Category Archives: Theatre

NOEL COWARD’S CHRISTMAS SPIRITS St James Theatre SE1

“I’ll sing of home and love and work,
Of Magna Carta and Dunkirk
And Christmas bells and charity and pride…”

Who is this, melding private and patriotic sentiment to salute Christmas unembarrassed, heart on sleeve? It is Noel Coward writing to a friend, resolving in the depths of the London Blitz to stay put, work on cheer-up propaganda, and finish – for all his misgivings about the theme in such a deadly time – his “ghost play”, Blithe Spirit. On a hunch close to cabaret genius, this gorgeous little show has been devised and drawn from centuries of threatened Christmases.

Its creators are Nick Hutchison, who directs, and musical director Stefan Bednarczyk. Who also plays Coward himself, alternately twinkling and troubled, sitting at his piano or roaming around his Belgravia sitting-room on Christmas Eve, 1940. Behind him is the famous Blitz photograph of St Paul’s rising from the clouds; planes and the crump! of bombfall remind us where and when we are. Struggling with Blithe Spirit, Coward summons up his invented Madam Arcati – the marvellous Issy Van Randwyck in floating garments and green tights – and she in turn conjures the mediumistic maidservant from that play, Edith (Charlotte Wakefield). Between them, without gimmick or explanation, they call up Christmas words and songs from the centuries.

Not least Coward’s own: Bednarzyck’s strength is in not attempting imitation or pastiche of the master ’s delivery but in re-creating them for himself, skilful and expressive whether in the yearning sentiment of London Pride or the brisk humour of “Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans”. There are Coward letters and diaries too, and that remarkable poem about the bombers, Lie in the Dark and Listen, with its guiltily appalled awareness of the young bomber crews overhead :

 
“City magnates and steel contractors, factory workers and politicians, soft lysterical little actors, Ballet dancers, reserved musicians – safe in your warm civilian beds, Life is flying above your heads”…

Yet the delight is not all Coward; he and Arcati and Edith are but the conduits , as from the cast flow songs by Maschwitz and Berlin, Novello and Jerome; words by Ogden Nash and Samuel Pepys and Ben Jonson and John Clare and Dickens and that greatest of the world’s writers, Anon. Sometimes you laugh, sometimes hairs stand up on the back of your neck as you channel the fear , frivolity and fragile goodwill of the ever-threatened festival: banned by 17c Puritans, despoiled by greed, redeemed by moments like the Christmas Truce (yes, that’s there too). The brilliance of the presentation and choice is that even the best-known passages – like Scrooge or Dylan Thomas – emerge suddenly fresh and new.

In short, it’s a wonderful piece of theatre, magically magpie and delivered with full heart. And on the tables there are clove-stuck oranges: breathe them in deep, drink mulled wine, it’s proper Christmas.

box office 0844 264 2140 stjamestheatre.co.uk
to 23 Dec. Some matinees.
rating five   

PETITE BUT PERFECT PANTO. Oh yes it is. 

 
To start with, he’s a real kid: a young goat. Matthew Kellett, a cheery figure with furry chaps, horns and ears poking through his cowboy hat, is the favourite of economically squeezed rancher Buckaroo Dan (Joanna Marie Skillett, a girl) and pally with raunchy twerking 6ft 2 barmaid Nell (John Savournin, a bloke. Panto tradition must be respected). Evil Mumford (Bruce Graham) is out to kill Billy and ruin the ranch, assisted by his rudely named Indian slave Pocabeaver (Nichola Jolley). The Sheriff (Amy J Payne, another female, naturally) is in love with Nelly.
Actually, we all are , by the time she hits her first big number. For this is none of your yowly amplified panto-pop: all of them are opera trained singers: Royal Academy, Guildhall, Northern, D’Oyly Carte, you name it. People have been telling me for years that I ought to see Charles Court Opera at work, and at last I made it.

 
And frankly, if you want a boutique small-scale panto, this is the classy one. Though the definitive classiness of the singing (snappy lyrics in nicely borrowed tunes ranging from House of the Rising Sun to In The Navy) does not prevent them from spirited pantomimic daftness. Kellett the goat turns out to be a mean tap-dancer, there is an arresting scene where they milk a buffalo (a truly enormous one, heaven knows how they fit it in the tiny wings), Nelly gets to fling dung at us, there’s a pie fight, a singalong, everything you need.

The small children were beside themselves (though it was a bit loud for the year-old baby, these big voices don’t hold back) and the energy, musicality and disciplined daftness had adults whooping and cheering from a Islingtonian-cum-international audience. As for the barbershop quartet of puppet spirit-wolves who resolve the treasure hunt, words fail me. And there is even a fine Budget-week moral when they find it…wealth isn’t everything. Not when it’s cursed. Lovely: no wonder they sell out. Still some tickets though…

Box Office: 020 7704 6665  to 10 Jan
http://www.rosemarybranch.co.uk
rating: four  

…AND MISCHIEF THEATRE GETS IT TRIUMPHANTLY RIGHT

 
My latE Dad hated the theatre, for the kindest and most dignified of reasons. He preferred cinema : in live performance he feared that someone would get something wrong and “Show Themselves Up”. But he did like a good joke, and enjoyed silent-movie pratfalls; so I wish I could take him to see Mischief Theatre. Where with masterful precision, cast and crew make everything does go wrong for their fictional avatars; theatrical peril and pomposities alike are pitilessly defined, ambition meets its nemesis, props misbehave and sets collapse, extravagant gestures freeze into helpless stares, and jagged interpersonal relationships poke through the rubble.

I have had a soft spot for this gang ever since the short version of The Play that Goes Wrong, fresh from a drama students’ lark in a pub. It set me raving in the Times,whereon the producer Kenny Wax nipped round to check, and took it on. It lengthened, grew a bigger and even more technically tricksome set, toured, and has now settled up West in the Duchess, filled houses, covered costs, and extended well into 2015.

 
So last year I hurried to see the same writers and cast do Peter Pan Goes Wrong, with the same idea of an inept am-dram company. I gave it a reckless Christmas five, though it wasn’t perfect yet. Now here’s a return tour, with a new cast (the originals being busy in the Duchess) and a new director, Adam Meggido (of Showstoppers). And it’s better, leaner, more inventive. Authors Jonathan Sayer and Henries Shields and Lewis made a wise decision in sticking close to JM Barrie’s original text with its fey sincerity and faery whimsy, rather than attempting a panto. Indeed a good running joke is that the “Director” – Laurence Pears – who plays Hook becomes glaringly enraged whenever the audience, on nicely subtle prompts, shouts BEHIND YOU or O NO IT ISN’T. “It’s a traditional Christmas vignette! It’s not a panto” – “Oh yes it is!” we cry. The cast utter Barrie’s Wendyish lines under hideous duress as harnesses, props , scenery, and (memorably) costumes let everyone down .

This new cast is very good at doing suppressed panic with edges of miserable resignation; particularly enchanting in deliberate awfulness is Leonie Hill as Wendy, all stage-school overacting and worryingly inappropriate dance moves. Naomi Sheldon plays Mother, the maid and Tinkerbell with a sort of panicky determination, suitable to her fake biography as Annie the promoted ASM; and Cornelius Booth is the heavily bearded co-director and emergency substitute infant Michael.
Sound effects tapes played in error fill the stage with back-bedroom revelations about how much the directors despise the crocodile and only cast him because his uncle is funding it (Matt Cavendish is so nicely woebegone and put-upon that he gets a cheer every time he comes on).

 
Mischief’s trademark physical courage and skill are deployed in the botched flying scenes (including one unexpected moment of audience participation),in hairsbreadth-timed musichall head-bashes, and in the unfortunate electrocution of Tinkerbell, whose light-up tutu trails a mains lead. Some of the jokes I remembered, but under Meggido many physical ones are brand new and excellent. So is the chorus of genuine children, who relentlessly sing a jolly song during a dangling medical crisis overhead. They too get their comeuppance: Italia Conti mothers, look away…

Joy was pretty much unconfined, in one of the most technically challenging and funniest shows of Christmas. There is certainly a challenge to the touring theatres in the fearful culmination, in which the revolve -with a collapsing seesawing pirate ship – becomes unstoppable and reveals dozens of small vignettes of conflict, repair and dissolution, And am glad to report that they list a lot of understudies. Some of that stuff must really hurt. But down in the stalls, we’re very, very happy.

Guildford till Saturday; then touring!      
http://www.mischieftheatre.co.uk

rating: five   

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES LURKS HAPPILY AT THE BACK OF THE CLASSROOM

There is nothing funnier in the world than kids swearing. This play gets us as close to that as possible without without social services getting involved.
Class 4N are a trial class. They are the fortunate guinea pigs being tested with a new
child-led style of teaching. At the head of the classroom sits Badger Be Good whose bland morality tales will guide the children painlessly into compliant adulthood. “It shouldn’t even have any capitals” remarks one of the children. The walk into the theatre is one of the first thrills. You arrive at a devastatingly realistic looking primary school classroom. The detail is outstanding. Chloe Lamford’s nudges gasps from all who enter and mutters of “shit, look!” from one patron to another.
The play, like setting, is uncanny. The story is disjointed and sinister – a form of something we think we know. Children sing, plot and tell spooky tales of what happened to the kid who ate too many super-green smoothies. Middle class parents of the world look away now.  Amanda Abbington is the prim powerhouse Sali Rayner. She is the creator of this scheme and the kind of ball-clenchingly terrifying person who is both an educator and a star of ITV1. Think Mary Portas but with ‘thinking stools’ and felt tips. She is fierce and delightfully patronising to the children but they bite backfz. “She is called Sali which is a normal name but she puts an ‘i’ at the end to make her interesting”.

However the Guardianista wares she’s come to peddle are not welcomed by the kids. The kids say they are ‘stressed’ and the headteacher talks of ‘phases’ and ‘logs’. It stinks of an educationalist with a plan.  The kids start by playing along, but eventually rise up. Their teacher Ms.Newsom (nicely frantic by Ony Uhiara) breaks down and leaves. The quasi-corporate headteacher (snappily played by Nikki Amuka-Bird) desperately tries to keep the school afloat whilst the pleasingly no-nonsense northern Mrs Bradley (charmingly brought by Corrie’s Julie Hesmondhalgh) gives the children brief freedom.

The real joy here is how horrible the child Louis can be. Or “King Louis” as he manipulates his classmates into calling him. Brilliantly played the night I went by Bobby Smalldrige (a new acting dynasty name if I ever heard one), he is calmly and terrifyingly in charge. He cuts through a terrific amount of bullshit and looks barely 6.

But although Molly Davies’ play is politically fierce, sassily spoken and expertly staged by Vicki Featherstone, it suffers from a lumpy structure. It runs for 1 hour with an extra 45 minutes weighing it down. There are far too many scenes which cloud the gems and its neat politics get lost in setup and explanation.  Faulty but joyously original. Educational policy made punchy drama – no easy feat!
Box Office: 020 7565 5000 to 20 Dec
Supported by the Jerwood Charitable  Foundation
Rating: four   

NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS:  600 YEAR OLD SEX CRIME COMES TO TRIAL

It is the year 1399. In dim light, great John of Gaunt lies on his funeral bier awaiting burial in St Paul’s. Before him Geoffrey Chaucer and his resentful amanuensis Adam Scriven conduct a quarrel. It resolves into a trial of the old man for a rape which took place nearly twenty years earlier. His patron is dead, and Adam feels that celebrity has protected the poet for too long so this is the time for a reckoning of the old sexual crime. Years before, powerful friends and money meant he got away with it Topical, eh?

 
This is a two-night curiosity, past now, but an interesting experience to share the great Inn’s “Revels” on a night they took the form of a play presented by two veterans of the form: author Garry O’Connor (who wrote the novel Chaucer’s Triumph, about the real historic case) and director Nigel Bryant. The gilded and grand Great Hall stuffed with lawyers , plus a few of us legal ignorami, plays the jury. And once we had pronounced the defendant Not Guilty, it was revealed that on the first performance the night before, he was found Guilty. Which denotes, at least, a remarkable achievement of balance.

Or possibly a different audience attitude to changing legal rules It seems that in the 14c a man could not be convicted of “Raptus” if the woman got pregnant, because it was rather prettily believed that only her enjoyment could create a child. And it does transpire in O’Connor’s version that Cecilia Chaumpaigne, the supposed victim, was having a voluntary affair with Chaucer, but was just furious that he approached her during a naked bathe at a time she knew she was fertile.  All sorts of issues, human and legal, arise out of the attempt to untangle questions of human behaviour in the least rational of its activities.

Anyway, we let him off, but the story – told by himself, his wife, Adam, and the girl (briefly joined by the corpse of Lord John reviving from the bier) has an ancient, intricate humanity which fascinates, though it is more like a radio play than a fully-staged drama. Chaucer is Ian Hogg of the RSC, giving it all the depth of likeable fallibility and self-awareness one would expect in the feeling and mischievous author of the Canterbury Tales; Scriven as Stephen Tomlin radiates a skinny furious energy, and Alice Bird’s Cecilia is his strong, sharp, self-willed lover and accuser. Sarah Neville as the scornful Mrs Chaucer is a professional, but the two others (including the roused corpse of the grandee) are lawyers.

Altogether, a play which could either grow into full theatre, or work on radio. And I like Chaucer’s prescient sideswipe at the future porn industry – “Are they who feed on filth any better than those who commit it?”

THE WOMEN AND THE BOYS: YOUNG RATTIGAN BEGINS…

There’s a rugby ball and a bottle of Oxford Ale, clothbound law books, pipes, a cricket bat, 1930’s clutter. There are tweeds and cricket sweaters and waistcoats and immaculate whites. And it’s not entirely frivolous to start with design and costumes (Neil Irish and Emily Stuart): for that lovingly detailed attention to a particular period and place reflects the care and significance lavished on this first revival of Terence Rattigan’s first play.

Its milieu is important: an undergraduate shared house in Oxford, a male world where best friends Tony and David (Gavin Fowler and Philip Labey) are theatre-minded, social confident pups, sharing with the sporty Philip and the nerdy, bespectacled, prim Bertie. A butler tends their needs, but Proctors and “Bulldogs” police their social lives, making guests leave at midnight and banning them from lustful visits for “Female companionship” at the King’s Head. In those days (indeed, right up to my own late 1960’s when Burton and Taylor dropped in) OUDS plays had the clout to draw down not only national critics but professional female stars: Peggy Ashcroft came to play Juliet. In this play it is the glamorous Margot, recruited as Cleopatra against the youthful director Tony’s Antony. She is given pitch-perfect actressy charm by Caroline Langrishe until – equally perfectly – she stumbles into the emotional pit and becomes, vividly, the ancestress of Rattigan’s great portraits of middle-aged women shipwrecked by wrong love: Alma Rattenbury, Hester Collyer, Millie Crocker-Harris.

Rattigan was only 22, gave a co-writing credit to Philip Heimann his friend (model, probably for the characters’ casual love lives) and he did not include it in his Collected Plays. Probably thought it juvenilia, not to be remembered. But goodness, it’s Rattigan all the way: a first strike at the great themes of his heyday, and not least evidence of his heartbreaking ability – astonishingly young – to write strong woman characters. But youthful high spirits will win through, and until its rueful darkening in the final act, it’s a fine comedy, with real student rumbustiousness (which director Tom Littler amusingly uses to create some dancing, larking scene-changes).
There’s a wonderful turn by Molly Hanson as a dim but amiably willing flapper passed between the young men with a shrug, and a fearlessly hilarious, showstopping portrait from Adam Buchanan of the prim, naive geek Bertie, with his feeble moustache and round specs.

Bertie, indeed, is a very good joke in himself. For the story has Tony and Margo becoming emotionally entangled, despite the twenty-year age difference, with what she exasperatedly calls “you screaming brawling children” and the sardonic David, with homosocial if not actually carnal jealousy, possessively resents his friend’s involvement. It sails near the wind: the Lord Chamberlain insisted on changes of language, the Public Morality Council found it “unpleasant and immoral” and one critic huffed “I cannot commend the morals of the piece, which shows a number of undergraduates a little too preoccupied with sex”. Thus the joke is that Bertie – in a series of wonderful moments when he talks up virginity and cricketing team-spirit and tries to warn the all-too-knowing Joan about the “danger” she is in if she gets kissed – is in himself an embodiment of the censors, and of all that inter-war panic about young people getting out of control.

But the remarkable thing is that this young Rattigan, despite his obvious debt to Coward comedies, is drilling deep already into the dark. Into emotional male bonding, the alien strength and vulnerability of women, and the profound sadness of impossible love. This terrific, close-up, thoughtful production does him honour.

BOX OFFICE 020 7287 2875 to 22 Nov http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

rating: four

RADIO FOUR THE MUSICAL?   ABOUT TIME TOO

 
Radio 4 announcers tend to have a dry, contained sense of humour, honed by years in their lonely hutches listening to that most literate of networks, observing its idiosyncrasies and reading both news bulletins and programme introductions without ever betraying their secret opinions (you had to know the legendary Peter Donaldson for decades before you could detect the undertones of satire in his bland deep-brown announcements. Even then it was uncertain.)

 
So there is a real buzz in encountering, in this tiny adventurous producing-house, a comedy musical written by Kathy Clugston, one of those announcers. It has music and additional lyrics by Desmond O’Connor, and a spirit of mischievous affection shared utterly by her first-night audience . You knew she was preaching to the choir as soon as the defunct UK Theme, axed by Mark Damazer, began its Rule-Britannia chords before the start and everyone went “aaahhhh!”.

 
In moments we were into the first number, with John Humphrys and Jim Naughtie (Michael Fenton Stevens catching the Humph with uncanny accuracy and deadly humour) and Jonathan Dryden Taylor, who actually looks more like Peter Hobday but who got the monologuous questioning style bang on. And as the weatherman (Neil Ditt) and newsreader (Helena Blackman) sparred with authentic dawn ill-temper as the romantic juveniles, we learned the engine of the plot: that the Controller (Louise Plowright) was threatening dreadful cuts to the network, reducing the pips and abolishing Woman’s Hour and the Shipping Forecast.

 
To be honest, the first number and early minutes made me wonder whether it would sink beneath the weight of insider affection (though the wealth of groanworthy punning programme titles from an invisible Alice Arnold was fun from the start “The Classic serial will be – muesli”.). It is really more of a revue for R4 lovers, sending up musical-theatre itself and disguising a slightly too-fey plot with quick changes and daft beards. But Clugston’s strength is in big numbers, and some of them are lyrically brilliant. A trio led by Naughtie sings of a sneaky male addiction to Woman’s Hour; a marvellous interlude in the Pronunciation And Grammar Pedantry department hits many grudges about language (“What’s the use of saying utilize? And impact is not a verb!”) . It should be played on the real Radio 4 daily. Another showstopper is Humphrys’ confessing his secret love for scented candles, petting zoos and Michael Bublé.

There are flashes of real wickedness, not least the downfall of the evil Controller (Plowright storming the role) as she accepts the standard management punishment of being “moved to a higher position in aa different department”. So I was won right round. And in the style of the Shipping Forecast, whose fate provides a running theme , let’s just say:
General situation: Plot fair, occasionally rough. Scilly, gags advancing , becoming strong. Cast good becoming very good. Intermittent puns, poor becoming adorable. Over-Forties: very happy with occasional singalong. Outlook: possibly moving Westward. Good.

box office 01635 46044 to 8 nov http://www.watermill.org.uk

rating: –     ….oh all right, musicals mouse says four 

THE SADNESS OF THE SINGLE SPY…BENNETTIAN COMIC  MELANCHOLY

These two short plays are vintage, premier-cru Alan Bennett: funny, melancholic, sparking with ideas about Britishness, personality, class, the fingers of the past that claw at the present, and the yearning, seductive, necessary hypocrisies of national sentiment. Sarah Esdaile’s direction gives them the intelligent respect they need, and the shimmering ambiguities: the latter beautifully supported by a Francis O’Connor’s thoughtful design: both plays, with economical moves of furniture, take place against a vast collage of photographs. Anyone meeting them for the first time will get all that they should.

 
The first, An Englishman Abroad, was inspired by the real experience of the actress Coral Browne, playing Gertrude with the RSC in Moscow in a period of détente in 1958. Seven years after his defection, the “Cambridge spy” Guy Burgess invaded the dressing-rooms and asked her to “bring a tape measure” so he could order a suit from his British tailor. Their conversation reveals the aching loneliness and pointlessness of the exiled traitor’s life, and the actress’ response – half fascinated, half disgusted. Browne (Helen Schlesinger, crisply irritable) claims that “actresses are excused newspapers, as delicate boys were once excused games” but once exasperated after a long afternoon reproves him in basic terms: “You pissed in our soup and we drank it”.

 
Alexander Hanson ,after lately playing that other ambiguous smoothie Stephen Ward, is perfect casting: his floppy quiff and Jermyn Street campness covering disillusioned depression. He is even tearful, to Browne’s cynical dismay, when the scene changes and Orthodox church chanting fills the gloomy Moscow air (moody lighting turns the photographs into sepia ghosts). The London cameos with Alex Blake as the complaisant tailor, and Steven Blake as the shop assistant who refuses to make him new pyjamas are dry, funny, slyly sad. And as far away Burgess hums “O God our help in ages past”, echoing the old school chapel and old certainties, one is reminded of Bennett’s line in one of his diaries, about such hymns at funerals: “All one loves and hates..”

 
The second play – A QUESTION OF ATTRIBUTION – is slightly longer and heavier going, but a richly rewarding meditation on art, reality, and value. It covers an imagined moment in the life of another traitor, Antony Blunt, when he was given immunity – and anonymity until his 1980’s outing – but remained in charge of the Queen’s pictures. The scene everyone remembers is the one where the Queen has an oblique conversation with him, supposedly about a possible Titian forgery; but this riveting interlude is framed in his routine questioning sessions with an investigator, trying to identify the “fifth man” and beyond, Blunt being the fourth.

 
The policeman Chubb (Alex Blake, a nicely chippy performance) duels with Blunt: MIchael Pennington is elegantly patrician, engaging, clever, but projecting growing unease and fear of exposure. When Chubb, who claims to be learning art history, brutally says “Giotto had no grasp of perspective, and neither did you in the ‘30s”, Pennington’s irritable frightened wince is perfect.

 
Schlesinger becomes the Queen, never an easy gig because it is too easy to caricature and too hard to find the monarch’s inwardness, especially in this play where she exists really as a disrupter of Blunt’s peace. But again there are a couple of lovely cameos, notably Thomas Coombes as a footman. “Raphael? No, school-of. I know, I dust it”. And again, that Bennettian melancholy: a sense of waste, of idealism turned to shiftiness, of conflicted loyalty and wondering how far a bygone principle was worth it.

Box office rosetheatrekingston.org 020 8174 0090 to 11 Oct

RATING four   the fourth a bow for the designer 

Well, what a day that was. There is still in October one chance to see, in one day, all three of Rona Munro’s immense trilogy about the first three King Jameses of Scotland in the wild 15th century. I just did. But each play can stand alone, given a minimal introduction, so here before the detail are a few lines on which is which.

All three – directed by Laurie Sansom of the National Theatre of Scotland and designed by Jon Bausor – are staged in the round, the Olivier stage pierced by a great sword which will bleed and flame unexpectedly and never let you forget that the blade is everything in 15c politics. A tremendous ensemble cast of eighteen carries right through, with single stars in the first and third. The programme tells you enough to be getting on with, but Munro’s broadly true but dramatically fictionalised storytelling does the job.

The first – The Key will Keep the Lock – is a gracefully accessible tale of how the first James returns from being held hostage in England, marries his English Joan, replaces the Regent Murdac and tries to establish law, via a bit of murder and betrayal. It’s funny, wild, touching and spectacular.

 
The second – Day of the Innocents – is trickier, often surreal, as a child King is haunted by nightmare memory; some find it less rewarding. But after the interval the central relationship becomes seat-of-the-pants exciting, and I loved it.

The third – The True Mirror – is modern-dress, knowing, focused largely on the women: the least violent of the trilogy and immensely different in tone. Its resonances tickled Edinburgh audiences maybe more than it will in London, but the wit and vigour is intact. My least favourite.

Box office: 0207 452 3000 All run to 30 Oct

So here come the reviews: scroll on down…

GUEST CRITIC PHILIP FISHER IS AWED BY GEORGIAN ORWELL..

Anyone expecting a children’s show from Guy Masterson’s adaptation of Orwell could be in for a shock. This deeply political production, performed by a large ensemble from Keti Dolidze’s Tumanishvili Film Actors Theatre of Tbilisi, Georgia can be quite terrifying. In fact, its impact and mood are closer to what we expect from 1984 rather than Animal Farm.

It takes a little time to tune into the 90-minute play, partly because it is performed in Georgian with English surtitles; but also because the animals (a large menagerie) are only identifiable thanks to the strong physical acting capabilities of cast members. Once they get going, the classifications become pretty clear and the audience is treated to some chillingly effective imagery, courtesy of designer Simon Macahbeli.

The story is familiar but even so, takes on new connotations when delivered by actors from a country that was for so long a Soviet state and home to Josef Stalin. What seems like a hopeful beginning, when the animals are freed from the established tyranny of Farmer Jones and his human henchmen doesn’t last long. The seven commandments laid down to regulate life are soon forgotten as the terrible Napoleon, given a fearsome mien by leading actor George Kipshidze, begins his civil war against the more benign Snowball, Vano Dugladze.

Soon the animals are divided into two factions and the farm has become the USSR under Stalin, complete with plans, empty promises and enslavement, state-sponsored murder not too far behind.
The animals react very differently to Napoleon and his black hench-dogs, but one the most poignant experiences is that of Zurab Getsadze’s stalwart, workhorse Boxer who keeps the faith to the end. Which comes in the knackers’ yard, not the promised hospital ward.

This very special production is an undoubted Edinburgh highlight, thanks to a powerful adaptation and the commitment of its talented cast. It would be good to see it transfer to London in the autumn.

http://www.edfringe.com to 24th

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF?
I thought it was a children’s walk-through amusement, something to keep the little bleeders willing to accompany parents to the serious Traverse plays below. Had too many reviews to do anyway. But that heroine of fringe and innovative theatre, Lynn Gardner of the Guardian, said “Go. It takes twenty minutes. Go”.  So I booked a slot, divested myself of shoes and bag, and crept into a tiny room and sat down on some suitcases to watch revolving musical china pigs on a dresser . And I saw that she was right as usual. One must abnegate adulthood sometimes if one is to maintain balance.
What Shona Rebbe and Andy Manley have created (for Catherine Wheels) is indeed child-friendly: a series of miniature rooms taking you – surreally and obliquely – into the domestic world of the three little pigs: the reckless jerrybuilders who used sticks and straw, and the prudent one with the bricks.  The joy is in its weirdness: you are encouraged to handle and touch things, and you open the kitchen drawers to find bricks, find a fridge worryingly full of Italian ham, and a washing machine spewing straw. It has an unpretentious Dali-cum-fairytale appeal.

A disembodied kindly voice leads you on, telling you which wall is the door out (my favourite instruction is “pull on the underpants”. The bathroom is upside down, lav on the ceiling: sometimes you are in a cupboard, once a garage, always with offbeam, slightly threatening suggestions of the prowling wolf only countered by determined porcine domesticities.
It is quite lovely. Thank you Lynn. Unaccompanied children should be 8 at least (CCTV watches out for panic). But with siblings or parents , six year olds have loved it. As for lone adults…well, I played with everything and had a little dance once or twice. Bliss.
box office 0131 228 1434 to 24 aug
rating four

A KNIGHTSBRIDGE REDEMPTION….

 
Quotes from critics are always helpful. This one has “Drop dead funny and informative” on its flyer: not from a Spencer or Billington but signed “Inmates from Brixton Prison”. It was taken in there a year ago, and now this unlikely theatre, youth and mentoring outfit in a once ‘redundant’ church behind Harrods has a fresh production. That inmate imprimatur is significant because Darren Raymond, Artistic Director of Intermission, sets his 80-minute piece inside a modern UK prison, mainly in one cell. So it had to feel right: to catch the sweaty pointless claustrophobia, despair, disgrace and bravura bitterness of jail, and the black humour of men locked up.

 
Which, I reckon, it does. The opening parole scene with a weary governor and a severe, sarcastic woman officer (Janine Gillion) fairly catches both the mouthy indignant frustration of prisoners and the half-despairing patience of the staff who deal with them. We see the hero (played by Raymond with a staccato, rap-speed stroppiness) messing up his parole interview with a refusal, as the weary governor jots down “to comprehend the definition of punishment”. Nor does he admit any responsibility for the arsenal of guns found in his possession or the consequent death of a 12-year-old. He snarls that the officers are all just “police rejects and fat kids who got bullied at school”. He despises everything.

 
He has also, in an overcrowded prison, managed to be so violent and uncontrollable that he has had no cellmate for ten years of his sentence of eighteen. Gillion, with persuasive bribery, manages to get him to accept a young rookie, Charlie (Eddie Thompson). The first hint of strangeness, in a nice detail, comes when the officers can’t make the ID machine take Charlie’s photo. He comes up blank…

 
But then in the cell the play becomes a two-hander between this angry inhospitable Ryder, violently possessive of everything from his second bunk to his soap, and the naive lad who has to be told about prison ways like trading cigarettes for double ‘canteen’ credits to get luxuries like orange squash. Quite early on, Charlie says he won’t be there long because he is, in fact, an angel: to which a furiously horrified Ryder cries “A bible-bashing Jehovan’s witness wacko!” and dismisses him as crazy. Eddie Thompson, honed by five years with Intermission Youth Theatre and now in the full company, puts in a superb performance in this enigmatic part: naturalistically naif, good-humoured, nervous in a way which could mean he is a real inmate but could also denote an angel on a first mission. There are some good shivery moments as Ryder slightly softens towards his “nutter” cellmate over several days: not least when Charlie seems supernaturally to know the name of the older man’s wife, and we think “aha! an angel”. But “It’s tattooed on your arm” sputters the youth..

 
Raymond himself was inside many years ago – indeed first encountered the transformative power of theatre there with the London Shakespeare Workout projects. Since then he has matured into a serious and accomplished actor and created with Intermission some fabulous riffs on the Bard – HMP Macbeth, and before it the “Playground” version of a Midsummer Night’s dream. Here, though, he has gone back to a direct, naturalistic portrait of a prison world, and frames it in his own vision of redemption. And yes, in the final moments the redemptiveness gets you. The over-suave might find its religious underpinning and happy conclusion sentimental. But they’ve never been locked up for years and really needed to believe in hope.

In a week when we learned that reoffending by ex-prisoners has doubled, a good one to see.
020 7823 8979 info@intermissiontheatre.co. to sat 14th

THE PIG TAKES ON THE PROVINCES, AND WINS      

I reviewed the West End premiere of this new Stiles-and-Drew musical, directed by Richard Eyre and passionately backed by Cameron Mackintosh (the man was happily obsessed with his animatronic pig, which sang in Kylie Minogue’s voice at the curtain call). My Times review (£ paywall http://tinyurl.com/lhacvz5) was enthusiastic: the story of post-war rationing and snobbery defeated – based on an Alan Bennett TV play – was “witty, rude, lovable, warm, dramatic, hilarious.” I said it “beautifully evokes that Bennett north, preoccupied with good dinners and bad feet” . It was also timely, with its theme of a town preparing a banquet to mark Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, just as William and Kate revved up for theirs.
But for all the affection poured on the show, despite Sarah Lancashire and Reece Shearsmith in the lead, it did not run and run. I rather mourned it, with its lovely tunes, its English self-aware nostalgia and bicycling chiropodist hero (few musical lyricists would tackle the words “fetid fungal growth” or hymn verrucae with such elegance). I hoped it would find an afterlife, and suspected that an out-of-London tour was its best hope. Away from the West End audiences are more relaxed, pay less, and perhaps have a little more generosity of spirit.
So I have been wanting to catch up with Daniel Buckroyd’s recast, touring production. And it is lovely. I caught it in Oxford – though an unavoidable late start sadly made me miss the denouement in favour of a train – and can confirm that there’s real joy in Buckroyd’s version, slightly re-tweaked and presented with what he calls a “make do and mend austerity aesthetic.
It may not have major stars but it has even more personality: Tobias Beer booming a ferocious bass as evil Mr Wormold the Food Inspector , Haydn Oakley enchanting as Gilbert the chiropodist, the humble worm that turns. Amy Booth-Steel is plaintively bossy as his wife, dreaming of social advancement, one of those who like Bennett’s portrait of his own mother, will always long for roast pork but suspect that their life will always be spam.
The illegal pig, whose personality, theft and final consumption lie at the heart of the show, is not the clever but limited half-robot of the West End: this time she is a thing of cloth, manoeuvred by Lauren Logan with that magic puppetry which works so surprisingly well on stage ever since War Horse taught us that it could. And my favourite song of any recent new musical made me softly happy again, especially so soon after the D-Day commemorations and the renewed appreciation of that generation. As Gilbert tends the bad feet of war-widows and weary, hungry ration-era wives struggling to hold families together in 1947, they sing their gentle chorus of appreciation: “He reminds me of my husband as he was before the war…he has magic fingers, magic hands..”.
Daft, homely, but tears in the eyes. I’m glad it’s roaming onward and will last. Yorkshire and Liverpool next. Go for it.

TOURING

12 June – 5 July     West Yorkshire Playhouse
Tickets: 0113 213 7700 or http://www.wyp.org.uk

9 July – 2 August     Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse
Tickets: 0151 709 4776 or http://www.everymanplayhouse.com

FRESHER THAN EVER,  AN ANCIENT LOVE UNDER THE SKY

Eve Best is an irresistible Cleopatra for today: no slinky seductive exoticism but a fresh, joyful, larky sensuality as well-expressed in warlike cloak and breeches as in a nightgown, royal robes or – at one stage – just a sheet as she searches for an Antony who has deserted her bed when – she snorts with irritation – “A Roman thought hath struck him”. A fierily physical performer, Best gives full rein to the Queen’s hysterical jealous rages (never has a messenger been so comprehensively beaten up by a woman) but defuses even her greatest griefs and rages with self-aware jokes right to the edge of death. Even when rudely silencing the rather beautifully melodious singing eunuch (Obioma Ugoala) she mocks her own mood. Touching, too, is the relationship with her handmaids Charmian and Iris: easy, affectionate, joshing. Charmian’s “Good madam, keep yourself within yourself!” evokes a habitual, unrebuked intimacy.

 
Indeed the whole of the Egyptian court, fanned with hanging carpets in the sparsely set, free-moving visual language of the Globe’s great stage, looks considerably more fun than the Roman senate. Here the rest of the triumvirate – an unhappy sober-suited coalition – discuss Pompey’s maritime threat and Mediterranean power politics. For in order for Shakespeare’s play to work well, we must believe that Antony is torn between his destiny as soldier and statesman and a mid-life love affair which made him willing to “give a kingdom for a mirth”. We have to see how a tough man’s man, whose campaigning stamina and hardships were legendary, could be caught by the “serpent of old Nile” and make disastrous military decisions. And how all the same his other nature could draw him back to embrace Roman duty and let Cleopatra down by marrying Caesar’s “holy, cold and still” sister.

 
Some Antonys fail at this, either playing too much the lover, or trying for the kind of preternatural , soaring, godlike nobility described in Cleopatra’s extraordinary late encomium in the Monument scene. Clive Wood does not fail: he creates a chunky, passionate, troubled man whose sweetness is always at war with a habit of ruthlessness. Against him is set Jolyon Coy’s Octavius Caesar: prim, puritanical, the parting of his schoolboy haircut straight, afflicted by no visible affections except for his sister. When Antony returns to Rome, his bright purple jacket contrasts nicely with Caesar’s sober-suited court.

 
So the emotional line of this broad tragedy – pretty well untrimmed at three hours – hangs finely on those three performances, and is studded with other treats. Phil Daniels’ Enobarbus – entrusted with some of the most famous poetic lines – will not be everyone’s favourite but I like the way he speaks them , without pretension, as if he had just made them up. The choreographed dancing exuberance of the Egyptians set against the stamping march of Rome underlines the difference even when both share the stage. When war breaks out in earnest a great tattered map of the Mediterranean countries falls from above and men with banners whirl aloft around one another on ropes.

The great golden-winged tragedy unfolds in the monument ,the asp strikes: silence and applause from thatch to groundlings confirm that necessary and ancient sense that we have been through something big, together.

 
box office 020 7401 9919 to 24 August

rating   four

REDEMPTION OF A HOLLYWOOD HUNK…
The tiny am-dram theatre is threatened with redevelopment: only celebrity casting can save it. Jefferson Steel – fading star of Ultimate Finality 1, 2, 3, and 4, each worse than the last – is hoodwinked by his LA agent into a UK stage debut, as King Lear. He thinks he is heading for the the RSC but finds the Suffolk mud of another Stratford. Director Dorothy Nettle welcomes the furious dupe, though a less warm reception comes from her deposed leading man, preening Nigel who reckons he’s the new Olivier. Cue an evening of raging, pathos, bathos, and fine old-fashioned farcical fun.

For theatre loves to mock itself: from The Critic to Noises Off , cluttered backstage sets, self-parodying tantrums and blissful overacting strike a happy chord in both actors and audiences. Comedy scriptwriters Ian Hislop and Nick Newman (with an idea from John Ross and Jonathan Gershfield) wrote a 2008 film with Burt Reynolds as the American and Derek Jacobi, no less, as Nigel. This, though, is its stage premiere, rewritten entirely: Hislop assures me “We were able to use more Shakespeare, and put back lots of good lines which Burt couldn’t manage”.
They have also, with oddly moving effect, used the Fool’s songs from Lear, set by Paul Herbert, to cover with rueful aptness the scene-changes. For these, in Tom Rogers’ faux home-made amdram set, the cast unfold chintzy perfect little room-sets of the local b & b in front of the central stage-within-a-stage. It supports the general sense of homely fun. Mitchell Mullen is choleric and satisfyingly bad-mannered as the Hollywood star: trapped by his own publicity, trailerless and outraged by having to walk the fifty yards from Mary’s b&b – “English breakfast? Bring me a guava juice, eggwhite frittata, and a skinny decaf latte with soya..” etc). Sarah Moyle is wonderful as the starstruck middle-aged Goneril, all girlish toothy grins and flattery, but constantly confusing him with Willis or Schwarzenegger. Another treat is Damian Myerscough as the local plumber torn between his self-appointed role as Steel’s “entourage” and his anxiety to incorporate a pickled onion in the blinding of Gloucester. Aactually, in a recent Lear in Bath, the eye was tossed into Goneril’s martini just like a cocktail onion, so he’s bang on-trend there.
There is nicely modulated tension between Nigel (Michael Hadley) with his orotundly ghastly Gielgud ac-ting, and Steel’s contemptuous Hollywoodism (“I wanna rewrite! And I don’t do crazy, cut the loonytunes on the heath”). The plot romps along briskly, with the arrival of Steel’s estranged teenage daughter and Lear-ish echoes in their relationship. There’s a standard rom-com misunderstanding and a crisis elegantly reflecting Shakespeare’s storm. Hislop and Newman are human enough to let in real emotions, not to mention sentimentalities about the redemptive power of theatre ( with which I of course concur). But they’re savvy enough to temper both with sharply funny bathos.

And just as you think aha! here comes a soft landing with “I am a very foolish fond old man”, there’s a final shock which tumbles, beautifully, into a priceless joke relating to ER. There’s a lot of love gone into this production, under Caroline Leslie’s skilled direction: whether the play will last I can’t quite predict. Except to say that if Kevin Spacey fancies a bit of self-mocking fun in his final summer next year at the Old Vic, I’d really love to see him as Jefferson Steel. Could happen.

01635 46044 to 28 June

rating four (it woz Shakespeare that won the fourth..)

WELL, SWIPE ME DOWN THE OLD KENT ROAD, ME OLD CHINA…

Would you Adam and Eve it: the Joan Littlewood centenary restores to her sacred stage not only Oh What A Lovely War but this celebration of bygone lowlife: tarts, spivs, pimps and gamblers. We’re in a club beneath the Soho pavement – William Dudley’s set is brilliant, you can almost smell the stale beer and sweat. Our characters are living in 1959 but mourning for the good old days when a man could make a dishonest living in peace and pay off the cops.

 
Now poor Fred (a suitably battered Mark Arden), has emerged from jail to find the Palais is a bowling-alley and there are “Teds in drainpipe trousers and poofs in coffee-houses” . He has lost half his club to the barman at poker and fings simply aren’t the same. Even the slumming posh-boy Horace and his spangled deb girlfriend are depressed about it – “There used to be Noel..now it’s the dole” and the bent cop (Gary Kemp) is going straight because he gets tired of never entering a room without someone running out of it it. Usually that is Christopher Ryan as Red Hot the diminutive burglar, who steals every scene he is in. Only the oldest profession soldiers on undaunted, under the pimp Tosher (a Teddy-quiffed Stefan Booth, nicely nasty). Fred’s girlfriend Lil – a lovely solid performance with a real vaudeville voice from Jessie Wallace – has given it up but admits “My old lady’s still on the game. So’s my Nan, some afternoons”. But all the girls doughtily maintain the old whoop-de-doop cartoon standards of frill, paint and corsetry now defunct in the London Road age of sad junkies in bomber-jackets and trainers.

 
Lionel Bart’s musical – from a book by ex-con Frank Norman – was a pet project of Littlewood, seeking working-class liveliness to kick at the old order: “Guys and Dolls, but with its flies undone”. Tweaked by Elliott Davis with extra Bart songs thrown in, it is a lot of fun, at times deliberately shocking. As when Rosie the modest runaway (Sarah Middleton, very sweet) comes fresh from a plaintive number about why sparrers can’t sing to join Tosher’s tarts; sent out to a known bruiser, she comes back covered in blood.

 
There are plenty of funny touches, as you’d expect with Terry Johnson directing: when Herbert the gay designer tries to make the dive look “contemporary” there is not only a Magritte and a Picasso weeping-woman but a set of Keeler chairs: nicely prefiguring the Stephen Ward scandal of three years later as the cast quite casually straddle them. And I cherish Rosie’s exit line “”Going to Stevenage. They say it’s going to be lovely when it’s finished”.

 
That sense of era is well established, though occasionally it feels weird to be in 2014, in the same row as the real Barbara Windsor who played in the original, being nostalgic about 1959 people who themselves nostalgic for 1930. Bart’s songs – as ever – require and get a lot of quite raucous belting, but Davis and Johnson have paced it well, so that only a few numbers have that dated Bartian “I feel a song coming on” sense of stopping the action. All in all, the cheerful treatment of dead-end lives makes you suspect that in 2054 there will be a lovable musical yearning back to the Olympic London of knife gangs, half-million quid flats, Boris, oligarchs, Starbucks ,Farage….

Box Office 020 8534 0310 to 8 June  www.stratfordeast.com

Rating: four 

IMBRUGLIA IN A FINE IMBROGLIO
When two old schoolfriends meet after eleven years, naturally they sing the old school song. “Girls of St Gert’s! Pure in your body, healthy in mind..” When two women are at odds over one man, it’s the dirty version you hear by the end. Gerts, Gerts, lift up your skirts!  It is a traditional love triangle that Alan Ayckbourn creates in this 1997 play; but there’s a fourth wheel on his wagon, and very beautifully it rolls along.

 
In heartless Feydeauesque farce it is important not to care much for the poor deluded puppets struggling in the machinery. In comedy drama you ache for them: when Ayckbourn is at his best, with his typical streak of pain, it can be difficult to remember why anybody ever chooses any other medium to lament the human condition.
Laurence Boswell’s shining production feels dateless : these people are ever with us. There’s Barbara the brisk chilly spinster PA and Nikki the eternal fourth-former, a cooing, little-girlish tease trailing her hunky oceanographer fiancé Hamish. Even the sweet, unpredictable oddball Gilbert in the basement flat is real: jauntiness and plumbing jargon on the surface and a boiling ferment of secret self-expression below.

 
Unusually, Ayckbourn wrote it for proscenium theatre, and part of its wit lies in the way it displays three floors of a Fulham house (Giles Cadle’s design here). Barbara’s flat, mimsily manless, is the centre, above and below mere slices. Aloft is the flat Nikki and Hamish have temporarily rented, so only feet and legs indicate the goings-on; below, we glimpse just the ceiling level of Gilbert’s basement, but it becomes a highly significant ceiling.

 
Claire Price is Barbara, with just the right combination of defiant briskness and shattered disappointment: her interplay with Edward Bennett’s Hamish, initially instinctive mutual hatred, gives the play sharp laughs from the start in those establishing scenes which often slow down such a comedy. Simon Gregor’s Gilbert is pitched to perfection, and pulls off the very Ayckbournian moment when, leg-jerkingly, assertively, comically drunk he suddenly catches pathos with the announcement that when his wife died the disco-ball stopped spinning in “a lonely ballroom where once we danced through life together”.

 
All are seasoned stage performers, but the surprising joy is Natalie Imbruglia, Neighbours star turned smash-hit popstrel. It’s her stage debut, but you’d think she had been working live on the boards for decades. Her Nikki is faultless: twining and gushing, teasingly frigid, finally a ball of tense and vengeful violence.
It romps to its conclusion beautifully, by way of a spirited, bum-biting, roller-pinning, headbangingly bruising fight (arranger, Kate Waters , take a bow). And students of the comic form will rather enjoy the fact that it seems to end twice. If Joe Orton had been in charge (at times his ghost nods approvingly) it would have ended with a certain mayhem-transvestite-disaster shock. Ayckbourn bolts on five more minutes because not all audiences like to go home on a note of disgraceful chaos. Two for the price of one.

TOURING to 21 june: next up, 13- 17 May at New Theatre, Cardiff
details: http://www.uktw.co.uk/Tour/Play/Things-We-Do-For-Love/T0337620179/
Rating: five

MINXY MURDEROUSNESS AMID THE WAVING CATS..

Polly Findlay, who gave us the National Theatre’s tough Antigone and Derren Brown’s Svengali, has great fun with RSC directorial debut: heavy snow, thick fog, pitch darkness, the more evil characters enjoying petulant asides to the audience, and a crane facilitating a memorably unsuccessful attempt at hiding a corpse. Oh, and a startling final treatment of Chinese Lucky Waving Cats. It is a play which demands no less: as Stratford’s “Roaring Girls” season rolls on in the small auditorium down the corridor from the male political solemnities of Henry IV, anything less than a full-throated 100-minute trip over the top and down the other side would be unwise.

For it’s no masterpiece. It’s an anonymous 1592 play, bits of it fairly randomly ascribed down the centuries to Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare himself, though there’s only one scene, a ferocious lovers’ tiff, which for me rises to a Shakespearian level of vigorous insult. Elsewhere there is a sense that his contemporaries, between beers, were taking the mick. Ian Bonar’s nervous manservant William has a Hamlettish soliloquy about whether to collaborate in the central murder, and Sharon Small’s flirting, wriggling, slinky finger-snapping killer-wife is awarded an improbable Lady Macbeth moment. Think of it as a prototype Ealing black comedy; it bears the same relationship to Shakespeare as The Comic Strip Presents does to a solemn BBC drama.

Not least because this is a thoroughly middle-class tale. It could come straight out of a modern tabloid, and Findlay makes Arden (Ian Redford, splendidly fat-cat) not only a 21c property man but owner of a warehouse packing up terrible gold Chinese waving-cats, presumably as a cheerfully unsubtle symbol of naff pointless globalization. Sharon Small as Alice is equally TOWIE, in Lacroix-style garish outfits and inch-high aquamarine eyeshadow which precedes her into the room.

It was based on a real murder in the mid-16c: Thomas Arden was killed by his wife Alice and her lover, who hired a hit-man. Additional interest arises from the fact that Arden is no innocent: in the few poignant moments petitioners beg for the return of land and livelihoods which he has annexed. There is a sub-plot, of which Findlay makes the most, involving rival suitors for Alice’s terrified maid (a physically hilarious though mainly silent Elspeth Brodie in Marigold gloves). The larkiness, however, stems from the glorious (Ealing!) incompetence of the plots: first Alice tries to poison Arden and he dislikes the porridge: Small hurls it around the stage with magnificent petulance. Then they persuade an idiotic painter (Christopher Middleton) to make a lethal poisoned crucifix (very Jacobean, that) protecting himself by stuffing rhubarb up his nose. But nothing comes of that.

Mainly, though, the murder is delegated to Black Will and Shakesbag – Jay Simpson and Tony Jayawardena – who when not accidentally knocking one another out or falling in ditches, can be seen in the gallery overhead fighting hopelessly over the instruction book for a laser-sighted sniper rifle. Top marks to both for not falling off the catwalk into the audience’s laps, either in the pitch dark or the thickest fog I have ever seen on stage. They get Arden in the end, of course, and justice gets them all. Macbeth it ain’t, but smartly done.

Rating: Oh all right. Four .

IT’S TRUE! A FISH DOES NEED A BICYCLE!
We’re in a cavernous Victorian swimming-pool, a dreamworld where the waterfall is made of bath-plug chains. Then we’re in a sea-green underwater of gliding bubbles, carnival fish on elaborate bicycles and a top-hatted vaudeville villain. Our yearned-for angel perches on a diving-board above, and hooded watery creatures suddenly bubble and vanish upwards in a Pepper’s Ghost illusion. As a family musical it’s pretty odd, and not just thanks to Morgan Large’s extraordinary designs.

Having had a retro childhood , I grew up with the Rev. Charles Kingsley’s sentimental yet fierce fable about Tom the poor sweep-boy, tossed into an underwater world and morally educated by the beautiful Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and the witchy, vengeful Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid. This new musical is at two removes, writers Guy Jones and Ed Curtis (who also directs) and composer Chris Egan having been “inspired” by the film. So I vaguely expected the morality to be ironed out and a romantic ending bolted on.

Wrong! Instead – and this may give it ongoing succcess – they key in to the modern, vampire-loving young-adult fiction world: teenage angst at injustice, confused guilt at letting people down, and impossible unfulfilled romance. Tom – leaping down the waterfall to escape a wrongful accusation – is Thomas Milner, with a naive, emotionally truthful boy-band sweetness. Egan’s songs are often lovely and always listenable, Louise Dearman as the overseeing Mrs D. handling some fabulous power ballads and sharp lyrics – saving the boy from court she sing-snarls “I don’t like stories that end with teenage boys locked away – handed a story without hope, a story that ends at the end of a rope”. And as Ellie, the upmarket blonde teen angel perched on her diving-board, Lauren Samuels is vocally and physically gorgeous.

Tom meets three sea-creatures (on those mad bicycles) who want to help: Andy Gray is a punning Scottish lobster, Tom Davey a screamingly camp quiffed seahorse and Samuel Holmes a cowardly French swordfish. If you think someone’s channelling the Wizard of Oz, just wait till our heroes go down the terrifying tunnel at the End of Nowhere to confront the Wiz – sorry, the Kraken, who turns out to be a hologram of Richard E.Grant on a rocking chair made of old pipework. In between repeatedly dissolving into a small child, he offers temptations in the best moral tradition, luring the boy with visions of home and love to dump his water-baby friends.

Tom must make a Kingsleyesque moral choice here, since he has accidentally, betrayed the dopey dancing water-babies to the evil Electric Eel. The latter gets a great storm of cheers and boos: it’s Tom Lister – how he was wasted all those years on Emmerdale! – storming around in a top-hat and cloak, ever-changing cod accents and startling lightning effects. He electrifies the enslaved water-babies so that they constantly applaud and praise him (a sort of Kim-Jong-Eel, ho ho). Richard E.Kraken is not the answer though: look rather for the modern teen moral “Name your monster, share your fear, make the nightmares disappear” and “Be the man I know you want to be”.

Tom does the right thing, but it’s no trite ending. A spectacular one, though. And in its, way this show is as odd, sentimental, moral, tough and otherworldly as old Rev. Kingsley could wish. He was a friend and supporter of Darwin, and I think he’d rather like the evolution. Lobster-bikes and all.

box office 0)116 242 3595 to 17 May

rating: four

A FABULOUS LITTLE FRIGHTENER…

What’s going on? you quaver, as four characters move and weave at impossible angles around a bare scaffolding of wall and door shapes. Are they gripped by some fiendish science or magic? or just by their own tormented psyches, as they utter broken sentences trying to remember something dreadful? You jump out of your skin as neon shapes of rooms and windows overhead reveal a screaming face, and thumping heartbeat sounds of dreadful import shake the little theatre. Is it sci-fi? are these people blown into the Fourth Dimension through a cosmic wormhole? Or has Bryony Lavery taken to surrealist neo-Beckettian theatre of disorientation?

The bewilderment clears and it seems that were are in a genre lately scorned by Kathleen Turner as “kid-jeop”: in which emotion is ratcheted up by putting a child in peril. We flash back, via an admission that drink and spliffs were involved. There was a terrible gale and flooding (this is, after all, co-produced with Theatre Royal Plymouth). Marianne and Joff (Eileen Walsh and Christopher Colquhoun) were invited, with their unseen nine-year-old Grace, to eat and sleep over with less afflicted neighbours they haven’t met before, Maud and Ollie (Penny Layden and Richard Mylan).
These are the Believers: hippyish, prone to long rambling graces, candles, herbs, new-agey stuff about Forces and sexual freedom. The dinner-table discomfort of the new – non-believing – arrivals is beautifully done and naturalistic (bar the odd weird convulsion and worrying neon room-shapes overhead). As they grow drunker and more stoned the talk turns to the ‘challenging’ behaviour of Grace and her parents’ despair, compared to the daughter of the house, Joyous. Offstage, Grace kills a chicken, and the believers offer a “warm herbal bath” with candles and prayers to “heal” her of evil. It’s as if Ayckbourn rewrote The Turn of the Screw.
Suddenly the blackouts and perspectives grow crazier: figures seem to stand at impossible angles; once we are looking down from above (how? mirrors?) on the two visitors. Blackness, candlelit faces, more convulsions. Sexual threat. Foreboding noises. Is it Satan, is it devil-children, is it the Thing in the “sky with a lot of claws”? Will we ever face a windy night again without shuddering?
You may notice that my graphic mouse-rating for this fabulous little frightener consists of director, designer, lighting and sound-mouse. Which is not to belittle four terrific actors, or Lavery’s writing, but to acknowledge the major contribution from director-choreographer Scott Graham of Frantic Assembly. Working with Jon Bausor’s giddily incredible designs, artfully lit by Andy Purves and the most alarming soundscape in London by Carolyn Downing he creates a spectacle: a 75-minute ride to beat any ghost-train. You could get all portentous and say it has messages about modern parenting, drugs, or the flakier brands of religiosity. But I’m not sure what those messages are. Too frightened to think. Lovely.
box office 0207 328 1000 to 24 May (extended already!) http://www.tricycle.co.uk

Rating: four    

THE BUTLER, THE FETE, AND THE HOLLYWOOD HORROR
I saw this Coward revival last summer in Bath (Times review, £, http://tinyurl.com/qyxqbw2 ) with its gorgeous Palladian country-house drawing-room by Stephen Brimson Lewis matching the Theatre Royal’s own sumptuousness. I remembered the clever casting of Caroline Quentin, solidly honest, as the matter-of-fact lady’s maid Moxie who discovers to her horror that the young earl’s Hollywood fiancée is her own long-lost (and unregretted) sister who ran away.
I applauded the brilliance, both in comic timing and feeling, of Patricia Hodge as the dowager Lady Marshwood fussing over the village fete but aware in 1951 that she belongs to a bygone Downtown world, “something that’s over and done with…So many of one’s friends have to work, and they’re so bad at it!”. England is slowly struggling out of the aspic of prewar social certainties , its nobs trying to work out the difference between above-stairs and below. In one argument they decide that one could, for instance, take one’s golf instructor to the opera, but noe one’s butler – even though both might be born in identical social circumstances.

Trevor Nunn wisely intersperses the scenes with bits of newsreel, both real and cod, reminding us of the recent war and rationing, the Festival of Britain, and Prime Minister Churchill’s unconvincing speech about the end of social distinctions.
Quentin is still brilliant, better if possible than at Bath; so is Hodge. And this matters, because the emotional core of the play is the longstanding devotion, even friendship, of mistress and maid, compared to the hollow flibbertigibbet romance of the silly young Earl and the self-absorbed Hollywood girl with her movie-star ex and misery-memoir fibs about her humble childhood. The scenes where Moxie has to pretend to be a “secretary” so as not to lose face and liten to the actress Miranda showing off, are as funny as anything in Coward. Stepping into the cast as Miranda is another treat: Leigh Zimmerman, so funny and touching in A Chorus Line, here playing the part of the Awful Actress with elegant glee.

And for aficionados of dear Noel, it is fascinating to see a late – if lesser – play in which (las in Volcano) the old chap has grown bored of his passionate young lovers from Private Lives and Design for Living, and just wants to celebrate long, calm partnerships which make less fuss. It is also fun to notice his chippy, insecure references to other dramatists . They’re given to the butler Crestwell, like “If you will forgive a Shavian archaism…” or “Yes, a coincidence in the best tradition of British comedy. Imagine what Mr Somerset Maugham would make of it!”.

Ah yes, Crestwell. He is Rory Bremner, and to be honest, still not brilliant. Nothing you can put your finger on, and to be fair a butler always is to some extent an impressionist – playing a part, perhaps a little jerkily, in front of the toffs. But there’s a dryness here, a lack of reality. Only once does he seem real, when Moxie is berating him. But it’s fun, a cheerful evening and a last laugh from a Coward no longer brittle, but wistfully acknowledging how the anchor of daily, familiar affections is a consolation in a crumbling world.

0844 871 7615. atgtickets.com/london to 21st June

rating : four  

AND SO IT GOES ON… (review of part I just below)    

Such is the traditional, ungimmicky nature of Greg Doran’s productions that it is quite a shock when “Rumour”, the abstract character who introduces the second part of the Henry-Hal-Falstaff saga, comes on in a pop art red-mouth T-shirt in front of a flashing projection of social media gabble. It wakes us up, though, and is only a fleeting moment before the centuries roll us back into the tale. Having seen Part I, we know how much is rumour and how much truth: that Hotspur is dead, the first battle won but the rebels still angry, and that a slight souring has crossed the relationship between Prince Hal and Antony Sher’s Falstaff (who has by now scored a feather in his awful hat and a cheeky, adorable tiny page).

This play gives more space for the tavern characters to grow, and to find their own melancholy. Paola Dionisotti as Quickly is a victim of Falstaff’s debts and lies, still fiery but less certain; the fat knight himself is more often obstreperous than amusing, Bardolph remains glumly, beautifully resigned and Pistol (Antony Byrne) is plain barking mad, with a hairstyle that can only be described as deshabillé Jedward.

But what Greg Doran finds in this second part is a sense of inexorable change: old Henry is dying, Hal’s return to the tavern set is sourer, more bent on teasing Falstaff than enjoying him. Doll Tearsheet (Nia Gwynne) has an unhappy anger about her. There are moments of great fun, not least Pistol’s crazy chandelier-swinging and trouserwork, but decline and death haunt them all. Falstaff’s “Do not bid me remember mine end” to Doll is amplified later in a peculiarly touching rendering of his scene with the old men Shallow and Silence, set before a hay-cart which reminds you of the simple, suffering rural England across which battle has raged. The limping, shuffling peasant soldiers they recruit are treated with more pathos than humour (congratulations to Leigh Quinn as Wart, bent double: that’s a memorable RSC debut and I hope the physio looks after her).

So the serious Matter of England presses hard, beyond the foreground concerns of warlike nobles and tavern revellers. And so does the gradual, inexorable advance of death on all: when the old men giggle about “Jane Nightwork” a former tart of fifty years ago, the shocked realization in the line “She’s old..she cannot help but be old..” hits home with rare force. “We have heard the chimes of midnight, Master Shallow..”
This has never been my favourite of the two parts, and if I were forced to ask which one to book, the first would win. But if you can do both, to see the story out is a great thing, the cross-currents richly rewarding. Jasper Britton makes Henry’s approach to death deeply moving and involving , and Alex Hassell’s self-reinvention as a responsible prince is well taken. Because in a characteristically young-male adolescent switch, the thoughtless irresponsibility of his past becomes an equally thoughtless, posed frigidity as he delivers that most famous snub in literature: “I know thee not, old man”.

0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 6 September

Part 3 in participating cinemas 18 June (see below for Pt 1)

rating: four   

RADICAL FEMINISM – IT’S NOTHING NEW…
Now here’s politics! The mistress of the runaway Tory MP is a revolutionary preacher, previously known as Mad Agnes. She berates her lover with “Accident of birth sent you to the wrong side of the House; influence of family kept you there – supporting the Party that retards, the Party that preserves for the rich, palters with the poor!”. Having converted him to the cause of progressive radical moralities, when the poor sap buys her an evening dress she scorns it with “Would you have me hang this on my bones? Rustle of silk, glare of arms and throat, they belong to a very different order of things from that we have set up!” . Good grief: it is still only 1895, and already we have a prototype 1970’s feminist bra-burner.

Arthur Wing Pinero is best known now for The Second Mrs Tanqueray, and his The Magistrate was lately at the National. This one, set in Venice amid expatriate English, hasn’t been revived since 1895 with Mrs Patrick Campbell shocking the bourgeoisie. But it is a fascinating, dramatic, verbose take on the hypocrisies and emerging radicalism of the age – a nice companion-piece, indeed, to Ibsen’s GHOSTS just up the road, another moral cornerstone of the changing century. So credit to Primavera for reviving it in this tiny theatre, tidying away a few minor characters and delivering – with a cast of nine – Abbey Wright’s spirited production. There’s a suitably leprous palazzo backdrop by Cherry Truluck and an intelligent, lead from Rhiannon Sommers as Agnes: open-faced , striding, and confident that womanish emotions can’t weaken her until they suddenly do. As she cries “To be a woman is to be mad”.

She is counterpointed by a fine Julia Goulding as Gertrude, the virtuous Yorkshire widow grieving a lost child, who befriends her despite an initial moral shock at the free-love views and bitter conviction that marriage is a “choked-up, seething pit”. Max Hutchinson plays Agnes’ Hugh-Grantish wimp of a lover Lucas, and Christopher Ravenscroft (in gorgeous spats) delivers a very subtle performance as the world-weary silver-haired rake of a Duke, sent by the family to reclaim the runaway MP but finding himself drawn to the vitality of the “dowdy demagogue, a shabby shapeless rebel”. He alone realizes what the evening frock is doing to her. “In your dowdy days you had ambitions..they were of a queer gunpowder-and-faggot sort, but they were ambitions”.

The story played out by these layered characters is as if George Bernard Shaw had fallen under the influence of Charlotte Bronte, and the second act rises to a terrific confrontation. Agnes is leaving Lucas, but his wife and brother are horrified to find that without her, he still won’t come home. Shockingly the wife pleads with the mistress to go back and be set up in a quiet suburban lovenest so she can remain his ‘a la mode’ public wife.
It’s rich with ironic contradictions, uncanny modern parallels and one of the cruellest portrayals anywhere of a particular kind of vain male politician. The sort who has “Ambition without confidence” and feeds on applause, praise, and female admiration. Ouch!
box office 0207 287 2875 to 3 may

rating:  four

DARK BITTER JOY: A PERFECT CONFECTION

This play is vintage Alan Ayckbourn: elegant, polished dramatic machinery serving a darkly comic and rueful human heart. Perfectly suited to a renewed age of acquisitive moral relativism, it actually dates from a 1987 commission by Sir Peter Hall. He invited Ayckbourn to take a break from Scarborough in-the-round and write for the National. The playwright, never in a proscenium, chose the Olivier’s vast thrust stage and split it into many rooms. Now in Adam Penford’s lovely revival, Tim Hatley’s set is a vast brick dolls-house two floors deep, before a glimpsed arc of other houses. This suits the action perfectly, since it happens in three different family houses (sometimes at the same time in different rooms) and part of the joke is that they are identical affluent suburban-estate clones. Differences (like Anita’s bedroom dungeon) are only implied behind the identical doors.

The plot has a bluff new-broom Jack (Nigel Lindsay in terrific and heartbreakingly credible form) come to take over a faltering furniture business from his aged father-in-law. After a pleasingly hilarious opening – a classic farce moment with an inappropriate surprise party, as Ayckbourn tries to fool us into expecting pure comedy – Jack makes a rousing speech about rebuilding ‘trust’ and honest dealing down to the last office paperclip.

They all concur. But the whole tribe has been on the take for years, enmeshed in fraud with five dodgy Italian brothers all sleeping with Jack’s sister-in-law Anita, which leaves her husband Cliff untroubled as long as he has his Porsche and boat. Brother-in-law Des is saving up to run away from his praying-mantis of a wife, who has a terror of food, and become an incompetent chef in Minorca. Jack’s daughter Sam is shoplifting: getting her off the rap leads to the first crack in his integrity, followed by all the other cracks all the way to a startling extreme in which one character (no spoilers) meets a fate piquantly similar , if you swop a trough for a bath, to what happens to Lear’s Fool on this very stage on other nights. Excellent symmetry.

Darkening hilarity and angry irony drive the tale, with twists too good to betray. So let me just list a few joys: Niky Wardley as Anita , a suburban Goneril in fetish corsetry; Neal Barry’s Des amid clouds of evil-smelling smoke in his kitchen, Amy Marston’s Harriet with her loudly snoring pet dog and hysterical revulsion at food, and not least Matthew Cottle, sinister and pasty, as the private investigator moving from gloomy righteousnessto thrilling villainy (Cottle saying the words “corporal punishment” is worth the ticket price).

And let us not forget Gerard Monaco as all five Italian brothers in wigs of varying horror, who is sportingly credited in the programme as various anagrams of himself (Gordon A.Cream, Don Groamacer, etc). And credit to NT debutante Alice Sykes as Sam, the youngest and most betrayed, alone in a grim final spotlight as the family downstairs completes its transformation from Cheadle-Hume respectability to Cosa Nostra. Excellent.
Being away last week and late on the draw for press night, I bought my own tickets (it happens!!) and regret not a penny of it. There’s an endorsement for you..

Box office 020 7452 3000 to 27 Aug
rating: four.  
Plus a special playwright mouse for Sir Alan. 

THEY MAY BE DIRTY BUT THEY’RE EVER SO DIOR…

The best moment of proper musical-theatre comedy in this slick hard-hearted show comes not from its principals (though they do get a good few) but from a sideshow event from Lizzy Connolly. Stepping forward from the ensemble on her West End debut as “Jolene Oakes”, this splendid gal plays an oil millionairess targeted by Robert Lindsay, the a smooth Riviera con-man posing as a deposed European royal.

Jolene abruptly decides they are engaged and will live in “Oklahoma! Where the chief cause of death is melanoma! Not a tree or a Jew to block the lovely view…oh, dontcha love it when the bobcats howl!”. As Lindsay gapes, appalled, she clicks her fingers, pulls out a six-gun and brings up a grim desert oilrig backcloth and a hellish line-dance of cowboys: she leads them in a wild, thunder-thighed, high- kicking dance fit to shrivel the testicles of the smooth Euro-boulevardier. Lovely.
But, in one of the uncomfortably uneven moments of Jerry Mitchell’s production, the two con-men – Lindsay and his apprentice Rufus Hound – decide to put her off by pretending that Rufus is “Ruprecht”, his inbred idiot brother who will live with them. Hound – a crude enough actor at best, and playing the crudest of the characters – performs the idiot role with a gurning, dribbling, jerking, masturbating repulsiveness (not to mention a lyric about KY Jelly on a rubber glove). It is offensive enough to neutralize any pleasure in the show for anybody remotely acquainted with mental impairment.
Which is a surprise, given that Hound is a politically minded comedian so righteous about NHS changes that he lately blogged “David (Cameron) and Jeremy (Hunt) want your kids to die unless you’re rich… Why can’t they take that big pot of money ear-marked for medicine and just start sharing it out amongst themselves?

Given that sequence, and the prolonged wheelchair-jokes in the second half when he pretends to be a soldier with traumatic paralysis, one does tend to keep an uneasy eyebrow up throughout Hound’s reasonably competent comic performance. Can’t love him. Luckily, however, you absolutely can love Robert Lindsay, who not only swings an elegant leg and preens beautifully as the leading con-man, but handles his faint dawning of conscience with proper rounded humanity. The same goes for Samantha Bond, a comedienne who knows precisely the weight to give both to the rich Muriel Eubank’s absurdities and to her needy wistfulness. To see her playing against John Marquez’ crooked police-chief in the second act is a treat. And Katherine Kingsley, as the kingpin of the twisty plot, deploys all the joyful vigour which made her Helena for Michael Grandage’s Midsummer Night’s Dream a delight. And wow, can she belt out the big numbers..

Otherwise, director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell (who gave us Legally Blonde the Musical and launched the splendid Sheridan Smith to glory) delivers fine comic dance routines: you can see why he wins Tonys. Yet this show, (music and lyrics by David Yazbek, book by Jeffrey Lane, spun off from a 1988 Michael Caine and Steve Martin film) is haunted by that peculiar Broadway quality of uncertain heart. Legally Blonde was heart all the way; this, and not only because of its double-sting plot, misses too many beats for comfort.

Still, there’s a kind of genius in some of the sillier lyrics: not least Hound singing “I’m alone and cold and damp..you lit the light to my exit ramp”. And Lindsay does get to sum up his fellow-conman (and co-star) in the line “What you lack in grace you make up for in vulgarity”. Yess…..
box office http://www.atgtickets.com to 29 Nov

Rating: 3  

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY: INSPIRING, INTIMIDATING, INVALUABLE

The lad in the Army Recruiting Office listens enthusiastically to the Para behind the desk speaking of comradeship and adventure.  But as he shifts his chair  the startled recruit blurts “You’ve got no legs!”.  “At least” says the soldier “you passed your observation test” .   God help us: in this searingly memorable evocation of military attrition it isn’t the wrecked young bodies or the drugged night-terrors which bring on tears; not even the anxious lovers and mothers.   It’s the military deadpan,  the ancient dry courage which will quip  in the face of disaster and only then turn inward to contemplate the future in bleak and lonely privacy.

The play brilliantly captures both that deadpan black humour and the soft desperate  inward reality of the seriously injured.  It had to, because most of its cast are real veterans telling real stories: they were recruited at the Headley Court rehabilitation centre  by the producer Alice Driver as a therapeutic recovery project . Still struggling with pain and powerful medication,  they began by telling their stories to writer Owen Sheers and director Stephen Rayne.   A BBC documentary followed the process towards  last year’s gala performances at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with a thirty-strong cast  –  soldiers male and female,  plus a few professional performers and dancers.  So overwhelming was the impact that the Royal British Legion is supporting a nationwide tour with a trimmed-down cast of fifteen.

Quite apart from its documentary and personal reality it has become a striking and effective piece of theatre.  Simple but shattering use of shadow-play, chorus, soliloquy and movement meld scraps of memory and progress into a powerful whole.  In one sequence a balletic rehab-gym sequence explodes and collapses into a remembered image of civilian carnage,  then as the broken bodies move they become night-victims, suffering “high-def hallucinations” and afraid to sleep.   Shafts of rough soldierly humour cut through sentimentality:  one beautiful song sequence as the soldiers read loving, hopeful “blueys” ends with one getting a “Dear John” letter and the others – for the safety of the platoon – mocking and sending him up, forcing  it not to matter.

Nothing is overstated or milked,  Jason Carr’s  songs are low-key and beautiful in their truthfulness:   a chanted list of medications, from oromorph to antidepressants,  chills the blood, and Sheers’  skill picks up and makes poetry of documentary reminiscence.   We believe in  the heat and sand,  the unseen Taleban “like fighting ghosts”,  the frightened villagers,  the misery of trying not to shoot back at children.  A straightforward military lecture illustrates how IED injuries happen,  eyelets from your very boots ripping through your groin:  within modern military kit  still lies the same soft human flesh which wars have always shredded.

To speak of stars feels crass but “Charlie F” (also military slang for a complex disaster or “clusterf–k”)  is the nickname of the protagonist, played by Royal Marine  Cassidy Little:  a natural star who lost half a leg to an IED in Helmand and woke in Selly Oak hospital convinced he was a captive being tortured.   Maurillia Simpson from Trinidad sings with a lovely gospel voice and remembers how as a child she saw the Queen’s visit and vowed to be one of her soldiers. Stewart Hill terrifyingly, flatly,   relates the brain damage which torpedoed his career as an officer.  A wife remembers at the hospital seeing women in burqas, and hating them but then hearing them praying for her husband by name.

But they all shine, in wheelchairs and on crutches, criticizing one another’s stumps or confessing with raw sad courage the emotional and sexual chaos of recovery.   For it is about recovery:  in the final speech Charlie F salutes the oldest regiment in the world,  the regiment of the injured.  Their daily victories of body and mind are being fought all around us, if we would just look.

rating:  five  
box office 0844 871 7651  to 22 March        TOURING  to 7 June  http://www.charlie-f.com/‎  

Quite a few people have asked about the theatre cat logo for theatrecat.  Even more are curious about the mice.

They are all created by Roger Hardy.  Who is really a painter and creator of strange sculptures made of things he finds.

His website is http://www.rogerhardy.co.uk

And it seems impossible to stop him inventing new mice.

Here is the Dead Rat (not needed so far) for truly awful productions:

and here are his Shakespearian mice, which I am saving up…

PORN:   THE NASTIEST COTTAGE INDUSTRY  

Julie is alone,  reminiscing with a cup of tea,  calling her cat.  She’s a geriatric nursing auxiliary,  gentle and cheerful, fond of a laugh and a night out. She strayed from a dull marriage to a series of boyfriends but the latest, Garry,  has a camera.  He likes taking pictures of her in provocative shiny fetish-wear.  It’s under her dressing gown.   He says she could be a model,  pretends she won a prize, takes her for a London photoshoot. They get her waxed and make her snog another girl. Bit of a shock, but it’s just fun, yeah?

He moves on to video.  And live sex filming, and rape simulations.  She is that increasingly hot commodity, an “amateur girl”.   The modern porn industry doesn’t just want professional models, glamorously untouchable.  Carnal  – and violent – fantasies feed on the girl-next-door.    In Amanda Whittington’s 70-minute monologue Lucy Speed plays Julie to perfection:  with wide TV experience she conveys with naturalistic intimacy Julie’s ordinariness, larkiness,  wild party moments and spurts of quiet shame. Garry,  and the boss who remonstrates and eventually sacks her,  are voices offstage.    We have to like her, appreciate the artless sweetness of her reminiscences about her patients,  and mourn her decline to final humiliation and a sex chatline in the small hours  (amateur-girls have, to the Garries, a limited shelf life).

It is heartening that theatre, with its uncensored freedom to challenge and shock, is taking on the ubiquity of porn in a digital age when ten-year-olds in the playground swop on smartphones various vivid, twisted and inventive images which their parents’ generation can barely imagine.  The NT studio has workshopped a startling piece on the subject,  Christopher Green’s “Prurience”,   and porn’s influence crops up in the Shed’s Blurred lines and  Hampstead’s Rapture Blister Burn.   One of the strongest moments in this play is when,  confronted by her Matron’s reproof,  Julie cries “What’s your husband doing when you’re at work? What does your son watch?”.

Whittington does not conclude with having Julie maimed or murdered  (a male writer, I suspect, almost certainly would) .  She’s just used, saddened, humiliated, lonely and looking for friendship from the only man who seems to like her for herself.   I regret only two things:  one is that Whittingron (and director Kate Chapman)  shy away from making us understand that by the stage Julie has reached in this ghastly cottage industry she would most likely have met seriously perverted abuse and probably be on painkillers.  The other is the suggestion of her having been molested by a past  stepfather.  It feels too like a cliché.  Un-abused,  normally happy girls have been drawn into this web by boredom, bad boyfriends and the reckless party vibe.  The play would be stronger for admitting it.

Box Office: 0115 941 9419    to  8 Feb then touring        (www.fifthword.co.uk for schedule)

rating :  three   

MISCHIEF GOES ON THE ROAD     

Sometimes it pays to be a brave gang of friends, fresh out of LAMDA,  putting on your own show rather than waiting for auditions.   Early last year I spent 70 happy minutes snorting with laughter at Mischief Theatre’s tightly-worked, physically adept spoof of a student drama group from “Cornley Polytechnic”,  ruining a Mousetrappy old whodunnit   (original Times review for £paywallers: http://tinyurl.com/nz3p5zg).    Also in that cramped little audience was producer Kenny Wax, who waited for them afterwards and offered investment provided they could extend it to two acts and extend their remarkable fall-down scenery fit provincial touring theatres.   After a blast through the Edinburgh fringe and a splendid Peter Pan (see this site) they have done so.

So I sneaked in to an early gig at the Oxford Playhouse (not press, own ticket),  not least for the pleasure of seeing people pretending to be bad actors on a stage where forty years ago as a student I really was one.   The Haversham Manor library set, now by Nigel Hook, has grown to two storeys, enabling even more interesting collapses as the fictional SM (Lotti Maddox) struggles to keep it together, doors jam and actors make desperate exits through grandfather clock . Which, itself, gets its own superb moment in Act 2.

The best of the original jokes are there,  including the one about the portrait and the mounting desperation of wrong props.  The second storey enables a sequence with  Robert Grove which looked so physically risky that people gasped through the giggles, and the high-perched visible prompt and sound box makes the most of Rob Falconer’s role as the surly techie.

And I still enjoy the central metaphor, embedded in the script by Henries Shields and Lewis: the impossibility of getting life right, the terror of embarrassment, the peril of getting stuck on detail at the expense of the bigger picture (the plot)  and the rage of those who bite off more than they can chew and won’t admit it.  Shields’ nervy, panicking director/Detective is splendid, as is Dave Hearn’s Cecil:  his body language alternately plankish and desperately windmilling.  The catfight between Sandra Wilkinson’s posing ingenue and Maddox’ frustrated stage manager is even more pleasingly violent than before.

I am glad to have watched it grow.  I suspect it will get still sharper on its long tour, and hope the bruised cast find comfortable digs to rest in.  To taste reaction:  I can confirm that Oxford roared with delight and often clapped the scenery or the running jokes,  and that the 19-year-old who came with me was enchanted.  I did meet an eminent philosopher in the interval who, rather baffled,  didn’t get the point at all.  But as the Cornley Players would ruefully confirm from under a heap of collapsed doors and walls,   you can’t win them all.

Mischieftheatre.co.uk     touring UK to 15 June: schedule :  http://tinyurl.com/o8fcpdb

Rating:  four   

AN ERA RECREATED:  THE REAL 1968 IN AN UNREAL WORLD

The opening,  in  a student room correct down to the battered stack of albums, took me aback.    Friends, I was there in 1968:    in Oxford rooms heavy with illegal smoke,  where skinny lads planned groundbreakingly tedious college  productions of Coriolanus and lounged around listening to Bob Dylan protesting  half a world away.  There was often, as here,   an ill-matched roommate:  a “Northern Chemist” stumping off to the lab muttering “Never knew such a place for encouraging bullshit”.

 
My God, how it all comes back!   Even the crucial plot detail that offstage,  the lounging one’s friend Nick risks suspension for nicking books from Blackwell’s on the half-baked Marxexcuse that “Property is Theft”.   The only difference is that in 1968  nobody would say aloud like Nick’s posh sister Pippa (Sophia Sivan) “You’re living in the most amazing old buildings and studying the literature of the greatest language there is. You don’t do a stroke of work and all your cooking and washing is done for you. It doesn’t cost you a penny because the taxpayer is footing the bill. It’s a scandal really.”

 
Yet Alan Franks’ new play is not a satire  but a rueful, layered attempt to pick  its way through the innocent hypocrisies and shifting values of the time.  It’s more Rattigan than Osborne,  mindful of how human relationships drive or impede  progress.   It may seem a tiny world,  but  its faithfulness asks awkwardly universal questions about gilded intellectual elites and the harsher world elsewhere.   The 1968 setting is pivotal,  because into the sweet simplicities of the English undergraduates’ lives (they’re blackmailing a senior tutor for plagiarism to save the book-thief’s bacon)  strides a Rhodes Scholar from Minnesota.  I remember them too, the Clinton generation:   older than us,  avoiding the draft,  their politics forced into sharper focus by the deaths of Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the ascent of Nixon and the fate of  contemporaries in Vietnam.

 
Sally Knyvette directs a cast whose very physicality is evocative: Steffan Donnelly as a wispy boy-child Toby is dreamily planning to emulate a 1953 Brecht production of Gunther Grass which incorporated real strikers  (he finds the Cowley pickets unenthusiastic).   Chris the Chemist is Dan Van Garrett,  more heavyset and bearded: a decent old-school leftie who scornfully points out that the Dylan numbers drifting through the scenes are nicked from folksongs his uncles sing in pubs.   And  Elliott the American is Michael Swatton:  broad-shouldered,   a man among pretty children.  He knows economics and politics,   and recites Bobby Kennedy’s magnificent Kansas speech on the fallacy of mere GDP  (worth a look today –   http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4110).   He mesmerizes Pippa,  who despite a benign nature dislikes “causes”.  Though Mummy does do hospital visiting, in Godalming.

 
Franks weaves themes of  integrity,  emulation, plagiarism,  imitation both straight and crooked:  wistful respect for ancient texts meets an uneasy need for progress. I would love to see it grow to a fuller length.   As for Mayhew the Middle English tutor, Crispian Cartwright is so horribly convincing in the role that for a moment I wondered if Knyvette had done a Brecht-and-the-strikers,  captured and incorporated the real thing…

box office  0207 978 7040 to 15 Feb

rating: four   

…theatrecat.com will be back in the New Year with Wolf Hall and wartime and the new Wanamaker, and Beckett and Cleopatra and maybe even the odd panto.  Thank you all, very much, for following this rogue website and giving head-space to a theatre moggy thrown out in the rain without a newspaper to shelter under.
And remember – at least 40 of the plays reviewed here are still running into January, and many are well worth seeing

This is not a theatre-news website, but it wishes to extend sympathy to the audience and cast of The Curious Affair of the Dog in the Night-Time, and to Nica Burns and her staff at Nimax Theatres,   after tonight’s structural collapse.
And admiration to those who reportedly evacuated without panic, and to the front-of-house team who assisted them.  There will be some doomsaying about our old Victorian and Edwardian theatres,  but this rare and shocking event will not, I hope, diminish the affection and enjoyment we get from them. And will do for many years to come.

Storm winds and logistics permitting…  each should turn up late night:

Monday 28th –  David Storey’s HOME at Arcola – anniversary production

Tues  29th  –   The Scottsboro boys,  Young Vic : Kander/Ebb musical about historic injustice

Weds  30th  The Potsdam Quartet   at Jermyn St   Politics, history &  hindsight…

Thurs 31st   HMP Macbeth – ex-offenders’ storming prison take on it

Friday 1 Nov    Mrs Lowry and Son  –  the artist’s tricky home life reimagined     Trafalgar  2