Category Archives: Three Mice

April 24, 2014 · 7:09 pm

AN INTERVENTION – Watford Palace Theatre

MIKE BARTLETT’S OTHER NEW PLAY…

 

It’s played by a man – John Hollingworth – and a woman, Rachael Stirling. But it is not a love story, not that kind of love anyway. Indeed Mike Bartlett made a point of not naming the characters in this tight 80-minute two-hander, calling them A and B, and specifying that they can be of either gender, age and ethnicity. The point is that they’re friends.

 

And though these actors are of similar age, race and class, the interest of the piece as done here (Watford working once again with Paines Plough) lies partly in a certain rarity. For it is weirdly unusual to find playwrights anatomizing s sexless male-female friendships onstage. In an age of socially acceptable gender-blind mixing, there should be more of that.

 

The title invokes two kinds of intervention. In an opening scene Stirling – a teacher by profession, leaping around in a sort of dungaree playsuit and rarely without a glass in her hand, is more than a little drunk. She berates Hollingworth for not having come on an anti-war march. He, cautiously and moderately, supports armed Middle East intervention. Probably, right now, that means Syria, but it could be any of them. She thinks it is evil, fascist, murderous, and accuses him of growing a Hitler mosutache. He puts up with a lot from her: we learn that they have been friends for three years. She says “best friends”. Tellingly, he says “Only small children have best friends!”

The rapport between them is claimed strong, though it is clear that it is on the verge of crumbling: I could have done with seeing them have a bit more joy in one another at the start. Its erosion is being caused by two things: one is her drinking, which he sees is getting out of control; the other is her dislike of his new girlfriend. She may be right: the offstage Hannah sounds like a new age drip, and in some of his few guarded self-revelations, the man admits that he is retreating into domesticity out of certain insecurities, fuelled in part by the distant, harrowing war news.

On the other hand, he’s quite right that his platonic friend is heading downhill. She makes all the standard alcoholic excuses, even when she quits her job; she becomes an aggressive, uncontrolled bore (what the Germans delightfully call an “ich-bin-so”, claiming “I’m passionate, I’m Mediterranean!”). And she blurts out tactless condemnations of the invisible Hannah (“Bride of Satan! a nightmare! A class A horrrible person!”) and hilariously claims that she Facebooked all his friends who all agree she’s awful, “including your mother”. So he withdraws. And has a baby, and a home life, for a while.

 

But the moment for the other kind of intervention comes; and with nice irony Bartlett makes sure that his final chance to rescue his friend from drunken suicidal despair is triggered only by his own disaster. There’s a remarkable, rather nasty bit of staging involved, but it’s an effective metaphor. And I must say that Stirling’s performance all the way through is – well, sterling. She leaps, circles, yells, drains glasses, brags, berates, plays the harmonica with terrible despair. She’s both funny and awful, and anyone who has ever dealt with an alcoholic in denial will shiver in recognition.
Box Office 01923 225671 http://www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk to 3 May

RATING:  three   3 Meece Rating

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April 10, 2014 · 11:41 pm

KING CHARLES III – Almeida, N1

CHARLES, CAMILLA,   WILLIAM, KATE…THEIR FUTURE?  AND OURS?

 

Billed as “a future history”, Mike Bartlett’s new play begins with a chanted Lux Aeterna for the Queen’s funeral. Director Rupert Goold makes the most of it, with the whole cast bearing candles in the gloom beneath Tom Scutt’s dado arc of faint, jumbled historic monarchal portraits. Later the ensemble is briefly hooded and in Guy Fawkes masks. Palace – and Parliament, and Abbey – are unfussily indicated by a pink-carpeted dais. There are stars and garters. Goold knows how to make an impact.

 

At the play’s heart is Tim Pigott Smith, brilliantly capturing the ageing Charles not as impressionist but as essence. The heir’s hand gestures and occasional buzzing consonants are there, but more importantly he catches not only the habitual angst but Charles’ rarer, but authentic, edge of ironic mischief. Just as well that this great actor is cast, since Bartlett seems to see the part as a cross between Richard II and Lear, with a dash of Edward VII. To ramp up the Shakespearian history-play feel he writes most conversations, especially between royals and politicians, in iambic pentameter. If you are no poet this is a big risk. It can chime quite horribly (“he stands his ground as stand his ground he must”). Once or twice it works – as when the anguished King says “Without my voice and spirit, I am dust”. But too often it caused me to scrawl STUPID in capitals on my notebook.

 

This Charles, in his first meeting with a (leftish) Prime Minister, is confronted with a new press and privacy act, which he considers hampers the ancient right of free speech. He refuses to sign the Royal Assent. The PM (a Cleggish Adam James) insists. The smarmy Tory opposition leader (Nicholas Rowe) at first encourages Charles then reneges, realizing that the precedent of royal interference is dangerous. The King remembers that technically he can dissolve Parliament and force an election, and does. In the ensuing mayhem of dissent, riots and military deployment his next heir (Oliver Chris as a spookily lookalike William) is persuaded by a machiavellian Kate (Lydia Wilson) to wade in. Meanwhile Harry – a funny, touching, dishevelled, conflicted evocation by Richard Goulding – falls in love with a stroppy art student in Doc Martens whose past “sexts” come to haunt them.

 
Promising stuff, and Pigott-Smith carries superbly the frustration of a man of strong ideals pitchforked into a role which makes him a puppet for politicians of dubious morality and sense (very topical in Maria-Miller week). The downside is not only the tortured blank verse – which creates a barrier to belief – or even the wincingly unnecessary appearances of Diana’s ghost, forever sticking her oar in. It is also marred by a certain News-Quizzy cartoonishness. The idea that Harry would be awed at being introduced by his girl to “Sainsbury’s! I bought a Scotch Egg!” is just stupid: the young princes have led far more recognizable lives than their predecessors, William as a student making his own beans on toast.

 

Also, the burning issue of the press freedom law is almost forgotten in favour of the Royal Assent row. In the second half there are surges of power, mainly because of Pigott-Smith’s strength, and genuine sparks of emotion from the princes. But the most interesting speech (free from ti-tum-ti-tum iambics) is from a nocturnal kebab-man. He tells Harry that since the Queen died people don’t know where they live any more: too many British things are eroding: army, post office, pubs, monarchy…
Now that is interesting. And prescient. Could have done with more of that.

 

box office 0207 359 4404         http://www.Almeida.co.uk, to 31 May
partner: Aspen
Rating: three   3 Meece Rating

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March 27, 2014 · 3:15 pm

THIS MAY HURT A BIT – Octagon, Bolton and touring

POLEMIC, COMIC, FURIOUS     
 (note: theatrecat saw this a fortnight ago in the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds, where it premiered, but respects tonight’s embargo)

You might do well, before watching this, to read up both sides of the NHS argument. Stella Feehily’s play for Out of Joint and the Octagon, directed by her husband Max Stafford-Clark, was born of their experience during his treatment for stroke, and of political indignation: it owes its central statistics and argument to Jacky Davis’ polemic NHS SOS. On its way from Bury (where I saw it) to Bolton it had a performance at Westminster hosted by Lord Kinnock, who in early workshops played Aneurin Bevan. Bevan’s score-settling 1948 speech begins it, and he pops up throughout, in modern scenes. So it’s a show about indignation, not ambiguity: a cryof fear that we will copy the US insurance model and betray the Spirit of ’45. The most inspiring line comes from the 1647 Leveller MP Thomas Rainsborough: “The poorest he that is in england, hath a life to live as the greatest he”.

Having said that, it is a refreshing and often informative couple of hours, with some good theatre moments (the Grim Reaper gets the best laugh). There are some lines designed more to infuriate the Coalition than to enlighten anyone, though: the present PM, weirdly, is portrayed as an grey-haired senatorial posho (Brian Protheroe) and is tended by a cynical civil servant and an Australian PR thug. Their dialogue is like a very poor imitation of The Thick Of It.
But there are livelier illustrations: the first half introduces Nicholas, a retired teacher with prostate issues (Protheroe again), struggling with a suave consultant and chaotic computer booking. Sketchy, surreal, choral and polemic moments finally solidify into Nicholas’ family gathering with his snobbish sister and her American consultant husband. They argue about the NHS with his 90-year-old mother who remembers the Spirit of ’45. She is the treasurable Stephanie Cole, whose drop-dead comic timing and fierce stage presence pretty well steal the show.
Of course – being central-casting elderly – she has a fall, a confused episode, and the second act is set in hospital. Here Cole has competition from Natalie Klamar’s fabulous performance as an busy East European geriatric nurse, ricocheting willingly between laying out an offstage corpse, feeding cornflakes to a groping vicar with a stroke, dealing with the family and fielding a demented Caribbean lady shouting “Sexy bitch! (one of Frances Ashman’s four roles).

Their story is interrupted by statistical lectures and surrealism: Bevan argues with Churchill, and Jane Whymark as “The NHS” sits up on a trolley and reminisces on her dating history (“Clem was the best…then rather indifferent liaisons, Winston, Anthony, Harold, Alec, little Harold..Margaret cut me to the bone… Tony was the most tremendous disappointment, fell in love with city boys..”. The present one “Says I must heal myself, so why won’t he let me alone? What a shit!”
It is right that a theatrical vehicle should tackle current issues, but there are incurable steering troubles here because the vehicle is loaded unevenly. It is fixedly cynical about politicians’ motives, and equally fixedly sentimental about nurses, paramedics, comely young female consultants and lovable Geordie porters (Hywel Morgan, who also plays Nye Bevan). When an opposing point of view is briefly expressed it is given to the selfish, Americanized daughter. And Klamar’s rushed nurse is so heroic that there is no reflection of the complex human problems of the service, or of cases like Stafford. Even in my own extended family we have seen night nursing so lazily uncaring that a sick old man struggled , choking, and another wandered lost until a passing visitor helped him. The nurses sat chattering over teacups at the desk. Nor is there any mention of revolving-door bureaucrats or irrationally demanding patients. Still, everyone will find swipes to applaud: mine were PFI and outsourced cleaning.

 

box office   01204 520661  to 5 April or http://www.octagonbolton.co.uk

tourdates to  21 June including St James, London:   http://www.outofjoint.co.uk      Touring Mouse wide

Rating:  three  3 Meece Rating

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March 25, 2014 · 10:56 pm

FATAL ATTRACTION – Theatre Royal, Haymarket W1

McELHONE –   BUTTERFLY OR  BUNNY-BOILER? 

It is 27 years since James Dearden saw his film script explode into public consciousness, deify Michael Douglas as a hapless adulterer and Glenn Close as first holder of the now classic epithet “bunny-boiler”. He admits that from draft to draft the role of villain slid gradually towards Close, making Douglas the victim, and indeed the end got re-shot to blow her away. He fancied levelling things up now with this play, directed by Trevor Nunn.

 

So here as Dan is Mark Bazeley, fresh from Nunn’s last matrimonial doomfest Scenes from a Marriage. Kristin Davis is the smiley wife Beth who wants to move to the countryside, and the peerlessly foxy Natascha McElhone swirls a great blonde mane and killer red ciré heels as Alex, the psychotically needy urban-chic woman he picks up in a bar . And later wishes to God he could put down again.

 

It is updated to the new century in more ways than the obvious – and very helpful – fact that Alex can now persecute Dan not only by landline and turning up in his office and home but with mobile calls, texts, email and messaging. Bunny-boilers of today are well-armed indeed. The real update, though, is an attempted feminist consciousness, making more of the familiar complaints that selfish men take what they want, won’t commit, lie, never ring, abdicate responsibility and think abortion is easy. Sometimes this works, sometimes not.

 

Bazeley is great casting as Dan, lithe and narrow-headed as a particularly handsome stoat, and McElhone mostly manages the difficult task of jerking Alex – at one point in less than four minutes – from charm to violence, back to charm, then via self-harm to more aggression and finally pathos. Sometimes the script defeats her, as it would any actor. It is in less obvious moments that she flares into reality: her sudden glare of rage at being left asleep, and an electric shock of fury when Dan shouts “You poor, sad, twisted, lonely -” and she explodes on the word “lonely”. Her Madam Butterfly obsession is ramped up, the music swelling repeatedly. For Dearden, rather obviously, wants us to ask ourselves whether she is victim or vampire, nutter or Nemesis, bunny-boiler or Butterfly. And the endgame is different, more in tune with the feminist-Butterfly theme: some tellyish NYPD clichés get defused by a final tableau artfully designed to flatter our cultural sensibilities.

 

In style it owes much to film: Dan becomes a retrospective narrator, scenes are short. The setting is elegant: Robert Jones’ design of blue neon bars , projections and cool decor creates a restless Manhattan feeling, expertly enhanced by Nunn’s use of a wandering urban ensemble of barflies, straight and gay couples, stragglers, workers, passers-by who make the guilty Dan pause mid-sentence. There is a properly funny, Ayckbournish scene when Alex turns up pretending to be a buyer for the apartment and Kristin Davis deploys those happy-smiley-wholesome-trusting expressions we fondly remember as prologues to every romantic disaster when she was Charlotte in Sex and the City.

 

The rabbit gets it – of course it does, with decently brief and inexplicit horror and not before the entire audience (O, Britain! Britain!) has gone aaaaaah! at its sweet lop-ears. Rabbit and her understudy are interviewed in the programme, boasting of “nibbling on Sir Trevor’s denim”, which one hopes is not a euphemism.

box office 020 7930 8800 to 21 June

 

rating: three  3 Meece Rating

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March 20, 2014 · 10:34 pm

THE DEAD DOGS Print Room, W2

FJORDS, FATALITY, FRAGMENTATION

The young man lies on the settle thinking about his dog.  It’s run off. His mother, stiffly repetitive between pauses, tells him he’s a grown man and should go and look for it.  He doesn’t.  She also wishes he’d go to the shop for some coffee because his sister and husband are coming.  He doesn’t do that either.  So she goes.  There’s white empty sky over the fjord.  and a lot of silence and no dog.  It’s a Beckettian silence.   Waiting for Doggo….

Perish the thought: there  is no place for such frivolous inward mutterings.   Jon Fosse is a very celebrated contemporary Norwegian writer, performed worldwide and  tipped for a Nobel Prize.  This is a British premiere in the enterprising little Print Room,  rendered by May-Brit Akerholt, a distinguished Ibsen scholar and Fosse translator.   The cast are good: Valerie Gogan as the mother trapped in unexpressed anxiety,  and Danny Horn glaring,  surly, depressed and mainly silent as the failure-to-launch son whose only interest is his dog,  even if he won’t go out and look for it.    A boyhood friend drops in and tries to get him to come to the city to work,  or at least go fishing;  the Sister (Jennie Gruner) is the only other character to be allowed to behave remotely naturally.

Simon Usher’s direction allows the 90-minute piece all the painfully pregnant pauses required, and the cast do a remarkable job remembering and rendering the broken, rarely finished,  awkwardly repetitive sentences of  what is dubbed an  “abstract theatre-poem” or “existential suspense story”.   The lines often feel more like subtitles than speech. And maybe if it had stayed as gnomically obscure as Beckett’s Endgame it would work better.  Because curiously, the problem lies in its having an actual plot:  the brother-in-law finds the dog dead, the neighbour having shot it for bothering his children.  Next morning the taciturn son has taken up a station at the window staring at the grave for hours,  and we learn that the neighbour was murdered in his bed.   No prizes for guessing whodunnit.

The difficulty is that while Jennie Gruner as the sister remains naturalistic,  and Valerie Gogan gallantly gives the jerky script a miasma of maternal dread,  the oddly rendered text creates a sense of slightly absurd unreality, and psychologically it becomes plain irritating.  Here’s a family with a clearly disturbed son,  so patently in mental trouble  that he lies for hours staring at the wall and has got rid of the guitar which was his main talent.  His beloved dog, the one emotional outlet, is lying dead in a plastic bag offstage.  But when he  goes out to look at it, not one of them follows him.  Not even the anxious mother.  They just stand around speaking half-sentences like broken robots.  It doesn’t wash, either as realism or poetry.   Nor does the fact that the seemingly normal brother-in-law talks in exactly the same jerky unfinished way as everyone else.   Fosse builds atmosphere, but at the expense of credibility.  He has said that Britain has “a fear of what is different”.   But there are some kinds of bafflement which make you care. Not this.

box office http://www.the-print-room.org   to 12 April

rating:  three   3 Meece Rating

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March 20, 2014 · 12:30 am

TWO INTO ONE – Menier, SE1

SPIRIT OF ’84 IN  A BUDGET-DAY FARCE

“Why is a civil servant from the Home Office posing as a Dr Christmas from Norwich auditioning an actor from Kingston?”.  Why is a hotel corridor alive with panicking establishment figures in towels? And can that ginger wig really be explained as part of a Tory revue skit on Neil Kinnock?    We are in the Westminster Hotel and the world of Whitehall farce, of which the author Ray Cooney is graduate and heir.  This one dates from 1984, which is both its interest and its weaknesss.

Plays with timeless emotional content, however period-fixed,  are safer revivals than farce,  where character is a cartoonish plot-driving device.  You might wonder whether this revival does more than memorialize an interesting point in the evolution of the British Sex Farce: the year when embarrassing bedroom misunderstandings suddenly dared to include male-on-male liaisons as well as the trad pajamas-meet-negligeé variety.

It is set during the Thatcher government,  the hero a Home Office minister about to present an anti-porn bill:  but the political setting is only a device to make the potential disgrace credible. After Yes Minister and The Thick Of it we tend to expect sharper lines about ministerial hypocrisy,  and door-slam bedroom farce itself has been growing mould ever since Frayn spoofed it back-to-front in Noises Off.   But if this is as much archaeology as entertainment, it is classily executed.

Ray Cooney himself directs,  and plays the doddering hotel waiter with a taste for Kung Fu moves  and tips. Michael Praed has a senatorial enough air as the Home Office minister (tiresomely called Willey)  attempting adultery with the PM’s secretary and ending up overdosed on benzedrine and hectic lies. Josefina Gabrielle makes a nicely lustful Knightsbridge-matron as his wife Pamela with needs of her own.  But the heart of the play is Nick Wilton as Pigden: the shy, tubby civil servant charged with booking the guilty pair a hotel room.   Wilton plays it shudderingly but  gallantly terrified, making increasingly crazy attempts to smooth things over and fend off Pamela.   A fine physical clown, he combines absurdity with  brief  but precious moments  of real poignant desperation.

But I did have irritable moments,  even while appreciating the deft engineering of an eight-door farce and the sideways-sliding set by Julie Godfrey. Cooney  knows his stuff, follows the First Farce Law Of Non-Consummation, and sparkily introduces a new character halfway through the second act to drive a fresh set of complications.   But the best  TV sitcom has become smarter and sharper in the last three decades, so   and jokes like ‘When it comes to porn, everyone wants to take up a position”   or “Send up sandwiches and champagne” “Vintage?” “No, fresh ones”  ring tiresome on modern ears.   I suspect from the cackling around me that it works best after a couple of drinks,  so this is one of those situations where sobersides critics are not reliable guides to a jolly mid-priced night out.

But I did appreciate some excellent trapped-in-a-trolley work from Kelly Adams  as the panicked girlfriend.  And Pigden’s loyalto to his minister is a shining  example to all Sir Humphreys: perhaps they’ll have a post-Budget stress Whitehall staff outing.

box office 020 7378 1713  to 26 April
Rating:  three    3 Meece Rating
But my first newly invented set-design mouse is awarded to Julie Godfrey…  Set Design Mouse resized

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March 17, 2014 · 9:57 pm

SATAN SINGS MOSTLY SONDHEIM Jermyn St Theatre, SW1

DEVILISHLY SILLY,  BUT NOT STUPID

Satan (Adam Long  in plastic horns) came up to earth in human form in 1964 because he was “excited with what was going on in musical theatre”, notably West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof.   His human mother remembers him always singing and dancing, though he did get bullied about his tail.  Now fifty,  he is hanging around in the office of his equally camp manager, Schifrin  (Mark Caven), breaking into the odd soft-shoe (well, cloven-hoof) shuffle and pestering him about a one-night Sondheim songbook gig at the Palladium.  Only Sondheim won’t give permission.

That’s the conceit of this hour-long amusement: together they
plead down the phone, bicker, reconcile,  and make a ridiculous lifetime-achievement video,  including  Satan’s X-Factor-style sob story about a blighted childhood and how badly God treated him.   They sing the Public Domain Medley, all they’re allowed (like Daisy Daisy) but Satan keeps trying to break into Send in the Clowns  on the grounds that the Jermyn is licensed for cabaret and incidental music.  A panicking Schifrin points out that  if he’s in costume it counts as theatre, which is a different licence.    Satan says they’re his own horns not a costume,  but Schifrin cites a Performing Rights Society ruling that  in a landmark case Nosferatu the Vampire’s teeth were deemed costume…

Well, I relate that gag so that you get the idea.  Adam Long – one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and  lately reator of one of its best spinoffs, the Complete Dickens,  has put together this parodic tribute to the yearnings, splendours and hissy-fits of musical theatre pros:  toe-tapping neurosis, pleasure, absurdity and dodgy rhymes.  Schifrin mourns his sole client’s unreasonable ambition – “I coulda got him loads of regional work” –  and finally drops his affable optimism to snarl “You’re fifty years old with horns and hooves – no, you can’t play Tony in West Side Story!”.

The show is, as they sing, not “Something too rational / on the main stage of the National”.     Yet there is a moment of real feeling – as the old Reduced Shakespeare used to drop in –  when thwarted Satan grieves for the Sondheim numbers he must never sing.  “He’s special. You know he is.  It’s like leaves in the sunsine…like he knows something about you – you wanna cling to it because it’s perfect, but it keeps changing…music like water, music like light”.

I like that. And there’s a happy ending, sort of.  Well, a compromise.   That’s showbiz.  It runs as a separate show after AWAY FROM HOME (see above) which  makes not a bad evening. Silly,  but not stupid.

box office 020 7287 2875  to 29 march
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk
Rating: three  3 Meece Rating

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March 14, 2014 · 12:09 am

AWAY FROM HOME Jermyn St Theatre SW1 and touring

PREJUDICE AND THE PREMIERSHIP:   A GAY FOOTBALL STORY

As gay shame and secrecy gradually fade from British life,  one of the last frontiers is professional football.  We know from tragedies like Justin Fashanu’s and from the mixed reception to the courage of Hitzlsperger that there are still minds to be won. Theatre does well to weigh in:  Rob Ward and Martin Jameson’s solo play (Jameson directs, Ward performs)   actually predated THE PASS on the same topic at the Royal Court,  having run in Manchester.  Yet they were told by marketeers that it was only fit for a “niche, difficult-to-access audience”.   Since young men in incalculable numbers  – here and abroad – adore Premiership  players and take a cue from their public face,  it seems to me not niche at all but something more like urgent.

So Ward,  all fit, crop-haired macho ferocity, tells his story as  gay Kyle: an ardent fan , out to his family and straight friends but also, unbeknownst to any of them,  working as an escort – a rent boy –  for a shadowy unseen pimp called Vince.   His grumpy, pragmatic defiance about this is nicely drawn: maybe if his Dad was less hostile (“You can’t be happy, being what you are”) he would  have accepted the proffered job in the family business.   But he’s doing fine, repelled at times but resigned to it, taking eighty quid for an hour.   But a real relationship threatens to develop:   the client who wants him exclusively is a Premiership star from the hated rival team.   There is a scabrously funny moment in their first encounter when Kyle is asked to have sex with him wearing the enemy shirt.  “I’ve got to f— the fellow whose goal robs my team of two points??”

But the two passions are reconciled for a time,  as Kyle falls in love and becomes a secret “mistress”, kept in a flat with a big telly and a posh coffee machine,  The secrecy remains corrosive:  “socialite” blondes are hired to massage a hetero image for the unseen footballer.    Kyle’s friends find out that he’s a “WAG”  but stick with him: a splendid exchange has him admitting the escort work.   “I .. I don’t fix shops for me uncle”.  It meets the resigned reply :  “I suppose I should be surprised. But you always were shit at woodwork.”

There is rudeness,  laddish machismo and tenderness:  Jameson,  who writes for Holby City and knows how to push the buttons,  offers alternative endings to the affair, one happy and one less so.  But the curious parallel that sticks in my mind is with the story of Dickens and his mistress Ellen Tiernan in The Invisible Woman.   When they were in a train crash, the celebrity author would not be seen tending her or admit they were travelling together.   Here it’s a car crash, and exactly the same thing happens. Unacknowledged love:  timeless and terrible.

Box office 0207 287 2875 to 28 March

Touring to June:   awayfromhometheplay.com    Touring Mouse wide

Rating:  three    3 Meece Rating

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March 3, 2014 · 11:34 pm

NEVER TRY THIS AT HOME Birmingham Rep & touring

PIES, PRATFALLS AND POLE-DANCING:  SATURDAYS AND THE SEVENTIES

(NOT A CHILDREN’S SHOW…BEWARE..)

  Oh, the wicked 1970’s!    Sexist, racist, rapist:  gropey DJs in the Beeb,  paedophile apologists in the NCCL,  bad hair and worse flares.  Retrospective headshaking is everywhere, so with oblique mischief  Carl Grose and Told By An Idiot target another  ‘70s phenomenon:  TISWAS and Swap Shop. Mercifully too late for me and too early for my children,  this was the time when the new wave of exhausted two-job parents slept in on Saturday morning while children’s TV found a fresh style: anarchic,  larky, improvised, exuberant, messy, calculatedly irresponsible.    An essay in the programme speaks of countercultural social currents; Grose and director Paul Hunter just remember the custard pies, japes and grown-up pseudo-toddlers (“Now it’s time to RUN ABOUT! yaaay”)

    We are supposed to be a modern studio audience at a show called “Looking Back  – together” : like Radio 4’s The Reunion,  only with Niall Ashdown  as a sweatily pompous host instead of  Sue MacGregor.   He interviews former presenters and producer of a fictional show called SHUSHI,   famous for its “Kick a Vicar”  and “Look Out It’s The Pie-R-A”  gags.   We learn that it was taken off air after a disastrous edition in which the token female presenter snapped, stripped, rubbed baked beans on her body and promised onscreen suicide “Right after we’ve heard – Phil Collins!”.

       The interviews are interspersed with re-enactments of bygone rows inside the cast  and  “archive video” of SHUSHI  performed live by Stephen Harper, Dudley Rees, Ged Simmons and that most peerless of clowns, Petra Massey of Spymonkey.    In the flashbacks she is the show’s token totty,  introduced with a leering “something for the Dads”,  landed with duff segments like Make Your Own Dog,  and fed unspeakable things blindfold.   Harper  protests,  “If it was illegal in the 70s for a man repeatedly to hit a woman with a rubber mallet against her will, half the men in England would be in prison”.   Good gag.

          Okorie Chukwu plays an obsessed ex-child-fan, persistently humiliated,  until he and his barmy pole-dancing mother (also Massey, always up for an upside-down slither)  attempt an armed kidnap of Harper to demand that he be let to sing.   And there’s a nice Noel Edmonds parody (“Exchangeathon”),  as the team deride their rival Saturday show.  Edmonds is Massey again,  sitting at a desk in a fine black beard wittering “It’s going nuts in here!” while desultory phone calls trickle in. 

       So a lot of laughs:  sharp digs at 70‘s male stars keen to drive a status-y “Sunflower Yellow Testarossa”,   and lovely physical gags like the ultimate chaotic  pie-fight being repeated in slo-mo.  But it needs a better climax,  since the disastrous edition is the first thing we see.  It isn’t as fine-tuned as most of Hunter’s work (or indeed Spymonkey’s).     Nor do we need the Korean Butler gag.  But maybe that’s a fiendishly cunning internal joke: not unlike TISWAS  this gang can’t resist a diversionary lark.   And nobody with a heart and eyes can resist Petra Massey.

box office  0121 236 4455   birmingham-rep.co.uk   to 15 March  
then TOURING  Sheffield, Edinburgh, Soho   –  to 26 April     Touring Mouse wide

Rating:  three   3 Meece Rating

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March 2, 2014 · 12:23 pm

BRASSED OFF Theatre Royal, York – now touring

LET THE BAND PLAY ON

Billy Elliott, The Full Monty, now Brassed Off –   thirty years on from the loss of pits and steelworks,  we seem to need a national rite of mourning and expiation, acknowledgement of  the social violence which dismantled old  industrial Britain and its communities. All three shows, now onstage, began as films:  but rituals, after all, are best performed live.

Mark Herman’s tale (adapted for the stage by Paul Allen)  tells of a colliery set to close,  its mining families living in anxiety and uneasy dispute (for there is £ 20,000  a head compensation offered, and some will vote for it).  Grimley’s pride is its brass band, and in that too there are some who want to finish and others – especiallly bandleader Danny (John McArdle)  who demand that it play on , just as in real life, Grimethorpe did.  In a hundred years, says Danny, it survived “seven strikes, two disasters, two world wars and a bloody great Depression”. It must endure.

Perched on a set of towering pithead machinery  young Shane – eight years old when it all happened – tells the story and sometimes descends to act his eight-year-old self,   the son of Phil and grandson of Danny. Luke Adamson is a pleasing Shane at both ages; his mother Sandra (Rebecca Clay) expresses the weariness of the women.   Indeed the wives help to make the story real:  campaigning for the men’s jobs yet impatient with their band pastime   (“..but at least you know what they’re up to when they’ve got their ands full of tuba”).

The heart of it is Phil:  Andrew Dunn  is  always a dryly beguiling actor, espcially brilliant (as in his superb Dinnerladies character)  as an essentially comic figure moving through a tragic situation.   He is part of that big, shining, defiantly manly band onstage:  great credit to the splendid players of the real  York Brass, under Nicholas Eastwood.  But his trombone keeps breaking, and he wrecks his marriage when he spends money he doesn’t have to buy a new one out of loyalty.
The script is not always as strong as the plot line itself:  Clara Darcy’s  Gloria arrives with her flugelhorn to join the band  (very good she is too) and is revealed as a Coal Board statistician;  her romance with the conflicted Andy nicely demonstrates the class gulf that yawns when one kid gets educated and the other stays down the pit (“Why couldn’t you have come back as a hairdresser?” asks Andy sadly.)    There are some wonderful set pieces, not least the band’s increasingly drunk march through a competition and its  heartbreaking distant “Danny Boy” as the bandmaster lies ill and the pit is closing.   And it would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the final coup de théatre in Land of Hope and Glory.  It’s  one to catch, a proper taste of a vanished England.

But I can’t not mention one inexplicable directorial decision by the otherwise surefooted Damien Cruden,   which dents its shine.    A play about the power of live music and harmonious collaboration does not need to mark its (perfectly smooth) scene changes with blasts of canned pop.  It’s not a film: that surely is the point?    Bad enough to have Pulp’s patronizing “Common People”,  but why mark a romantic moment with a few bars of Moon River,   pipe in a semi-audible outbreak of “The Lost Chord” during the ballot scene, and (aaagh!)  even after the perfectly apt brass-band mourning of “Jerusalem” during Phil’s attempted suicide,  some half-remembered pop tune?

One duff decision can’t mar the ritual – and bracingly polemic – splendour of the evening, or the impact of the live band.  There’s a long tour (details below) and it deserves to be seen. But I hope someone bravely pulls the plug on the canned link-music, and lets the brass mouths thunder out their message unhindered.

TOURING  :   Nottingham TR this week, 4-8 March (0115 989 5555)
tour continues nationwide to 10 May – details  http://theatrecloud.com/brassed-off/tour-info

rating:  three    3 Meece Rating

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February 27, 2014 · 9:21 am

THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE Wanamaker, SE1

FIGHTS, FLIGHTS, PANTALOONS AND PRENTICES:  BUT THE GROCER’S WIFE IS THE STAR.

Imagine three hours on a bench watching a cross between Spamalot and The Real Inspector Hound,  performed in flickering candlelight by a talented but overwrought gang of mummers who can’t agree which bits to cut.  You’re nearly there, but not quite.    After launching itself with the tenebrous, brilliantly morbid Duchess of Malfi  the Globe’s pretty candlelit playhouse stays reverently in-period,  but veers  to the opposite extreme.  Francis Beaumont’s 1607 romp shows a parody of a typical  romantic comedy-drama  of the day  – “The London Merchant” being hijacked by a couple in the audience.  They are an  affluent grocer and his wife (Phil Daniels and Pauline McLynn)  who object to the plot where a humble ‘prentice seeks to marry his master’s daughter. She  is destined for a chap called Sir Humphrey:  deathlessly portrayed by Dickon Tyrrell in a Barbie-pink slashed ‘n puffed pantaloon suit and what looks like Grayson Perry’s wig.

So they crash up out of the pit and insist on the star role going to their gormless apprentice Rafe (Matthew Needham). Incredibly, Noel Coward once played the part.  Anyway, they demand that Rafe celebrate ordinary people as  a heroic  “grocer errant – a knight of the Burning Pestle” and that the arty poseurs on the stage give him the best scenes.    It is as if Alan Sugar climbed on stage during Romeo and Juliet demanding a bigger part for the apothecary.

There are some fine moments, high and wild and marvellously ridiculous,  and real comedy gold every time  the fabulous Pauline McLynn chats loudly, rustles her bag of nuts or leaps onto the low stage to demand that her protegé kill a giant or sort out one of the hapless real actors‘ plots.   Her rounded and wonderful portrait of overconfident prosperous matronliness steals the show.

It is salutary to be reminded that there’s  nothing new about  “breaking down the fourth wall”  and having characters crash around in the auditorium.  Nor about theatrical in-jokes,  deliberate overacting,  offended stars dropping furiously out of character,  spoofy love scenes and gleeful parodies of overused 17c plots (knights errant,   an irrational test of love, faked deaths , a vengeful ghost,  and a rotund loon with a ginger beard (Paul Rider in another full-blown nutty performance) who can’t stop  singing.

Some fights, flights and  lines stick in the mind (“Is not all the world Mile End, mother?”) and anyone who rhymes “I”ll never clasp her” with “Jasper” can only be a pal.     But for an archaeological froth-fest, it’s too long.   Director Adele Thomas  does give us three brief musical entr’actes as well as the  interval  in which to uncurl our aching bodies,  and we need them,  while we did not in the  Duchess of Malfi.  Physical restlessness in theatres relates strongly to lack of absorption.

But the cast are heroes all, especially Needham who has already torn a ligament and wears a leg- brace but still dives into the pit with a knightly hobbyhorse round his waist.  Now my brain has stopped spinning, I’m quite glad I know what our ancestors got up to.

box office 0844 871 7628  to to 30 March

rating  three   3 Meece Rating

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February 25, 2014 · 12:11 am

THE A to Z of Mrs P Southwark Playhouse, SE1

WALKING THE STREETS, A FAR FROM LOST SOUL

Phyllis Pearsall became one of London’s great urban legends, through her own barnstorming memories and a fictionalized biography.  A young wife, a painter,  walks out on her husband in Venice in 1936, arrives in London,  gets lost once too often,  and resolves to create an indexed street-map of every borough. She walks 3000  miles of 23,000 streets and produces the A to Z street atlas we all love.    Here, in a love song to the teeming city,  she is  “Drawing the line, every road, every sign, The streets flow like wine, for this is our time!”.

It’s a grand romance. We have all in youth walked city streets, broke and adventurous, with a kind of love.   Over the years there have been weary reiterations of duller truths:  it wasn’t quite the first indexed atlas  (Bartholomew’s existed),  walking every street was unnecessary, what with Council maps and plans available,  and her father was a street-map maker (albeit a failing businessman) so it wasn’t quite a maverick idea.   Oh, and the actual drawing was done by an unsung draughtsman, Mr Fountain.

He does, in fact, appear here, endearingly played by Sidney Livingstone.  For this curious new musical by Diane Samuels and /Gwyneth Herbert draws from both the romantic legend of the lone steps and the factual conflicts of Phyllis’ life:  her bombastic Hungarian father Sandor who registered the company,  her runaway mother who died in an insane asylum, the plane crash from which Phyllis survived seriously injured, and her final determination to leave the company in Trust for its employees.

If that sounds a weak and confusing storyline for a musical,   so it proves.  It is wonderfully set beneath a multitude of dangling books, postcards, suitcases, street-signs, old telephones and newspapers;  Issy Suttie with her likeable clown looks is a beguiling lead, and  Sam Buntrock’s direction gives the ensemble a bustling, jostling city vigour to keep things rolling. But Samuels’ book falters: the narrative begins brightly with Phyllis’ arrival and a lovely song about London, but then  leaps crazily to and fro with flashbacks to her childhood, her parents’ first meeting well before that, and the end of their stormy marriage. You need to have looked up her life story or you could be lost, unsure what time-frame you’re in from minute to minute.

It is frustrating because Gwyneth Herbert’s lyrics are often excellent, almost Sondheimish, using tongue-twisting alphabetical lists of roads, streets, lanes and avenues and occasionally  a bitter gem like “A child needs a family like a pussy needs a well”.   The live music is pleasant enough, again Sondheimish though without his  hypnotic dash.  There are some good funny moments in the second half as she struggles to sell into shops, and one fine dramatic confrontation with her appalling father.  He is Michael Matus, a strong singer but wholly unable – who would be? – to make the choleric, noisy and overbearing Sandor even remotely likeable.   But there’s a grand bravura performance, often in lingerie,  by Frances Ruffelle as the troubled runaway mother.

box office 020 7407 0234  to   29 March             Sponsor: Sandfords

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating/

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January 31, 2014 · 11:12 pm

STROKE OF LUCK Park Theatre , N4

TIM PIGOTT-SMITH SHOWS HOW IT’S DONE

Few better fates can befall a new playwright than to have Tim Pigott-Smith cast – perfectly – at the heart of your premiere.  One of the finest modern Lears and a sharp-minded director,  when he takes on a role he brings undiluted intelligence and detail.  In Larry Belling’s début play he is Lester Riley,  a Long Island TV and radio repairman, widowed and recovering from a stroke.  We meet him – convincingly lopsided, even his left eye seeming to droop – in a wheelchair at his wife’s memorial service, confusing his adult children with a debonair grin beneath his battered baseball cap.  From then on, even when immobile in a hospital bed  his air of canny determined mischief drives the play.  He is convincingly in physical decline: only in moments of surreal conversation with his wife’s ghost do we see the nimble, resourceful man he was.

The resourcefulness is still there, because Lester is aware that he and his wife neglected their family:  he for work, she for “retarded”  children like their own Franklin.  Who is now institutionalized and  never visited by his three siblings, themselves on bad terms with one other and with life.  Monroe (Andrew Langtree)  is a smooth  dishonest accountant, Ike (Fergal McElherron ) a scruff fresh out of jail, and Cory (Kirstie Malpass) neurotically OCD about germs and constantly  washing.   We learn a bit more about each – sometimes rather too pat  – but Lester has a ploy to bring them together.  He lets it drop ‘accidentally’ that he made a fortune working and investing with the local Mafia, and announces that he is marrying his Japanese nurse Lily  (Julia Sandiford),  27 years younger and a widow with a child.  And leaving her everything.

There is enjoyable comedy to be extracted from this situation and Belling nails quite a bit of it,  not least in the larky relationship of Pigott-Smith and the nurse.   The children’s affront provides some good moments,  the best being when Ike visits one of the local godfathers to arrange his father’s extinction.   And though I cannot say that the final reveal is much of a surprise,  Kate Golledge’s direction offers decent obfuscation.  And just when  you are flinching a bit at the aw-gee-I-love ya finale – what TV sitcom writers call an “American Moment”  –  our hero hits us with a top pun about cremation.

Jez Bond’s brave, smart new theatre has a record of introducing interesting plays set in America:   Melanie Marnich’s haunting These Shining Lives, and a starry production of Daytona with Maureen Lipman and Harry Shearer.  Belling is the newest-fledged playwright so far, having worked in publicity, music biz and radio commercials.  You could murmur that he brings from this a certain over-easy facility,  an overemphatic underlining.   All the same,  it’s a good yarn with an honest heart, even if the latter spends a bit too much time on its sleeve.  And Pigott-Smith is a treat.

box office   020 7870 6876         http://www.parktheatre.co.uk     to 2 March

rating: three     3 Meece Rating

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January 22, 2014 · 11:15 pm

RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN Hampstead, NW3

WOMEN ARE REVOLTING!  BUT AGAINST WHAT???

The world is changing.  “Women are standing for President, men are exfoliating” Don,  an amiable klutz who used to teach but fell back on a quiet life as an ineffective college dean,  lets his bored wife Gwen (Emma Fielding) make lists of tasks for him to forget.  But into their world erupts old roommate, the glitzily single academic feminist, Cathy (Emilia Fox).  Her mother has had a heart attack, and the terror of losing the only person who adores her sparks a longing for a family of her own.  Possibly with  Don, who was her boyfriend before Gwen stole him.

The mutual lifestyle envy of the two women  – with interpositions from a scornful student babysitter, Avery (Shannon Tarbet)  and Cathy’s blissfully unreconstructed mother (an artfully understated Polly Adams)  lets Gina Gionfriddo meditate on the pitfalls of feminist theory.  It is Adams and Tarbet, the old and the young, who get most of the fun as their sharp lines undermine the angsty fretfulness of the fortysomethings.

The long first half is too talky-talky (or was at the last preview), suffering from  theory overload.  Indeed much of it is Cathy conducting a cultural studies seminar with Gwen and Avery as pupils.  It livens up whenever Avery delivers barbs of scorn or Alice potters past with1950’s wisdom about What Men Want.  But it is worth hanging on for the second half when the inevitable fling between Don and Cathy sparks some proper action.

Its questions about female destiny are all, of course,  unanswerable.   The moral, if any,  is that despite technical liberation women can’t win at everything,  because nobody does.  Stay-home mothers can long for brighter lights,   while high-flyers in their forties howl, like Cathy,  “I want a flawed tired marriage…I am ready to embrace mediocrity and ambivalence!”    As for Avery’s liberated generation (Shannon Tarbet is a jewel)  they may give their all only to be dumped for a submissive Mormon virgin. Harsh.

There are credibility problems.   One is the decision to dress Emilia Fox as Academe-Barbie in eyewateringly tight shiny leggings and four-inch heels;  another is that the literary and media success which Gwen envies and Don is dazzled by is – well,  a load of cobblers. Her seminars are pretentious feature-page fillers, droning about the influence of porn on Abu Ghraib and how the internet caused 9/11: she makes Camille Paglia look like Aristotle.   And when she urges Don to reignite his academic career, her suggestion is catchpenny parasitism: copy a chap who ran a book-group discussing Moby Dick with army veterans. Gawd!

It is hard to believe that Gionfriddo  does not know how vapid an academic her character is,  being herself a mistress of the far more demanding art of  building a good play (she wrote Becky Shaw).  But she probably didn’t mean me to end up siding with unambitious Don,  “ “jerking off to a computer while the family watch Toy Story”.  Poor devil, deserved his fling.  Even with a voracious cultural-studies maven in spray-on trousers.

Box Office: 020 7722 9301  to 22 Feb   http://www.hampsteadtheatre.com

rating  :  three   3 Meece Rating

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January 20, 2014 · 10:48 pm

THE BODY OF AN AMERICAN Gate Theatre, W11

 THE PITY,  PHOTOGRAPHS,  AND FASCINATION OF WAR

A howl of Arctic wind subdues the settling audience, facing one another from benches across a snowy floor. Screens informs us that all the words, photographs and videos were “spoken, heard, written or taken” between 1993 and 2014 by the playwright Dan O’Brien or his subject, the war photographer Paul Watson.  Watson won a Pulitzer for the significant photo at the heart of this docudrama:  an explicit and horrifying shot of an downed Black Hawk crewman’s body being filthily desecrated in Mogadishu.  O’Brien’s play about his developing friendship with the photographer, on email and then in person, won awards in the US.

Through its ninety minutes,  Damien Molony plays the youngish writer and William Gaminara the older, life-battered photographer.  Each also speaks the parts of others – interpreters, guides, victims, Inuits when they go to the frozen Canadian North together.  Sometimes they speak one another’s words, more as gimmick than enlightenment.  That is particularly problematic because Gaminara’s Watson is tremendous: so rounded and nuanced and natural that it is hard not to believe he is the real thing.   Molony, on the other hand – and one must credit the writer’s modesty – must struggle with  a pretty annoying character:   self-pityingly pretentious about his writing and his inability to get on with his family, which sounds no worse than most.  It is only when he takes on other parts,  notably near the end as the briskly patriotic brother of the dead airman,  that he can draw sympathy.

At its core is the moment when Watson was took the terrible picture in Mogadishu and the voice of the dead man, Sgt. William David Cleveland,  seemed to speak:  “If you do this I will own you forever”.  Watson struggles with racking honesty to justify the apparent prurience of war photography and to understand war itself.  He also expresses complex guilt,  fearing that it was such pictures which caused Clinton to pull out of Somalia, keep clear of Rwanda, and maybe thus encourage Al-Qaeda towards 9/11.

The character O’Brien, on the other hand,  falls into the depressive’s trap of seizing the emotional and physical agonies of war victims and making them his own,  while simultaneously nursing guilt at that feeling and wanting to make the man who really saw the flayings and dead babies his hero-friend.  This in turn, tempts Watson to make him his “confessor”.  Such uneasy male ambiguities gave me trouble committing entirely to the piece until near the end,  after their interlude in the Canadian Arctic. The best moment is when the photographer is calmly told what’s what by the  dead man’s clipped,  decent brother. He learns that the terrible picture performed more service than dishonour.

James Dacre of the Royal & Derngate directs,  moving the pair (and two chairs) deftly along the transverse stage,  exploiting their claustrophobic closeness and the screens which show harrowing war photos, Arctic vistas or once- wittily – a picture of O’Brien’s own theatre of action:  Princeton library.

box office   020 7229 0706   http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk   to 8 Feb
Royal and Derngate Northampton, 01604 624811   27 Feb-8 March

Rating:  three   3 Meece Rating

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January 18, 2014 · 10:49 am

CIPHERS Bush Theatre, W12

SPOOKS,  SECRETS , SEDUCTIONS

If you are, like me,  addicted to  Spooks on television and to the deeper-rooted psychologies of John le Carré,  Dawn King’s new play feeds the same hunger for ambiguity, dangerous secrets and ethical conflict. Nations need intelligence, intelligence requires spies and secrets,  but secrets rot people from the inside.

So you have the ingredients for drama, and for intensity.   In Blanche McIntyre’s deft and well-honed production from Out of Joint and Exeter Northcott (reaching the end of a good tour) the set is made of sliding screens , the scenes are short and often momentarily baffling,  the time-scale leaps backwards and forwards offering skilful clues. And each of the four cast is – without obvious disguise – playing two different people.

Grainne Keenan is Justine – a quiet, efficient redundant marketing assistant who, thanks to her fluent Russian and Japanese, gets a job with MI5.  She doubles as Justine’s sister Kerry, who we meet in flash-forward scenes distraught at Justine’s mysterious death.   Shereen Martin,  dark and assured as a feared headmistress,  is both Justine’s MI5  boss and the rich wife of her artist lover.  Ronny Jhutti doubles as the boyfriend and, superbly, as a furious young Pakistani youth worker who Justine is made to recruit as an informer.  And Bruce Alexander is a lecherous yet fatherly Russian spook and, briefly,  the heroine’s grieving but patriotic old Dad.

Complicated?  Bear with me, and be assured that  it is a tribute to Blanche McIntyre’s direction that you don’t get lost, and that every time the screens slide you are agog to know what – and who –  happens next.  So as a two-hour entertainment you can’t fault it;  and as it went on I found myself happily reflecting that it combined the interest of a TV drama with an extra theatrical layer of meaning conferred by the doubling of characters: so that rather than just considering the corrupting effect of intelligence agencies you think of wider things: uncompromising youthful innocence and crafty age, subtle bullying both emotional and professional,  layers of betrayal.

The problem with a cliffhanger-mystery, though, is that you have to resolve it. Unless you’re some really annoying intellectual ambiguist too arrogant to tell stories properly.   The author here acknowledges that we need to know: why DID Justine die?  Was it really suicide?  Once you work for MI5, is anything in your life real?  Echoes here of the real life “spy in the bag” case.

And so she does resolve it.  And although there is one chilling, horribly credible resolution,  it is followed by an odd coda in which the writer seems to be suggesting yet another layer of deceit, but without making it clear enough to satisfy.  And that sort of knocks the shine off it.  But whether here or in Salisbury, the skill and entertainment of it all is well worth the ticket, and Dawn King (whose Foxfinder won the Papatango prize) is certainly one to watch.

box office 0208 743 5050           to 8 feb  then tour ends Salisbury Playhouse to 16 Feb    Touring Mouse wide

Rating:  three   3 Meece Rating

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January 12, 2014 · 10:06 pm

DINOSAUR ZOO Phoenix, WC1, now touring

AUSSIE DINOS RULE

There is a good reason why frazzled British parents cherish Australian nannies: and every cheerful, firm, gung-ho, reliable quality we dream of is exemplified in Lindsey Chaplin.  Striding onstage through a forest of weird inflatable Aussie trees in her zookeeper kit,  with a bright “G’day!” she demands that the audience of restless small children and parents greet her back. “I like to start happy because by the end of this show some of you will be crying. True”.

She has been hosting this tremdendous puppet hour since 2011 and boy, does this sheila know how to handle us.  Everything’s a joke, but everything’s serious too:  not only the (considerable) battery of facts about wildlife 65 million years ago,  but the management of an unpredictable unfledged audience.  “Come on up  –  you –  yeah, nice to be part of the London slow-walking festival…Don’t come up unless you’re asked, OK? And parents, if you own a rogue child…”

There were several rogue children among the ones she did summon up to stroke baby Dryosaursi on puppeteers laps,  hypnotize a Leaellynasaurus,  assist in gruesome dentistry and throw disgusting looking bundles of guts to an apparently escaped – and monstrously enormous – Titanosaur with wobbling wattles and gigantic razor teeth.  Every child was fielded with amiable brilliance, whether rogue or helpful: some of them only three years old.  One  tiny girl flatly refused to put her head in the Titanosaurs vast mouth and insisted her brother come up instead.  No problem.    Not that the rest of us were left out of the action:  at one point giganic primitive dragonfly Meganeuras erupted suddenly around the audience, flapping on  long wobbly poles, and we leapt and shrieked in delighted alarm.

I had not quite known what to expect of Erth’s show,  except that the famous company’s puppeteering would be classy, subtle in movement and painstaking in accuracy,   and that its creatures – deduced from fossil science  – are proudly Australian and therefore even bigger and fiercer than the familar Jurassic-Park lot.      But it wears its educational credits with pleasant lightness,  eschews Disneyish sentimentality,  and is paced cunningly from the first cuddly lap-dinos to the fiercer ones and the immense and unexpected Bronto-neck which concludes the show.   The Titanosaur is fabulous.  If you stay on, you can go on stage to meet ‘n greet it.

I caught the show at the end of its London mornings at the Phoenix, where it delightfully shared the Irish-bar stage set built for shows of ONCE in the evening (hell, theses are Aussie dinosaurs, they’re comfortable a pub).  But the reason to alert you now is that it is off on the road again, from Southend to Scunthorpe and beyond.
And any dino-lover over three should not miss it.

Cue a celebratory touring-mouse – Touring Mouse wide

Rating   Four  4 Meece Rating
Touring UK:   29 Jan – 24 April  Details:   http://www.dinosaurzoolive.com

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January 10, 2014 · 11:45 pm

ONLY OUR OWN – Arts Theatre, WC2

ECHOES OF ANGLO-IRISH ANGST:   CRITIC STRUGGLES TO SYMPATHIZE
Full personal disclosure: having a longstanding connection with Ireland  I am not a natural empath for the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy displaced after eight centuries of colonial rule.   Hated the Somerville and Ross chronicles of “The Irish RM” , with that toff sense of entitlement and casually comic portrait of villagers as sly Papist drunkards.  So this play about an Anglo-Irish family “struggling for identity” found me  hampered by a sense that despite the 800-year occupation,   seventy years after Irish  independence the dispossessed descendants should bite the bullet and fit in.

That some of them don’t is the theme of this play by Swedish-born  Ann Henning Jocelyn, now married to an Irish peer in Connemara and catching the echoes of Protestant resentment with a keen foreign ear. Her director – Lars Harald Garthe – is Norwegian,  and the theme of a claustrophobic family trapped within social change echoes both Ibsen and Strindberg.   It lacks, though , the eloquent intensity which makes us feel for Julie, Hedda or Nora:  the first half in particular is so lugubrious that you just want to shake the lot of them.  No Irish sparkle here.

It is set between 1989 and today: Meg and Andrew (Maef Alexander and Cornelius Garrett) run a salmon fishery in Connemara, with the grim matriarch Lady Eliza  uttering cut-glass snobberies at the head of the table.  She wants to tell the sullen teenage granddaughter Titania (Alex Gilbert) about  1922, when as a child she saw the rebels burn down her family seat, shoot her brother and give them fifteen minutes to grab their treasures and leave their ancestral lands.   In a well-crafted monologue she writes a letter, but only later does it find its mark.

For Titania is  resents the isolation of her childhood (no school till 11, then Cheltenham) and mocks her parents‘ toxic snobberies: chillingly, they let a local craftsman stand outside in the rain waiting for his fee, claiming “Their Church won’t allow them to enter our houses”.  The grandmother’s funeral in their moribund Protestant church is “family only”  to prevent Catholic villagers coming.  Weirdly, though, in all their explanations of how the locals are “different”not one of them ever mentions what is going on through the 1990’s in the North: bombings, ceasefires, Orange parades.  Anyhow,   Titania rebels, has two children by a local farmer,  and dumps them on the parents to go to London, call herself Tania and hook an investment banker.   Whereon the parents find a new role,  start a playgroup, make friends in the village and send little Aoife and Cahal to the nun-run village school.  The forbidding shade of Lady Eliza and her 70-year-old grudge fades: but  Tania comes back, and reverts to genetic type by being vile and snobbish in a different way.

Henning Jocelyn is rather too keen to hammer home a moral about reconciliation and tidy up the end, though, and  there’s always an alarm bell when a character starts quoting her therapist and going on about her “fledgling soul” as Titania does:    “ I don’t exist…I”m just an empty shell without a place in the world”.   Hmmm.

box office 0207 836 8463  to 1 Feb

Rating    three  3 Meece Rating

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January 4, 2014 · 10:59 pm

THE CANTERVILLE GHOST Felixstowe/ Ipswich

CANTERVILLE MEETS VAUDEVILLE  –   on the road   Touring Mouse wide
   Here’s a bit of fun to report, the last rich dregs of Christmas before theatrecat puts on a straight face and heads to Stratford.   Last year Common Ground – the tiny community theatre company led by Julian Harries and director-composer Pat Whymark – gave us a blissful spoof murder mystery with silly wigs and Round-the-Horneish surrealism.  This time they seize on Oscar Wilde’s short story The Canterville Ghost,  in which an overconfident American diplomatic family rent a stately home and defy the resident ghost with a scornful “We come from a modern country!”

In the original,  ironic comedy is mingled with romantic pathos.  The ghost struggles to keep up the traditional  bloodstain on the hall floor against the power of Pinkerton’s Patent Stain Remover, and is affronted when his rattling chains are met with a tranquilly helpful offer of Tammany’s Lubricant.  But ultimately it is the innocent young daughter, Virginia, who by weeping for his ancient sins achieves him forgiveness and rest in the garden of death.  As a child I adored the story: so given the irrepressible larkiness of this team,  it was gratifying to hear the cast of six begin, solemnly straight  and melodious, by harmonizing Wilde’s “When a golden girl can win / Prayer from out the lips of sin…”

 

Following this salute to the poignant stuff, however, they revert to their Kenneth-Horne-meets-panto mode, and when the young heroine eventually does shed a tear  it is of another kind (blame the most unlikely performance of the Angel of Death you’ll see all winter)    So, no Victorian mawkishness but rather an equally Victorian vaudeville treatment.  There’s a puppet lapdog,  a speaking portrait, a lot of witty props, a depressed posh raven  and two barmily inventive  unWildean interludes in which the Ghost  reminisces about a cruise ship he went on or relates a complicated miniature epic involving the wicked showman Jeremiah Squanderbeef using a severed head as a coconut-shy until the headless highwayman Mad Jack McFlapjack  reclaims it.

Its gusto and humour carry the day,   even in a damp church-hall matinee where I caught the penultimate tour date.  As the Ghost, Harries roams around in a magnificent Tudor outfit enunciating like Donald Sinden,  and embroiders on Wilde’s jokes about the ghost’s ability to manifest in any form (“Henry Sawyer the poisoned Lawyer – Robert Rummer the Strangled Plumber”  etc). The Americans are played note-perfect by Stefan Atkinson as Hiram,  sweet-faced Lorna Garside as Virginia and an irresistibly over-the-top Alice Mottram as the wife prone to invented mid-West slang.    Whymark’s songs offer pleasingly groansome lyrics like “He makes our lives unbearable, lucky we ain’t scare-able” . There are low jokes to get the younger audience members snorting,  and cleverer ones like the Ghost’s worry about impersonating Satan because “he’s touchy about copyright”.   Wilde would like that.

Tour concludes at Wolsey Studio, Ipswich   9-11 Jan
box office 07928 765153     http://www.commongroundtc.co.uk

Rating:  three 3 Meece Rating

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December 19, 2013 · 12:24 am

WENDY & PETER PAN Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

NEVERLAND HAS ITS FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS RAISED

You can tick off reasons why this is just what the RSC should do.  A fresh commission from a rising playwright, Ella Hickson; an intellectually and morally ambitious reinterpretation of a classic;  a family show for the season with flying and sword-fights, superb sets full of surprises by Colin Richmond, and an internationally respected director , Jonathan Munby.

But you can’t win them all.  And for all its merits this long, sprawling show doesn’t quite jell.  Hickson reframes J.M.Barrie’s tale around Wendy and her mother,  gets rid of Nana the dog and offers themes of family grief and feminism.   Fair enough: Barrie’s elder brother died leaving an inconsolable mother, and it is not hard to trace the idea of the Lost Boys and the consoling myth of a Neverland of boy-fun which nonetheless yearns for a mother.   Also, the Suffragette movement was hot in 1904, so it is playful to challenge the domestic entrapment of Wendy and raise Mrs Darling’s political consciousness in a coda.

It starts in the nursery with a  romping family game .  The boys are not small children but early adolescents, John (Jolyon Coy) a  public-school prefect type and relegating Wendy to being a rescued damsel:  “You must be very very sad, very very impressed and very very grateful”.  It is not Peter Pan who arrives first,  but the consumptive deathbed of brother Tom. The doctor  is Arthur Kyeyune,  who strikingly doubles later as the silent crocodile  in a top-hat and trailing coat reminiscent of a voodoo Baron Samedi. The ticking of his clock is the ticking of time and mortality for us all.

Peter arrives, they all fly on a spectacular circling mobile, and Tinkerbell is a thumping, sarcastic, ginger-haired Waynetta Slob of a fairy with a vast pink tutu and a stroppy EastEnders attitude.  There is a refreshing slanginess to Hickson’s dialogue, with plenty of “Bog off!”  and “Do one!”.  Tiger Lily (a she-macho Michelle Asante)  inculcatesWendy with Girl Power.   But for all the delight of the underground den and the pirate ship,  the whooping boyish larkiness gets tedious, overdone perhaps to contrast with sensible liberated girlhood.  And Peter (Sam Swann) is too hyperactive and coldly inhuman for sympathy. It all sits uncomfortably alongside the mournful preoccupation of Wendy (Fiona Button)  with finding her lost brother.  One minute she’s resisting Captain Hook’s creepy attempts to woo her with a balldress and tiara, the next showing solidarity with Tiger Lily, then back to Barrie whimsy when she finds out (on a flying bed with Peter, hmmm)  that dead brothers become stars twinkling with maternal tears,  and can’t get to Neverland till their families stop grieving.

Interesting themes,  not balanced or woven satisfyingly together. Not a bad family outing, though:  Tinkerbell is a rude delight, and I do appreciate a thoroughly camp Captain Hook  (Guy Henry) suffering from existential doubts and failing to notice that Pirate Smee is in love with him and hopefully collecting colour swatches for their cottage together.  Very modern.

box office  0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk    to 2 March

rating:  three 3 Meece Rating

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December 6, 2013 · 11:57 pm

FROM MORNING TO MIDNIGHT – Lyttelton, SE1

CLERK ON THE RUN FINDS NOTHING WORTH BUYING.  NOT SURE I DO EITHER.

An absconding bank-clerk in search of raw primal experience settles on the thrill of a sports stadium.  “Feel the life, the roar of the crowd!..  All one, all screaming from all galleries, roaring, yelling… released from the slavery of wages and society!”   He’s looking out at us, moustache a-bristle, as he says this. But I cannot report that the Lyttelton audience was roaring.   Concentratedly respectful of Georg Kaiser’s 1912 German Expressionist classic (in a new version by Dennis Kelly); trusting it to mean something,  occasionally risking a laugh.  Not roaring.

Not bored,  though,  and enjoying  Melly Still’s fast-moving direction and Soutra Gilmour’s inventive sets.  A whole room rises overhead askew,  a giant sheet becomes a blizzard where our hero wrestles a skeleton hand and shouts at a skull-faced imaginary woman.  Later we get rudeish Weimar cabaret turns and a Salvationist revival meeting to keep us going.  Without such diversions,  though, this stylized study of disillusion, the emptiness of money and the tedium of city life could be pretty hideous.   It spoke importantly to Kaiser’s period and society, and will fascinate students of that time, but to be honest its message boils down to “Is this all there is?‘   and “money can’t buy happiness”. Neither statement feels either new or, in this style, especially engaging.

Melly Still certainly enjoys the stylization.  In that classic of deflation,  Cold Comfort Farm,  the intellectual Mybug enthuses about a new wave film where “they wear glass clothes and move in time to a metronome” .  I confess that this flitted through my head in the opening sequence  as a bank counter revolves ever faster like the clock, and scuttling jerky customers and staff speed up, pausing for a cartoonish exchange between a customer and manager in fat-suits (heavy literalists, these Germans).    Behind the grille is the expressionless Clerk himself,  Adam Godley,  with a cruel centre parting and the kind of ‘tache-and-glasses combo usually found fixed together in joke shops.  A fur-clad Italian bourgeoise brushes against his hand  and provokes a moment of madness.  He grabs the cash,  rushes out to find her, then onward in terror at what he has done attempts a brief interlude with his family before walking out,  causing Grandma to drop dead and his wife to reject her daughters  (seems even an idiot male is better than none).

Crying  “I want to experience something!” and writhing like a hybrid of Basil Fawlty and Woody Allen, he seeks fulfilment in a graveyard, stadium and nightclub (Pierette has a wooden leg so he never gets his own over).  Godley is a bit of a hero,  having returned to the rush-and-clamber  of this production after an operation on his arm, still bandaged.  It ends with revivalist preaching and an electro-crucifixion tableau which annoyed the scholarly German lady next to me, for reasons I failed  to grasp completely on the way out.  I had a train to catch.

Box Office 020 7452 3000   to  11 Jan

Rating   three   3 Meece Rating3 Meece Rating

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December 2, 2013 · 12:31 pm

DEATH SHIP 666 – Jermyn St Theatre, WC1

BEARS!  THOUSANDS OF THEM!  (well, two paws from the wings)

“You know what they say – if you upset bears theyll kill everyone you love!”  cries the demented flop-fringed architect.  “Thats not a thing!” scornfully retorts the paranoid female mental patient, locked in the ship’s bilge as it sinks.   Its a good line.  So is  “Bears! thousands of them!”   when uttered in panic aboard a sinking ship in mid-Atlantic previously untroubled by ursine invaders.

But in this shouty 75-minute melodrama you have to truffle for the good bits, like a bear yourself.    It was a hit at the Edinburgh fringe,   and is created with such youthful gusto by twins Michael Patrick and Paul Clarkson , with Gemma Hurley,  that you can’t hate it.  But it would help to be drunk, or getting that way , and young enough to shriek happily at the broadest of joke situations. There is a discount for Christmas parties, so that will happen.

The idea, nicely set up by jitterbugging cast members in sailor suits at the entrance, is that a doomed voyage sets out with the necessary central-casting passengers – a rich villainous couple on an insurance scam, a troubled architect with a tragic past, a ten year old prodigy, a paranoid woman on psychiatrists orders,  a mad one eyed captain and an evil electrician (“John deVille Crapwirer”)   and his love-starved bride.   The Titanic movie music swells  and fades throughout, though in a raucous musical mashup near the end we also get Phantom, Les Mis and Sondheim references.  Mattias Penman as The Architect hurls his hilarious quiff around to good effect, and Rachel Parris is particularly funny as the love interest.

Its problem for the post Fringe audience, though, is being too one-note and shouty, never giving a joke a moment to breathe and grow.  Holly Hobbie (Carrie Marx) plays the ten-year-old detective with panache but the gag gets plain irritating.  Still, there are moments of slapstick courtship and Poseidon-Venture staggering to enjoy. Even if , an hour in, you do rather end up on the side of the bears…

box office   0207 287 2875   to 15 Dec

rating:  three  3 Meece Rating

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November 28, 2013 · 5:10 pm

HORRIBLE HISTORIES : Barmy Britain Part 2 – Garrick, WC1

BLOOD, FILTH,  MURDER AND CHILDISH GLEE

A fearful roar, as of surf on rocks,  heralds the arrival and settling of school parties:  three hundred 6-11 year olds surging and bouncing while ushers look on with maternal pleasure or wincing horror,  depending on gender.  But they’re game for theatre, even if it risks being a bit educational:  it is rare for the mere rising of the safety-curtain to meet deafening cheers.  This softened me up, and I needed it:  Terry Deary’s “Horrible Histories” books are hugely popular but always put me off.   I admit that children love gory fights, beheadings, filth, bums, laughing at authority figures and any kind of noisy cartoonish disgracefulness.   I did, once.  But why, I grumped, encourage it?    So I avoided the books.  And the shows, written by Deary with Neal Foster (who also directs).

But when something’s big and beloved, it behoves the solemn critic to turn up, dodge the flying ice-creams and risk the eardrums.  And possibly to join in the audience chorus of the Black Death Song,  swellings and smelliness culminating in   “Time to ring your funeral bell / Then along comes Mr Death, and takes you off to hell”).    Not to mention a startling Burke and Hare number to the tune of Postman Pat.

For this is a lively hour,  with Lauryn Redding and Anthony Spargo hurtling between characters from Richard the Lionheart to Queen Victoria with a series of (rather classy) quick-change costumes and a magic folding prop-box as castle, prison or tumbril.   There is the inevitable delight in beheading, bum-wiping  (Henry VIII”s Groom of the Stool),  and any war which turned out to be pointless: some good jokes about William Wallace and the Bruce.   There is an attempt at curing an audience member of the Plague by rubbing a chicken’s bum on her neck and  “purifying the air” with loud noises.

That detail of superstitious plague-cures was why in the end, I gave in and admitted that as school or holiday trips go, it’s not bad.  For Deary may jump on disgusting facts and embarrassing errors of judgment like Richard  I’s crusades,  but they are real facts and sometimes enlightening:  these children now know the scale of plague deaths, the progress of Boudicca, why the Stone of Scone matters, how Tudor executioners got paid, and that the heroic legend of Dick Turpin and Black Bess is hogwash.  They know that history is a big, brash riveting story.  It’s not just Second Period After Break on Wednesdays, as it was for my bored generation;   or “How would you feel if you were a Roman Soldier’s wife?”  as it sometimes is now.  It’s a story.

Box office: 0844 412 4662   to 5 Jan

Rating :  three    3 Meece Rating

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November 27, 2013 · 11:08 pm

ONCE A CATHOLIC – Tricycle, NW6

KICKING THE HABITS IN A KILBURN CONVENT

Mother Basil is dissecting a rabbit’s reproductive system for the O-level set,  but as she reaches “vagina”  the Angelus rings and everyone must recite “The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary..”etc.    As work resumes,  an innocent enquiry about sperm sends Mother Basil into palpitations  and Mary Mooney to Reverend Mother Thomas Aquinas for a bollocking.

Full disclosure:   I was a convent girl, a decade later than this play’s 1950 setting,  and could have joined in that Angelus without hesitation.  But my nuns were of a subtler and kinder disposition than the maniacal blackbeetles in Mary O’Malley’s  1970’s hit play.  It is a savagely funny portrait of the Catholicism of the Irish diaspora,  cultishly clinging to the regulatory aspects of the Faith at the expense of spiritual and charitable ones.  It struck me as a curious parallel with how today’s Islamic burqa-fundamentalists console their exile  in these chilly climes.

The play deals with three 15-year-olds, all inevitably called Mary, and their attempts to understand sexuality in the teeth of their demented mentors:  three nuns, Father Mullarkey, and an ancient music-master obsessed with Gilbert and Sullivan.  Two have boyfriends and know a bit, not least from the dirty bits of Leviticus.  One is dating Derek, played by Calum Callaghan as a perpetually hair-combing Teddyboy with a bow-legged me-and-my-testicles swagger; another finds a dreadful posh-Catholic Cuthbert and goes all the way  (ah, more personal memories:  a chap called Malachy once informed me that extramarital sex is “all right between Catholics, because we can confess it”).

Director Kathy Burke opts to play it hard for laughs.   Don’t look here for the tragedies of Catholicism or the agonies of children.  Cecilia Noble could have delivered Mother Peter’s homilies about Purity  in a cooler, more sinister way, but here all religious adults are played as one-note cholerics. And it is indeed hog-snortingly funny,  from Mother Peter brandishing the compulsory stout Lady of Fatima Knicker, to the Purity lecture and  Mary Mooney’s Irish Dancing.  It’s not  topically vicious: Father Mullarkey (Sean Campion, delightful)  is not a bad man, just an eejit, embarrassedly kind when Mary Mooney (Molly Logan)  wants to confess a Mortal Sin.   She was coerced into giving a lad what she thinks he called a Twentieth Century Fox…Oh, she means a J. Arthur Rank.  Tactless of the priest to offer her a sausage, but she does get absolution.

She wants it.  Indeed the most serious character, and the only subtle performance, is Logan  as the lumpen, lank-haired devout child of a family too poor to pay for her to go on the Fatima pilgrimage:  a sweet open soul unrecognized by the purblind nuns amid her slyer classmates.  Her wounded sincerity edges this romp of a show closest to angry satire.  But it’s a period piece,   and probably best played as a lark.    There are darker plays to be written about Catholicism and sexuality,  but in the cheerful ‘70s,  when we shudderingly shrugged off the 1950s gloom, this one was needed.

box office  020 7328 1000    to 18 Jan

Rating:  three   3 Meece Rating

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November 20, 2013 · 11:04 pm

ERIC AND LITTLE ERN – Vaudeville, WC2

BRINGING BACK THE SUNSHINE 

“Are you going to read your newspaper or annoy me?”  asks Ern, trying to concentrate on his bedtime reading.   “I can do both!”  replies Eric confidently, a 6ft,  bald, black-spectacled eternal six-year-old:  charming , enraging and unforgettable.   Behind me a woman’s voice gasps in mirth “Just like my husband!” .  Moments later,  Eric wanders to the window and hears a police siren,  and suddenly most of the audience are laughing before he can say  “He’s not going to sell much ice cream going at that speed”.   This ninety-minute evening often feels less like a show than a ritual of remembrance, gentle mourning and solidarity.

There have been other Morecambe and Wise tribute acts,  recently a tremendous performance by Bob Golding as Eric alone.  For me that threatened  to overshadow this  affectionate re-creation by  Jonty Stephens and Ian Ashpitel.    But their focus is  the relationship between the pair over 43 years, first in variety  then  in TV shows  – at their peak written by Eddie Braben –   of an innocent brilliance whose closest modern equivalent is probably Miranda (and even that is less innocent.)

The first act, though studded with jokes from the Braben years and a daft old vaudeville klaxon gag or two, is dramatized, and works about 70 per cent of the time.   Ernie is in a hospital bed, nearing his own last heart attack in 1999 when the shade of Eric,  dead fourteen years, turns up at his bedside messing about in a white coat  (much serious tutting over the clipboard, culminating in turning it the right way up).  He gradually rouses Ernie to remember routines.    Stephens captures the restless funny-bones of the taller man  and Ashpitel the wounded self-image of Ernie: both convince after a while.  Poignant moments deflate just in time (“I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d lost you, Ern” says Eric. Then thoughtfully “Bought a hamster, probably”.    The gags endure, diamond-bright.  Some are sublime and perennial,  like Morecambe’s wounded “I was playing the right notes. Not necessarily in the right order”.    Some clean-yet-mucky ones will never die.   “Paintings?  My auntie’s got a Whistler” –  “Now, there’s a novelty!”.      Others are doubly funny for being out of date.  “Marjorie Proops”  “Really?”  “Every day in the Mirror”.

Ah, memories!   Bill Cotton , Lew Grade, Winifred Atwell,  Bob Martin’s dog powders, Russ Conway, Des O’Connor (“short for Desperate”).  For anybody over fifty these are magical incantations,  words of power and comfort.   For the young, the second act is  at least a demonstration, BBC-Sunday-night-style, of  their virtuoso crosstalk before the red plush curtain.  Why not?   Writing and personae like these are too precious to die with their original performers.  Tributes are  OK  if done with love.  And that fizzes from the audience like Tizer.

box office  0844 412 4663  to 12 Jan  (mainly matinées after mid- Dec)
Supported by : Stage One

Rating:  three      3 Meece Rating(and a vaudeville mouse as a makeweight)  Comedy Mouse

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November 14, 2013 · 11:26 pm

THAT FACE – Landor, SW9

AFFLUENCE AND ADDICTION IN A STORMING REVIVAL
     
After three red-carpet nights up West there’s bracing refreshment in a pub theatre, especially offering the first London revival of a play which in 2007 amazed the theatre world.  The first of the “middle-class dramas” promised by Dominic Cooke at the Royal Court saw Polly Stenham, then 19,  winning  a clutch of awards and an Olivier nomination with a dark, passionate 90-minute portrait of an affluent family in freefall.  Having missed it then,  I was eager to find out what the fuss was about (one critic called her a new Tennessee Williams).  Curiosity was the greater because her most recent play No Quarter (also about a messed-up rich family) struck me as  pretentious, vapid and fey.

This one is brilliant.  In No Quarter there was a tiresome sense that druggy, posh decadent bohemians are somehow more interesting than other people –   an attitude you can only get away with (and then, not for long)  if you’re Noel Coward.   In this earlier play, though, the teenage Stenham confronted head-on, with real fury as well as absurd humour,  the damage and horror of addiction.   Sixteen-year-old Mia (Stephany Hyam) is initially seen as a sadistic boarding-school brat helping  her ghastly friend Izzy (Georgina Leonidas, a sexy spitfire nightmare)  to torture a younger girl.  But by the end we weep for what her terrible parents have made her: Hyam, in a terrific professional debut, finely balances shrillness with childlike vulnerability.

Eighteen-year-old Henry (Rory Fleck-Byrne)   has been trying to cure his mother of alcoholism and prescription drug abuse since he was thirteen,  and is locked into a dreadful co-dependency,  unable to escape the dual roles of baby boy and adored boy- acolyte,  sleeping on the end of her bed in case she chokes herself in the night, joining in her crazed dressing-up games.  “If you left she’d either top herself or get better” says Mia; but the poor good boy is trapped.  Their father is in Hong Kong with a new wife and baby,  only flying home when the school rings up to expel Mia for feeding her mother’s drugs to a child who ends up in a coma.

As we agonize over “underclass” families and the children of addict mothers and absent fathers, Stenham’s pitiless message is that equally terrible childhoods may lie hidden,  cushioned by money and Docklands flats.  Tara Robinson directs with headlong, violent verve: the scenes unroll around a bed which can be  in a dormitory,  either apartment or – with sad chill – can represent the distance between father and daughter in a smart restaurant:  a flat white emptiness.   Caroline Wildi as Martha the manipulative, unrepentant addict mother  is a gaunt and glaring, beguilingly horrible figure:  a performance which, staring-eyed in that intimate space,  will be hard to forget.  A gripping play, with a  proper beating heart.  I now see what the  2007 fuss was about.

Box Office: 020 7737 7276 | http://www.landortheatre.co.uk    to  1 Dec

Rating:  four4 Meece Rating

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November 13, 2013 · 10:22 pm

MOJO – Harold PInter Theatre, SW1

FLASH-FLOOD OF TESTOSTERONE IN OLD SOHO:    FEMALE CRITIC UNMOVED.  

Three distinct audiences will head for this play.   It brought an Olivier to Jez Butterworth at the Royal Court in 1995, and some will come in mere homage to the playwright whose eloquence and mythic echoes gave the world Jerusalem, 14 years later,  and to his director Ian Rickson.   Then there will be (already are!)  hordes of teenage girls drawn by the casting of Rupert Grint,  Potter’s  Ron Weasley.   And finally it may lure a new generation of young men, drawn in by the £ 10 day-tickets after hearing that it is very Tarantino.  Black comedy, gangsters,  a sleazy club,  a corpse chopped in half in two dustbins,  a shooting,  and sharply dressed young men forever calling one another cunts.   Add to that an ecstatic programme essay on early rock ‘n roll, and the playwright’s claim that he wanted dialogue “as rhythmic and compulsive as Shakin’ All Over ,or Hound Dog” . Sweary rock ‘n roll! Cool.

It is set in 1958 in Ezra’s club on Dean Street, perfectly realized by Ultz and given  meaningful extra gloom by references (classic Butterworth, and effective)  to a fine July day outside.  It starts in the upstairs room where six guys, in various combinations,  fret over the poaching of their star Silver Johnny by a rival,  and break the news of  the owner’s murder to his weird son,  Baby.  The second act is downstairs,  as they endure a terrified siege alongside the corpse-bins..

The idealized image of a  grimly macho ‘50s Soho clearly gave the 26-year-old Butterworth a heavy dose of pre-natal nostalgia.  There are no women – the only mention of them being scatological remarks about how they lose control of their bodily functions when Silver Johnny is onstage.    Daniel Mays provides the humour and some humanity,  in a wilder reprise of his terrific TV role as Ronnie Biggs and his recent Donmar part as a dodgy lawyer. His cheeky-fixer facade crumbles into hapless panic and little amphetamine spurts of viciousness.    Grint  as Sweets  the drug provider  is an endearing fool;  Ben Whishaw is frankly   superb as the damaged, cold-eyed Baby.    The second act, which he dominates, is by far the best.

But to be honest,  this supposed modern-classic almost lost me before that.  Call the characters classical archetypes,  interpret it as an epic clash of two kingdoms with Baby as Hamlet,  or an “austere, savage, hilarious ritual” of male tribes (that’s what Butterworth says in the programme)  and you can admire it.  Everyone did when it was fresh and shocking in 1995.    But two decades of TV and film obsession with similar macho gangs,  monotonous cuntified  abuse and self-pitying male self-forgiveness  have blunted that sharpness.  It’s finely acted, set, and directed  (though it could lose ten minutes in the first half)  and  I am almost ashamed to say it left me cold.  But it did, it really did.

box office  0844 871 7622  to 25 Jan     http://www.mojotheplay.com

Rating:  three     3 Meece Rating

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November 7, 2013 · 8:31 pm

TARTUFFE – Birmingham Rep

MAKING MERRY HELL WITH MOLIERE

It kicks off with a lad sliding down the banister of Liz Ascroft’s brilliantly skewed mansion set (twisted like the Valkenborch Babel Tower and faintly inscribed with an elegant Fragonard).   The first speech is a rant from a ferocious grandma,  waving a lapdog in a box and barking for it between lines like:  “If I can say this without giving offence, you’re wrong in everything you say and everything you do”.    This figure, who handily identifies the family members with a shower of insults,   is Janice Connolly:  known and loved in Brum for solo shows as “Mrs Barbara Nice”, here gracing the Rep with her matchless comedy-knees and  solid, benign hilarity.

That opening gale of merriment sets the tone for an evening of pure frivolity. And why not?    Its a recession, its November, its Birmingham, its probably raining.  In reviving Moliere’s angry, twice-banned 17c comedy about Tartuffe, a holy-joe hypocrite invading a bourgeois family, Roxana Silbert’s first production for the Rep’s new theatre plays it for fun.  Which is not consistently easy,  because Chris Campbells new translation eschews the verse form which in French made Moliere’s lengthy philosophical speeches flow more easily.  Some may also deplore the missed opportunity to make topical points about fanaticism rather than revelling in farce.

But its funny, and thats what Moliere wanted:  excoriated for his parody of religious hypocrisy and of those like the householder Orgon who fall for it,    he wrote “the comic is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see and avoid it”.  Thus,  the broader the better.    The utter preposterousness of Tartuffe,  a con-man trying to seduce Orgon’s  wife Elmire (Sian Brooke),   is invisible to the dupe.   He tries to force his daughter to marry the interloper,  gives him all his money,  and ignores every argument and evidence of his felony until –  in a second-act scene of comic physical perfection –  Elmire forces him to witness her near-rape, and he crawls out from under the table to confront the sagging underpants of his fallen idol.

Tartuffe is Mark Williams, a hippyish sandalled guru (“Laurent, just roughen up my spare hair-shirt”)    but the real delight is Paul Hunter’s Orgon,  idiotic in orange socks and a Craig-Brown hairdo,  the one character who is allowed a certain roundness and genuine pained revelation.  The costumes are modern, down to a ra-ra-skirt and leggings on Ayesha Antoine, who is nimble fun as the scornful interfering maidservant.  But a periwig does appear and disappear, and the towering white perm on Connolly’s head has pleasing 17c echoes:  imagine an albino turkey rashly attempting to mate with a Marie Antoinette up-do.

There are intermittent breaches of the fourth wall,  to the crowing delight of the front rows, and  happy local jokes in the crevices of Moliere:   HS2,  local parking, government policy,  and the cast’s horror that a visiting bailiff is from Wolverhampton.   It ends on a high. What more do you want?

0121 236 4455   or   www. birmingham-rep.co.uk    to 16 Nov.

Rating :  three      3 Meece Rating

plus a first sneak preview outing for Panto Mouse…because it nearly is one…     Damemouse

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November 7, 2013 · 12:11 am

KEELER – Charing Cross Theatre, WC2

A SAD FLAT ECHO OF  NASTIER TIMES

“I have never committed a moral offence”  says Stephen Ward indignantly.   Sleek, patriarchal, patronizing, with a curious sexually ambivalent prurience,  Paul Nicholas convinces as a man satisfied with himself.   Never mind that he takes up pretty teenage simpletons, introduces them to his randy middle-aged friends, demands details of their sex lives “Bra first or panties?”, asks them for espionage pillow-talk and procures illegal abortions.

But Gill Adams’  play is called KEELER,  and  the important thing is that it is based on Christine Keeler’s own account and  approved by her:   a woman now aged and reclusive,  whose public identity has been defined by what happened to her half a century ago,  between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.  A strikingly beautiful Soho club dancer,  she was taken up by the society portraitist and osteopath Ward, and introduced both to dangerous lowlifes in the Rachman set,  and powerful wealthy men at Lord Astor’s Cliveden.

She slept with both the War Minister John Profumo and the Soviet attaché (and probable spy) Ivanov.  At the height of the Cold War and the global shudder of the Cuban missile crisis,  the scandal brought down the Macmillan government;  Ward killed himself before his conviction for pimping: a trial seen by many (including Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose much bigger version is about to open) as an Establishment revenge.  But it had, of course, the side effect of branding Keeler (and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies) as ‘prostitutes’.   In modern terms they were just ambitious models not averse to rich boyfriends:  Stringfellow girls,  football  WAGs if lucky,  at worst resorting to kiss-and-tell.  But in 1963  their public disgrace was extreme.

So Keeler has a right to be remembered in her terms,  and with Charlie Camms’ designs , ‘60s projections and music,   the play evokes smart flats, aristocratic swimming-parties and seedy clubs with tit-tasselled dancers playing coy and blowing kisses (ah, innocent pre-twerking days!).

It’s a missed opportunity though: a flat play with poor dialogue.  Sarah Armstrong’s Keeler has a pleasing vulnerability and nervous cheekiness: you wince for her,  though less for the tougher, larkier Mandy (Stacy Leeson).  The sequences with Profumo (Michael Good)  and Astor (Andrew Harrison)  are nicely dislikeable, emphasising the casually bossy entitlement of the age;    one of the strongest scenes has Keeler wanting to report her rape at the hands of one of the Notting Hill heavies of Ward’s slumming life,  and him shrugging it off “No bruises”.

Perhaps because Nicholas is also the director,  or due to the looming Lloyd-Webber musical,  Ward himself dominates more and more as the play goes on.  The corruption and unhappiness of Keeler fade in favour of a prolonged verbatim scene of his trial.  A queasy echo, come to think of it,  of the way the girls were treated as disposable and forgettable in 1963.

box office 08444 930650   keelertheplay.com  to 14 Dec

rating  :  three  3 Meece Rating

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November 3, 2013 · 6:23 pm

MRS LOWRY & SON – Trafalgar 2 SW1

THE ARTIST AND THE TYRANT MOTHER 

“Jesus wants me for a sunbeam!”  sings old Mrs Lowry,  playing an imaginary piano with a self satisfied smirk.  “…a sunbeam, to shine for him every day.Jesus wants me to be loving, And kind to all I see!”

I fear Jesus will have a long wait before any such lovingkindness reaches her son,  the artist L.S. Lowry.   In Martyn Hesford’s play, based on sad fact,  Elizabeth Lowry tyrannizes, manipulates and belittles her  lonely son her weapon being  a supposedly bedridden state (she leaps back from the window nimbly enough when she hears the door bang of an evening).   Disappointed in her marriage and dreams of doilyed gentility,  she despises the dutiful weary man who feeds her, rubs her feet,  and labours as a rent-collector to pay his father’s debts.

Worse, she despises his painting,  the loving work he does by night to record the scenes of scuttling crowds at the Salford mill gates,  lone wanderers like him, the trams and chimneys of his daily life.  “I paint what I see.  I’m a simple man , who paints. Every stroke of colour is made up of me”.   He wants her approval, her love, her cheerfulness (“I haven’t felt cheerful since 1868” she says, this being 1934).   Sly, helpless against her own maliciousness, she offers only enough crumbs of love to keep him enslaved. When the Manchester art critic calls his pictures “an insult to the people of Lancashire” she joyfully concurs; when a London gallery takes an interest she rips up the letter.

This ninety-minute play,  originally a Radio 4 commission, might be hard going, and takes a while to rise to its fierce emotional climax.  Its theme of blinkered gentility at odds with innovative art sits, at times, uneasily in the conventionality of the play itself.   Yet we are held by two remarkable performances .  Elizabeth is the marvellous June Watson,  hinting at just enough real pain to stop us physically hurling ourselves onto the tiny stage to shake her like a dog with a rat .  Laurie Lowry is Michael Begley,  with a merciless 1930’s hairstyle (unflattering to any man’s ears)  and a pallid subtle sweetness.  Abbey Wright directs, with Richard Kent’s subtle lighting and projection on the plain bedroom set suggesting the mournful beauty Lowry showed us.   As the London critic said, “all is conveyed by the expression of feeling”.  Her basilisk glare and  his sad, kindly, lopsided yearning convey it all afresh.

0871 789 1004  to 23 nov
rating:  three   3 Meece Rating

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October 28, 2013 · 11:29 pm

HOME – Arcola, E 8

SMALL TALK,  GREAT THEMES,   THE LAUGHTER OF DESPAIR

“At times”  says old Jack stoutly, flourishing his silver-topped cane “One’s glad simply to live on an island. Without the sea all around, civilization would never be the same. The ideals of life – liberty, freedom, democracy – well, if we’d been living on the Continent, for example…!”   Harry civilly agrees.  “Yes, no, absolutely”.  They have bluff memories of army and RAF,  nostalgia for imagined wartime values.  They are  ageing men,  sitting out in the chilly sunshine: the Arcola’s underground studio nicely trellised, and scattered with post-gale autumn leaves.

When David Storey’s play premiered,  it was 1970  and the men were John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson at the Royal Court.   Now, with that generation almost gone,  SEArEd and the Arcola revive it to honour the author’s 80th birthday.  Director Amelia Sears, like many of us,  finds it for the first time and recognizes its modern-classic beauty: like PInter with more heart, Beckett with more realism.  Jack Shepherd is Harry,  a dishevelled moulting eagle whose gentlemanly amiability masks an abyss of pain and dislocation.   Paul Copley is the Brylcreemed, bonhomous Jack, all card-tricks and evasions.   As the increasingly disconcerting, tense 105 minutes wear on they are joined solo and severally by others with an equal obliquity of small-talk.  A shrewish, sharpnosed Marjorie is Tessa Peake-Jones,  her giggling vulgarian friend Kathleen Linda Broughton.

The talk ranges around: anecdotes about  relatives, truisms of business and current affairs, what’s for dinner , the weather, mutual half-acquaintances : they could be anybody you meet and make foregettable small-talk with or (in the women’s case) smile wincingly as they utter sudden coarsenesses.  The play is interpreted as a commentary on a declining, stiff, post-imperial Britain but that now feels dated, a historic commentary.   It is the picture of a more timeless dislocation that hurts:  we learn gradually that they are all inmates in a large mental asylum:  one of those which, had Storey but known it,  would shortly be closed down and the inmates scattered into “care in the community”,  erratic drug regimes and, often, prison.  It is hard not to reflect on that  as the pathos and revelation build and glimpses of their back-stories emerge – suicidality, violence, collapse, “following little girls”.    Only one,  the monosyllabic Alfred (Joseph Arkley) fits the popular image of a madman,  appearing intermittently with an abrupt helpless violence which jerks the action onto another level.

Mostly, though, it is a fugue of small-talk revealing big themes:  clichés woven into an immensity of human helplessness, pathos, despair. The laughs are real, but ever more sad (Peake-Jones’ veiled malevolence provokes several).  Despite one heartbreaking handclasp it expresses the near-impossibility of mutual help,  as each of us,  forever alone, gabbles to distract ourselves from the yawning abyss of private reality.   Storey’s brilliance has not faded away.  The only glimmer of hope is that this particular kind of Englishness is on the wane…

box office  020 7503 1646      http://www.arcolatheatre.com      to 23 Nov

rating:  three    3 Meece Rating

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October 15, 2013 · 10:27 pm

The Love Girl & The Innocent – Southwark Playhouse SE1

A CHILL BLAST FROM THE GULAGS

They painted Stalin’s words on the hut walls. “Instead of the onerous burden it was under Capitalism, work has become a thing of glory and valour”.   Ragged, half-starved men and women trudged past that in labour camps.  This play’s author is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, not imagining but remembering: he spent eight years in the gulags from 1945.  It hasn’t been seen in London for thirty years (though a more serious-minded BBC  televised it in 1965).
The author was imprisoned for “counter-revolutionary activities”, and as new prisoners come off the lorry in Mathew Dunster’s stark, vivid production they  each recite their subsection of that same Article 58: even “failing to report an overheard conversation”.   Among them are more conventional criminals: a black-marketeer sold penicillin and gramophone needles, an  army sniper (Emily Dobbs, a superb tough performance)  shot her unfaithful husband.   But most are Article 58:  political prisoners.
With fifty characters,  a working foundry and building site it is daunting to stage:   with 16 actors Dunster nimbly uses Solzhenitsyn’s stage directions as brief narrative.  Anna Fleischle’s design uses the battered urban skeleton of Southwark’s new home well: pallets and planks scraping on the concrete, old tyres seeming to burn from within, an unforgettable lineup of naked prisoners, faces to the wall, in dim red light, beneath the wire.
The play’s authenticity is at once a strength and a  weakness. Its strength is in delineating  the top-down pressure to be corrupt:  both victims and guards (mostly prisoners themselves) are fixed on their own survival.  The commandant himself is under threat if he doesn’t increase production,  the clerk struggles with bureaucratic lies,  the foundrymen cheat, the girls do whatever it takes.
Cian Barry is Nemov, the newly convicted army officer who asks “In all the years we were in the war, defending Russia, was it as bad as this?”  They laugh at him for a mug, a greenhorn.  Worse!  they say.  As ‘work supervisor’  Nemov talks helplessly of decency and conscience while more experienced prisoners loot the newcomers’ baggage.   Demoted, he has a brief respite as a powerless “dirty faced worker” with no temptation to tyrannize,   but almost hysterically finds  love with Lubya.  Her bitter, much-used quality (conveyed with ruthless sweetness by Rebecca Oldfield)  is hard to accept.  She was a Kulak exile sold into marriage at fourteen, knows her value to men and submits pragmatically to the camp doctor (a smooth Ben Onwukwe) .  Rob Tofield is the tubby venal cook,   Ben Lee the sharp prisoner who usurps Nemov’s job.
But the gulag itself  is the central character, and the detailed complex portrayal of its life impedes impetus and character development.   Hence you get a historically fascinating evening rather than a great play.  Jagged Fence deserves credit for bringing it to Southwark and Solzhenitsyn was a hero. But a bit more impertinence in adapting it would make it stronger.

0207 407 0234    southwarkplayhouse.co.uk   to 2 Nov
Rating : three

Rating : three    3 Meece Rating

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