient comedy and giving it relevance to a younger audience. The gender fluidity in this tale feels modern and well-managed. Annette McLaughlin’s Olivia rolls her eyes and chastises herself in despair for asking Cesario ‘What is your parentage?’ toying with the source material and very much letting the audience in on the joke.

 

 

Amidst the funk of a slap bass guitar there were some indisputably outstanding performances. Of our comic performers, Marc Antolin brings the joy as Sir Andrew, sashaying around the stage, chomping on Monster Munch and exposing himself at every opportunity. Katy Owen is an inspired Malvolio – shifting ceaselessly between comic and tragic, a character who explodes before our very eyes in a burst of mad energy, to be seen wildly humping a tree in a fit of passion before ultimately giving us the play’s sincerest glimpse at poignancy.

 

 
This was a warm summer’s eve where young and old came together beneath a blue sky to find new life in the work of our most celebrated playwright. The joy of the Globe is that it is inclusive – amongst those standing or sitting there was laughter, applause and a palpable sense of participation and togetherness that is unique to this wonderful space. We shouldn’t, therefore, seek to stifle innovation in the name of historical accuracy, merely because it is in this particular theatre- it should simply be about the sheer pleasure that we find there. This play is silly, powerful and reflective in part, but above all it is a fabulous, sparkling, spectacle that demonstrates clearly that Shakespeare and his Globe is theatre for all.

 

 

Box Office – +44 (0)20 7401 9919  to 5 Aug
https://tickets.shakespearesglobe.com/

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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May 22, 2017 · 6:47 pm

THE ADDAMS FAMILY Touring

LOOK INTO THE DARK AND SMILE ALL TOUR LONG    Touring Mouse wide
This cheerfully macabre celebration of Charles Addams’ famous 1930’s cartoon is off on tour: link below. I saw one of the last shows in its opening Wimbledon week, and judging by the larky atmosphere of both audience and cast the cast are having enough fun to storm very happily round the country. The moment you see Les Dennis as Uncle Fester in a bald wig and banjo, dancing in a graveyard to rouse his random ancestors – a chorus who turn out to be Tudor, Japanese, and everything between – you are swept along in its rather magnificently silly, cobwebby train.
To be honest, the story is weak (it’s basically meet-the-parents, young Wednesday wants to marry a preppy muggle) and the music is – well, it just feels like a musical. Any musical. Only one song stands out, a beautiful “Death is just around the corner” by Morticia. But the general jollity of the evening is unarguable.

 
Matthew White directs this UK version: the book is by Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman, the lyrics and music by Andrew Lippa. Some lines are lovely in-jokes “Trapped! Like a corpse in the ground. Trapped! Like theatre in the round..” and there are some neat jokes about New York – they live in Central Park – and of course about Trump. And, of course, the dark Addamsy jokes. When the parents of the fiancé arrive (Charlotte Page daintily funny as the wife) the question “Do you have a little girls’ room?” is answered “We used to, but we let them all go”.The zombie butler Lurch is Dickon Gough, whose every move sparks gurgles of laughter;

 

 

Another focus is on the flirtatious and argumentative marriage of Gomez and Morticia – she a sinuous Samantha Womack, he a sharply comic Cameron Blakely (“Darkness and grief and unspeakable sorrow” – “Ooh I love it when you talk dirty!”. She dreams of Paris, where she wants to see the sewers. Uncle Fester has a sentimental love song to the moon, who is his ideal partner since a quarter of a million miles away is a good distance for romance: Les Dennis is the one you most warm to, and the most rounded romantic character. Which, for a chap playing ““a fat bald man of indeterminate sexuality” up against the gorgeous Womack and Carrie Hope Fletcher’s beguilding Wednesday, is not a bad result. The mainly young audience adored it. The final corpsy chorus “look into the dark and smile” does bring on that smile.

 
box office http://www.theaddamsfamily.co.uk/tour/
Touring nationwide till 4 November
rating three  3 Meece Rating

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May 19, 2017 · 12:10 pm

RICHARD III Arcola, London E8

TWISTEDLY IRRESISTIBLE 

I would not like you to think that I stalk Greg Hicks (though obviously I do: aaah, that odd strong Caesar, that agonized Leontes, that bonkers newspaper editor in CLARION…). But hearing that Mehmet Ergen had cast him as Richard III, close-up in the intimacy of the Arcola, meant a three-line whip. And there he was as we came in: sitting in a leather jacket at a bar table, ignoring us, spinning a brass miniature top, slouching and menacing. Everyone’s most feared biker badboy.

Ergen’s production is casually set, minimally propped, modern dress but with suggestions of robe or crown when we need it. The focus is on the text, served with respect and energy by all: especially Hicks, who always speaks Shakespeare as if he had just, in a fit of anger or mischief, had the thought himself. He has Richard’s irresistible wicked vigour: a painedly malicious tension, and plays him as more seriously crippled than most, dragging his lame foot by a chain to his withered arm. Often he bent almost double, head oddly averted from many of his families’ and enemies’ curses, a twisted satirical child grown monstrous. In the small space it sometimes seems a pity he does not catch our eye. But this Richard never willingly catches anybody’s.

Except by a fierce act of willpower and savagery, when he lasers in on Anne. The first test of a Richard is this: Shakespeare’s most audacious scene when he must convince us that he, misshapen and avowedly murderous, can seduce her over the very coffin of the husband he slew. This extraordinary scene, followed by the shrugfed “was ever woman In this humour won?” is particularly breathtaking in this production. Hicks’ hypnotic energy, and the sensuality in both word and fumbled gesture, is properly chilling.

But Ergen’s production is above all ensemble: a real actors’ show, glorying in the language, the violence, and evoking the perennial unease of any country fresh from wars and murders, under a weakening king (Jim Bywater is excellent – quavering, horrified, weakly blaming others for not making him prevent Clarence’s murder). In such a state nobody knows how the dice will fall. A heady neurosis hangs over every character, anxious and wary.  Each lord in turn balks at some Ricardian horror and is dispatched: from Mark Jax’ bluff Hastings to Peter Guinness’ long-serving Buckingham.

Only Catesby in his business suit and prim glasses (Matthew Sim, unnervingly a dead ringer for Lord Birt) endures to the last battle, an ice-cold functionary. Brackenbury the Tower keeper, is given an unusual gentleness by Jamie de Courcey; Paul Kemp is a poignant gentle Clarence. All serve the play, moving swiftly, too close to us for comfort, so three hours pass in alarmed fascination.

But it has to revolve around Hicks’ Richard: poisonous, sarky, sometimes hitting a one-line riposte to raise a bark of shocked laughter in the close audience, often hunched inside his private world of hollow hatred. Here is Richard the ultimate unreadable creepy uncle, baited by the cheeky boy Duke of York, who jerks him violently off his feet by his chain, rousing God knows what memories of crippled childhood in a macho world. Here is Richard sadistically preposterous in his final demand for the child Princess’ hand and womb: but also here is a Richard who, with a sudden involuntary jerk, reaches a vain hand towards the mother who has terrifyingly cursed him. His final rising fear is genuinely chilling: the hauntings on the battlefield stand quiet, free of melodrama, ruthless in the play’s flat return to moral certainty.

Box office 0207 503 1646.  To 10 June. Arcolatheatre.com
Rating four    4 Meece Rating

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May 18, 2017 · 12:00 am

LETTICE AND LOVAGE Menier, SE1

ENLARGE, ENLIGHTEN , ENLIVEN…ENTERTAIN!

 

 

Expatiating on the Grand Staircase of a dreary Tudor stately home (built with ironic love by designer Robert Jones) our tour guide Lettice Douffet opens with a virtuosa display of highly embroidered historical legends, growing wilder for each tour party. Felicity Kendal hurls herself through it, bright-eyed and irresistibly overdramatic, plucking ever more nonsense from the air: the gawping ensemble definitely give excellent Tourist, reappearing as a stage-army three days running in satirically diverse leisurewear. Only after her last wild flight about a tragic bride spending years mewed up “howling the wedding song specially composed by Henry Purcell” is Lettice hauled in to the Trust GHQ by the uncompromisingly stern Miss Schoen from Personnel. And sacked. And when Kendal sweeps in to her fate in a Mary Queen Of Scots full-length velvet execution gown, another piece of dream casting sees the desk of judgement occupied by Maureen Lipman in a stern tweed suit, deploying her most reproving bureaucratic staccato.

 

 

Yet after the deed is done Lotte Schoen cannot quite let go the acquaintance with this wild romancer who feels that fantasy must “rush in where facts leave a vacuum”; this storytelling self-dramatist who reckons that if an Elizabethan knight didn’t really leap fifteen stairs in one bound to catch Gloriana in his arms and feed her on swans and gilded hedgehogs, he damn well should have. So Lotte reappears, ten weeks and a slidingly ingenious scene-change later, in Lettice’s basement flat. Thence flowers one of the oddest, most beguiling buddy-stories imaginable.

 

 
The late Sir Peter Shaffer’s play is revived under Trevor Nunn in memory of his friend: it is not Shaffer’s most famous (that would be Equus – or Amadeus , so brilliantly realized now at the National Theatre. It is a curiosity, not just as an unfashionably rhetorical piece of writing, but because though nearly thirty years old it is startlingly in tune with modern defiances. For it is entirely about the friendship of two middle-aged women: eccentric women, women whose hearts and imaginations gloriously defy their plain-bread histories and single status. Indeed no mainstream play currently onstage would so triumphantly pass for the vast majority of its length the Bechdel Test: “two women talking together about something apart from a man”.

 

 
Lettice lures the seemingly stern Lotte into her world of dramatic historical romance; Lotte warms and unbends and tells her own story, with its own startling incident and deep-felt romance about the beauty of buildings and the atrocity of 1960’s architectural vandalism. Artfully Lipman, warmed by a terrifying home-made beverage of her new friend’s, regains a softer German lilt as she recalls her father’s love of lost European beauties: of Dresden.

 
It is a lovely duet, the two women’s natures and imaginations in contrast and counterpoint. Their talk expands Shaffer’s theme into the shrinking of the communal soul and the hunger for the beautiful and dramatic. Even if – as is generally the case with Lettice Douffet – it tips over rapidly into preposterous invention. As to the dramatic thing which seems to have happened over six months while we were out for the interval, the play is sufficiently forgotten now to prohibit detailed spoilers. Let it just be said that another startlingly unforgettable costume appears on Felicity Kendal, and that for a period Maureen Lipman’s face takes on an unwontedly sullen, grumpy, infuriated expression before lighting up – again and for good .

 

 

And that we all sail with the ladies into the mental world of Lettice , where despite the banal mere-ness of the age one may be “enlarged, enlivened, enlightened” . And warmed.
box office 0207 378 1713 to 8 July
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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May 16, 2017 · 11:47 pm

LIFE OF GALILEO Young Vic SE1

LET THERE BE LIGHT!

 
The year 1632 : we are halfway through the epic conflict between Galileo Galilei and the Holy Roman Church, an authority in its day quite as ruthless as Stalin and as doctrinaire as Mao.  Our hero has wisely gone quiet for eight years after the initial exuberant stirrings of his realisation , deduced from the moons of Jupiter, that the earth does not actually lie “serene and motionless” at the heart of a universe of crystal spheres with immobile stars. No: it is one of many  spinning, orbiting worlds. What every schoolchild learns today is still for Galileo a dangerous doctrine: .the Fathers fear it will make peasants restless, destroy their sense of meaning, upset the orderly disciplines of Christendom and lead (as it did) to the Enlightenment and the age of Reason outranking Faith.

 

 
At this particular point, though, near the end of the first half of Bertold Brecht’s sprawling political fable, our hero is returning to his astronomical studies, inspired by a proof involving sunspots. His personal glee becomes ours as, to a great vibrating, deafening roar from Tom Rowland’s disco-dramatic score, we stare up mesmerised. The overhead planetarium screen, until now merely for stars or Cathedral ceilings is boiling and dazzling, the sun’s very surface a sea of golden swirling brightness…

 

 
But then comes the Inquisition, and in 1633, Galileo’s forced recantation. The moment feels horribly modern, ideology trumping demonstrable truth and reason overruled by power.
The play is intellectually and politically chewy, but despite one overlong rant near the end it should swirl any half-willing spirit along with ease. Joe Wright’s exuberant direction uses bursts of puppetry, an anarchic carnival scene, and the cast of 11 ripping round Lizzie Clachan’s circular (orbiting!) platform as 68 characters, often invading the sprawled young groundlings in the centre. The staggering projections by 59 Productions finally evolve into the heartshaking beauty of modern astronomical pictures of swirling nebulae. For a serious political play, it’s a hell of a light-show.

 

 
Glowing at its centre is the phenomenal Brendan Cowell as Galileo: burly and bearded, moving over its three hours from teacherly excitement and optimism – “People will be delighted..it is a new age! ” , to incredulity at the dreadful old clerical scholars who refuse even to look through the telescope but prefer an Aristotelian “disputation” about why it can’t be true. Thence he moves into cautious depression, alleviated by his practical empathy with “craftsmen, precision toolmakers “ (Jason Barnett is particularly good as the lens-grinder). He finds renewed energy at the advent of a Pope reputed to respect science. But the sight of the “instruments” of persuasion lead to recantation . It feels, in the hollow, echoing dramatic moment Wright gives it, a real blasphemy. Finally in old age there is Galileo’s self-loathing defiance as his old pupil Andrea (an excellent Billy Howle) returns to reprove him.

 

 

It is full of ideas: about power, truth, social structures (including economics) and personal cowardice or courage. When Andrea cries in disappointment “Unhappy is the land without heroes!” the riposte is “No – unhappy is the land which NEEDS heroes”. As true today as in Brecht’s restless 1940’s. So is the core message: “If you don’t know the truth, you are an idiot. If you know it and call it a lie, you are a criminal”.

 

 

box office 020 7922 2922 http://www.youngvic.org to 1 July
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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May 16, 2017 · 9:11 am

OUR LADIES OF PERPETUAL SUCCOUR Duke of York’s, WC2

IN WHICH MICHAEL ADAIR LOSES HIS THEATRE-CRITIC VIRGINITY TO A PACK OF SCOTTISH MINXES

 

 

A few years ago, when High School Musical and Glee were in their pomp, we were forever seeing beautiful American schoolchildren with immaculate teeth, bursting into song and overcoming life’s adversities in glaring colour and merciless cheer.
Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour provides the glorious antithesis: directed by Vicky Featherstone, adapted by Lee Hall from Alan Warner’s novel ‘The Sopranos’, it follows six Catholic school girls from Oban on a day trip to Edinburgh for a choir competition. Thy are warned by Sister that they are not just representing the eponymous school (nicknamed ‘The Virgin Megastore’) but also God himself. Their response? ’Let’s go fucking mental’.

 

 
What ensues is 105 straight minutes of wonderful chaos , as our girls wend their way through the pubs and clubs of Edinburgh – swearing, singing, searing with energy. At first we have the angelic choral harmonies of Mendelssohn, soon replaced by an angry and defiant burst of Jeff Lynne’s Mr Blue Sky as the school uniforms are inevitably ditched for mini skirts and fishnets as the anything-but-virtuous pupils authoritatively swagger around the set in true rock n’ roll style. It’s sneering and it’s sleazy, in marvellous fashion and Francis Mayli McCann as Kylah, in particular, gives an electrifying, caustic energy to the musical numbers.

 

 

The girls are funny – and what a joy it is to see a cast made up entirely of young, funny women. The banter and teasing are quick-witted and constant, in a way that feels almost improvised; their language is filthy. For instance Orla (Isis Hainsworth), recovering from cancer and with less sexual experience than her equally underage friends, asks Manda (Kirsty MacLaren) what jizz is. She is soon matter-of-factly informed that it is ‘just like snot, only warmer.’

 

 
Chloe Lamford’s set evokes memories of the worst worn-out British dive-bars of a certain era – a sticky tiled dance floor, inexplicable carpet and colour palette to match any childhood school disco. There is seating at bar stools at the side of the stage for some of the audience, leaving no place to hide for a hugely talented cast who are not given a single moment’s respite in an energetic performance.

 

 
The six leads are the only actors, joined by three female band members lingering in the background. The story is cleverly woven together as each cast member ducks in and out to play the motley crew of characters they encounter in their journey across the city- lecherous drunks, nuns, police officers. More to praise than to take issue with, but if there was to be any criticism it would be that the quick pace of the dialogue and static nature of the set sometimes made it hard to pick up when we were encountering a new secondary character, or indeed where we were supposed to be.

As the floor of the stage becomes more prominently coated in empty bottles, shot glasses and cigarette packets, the play fizzes with hormones and the quest for sensation. The six girls’ appetite for the moment is infectious, yet for these young women – of whom only one to aspires to university – growing into adulthood is essentially a process of losing your potential. To burn brightly seems like the most reasonable decision of all.

 

 

So for all of its humour and mischievousness, the play is ultimately lifted to a higher level by a flickering poignancy. The girls are perhaps no older than 16 and yet we see Fionnula (Dawn Sievewright) sincerely lamenting on ‘what we could have been’. Chell’s (Caroline Deyga) ‘We’ve got the rest of our lives ahead of us!’ becomes a rallying cry for self-destruction, and not an optimistic claim to a broader horizon. For Orla, death could well be part of that blind journey sooner than the others, and it’s an obstacle she’s ill-equipped to circumvent seeing losing her virginity, symbolising entry into adulthood, as a way to make it ‘all feel ok’. This tension of hopelessness and impending doom makes it more than a reversioning of St. Trinians.

 
box office 0844 871 7623 to 2 Sept
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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May 12, 2017 · 11:39 pm

CAROLINE, OR CHANGE Minerva, Chichester

BLEACH, BLUES, AND BLACK AMERICA RISING

 
Here’s a pocket musical with huge themes, a blues opera of historic seriousness but with a singing washing-machine in a bubbled minidress. A tiny domestic upheaval opens up deep sorrow and the sharpest of human and civil rights: this intimate epic by Tony Kushner, with Jeanine Tesori’s music, wears far better than his Angels in America which occupied eight hours last week at the National.

 
There is apparent whimsy – the tumble-drier sings too, only more baritone and Satanic, and the radio is three foxy Supreme-alikes with aerials on their heads and a succession of fabulously tight costumes – but also real darkness. Its ending, balanced between revolution and resignation as Afro-American generations move on, is the first page of modern America. To see it with the fresh memory of the Obama White House farewells is moving.

 
On the face of it the story is tiny. Caroline – the redoubtable, powerful Sharon D.Clarke – is a maid, doing laundry in the hot humid Louisiana basement of a fractured family – ‘Sixteen feet down and feeling low, talkin’ to the washer and the radio!”. She has three children at home – including the rebellious, stunningly fiercely sung Emmie (Abiona Omonua) and can barely meet the rent and food. The father (Alex Gaumond) is a vague clarinettist, still grieving his dead first wife and disconnected from his 8-year-old Noah: a stunning little Daniel Luniko the night I went. He has remarried the New-York Jewish Rose (Lauren Ward) . She’s homesick for the Hudson river, and Noah dislikes her.

 
So the lad spends his time hanging out in the basement with the grudging, grumpy Caroline, sometimes allowed to light her one cigarette of the day for her. He has a habit of leaving his loose change in his pants pocket, and she saves it for him in the bleach cup. Until Rose, with a glorious mean-white-madam tactlessness probably all too familiar to many a Filipina here today, decides that it would both teach Noah a good Jewish lesson in the value of money and supplement the low wages she pays Caroline, if she tells the maid she can keep any coins she finds.

 

 

This system, and Caroline’s dignity, throw the whole fragile, artificial equilibrium of racism and inequality into a personal and political crisis. For it is 1963: Kennedy is dead, Luther King on the march, black America impatient. The frogs chirp at night in the damp, explosive heat: young rebels have topped the Confederate Soldier’s “Defender of the South” statue .

 

 
Under Michael Longhurst’s direction and Nigel Lilley’s musical leadership (its a substantial little orchestra) the almost through-composed score carries this domestic miniature into the huge theme of coming change: there are great blasts of blues and moments of mischievous exuberance : Emmie and two more young children pull out a stunning fantasy, assisted by Angela Caesar flying overhead as the Moon. There are moments mournful, demonic, whimsical, passionate, comic , threatening.

 

 

The gulf grows politically between the middle-aged maid- solid, enduring, unhappy and conflicted – and her fiery daughter and equally ambitious friend Dotty (“Some folks go to school at night, some folks march for civil rights!”). Another gulf is opening too, in a Hannukah scene both vigorously funny and dangerously threatening: Rose and her visiting New York parents fail to quench her firebrand grandfather (Teddy Kempner), a 1930’s Communist who thinks the negroes should give up this “non-violence nonsense” and get on with smashing capitalism for all the workers.

 

 

Yet the big themes all feed in to one point: the solid, the sorrowful, the melodious, the banked-fire unhappiness of Caroline herself, trapped in a cleft of history. The political is the personal, wonderfully so.

box office 01243 781312 cft.org.uk to 3 june
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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May 10, 2017 · 12:05 pm

THE CARDINAL Southwark Playhouse, SE1

FRESH AS A (VIOLENT) DAISY AFTER 376 YEARS

 

 

What wonders, sir, are these? How beauteous fringe theatre is! We Tuesday matinee-goers, paying peanuts for the smaller space in an  unlovely hangar near  the Elephant, hardly deserved such riches.   We got an impeccably mischievous RSC-grade performance in a long-forgotten play, a voice from the turbulent London of Charles I rising ragingly agai, with Stephen Boxer himself in Cardinal”s robes (albeit in need of an iron). This actor, seen nicely close-up in the small room rather than across a vast Stratford arena, can be studied rewardingly as he deploys a pleasing ability to express villainy as convincingly with one furry eyebrow as with a crazed ranting fury. Around him a fine – and mainly young – cast must be inspired to what will certainly be higher things. Not least Natalie Simpson as a fiery, passionate wronged noblewoman with a vivid emotional range (the part needs it, they were starting to take women ever more seriously . Simpson’s energetically un-corset-bound  body-language brings her dizzyingly close to any modern miss appalled at being betrothed to the wrong bloke and plotting to cut loose.. And that is as it should be.

 

 
This rumbustious tale of old Navarre, unseen in London for nearly four centuries, was a victim of the closure of theatres under Cromwell. It belongs firmly to the English Protestant tradition of Wicked-Foreign-Papists plays – like Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.  And in that genre it is a cracker: taut, clear, personal rather than political, revolving round a strong woman.  It is unusual to have to avoid spoilers in a 1641 play, but since John Shirley’s  revenge tragedy hasn’t been seen – certainly in London – its Blackfriars opening after which  the puritan axe fell,  I will give little away.

 

 

 

Just know that the Cardinal wants the rich Duchess Rosaura to marry his warlike nephew Columbo. She prefers Don Alvarez and begs to be released from the expected marriage, and the Cardinal is not happy about that. The King (Ashley Cook) is prone to trust far too many people who let him down – possibly Mr Shirley was sucking up to Charles I here. Rosie Watt and Sophia Carr-Gomm are entertaining, and involved, companions of the Duchess; Phil Cheadle a pugnacious Hernando, who hates Columbo (Jay Saighal a turkey-cock of offended hyperactivity). Expect masked and murderous revellers, blood on a bridal robe, deceit and anger and letters , lovers betrayed, two cracking sword and dagger fights (it’s a very small space, we flinched in the front row). There’s bloodshed ,spitting, a barely thwarted rape and a poisoning so complicated it makes the end of Hamlet look straightforward.

 

 
All shall unfold before you before the last corpse gasps its last, and a storm of applause meets them all as led by the wonderful Boxer they rise from the floor to a well deserved bow. It may be theatrical archaeology, but by God it’s entertaining. Honour to Troupe, director Justin Audibert (another RSC chap) and the Southwark. With luck someone will pick up the play for a candlelit reprise at the Wanamaker. It’s made for it…

 

 

box office 020 7407 0234 southwarkplayhouse.co.uk to 27 May
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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May 9, 2017 · 11:18 pm

ALL OUR CHILDREN Jermyn St Theatre

A CRIME, A CARDINAL, A CONFLICT

 

 

It is Twelfth Night, the feast of the Epiphany, 1941. In the Jermyn’s tight intimacy we are sitting in the clinical director’s office of a home for disabled and mentally incapable children: “incurables”.   We watch a series of the paediatrician’s meetings, from chill dawn light to evening candleglow , in a study beautifully evocative of old bourgeois Germany and bathed from time to time in equally evocative Bach and Mozart from the radio Dr Victor impatiently tunes away from broadcasts about Herr Goebbels.
He is ailing, coughing and weakened: his clinic is three months in to a new regime laid down by the National Socialist government. Each week a grey bus arrives (with blanked out windows to avoid distressing “hardworking families of the Third Reich” ). It collects some thirty of the inmates, between infancy and the age of 25, and takes them off to be gassed. The principle is economic: they are deemed “lebensunwurtens Leben” – lives not worth of life . The cost of their maintenance would, in the sternly pragmatic thinking of the New Germany, be better deployed on the productive citizenry,. And of course on armaments.

 
This is history: in the first two years of war some 100,000 disabled people were killed from such clinics. Writer-director Stephen Unwin, himself devoted father of a son with learning disabilities and chair of the national KIDS charity, infuses the awful record with a powerful and palpably personal eloquence as he imagines Victor’s encounters on a day which may move him from a depressed but helpless complicity to a dangerous moral resistance. Colin Tierney is strong in the difficult central role, not least when the doctor nerves himself to argue the case he cannot really believe; and also when, confronted by a suspicious mother of a boy already dispatched, he cracks and admits the truth.
Sometimes the author’s determination to air enough aspects of the ghastly business creates an unevenness in the hero’s psychological progress, but in the end that hardly matters. It is the meetings which strike home. There is the good motherly Catholic maidservant, Martha (Rebecca Johnson, sweetly credible) and the rather brilliantly appalling SS man Schmidt, seconded as administrative director. Edward Franklin is immaculately Nazi, with clean-cut cheekbones and a cold eye, whistling the Horst-Wessel-lied and punctilious in his Heil-Hitlers. He brings in files of names to which Victor must say “yes..yes…yes… yes…yes…No, not yet for young Karsten I think…yes..yes…No, not Edith Manstein. Really no. I heard her singing the other day…”

 

 
At this point one wonders whether the play might have had more bite if we hadn’t been told, in publicity beforehand, what is happening. But the shock is pretty good all the same. Especially when a grateful mother, the widowed Frau Pabst, brings the good doctor some stollen and enquires about her son Stefan, who it inevitably turns out was a “Yes” only last month. Lucy Speed is wonderful in the role: a tiny, bright-eyed, overalled factory worker whose Cockney humility turns into a towering, furious rage when she finally understands.

 

 

And then there is David Yelland as a pivotal historic figure in the whole story: Cardinal Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, an aristocratic Catholic prelate and fierce traditional conservative, who during that year preached strongly against the cull of disabled people and challenged the entire ideology of Nazism. He survived Hitler’s displeasure, probably because of fear of alienating the many German Catholics who could just about put up with the regime or preferred not to know. But in Unwin’s imagined encounter Galen takes on the weary Victor with immense eloquence and principle, his unassailable moral confidence battering down all the weak arguments (“all medicine is a matter of priorities..doctors are always involved in making touch choices”) like a sainted bull in a china shop.

 

 

 

So – while the whole theme is historically fascinating, and the character and pathos of each character is well done – it is this duel scene which gives the play proper dramatic fascination. Because what we are watching is a clash of two men: one is a hardworking functionary who is tired, ill and in mental torment and has just been spat upon by a grieving mother and threatened by his SS subordinate . The other is a well-fed, aristocratic, self-confident and bullying presence, a grandee who has been wafted here by his driver from a bishop’s palace, resplendent in a red skullcap and sash. The human instinct to feel for the hectored victim – Victor – is at odds with the plain fact that the overbearing Cardinal is absolutely right. And that is dramatically interesting and unsettling.

 

 
After a final swaggering entrance from the terrible Schmidt , voicing drunken disgust at the “blind dumb faces, drooling mouths” of the inmates and glorying in the new Reich, and a corresponding moment of good Martha as she begins to understand the horror, you emerge sober. You feel as if you’d been there, and were more than glad to be home in 2017.
box office to 3 june http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk
4 Meece Rating

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May 8, 2017 · 10:20 pm

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS Hampstead, NW1

AFTER SADDAM: WHAT’S LEFT WHEN YOU TAKE AWAY A TYRANT?

 
An electrifying moment in this sharp, riveting play sees two bitter rivals, in a moment of stillness between blood-feud brawls, shaking hands. A miraculous moment, inspired by the unity of a young Muslim’s prayer, and a passionate speech about an ancient clay tablet by a naively romantic Scot. “The outlaw days are passing” he says: this land, cradle of civilization, is no longer torn by tyranny but looking for a stable democratic peace…

 

 

Ah, if only! This is Iraq, 2003. Rory Stewart (now an MP) was thirty: a Foreign Office drop-out and fascinated Arabist who had walked six thousand miles across the Middle East and Afghanistan. So fuelled by idealism about the reconstruction, he went to Baghdad after the invasion and found himself in charge of Maysan province in the South. He was to organize a democratic council to elect a local governor, himself holding the preposterous title of “Governorate co-ordinator”. But it was all preposterous: how can an unelected foreigner smoothly enforce ‘democracy’, under the protection of British tanks?

 
Stewart’s memoir of events in his nine months there has been carved with great clarity and drama into a gripping 100-minute play by Stephen Brown and director Simon Godwin. It is riveting, funny, depressing and inspiring by turns: an angry fragment of a history still not played out.

 

 
And it is a personal story too. Stewart (played with eerie likeness in speech and intensity by Henry Lloyd-Hughes) addresses us at the start with an apologetic “it is about the confidence of youth”. The overconfidence of the occupying Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad is expressed too, by a breezy John Mackay as Paul Bremer optimistically predicting a “multicultural decentralized democratic state”: Doubling as the Colonel on the spot, Mackay is rather sourer in tone, reluctant to let Stewart even speak to the local Islamist leader Seyyed, whose followers have just murdered six of his men.

 

 

He looks with more favour on Seyyed’s more liberal-minded rival, Karim , a Marsh Arab leader and on the face of it more democratically minded and less fanatical. Both rivals fought hard against Saddam, but hate one another with deep sincerity. Stewart must bring them together. And , ideally, not to get them both falling on him with cries of “capitalist imperialist crusader!”, provoking riots in the square and tribalist murders. Even putting the Council together is like getting scorpions to dance a highland reel, or as Stewart says “the table plan for the world’s most awkward wedding”. Every scene has its shocks (and, occasionally, black laughs).

 
It is played out against a sparse, evocative Paul Wills design of sliding concrete walls, indicating the stern makeshift of a battered land where even getting the electricity and water to work is a fragile triumph. Wonderful performances crackle through it: Silas Carson as Karim, initial dignity blooming dangerously into arrogance, Johndeep More’s stubbornly devout Seyyed, Aiyisha Hart representing the few women who tried to step forward. Abu Rashid, ally of Karim, is Vincent Ebrahim, who doubles as Professor Khaled, an exasperatedly pessimistic non-aligned museum historian of Iraq’s 5000 years. And there is a particularly subtle, touching performance by Nezar Alderazi as Ahmed, trying to assist the impossible process.

 
It did prove pretty impossible. As the Colonel says, exasperated by Rory’s arrival “You say these people want democracy? They want to be not fucking dead!”. Many more of them were dead before the chaos abated, and what they got was not a multicultural tolerant democracy, but today’s stern brutal Islamism.

 
But whatever you think of the invasion with hindsight, the Colonel’s last words to Stewart feel right. “Forgive yourself. You should be proud”. Certainly proud of giving us this account, and letting it be staged. An account from a pariticipant, rather than just journalists and polemicists, is useful. And the question echoes in our ears as we leave: what’d we do another time in a collapsing country? “Sit and watch as they blow each other into bonemeal?” Or try to reconstruct?
Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com to 3 June

RATING  four 4 Meece Rating

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May 5, 2017 · 12:10 am

ANGELS IN AMERICA : MILLENNIUM APPROACHES Lyttelton, SE1

REAGAN, RELIGION, AND REMEMBERING…

 

Direct comparisons are dangerous, even when – as this week – two consecutive days see major works opening in London, both set in the 1980s and concerned with nation, ancestry and internal division. Butterworth’s magnificent THE FERRYMAN last night showed a Northern Ireland divided in the age of hardline Thatcherism; this NT revival under Marianne Elliott’s direction is of Tony Kushner’s Reagan-era howl of liberal dismay, combined with a threnody for gay men’s victimised alienation in the dawning of AIDS.

 
So there are parallels. But it is hard, after the fizzing warm naturalism of Butterworth’s farm-kitchen, to bond immediately with Kushner’s often self-conscious wordiness. His characters are sometimes almost Shavian in their  reluctance to stop gnawing repetitively over every socio-political bone. The play’s odd pacing jars too : there is really no need for two intervals, as Ian MacNeil’s setting of revolving roomlets needs no fussy resetting (indeed in the last acts the set does its own tricks, spectacularly). But the double interval breaks up an already episodic play, making it feel oddly more dated than it need be.

 

 

It need not, because in the age of Trump the echoes are useful. Kushner uses the real Republican lawyer and keen McCarthyite homophobe Roy M. Cohn as a key character, weaving in and out of the lives of two fictional couples. And when as Cohn Nathan Lane – always a treat! – breaks out into roars of contempt for legality (“Law is pliable! What the fuck is, this, Sunday school? This is enzymes, bloodshed, politics!”) you sense a proto- Trump. There’s the same contempt, the bending of truth, the same dismaying but almost attractive jollity of energy. Though there is no jollity when Denise Gough – normally rather wasted as the disturbed, depressed housewife Harper Pitt – slimes onstage crossdressed in a sharp suit as the Reagan insider Heller.

 

 

That sense of a runaway, opportunistically religious political right shouting for “the end of liberalism, of ipso facto secular humanism” is topical. The gay angst at the play’s heart is less so, thank heavens, but it is worth remembering that first terror of AIDS, and the sudden, sometimes unmeetable, duty on young healthy men to become carers for disintegrating lovers. Not to mention the fear of coming out at all, for fear of being branded a danger to society and probably a Commie.

 

 

But a play must work on an emotional level too, and here it is fitful. Kushner does fatally over-write, though there are treasurable lines: Jewish Louis’ at a funeral moaning “I always get so closety at these family things” , his dying lover Prior’s “You know you’ve hit rock bottom when drag is a drag”. Or Susan Brown’s Mormon Mum Hannah, losing patience asking for street directions from a rambling homeless woman : “I’m sorry you’re psychotic, but just make the effort!”. There are some tremendous short scenes, too, which keep it moving. Even though caring deeply about these people is harder than it should be.

 

 

Some do at moments touch the heart. Russell Tovey’s anguished Mormon Joe is restrainedly moving in his pious, panicked denial of his nature, fascinated from childhood with a picture of Jacob wrestling with a particularly buff angel. James McArdle is Louis, who can’t bring himself to stay with his sick lover, and is at his best in a scene delivering Kushner’s satirically observed paranoid-liberal-Jewish ramblings about racism to the patient, irritated Belize: Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as the most sympathetic character, an Afro-American nurse and drag queen. Indeed Stewart-Jarrett, fondly tending the dying deserted Prior, is one of the standout stars of the play.

 
The other is Prior Walter himself, its dying centre: camp but movingly gallant, it’s a humorous, suffering and boyishly open-hearted performance by Andrew Garfield. He is perfect, from the first jokey awareness that the curse has come upon him to the extraordinary near-death hallucination scenes where he is greeted by a 15c ancestor (broad Yorkshire, earthy, grumpy) and a 17c forebear ( Nathan Lane again , flouncing for England this time in a curly periwig). It is hard to play princessy-queeny with so much real, mortal feeling beneath it. Garfield achieves that.

 
box office 020 7452 3000   to 19 August
Rating for MILLENNIUM APPROACHES : four  4 Meece Rating

Afterword`: regarding PERESTROIKA

It was for critics a two-show day, but I must leave star-ratings and final analysis of this second one to an (angelic?) host of colleagues online and in print. For 95 minutes in, the first interval found me hosting a sweating temperature and spinning head (no fault of the production) so the mice and I had to bail out for everyone’s sake. Nothing spoils a retro “gay fantasy on national themes” like women keeling over in the stalls.
So here’s what I can report for theatrecatters:
Those who know PERESTROIKA, the sequel to the above, will remember that we meet again the same characters, who gradually grope towards personal and political reconciliation, albeit by way of a some ornately written dream-sequence mystico-bollocks involving a multiple-vaginaed angel seducing the still-dying Prior, and a wrenching separation for Louis and Mormon Joe because it transpires that a whiny New York Jewish liberal can never quite get along with a Reaganite, however luscious.
I can confidently report, though, from seeing the long first act that production and design do it even prouder this time, with acrobatic Finn Caldwell puppetry making a sinister angel of Amanda Lawrence, and Tovey becoming a Mormon-visitor-centre diorama puppet. And also note that for anybody with a taste for magnificently villainous invective there is the AIDS-stricken Cohn in a hospital bed now, outraged by only having one phone line, selfishly hoarding AZT. Glad I didn’t miss Nathan Lane splenetically informing the other Nathan – Stewart-Jarrett as the tolerant gay nurse – that when he had pubic lice once, he actually admired them for their itchy tenacity because they exemplified his hard-Republican philosophy : “Fuck nice! You want to be nice or you want to be effective?!”
Enjoy. Hope it makes your head spin in a more benign way than mine.

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May 3, 2017 · 11:48 pm

THE FERRYMAN Royal Court, SW1

IRELAND OF THE SORROWS: THE KIDS, THE  CRAIC AND THE KILLING

 

It is 1982 in  County Armagh. Not a good time to be Irish, not there. Not with internees still in the H blocks and ten recent deaths on hunger strike. The family farm kitchen (Rob Howell’s design so complete you could almost run up the creaky staircase to bed) is getting ready for the comradeship and craic of harvest day. For half an hour the worst that happens is that the fatted goose escapes, Auntie Pat pours cold water on Uncle Pat’s favourite story, and young Oisin gets teased and wrecks his newspaper kite. But two bus rides away in Derry, impassive before a scrawled-wall curtain, we have seen hard men putting the frighteners on Father Horrigan over a dark, dead secret. Which will by slow degrees, interwoven with hearteningly ordinary farmhouse chaos, raise comedy to tragedy.

 

 

For three enthralling hours this is a hell of a piece: theatrical, engrossing, a world unfurling and reaching out hands to the heart in a dozen directions. Fizzes of humour, surprise and shock dart through it. There is immediately a lamp set on fire,  a posse of small and eloquently profane  children, and a real baby staring out the front rows with placid equanimity. There is a live goose and a baby rabbit hauled from the poacher’s pocket of a giant beard-draggled simpleton. There is Quin Carney, father of an extended family with two mothers who each have hard emotional rows to hoe, Uncle Pat who thinks the answer  to most things is in Virgil,  sour passionate Auntie Pat who has wanted to kill Englishmen ever since 1916 and greets the voice of Thatcher on World Service with a fury burning since at Cromwell and honed by worship of Parnell and O’Connell.  There are volatile teenage boys, threatening Provos , an unusual proposal of marriage, and a body in a peat bog all too recognizably preserved. There is every reason for “Aunt Maggie Far-Away” in the chimney-corner to emerge from her placid dementia from time to time with a terrible clarity of prophecy, memory, and justifiable belief in the banshee spirits who wail of death.

 
Jez Butterworth’s immense, ambitious new play takes us deep into that world and – as in his great JERUSALEM – roams beyond it into universal themes of history and legend, memory and love, childhood, song and poetry and national identity and the way national dreams sour to vicious partisan expediency. It is sometimes ragged, always magnificent. And – though after all that you may not be expecting this news – it is very often dryly, shockingly, tenderly funny. Especially in the superbly directed posse of children and teenage scenes.

 

 

Spoilers of plot – or even explaining too soon who is who – would be unforgivable. But know that the performances in Sam Mendes’ production well match up to the material: there is an extraordinary delicacy in the way that apparently comic figures become importantly tragic: not least Dearbhla Molloy’s satirical Pat and John Hodgkinson’s heartbreaking Tom Kettle , a half-witted English foundling drawn into the farm thirty years ago. Notable too are Paddy Considine as Quinn, Tom Glynn-Carney as the half-childish teenage recruit, and Laura Donnelly’s restrained, enduring Caitlin.
And for evocation of the sheer dominant cold-bastard, smart-jacketed IRA commanders of that terrible era, Turlough Convery sends shivers up your spine. The dénouement, half-expected, still shocks.

 
box office 020 7565 5000 to 20 May. Sold out, but West End transfer in June.
rating Five    5 Meece Rating

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May 3, 2017 · 3:32 pm

CYRANO Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds

NOBILITY AND THE NOSE  on tour  Touring Mouse wide

 

You’ve hardly sat down before there’s a jolly mass drinking-song in pantaloons, leather breastplates and hat-feathers being romped through in front of cod-17c drapes covered in zodiac signs, followed by a magnificent somersaulting dwarf pickpocket emerging from a bustle, a wild chase, a fabulous spread of patisserie and a violent duel with rapiers in a theatre not unlike our own dear Bury. During which Cyrano simultaneously swashbuckles, leaps on and off tables and recites a complicated duel-poem. Then off he goes to fight a hundred men waiting in ambush for a friend, bring their hats home as trophies and proceed with sighing of love and despairing of his ugliness.

 

Which is to say, of his huge nose. Which, be reassured ladies, though a fine prosthesis which never falls off even in extreme fight scenes, does not entirely quench the gorgeous Christian Edwards’ appeal. Energy attracts, even accompanied by the strangest of noses, and energy is what Edwards has in abundance.
It’s a mad, poetic, roistering, barnstorming thing, Rostand’s original 1890’s play. Cyrano’s ugliness makes him despair of being loved by the lovely and brilliant Roxane, but also fuels a headlong, pugnacious arrogance and “ferocious integrity”. And, as it turns out, a sort of self-sacrificing but bonkers nobility which (I speak as a past French schoolchild) strikes me as the rich rank fruit of a Roman Catholic culture. There were a lot of martyrs in our convent school curriculum, back then. Also, a lot of rhetorical flourishes, and Rostand is not short of those: so in adapting it Deborah McAndrew goes for broke with the long speeches, rhymes, and almost rap-style rapid assonances dear to Cyrano and his cohort of warlike cadet poets, plus the devoted patissier Ragueano and the drunken yet musically gifted Ligniere.

 

 

So, very French, not least in a plot which makes even Shakespeare’s more exotic flights seem realistic. Roxane, here a dignifiedly mournful-looking Sharon Singh, is desired by the wicked count De Guiche, who tries to marry her to a wet nobleman who will be willing to share her favours. Cyrano, her cousin, loves her purely, to the extent that he’ll disrupt a theatre with that crazy rhyming duel merely out of fury that the star once looked lustfully at her. She, however, falls for pretty-boy Christian (Adam Barlow) who has no gift of language. So Cyrano writes the love letters – a beloved Victorian-era trope, that – prompts the dimbo lover from a dark bush and finally takes over, standing aside only for Christian to claim the actual kiss and the bride, leaving our big-schnozzled hero bereft. Everyone off to war, then, and there’s a death, and a revelation of how Roxane really feels. Fourteen years pass and, amid some nuns, there’s the love ’n death scene.

 
Which goes on too long. That is a problem. At 2 hrs 45 minutes a generally highly enjoyable romp could have done with stern trimming by director-composer Conrad Nelson: too many long poetic flights, so that at some moments you feel you actually have lived through the Thirty Years War. But take away twenty minutes and it’d be perfect. The songs are lovely, Edwards is tremendous, and the ensemble are Northern Broadsides at their merriest: broad Yorkshire and Lancashire voices suiting the military rowdiness and banter brilliantly well .

 

Indeed all the cast are smart, funny and elegantly choreographed. A particular palm should go to Francesca Mills as the tumbling pickpocket, the patissier’s apprentice and a small but resolute nun . 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.
01284 769505, http://www.theatreroyal.org to 6 May Then TOURING on – dates, www. northern-broadsides.co.uk
rating four   4 Meece Rating
joint production by NOrthern Broadsides and New Vic

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April 27, 2017 · 7:43 am

FORTY YEARS ON Chichester Festival Theatre

1918..1968..AND NOW.. ALAN BENNETT’S ENGLAND

 
In his 1994 diaries Alan Bennett described the funeral of a Dunkirk veteran in a village church. “crammed with the men who won the war. Young officers then, now in their sixties, good, solid, old-fashioned faces, never wavering, never doubting and singing their hearts out – “For all the Saints” “Immortal, Invisible”. It’s like Forty Years on – all that one loves and hates”.

 

 

This 1968 revue-style play, a tapestry of national memory and mockery, affectionate nostalgia and determined revolution , encapsulates exactly that conflict in the British heart. To revive it in a Brexit year, as we grasp more urgently the dangers of harking-back by the wrong people, is a canny if risky move by the theatre’s new leader Daniel Evans, who directs it himself with all the big-stage brio and playfulness he showed in Sheffield.

 
Risky, because it is hard to gauge how far the new generation will get its references to another era: schoolmasters uninhibited by childcare-correctness, Confirmation Classes, and legends like T.E.Lawrence and Sapper. On the other hand the WW1 centenary has re-sensitized us to both wars, so at least some history will resonate. For me, fifty years on the echoes were still all there. For newcomers , know that we become the parents and alumni watching, behind a huge posse of grey-uniformed boys, a frequently disrupted end of term play at imagined Sussex public-school, “Albion House”,: a metaphor for England itself. The retiring headmaster remembers starting on Armistice Day 1918, teaching boys who twenty years later fought in the second war. His successor-to-be the progressive Franklin has devised a series of scenes in which a posh 1940’s couple see out the second war with their old nanny in the basement of Claridge’s, remembering and lamenting their childhood Edwardian England which vanished in 1914, and their adult one which in 1945 was replaced by “a sergeant’s world, of the lay-by and the civic improvement scheme”.

 

 

So Franklin, Miss Nisbitt, Tempest and Matron and the boys zigzag through riotous sketches guyings of Wildean Edwardiana, Bloomsbury, John-Buchanesque “snobbery-with-violence”, and legendary 20c figures like Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell (strikingly depicted as a 10ft pantomime giantess by two puffing boys in a long frock). Between these, using diaries and poems, songs of the period and a tap-break and revealing political memoirs, the wars themselves are more soberly, movingly taken, still within the play’s odd beguiling structure. Bennett’s balance is artful: for every loopy tap-break, you get a Last Post from the gallery; for every mockery, a tribute. As the headmaster protests to Franklin “Memories are not shackles, they are garlands!”.

 
Except that, on the press night, that beloved line didn’t quite make it, for Richard Wilson, taking on at eighty the Headmaster’s very funny interventions and indignations, was not a hundred percent off-the-book, and made slightly more use than expected of his headmasterly stationery. Yet because he is representing just that stiff romantic old England a-dodder – it didn’t particularly matter. My own worry had been that I couldn’t able to shake off the ghost of Gielgud ’s gloriously querulous voice on the classic stage and radio version; but Wilson’s is a strong flavour himself, and I forgot it almost instantly. The odd fluff and fumble almost added to the charm.

 
And he is supported by not only a beautifully choreographed and flowingly vivid ensemble of boys, but by Alan Cox’s excellent Franklin and an utterly magnificent Jenny Galloway as Matron (ahh.. reminiscing about how fat legs didn’t put off men in her ATS wartime heyday). Lucy Briers is an nicely querulous Miss Nisbett and Danny Lee Wynter the master Tempest, particularly memorable as the pearl-draped, Wildean Aunt Cedelia in a bath-chair. Give that man more drag parts!

 

 

Lez Brotherston’s design excels itself too, with a full organ loft above and stone rolls of honour becoming screens with fragments of film or dates clarifying, as the play flits capriciously about, which year it is. So, even if it mystifies the young, it’s good to have it back after fifty years to watch it yearning back another fifty. The final For Sale notice on Albion House – five years before the 1973 vote – has a mischievous topicality, too:
“For Sale. A valuable site at the crossroads of the world. At present on offer to European clients. Outlying portions of the estate already disposed of to sitting tenants. Of some historical and period interest. Some alterations and improvements necessary”.
All that one loves and hates. God bless Alan Bennett.

 

box office 01243 781312
box.office@cft.org.uk    to 20 May

rating  Four   (the boys deserve no less)

4 Meece Rating

 

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April 26, 2017 · 12:26 am

OBSESSION Barbican, EC2

VAN HOVE, VISCONTI, AND OUR JUDE

 

London is  getting used to Ivo van Hove of Toneelgroep Amsterdam. But his tremendous A View from The Bridge (in a bleak arena)  and his striking NT Hedda (in a bleak white room) were written as plays: whereas one of his great tastes  as a director is adapting film screenplays. Not of the bubblegum family-fun variety, perish the thought: he best likes Visconti. Though the plays are made without re- watching or copying the original’s look and interpretation: rather his idea is to go right back to the screenplay and suck out the essence of it. If tonight is anything to go by, he is actually better with the comparative discipline enforced by stage plays.

 
But play or movie, the van Hove trademark fascination is with pressure. Put humans under increasing emotional stress and watch them wince, resist, dent and finally blow up: Eddie Carbone with a knife, Hedda with a gun. Here it’s Gino with a lorry,   plus a rubbish-hurling rage from his illicit lover Hanna. The various crises are accompanied by  exceedingly loud – and I fear rather clunkingly  obvious – music: Traviata for forbidden love, hard-rock for a brawl, French chanson for Hannah  throwing dustbins around, Woody Guthrie for Gino running away. Plus a lot of random sinister  angel choirs and some ominous silences. Especially early on, when distant cats miaow and Joseph (Gijs Scholten van Aschat) goes out and shoots them seven times. With all this racket, it is as well that the cast are heavily miked.

 
This tale, a  timeless one , requires the drifter Gino, an impoverished ex-soldier,  to be as the press release promises  “powerful and graceful as a puma”. So that’s a case for casting Jude Law, and puma-like indeed  he is.   Add a bored young wife in a rough roadhouse, a choleric older husband who takes Gino in to mend his lorry, and we are set for  passion and murder , remorse and disillusion and  classic betrayal and the whole stage suddenly turning into a lot of crashing waves of doom. Projections remind us of its film origins more than once: not least the remarkably sensual giant close-ups  of the skin-on-skin moments.

 
True to form, van Hove attempts no period or Italian  setting, but in the great bleak stage gives us a  block bar counter, a treadmill insert for Gino to keep trying to run away on, and a bath for Hannah to strip off into, and for the men to shave at in a combative manner. Oh, and  hanging overhead, ready to emit sparks, deafening engine noises and a cataclysmic oil leak , there’s a whole lorry engine which travels up and down on wires. Looming over them. The lorry is in the plot, but one darkly suspects that its suspension overhead has something symbolic to do with Sophoclean nemesis.
 
Halina Reijn is good as the tempestuous, changeably cautious love object, and van Aschat as Joseph convincingly patronises his wife and  belts out the Di Provenza bass aria from La Traviata shortly before getting lorry-murdered.   An  unusually helpful corpse, he then has to mop up the oil-leak mess while the guilty pair scrub one anothers’ beautiful backs. I think that’s symbolic too.

 
But to be honest, for all the aesthetics, the sustained Van-Hovery is as tiresome as it is inventive. So the 105-minute evening stands or falls on Jude Law alone. Fortunately, he is magnificent, and somehow snatches from the overweening directorial pretensions a genuinely felt performance of young Gino’s passion, poverty, damaged emotional confusion, baffled remorse and mournful yearning for the simplicities of the road. From his first seductive swaggering entrance, playing the mouth organ rather badly, to the obsessive need and rage and tragic grandeur of his fate Law moves through the slow, portentous interpretation like an actual human being, restrained and strong and heartfelt. Two of the mice are for him alone.

 

 

Box Office : http://www.barbican.org.uk to 20 may
then touring Vienna, Amsterdam, Luxembourg
NT Live in cinemas Thurs 11 May

rating  three 3 Meece Rating

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April 20, 2017 · 10:39 pm

THE PHILANTHROPIST Trafalgar Studios SW1

A WINDOW ON AN IVORY TOWER…  

 
Full disclosure: I bought a ticket for an early preview, because press night was my husband’s birthday but I couldn’t resist checking out Christopher Hampton’s 1971 play. Not least because it is set in just the sort of donnish room that ‘60s university tutors used to inhabit, blissfully undisturbed by the outer world unless my peers were actually throwing bricks or chanting “Ho ho ho chi Minh” outside. Also Simon Callow directs, and his taste is always interesting.

 
So I won’t offer a star-rating, as there were six previews left and Mr Callow says it was work in progress. But it was fascinating: I hope younger audiences realize, amid the laughs, how accurately Hampton’s text catches the curious sterile élite manner of that academic cadre. Horribly funny still is their comic indifference to a larger world: barely acknowledging the murder of the entire Cabinet (creepy to have the Westminster terrorist attack just as it opened). Better still is the way he skewers the tricky epigrammatic showing-off of the dreadful star-writer Braham (Matt Berry). HE is the classic intolerable 1960s intellectual, going on about art being just like masturbation while admiring girls in long floaty frocks drape themselves at his feet. Hampton also catches the insouciant new sexual freedom brought on by the Pill: poor Philip the philologist, a man so agreeable he can’t teach Eng.Lit for fear of being critical, is the central character. Turning Moliere’s Le Misanthrope upside down, he is a man who can’t be abrasive: he’s a philologist because he just loves words, all of them! . He is in love with Celia (Charlotte Richie) but gets challenged to a bunk-up by the more voracious Araminta. The run-up to their unsatisfactory night occupies the first half; the aftermath the second.

 
It is in the second half that the play really begins to bite, though Callow’s cast keep it tripping along (especially Simon Bird, who is rather wonderful as the innocent Philip, indicating subtly how much of his almost inhuman niceness is fuelled by fear). Lily Cole as the vamptress Araminta, with a torrent of hair and endless white hypnotic thighs, is oddly touching: her anger when Philip admits he isn’t, er, actually attracted to her rings eerily true. “Needing to be needed” is a mark of the most voracious of our sex, or certainly was in the treacherous 1960s. Actually, the retro sexual politics depicted in this play is dynamite, when you think of it: Celia is also interesting, desiring a real man like awful Braham to overwhelm her and uninspired by decency and faithful affection. This is a ‘sixties woman, not yet happy in the new age which, thank God, was just beginning to dawn.

 

So as a period piece, it rang true; and Bird’s and Cole’s performances in particular left me convinced and rather sorrowful. It’s worth bringing back. And kids: if any of your tutors and peers behave like this, just remind them that they are being really, really old-fashioned. Neo-Victorian, almost.

 

 

box office http://www.atgtickets.com to 22 July

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April 19, 2017 · 9:09 am

WHISPER HOUSE The Other Palace SW1

GHOSTS OF WAR AND SHIPWRECK

 
“When all the world’s at war, it’s better to be dead”. Pallid pessimistic ghosts roam around a lonely Maine lighthouse in WW2, with heaving sepia seas behind (Mark Holthusen’s projections are ace, atmospheric, and so is Andrew W Riley’s circular pit of a set). The two disaffected phantoms roam around  singing , between the two halves of the band, and serve as narrators, when not looming over the other dramatis personae like singing Dementors, or luring  the young hero Christopher onto the causeway to drown.
 

He is a doughty child (a fine debut on press night for Stanley Jarvis, sharing the role with Fisher Costello-Rose) . He has lost his airman father, his Mum is in an asylum after trying to drown herself, so he is sent to live in the lighthouse with his curmudgeonly club-footed Aunt Lily who “isn’t used to children ” . She has a dark sad secret sin in her past which the ghosts understand daily resent, and puts cod liver oil in the boy’s  porridge. The ghosts have it in for him too,  and howl in his little ears in his bed as the seagulls shriek and the waves roar, Gothically moaning in mid-market rock “If this doesn’t terrify you, it should”.
 

 

So here’s a rock-opera cross between Turn of The Screw and Silas Marner, with – as it turns out – a dash of The Go-Between. For little Christopher is a patriot, determined to do his duty and tell inconvenient truths to the simple hearted sheriff . Which is awkward, since Lily”s longtime assistant and friend is a tall, kindly Mr Yasuhiro, who before long she is ordered to give up as a potential spy an enemy alien. The friendship between the pair – gentle giant Nicholas Goh beautifully restrained, and Dianne Pilkington, gruff and enduring – is the psychologically solid anchor of the story, though needs more work in the script.
The plot thickens,  quite satisfyingly, before a dramatic U- boat bombing, fight, ghost-drowning in smoke, and a resolution happy enough to make is safe enough to bring any child old enough to see Goodnight Mr Tom.  Actually, for an early taste of rock musicals, it’d be ideal.  Tickets go down to £ 15.

 

 

That it is here at all is encouraging.  Andrew Lloyd Webber, well on a roll after the smashing School Of Rock – which he opens in workshop form – has taken over the former St James as a crucible for experimenting with new musicals, pocket shows which might grow, and unreviewed experiments. This one is more finished, and up for review, though interestingly its advertised 2 hrs 10 came in at under two hours: one suspects late cuts in Adam Lenson’s production. That makes for a briskly enjoyable evening, though the music is not particularly memorable, and themes recur in both tune and lyrics more than often enough.  The composer is Duncan Sheik, who hit awards with Sspring Awakening, the book and other lyrics by Kyle Jarrow , inspired by true wartime events and sharpened by Trumpian 21c xenophobia. There’s a ghoststory-within-a-ghoststory too, because our moaning phantoms were drowned in a yacht cursed by its owner “Solomon Snell, Ring the Bell, Too much trust is the road to Hell”. He got buried alive. Eeek.

 

Actually, It’s not a bad yarn, and top marks for not being a movie-echo. Needs more varied numbers, though, to develop the characters of Lily, Yasuhiro and the sheriff. Simon Bailey and Niamh Perry are fabulous as the ghosts though, every bit as petulant, resentful, threatening and glamorous as one could ask.

 

box office 0844 264 2121 to 27 May
rating three  3 Meece Rating

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April 13, 2017 · 6:27 pm

THE PLAGUE Arcola, E8

A JOURNEY THROUGH A PLAGUE YEAR

 

With the horror of Syria fresh on us, and Africa’s travails with Ebola still haunting, this sombre, unforgettable treatment of Albert Camus’ LA PESTE feels urgently present. Neil Bartlett has pared down the novel’s characters to five – the central Dr Rieux played with remarkable balanced strength by Sara Powell, and alongside her Joe Alessi, Burt Caesar, Billy Postlethwaite and Martin Turner as Cottard, Grand, Rambert and Tarrou : I note that for those who know the book, but you don’t need to in order to feel the force of this 85-minute play.

 
Bartlett – who also directs – stages it with just five chairs and two tables, but within that simplicity all the vigour and surprise we associate with Complicité, where he began. We seem to be the audience in a sports hall (the kind of place, in modern disasters, so often turned into emergency mortuaries), and the characters, led by Dr Rieux, urgently tell the story. “Understanding what happened” is their theme. Recording, remembering, accepting its terrifying truth, recording their city’s journey through death and horror, from the time when like any modern conurbation it was “frenetic and vacant”, hardworking and businesslike and neglectful of fellow-men’s reality.

 

So first there were the dead rats, merely a nuisance, but soon too many to ignore: corpses underfoot. Then the infection, the bubonic swellings, the gaping agony, the medical arrangements holding good for a while but people “properly unsettled”. Then it grew to quarantine proportions with people outraged, wanting exceptions, a reporter (Postlethwaite, swaggering at first) demanding to be allowed to leave because it isn’t his city anyway. As the horror mounts, the uncoffined dead thrown desperately into pits, he changes, and resolves to stay.

 
The doctor, and the others, flash back into the work they did, struggles with both practicality and despair; the people begin to find even love “useless, unfit for purpose” in this terrible captivity. A sequence when, invisible, a child dies before them is agonizing. But plagues end: the aftermath is strikingly a mixture of rejoicing and blame and the one hopeful conclusion:
“There is more to admire about one’s fellow-citizens than to despise or despair of. Of course it wasn’t a victory. It is what it is: an account of some things that had to be done, and which I am sure will have to be done again…Joy is always under threat”.
The plague bacillus – whether literal, or as Camus may have equally been indicating in that postwar year , political – is only ever dormant. It will be back. But somehow, from this harsh haunting show you emerge into the bustle of East London encouraged.
Box Office: 020 7503 1646 | http://www.arcolatheatre.com
to 8 May    RATING four 4 Meece Rating

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