May 28, 2016 · 9:06 am

A SUBJECT OF SCANDAL AND CONCERN Finborough, SW10

THE LAST BLASPHEMY TRIAL..AND ECHOES FOR TODAY

 
It is a thousand pities that John Osborne is predominantly famous for the spitting spoilt-brat misogyny of Jimmy Porter in Look Back In Anger (lately revived – http://tinyurl.com/gwrc7gl – to prove interesting but still nasty). Just about everything else Osborne wrote is better: notably LUTHER,  to which this hour-long evocation is closely related.  It deals with England’s last blasphemy trial , in 1842, and is studded with lines so ringingly topical in this age of “hate speech” law and “Prevent” rules that I would beg young lawyers – and dear God, lawmakers – to have them up on the wall – “I am under no contract to think as you do” says the victim, and ”What is the morality of a law which prohibits the free publication of an opinion?”. And “There is no magic in words, neither yours nor mine”.

 

 

Holyoake, a young schoolmaster of social-reformist views, walks between Bristol and Cheltenham, dusty, poor, prone to stammer, physically unimpressive. He delivers lectures in Mechanics’ Institutes and the like. So in Cheltenham one evening, after discoursing on the the national debt as a millstone on the poorest and on the disproportionate public money spent on clergy and churches, he is asked about our ‘duty to God” . He replies that he doesn’t believe in a deity, and if he did would put him on half-pay like soldiers “in our present distress”.

 

 

 
Down comes the establishment fist, prompted by a local newspaper (come on Cheltenham Festival – buy this play for the Lit Fest! I dare you!). His trial and imprisonment, lice and humiliation and barracking by sententious clergy follow. The rhetoric is tremendous: some from the prosecutors – socialism as “diabolism”, much about the perils of “disorder and confusion” and “wicked and advised bringing to disrepute” of religion among the people. From him there is still more, with the humanist affirmation that morality comes from mankind, not “2000 years of church”

 

 

 

Jamie Muscato gives Holyoake – intense, starveling, stubborn – his reported stammer, and in a fine performance holds it brilliantly just this side of intrusiveness, indeed using it to intensify the man’s fanatical, near- hysterical need to speak his truth at all costs. And there are costs. The hour begins and ends – crushingly – with the personal fallout of the activist’s stubborn determination.  We had met him first visiting his wife, who he boarded out with her sister’s richer family who despise him, and are not looking after her or his infant daughter at all well.  In the last prison scene she visits him to relate the child’s funeral, which he has insisted takes place priestless, with only a beadle and no “tinsel and angels” or “prayer and parade”. What this angry austerity, a prayerless farewell to her child, has cost the mother is evoked by Caroline Moroney with spare,frozen misery – “You may have your opinions, George, but I know now. This was not a manly thing to have done, and I can’t thank you for it”. Devastating.

 

 

 

In a play necessarily static and wordy, Jimmy Walters’ direction and Philip Lindley’s ingenious design create physical energy by setting it transverse and having the cast of six, in a sort of ballet of the benches, stylistically moving ingenious plain wooden barred platforms around to become a home, courtroom, meeting-house or jail. It works brilliantly, evoking a sense of a world whose every aspect conspires against poor Holyoake. And against the freedom of expressed religious opinion which we still have to defend today.
box office 0844 847 1652 finboroughtheatre.co.uk to 7 June
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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May 26, 2016 · 9:53 am

ROMEO AND JULIET Garrick WC2

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES SLUMPS IN DISAPPOINTMENT

 

 
Kenneth Branagh’s entire season has been built on one universal truth. From star to stage-sweeper, pack the production with the best talent and glorious things will inevitably follow. Why then, has that same formula now stumbled?I couldn’t have been more predisposed to liking this production, the cast or it’s director. But Branagh’s sweatily Italian and disastrously unfunny production is such a disappointment.

 

 

The scene looks like a Dolce and Gabbana advert. Cafe chairs are forever being put out and stacked away. Characters shimmy in, espresso in hand. And when the director can’t use the text at hand for whatever extra-curricular contrivance he has up his sleeve, they all start shouting in Italian.

 

 

It is these contrivances which are the fundamental flaw. Everything is played for laughs. With Meera Syal’s nurse (one of the better parts of the production) this sits fine. She jogs in, jogs out, lights a fag, winks and collapses. Lovely. But when Richard Madden’s maddening Romeo and Lily James’ flat Juliet start comedy-swigging from bottles and hamming up lines in the balcony scene you realise it’s gone too far. Too far, Ken.

 

 

It almost seems unfair to blame the cast. A lightening-fast pace is set in the first few moments and they’re all left panting to keep up. The protagonists are fine, but lack any kind of chemistry. Other than some panicked kissing, no moments of intimacy are allowed. There is no sex or fire behind anything. Just an eye on the clock and a mind on dinner.

 

 

The parents, Tybalt, and Paris are (to be fair like in most productions) quite forgettable, but Derek Jacobi’s shamelessly camp (and mysteriously old) Mercutio is light relief and one of the few moments where the incredibly camp production makes sense. This is weighed out by a Friar in his 20’s who only speaks sitcom.

 

 

But I can forgive the cast. They are cut adrift and lost in pointless songs and infuriating background mood music. Every inch has the director’s paws all over it. I never thought I would write the phrase this Romeo and Juliet has too much lounge jazz.The shame is that Richard Madden and Lily James probably have a brilliant Romeo and Juliet in them. Something fiery and youthful. Perhaps in a production which allowed silences and pauses. I have no idea why that production isn’t this one. But seems incredibly un-Kenneth Branagh like to try and whizz through the poetry to dig up a gag.

 

2 MICE
Until 13th August.
Box Office 0330 333 4811

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May 24, 2016 · 10:14 pm

A VIEW FROM ISLINGTON NORTH Arts, WC2

POLITICS. AS WE KNOW IT. O DEAR. 

 

 
Here’s a sharp one, beautifully suited to what is not only a Referendum season but one in which both main political parties are more than likely to do mischief to their leaders. We can’t rely only on nervous broadcasters and weary quiz-teams for performed political satire, so hats off to the Arts: whose historic shabbiness pleasingly channels a nicely threadbare Corbyn vibe.
 

 

Max Stafford-Clark and Out of Joint simply present five playlets designed to prod political sores . Three have been seen before, though not lately or freestanding, and there are two new pieces from Alistair Beaton and David Hare. Oh, and a short final ditty written by Billy Bragg.

 

 

One might have feared, especially after Stella Feehily and Max Stafford-Clark’s less well-judged NHS play THIS MAY HURT A BIT (http://tinyurl.com/j6y9huh) a festival of tired leftie indignation. All Brigstockey and Jeremy-Hardyoid, like a bad Friday at 630 on Radio 4. But it’s cleverer than that, acidly theatrical. Mark Ravenhill’s opener, The Mother, has a shocking, storming virtuoso perrormance from Sarah Alexander (Kathryn O”Reilly takes over the part from the 6th). She is an unemployed, 45-year-old woman on valium and benefits. Two soldiers – a young private and a middle-aged female Major – knock on her door, but can’t get a word in as she swears , chatters, offers breakfast and bats away all attempts at their “Mrs Morrison…” openers. It becomes clear that she knows they will be there about her son. All mothers of squaddies in recent wars know how bad news comes: she just doesn’t want to hear the words. At first very funny it becomes troubling, briefly violent, suddenly deeply touching, finally oddly dignified. It makes your hair stand on end , evoking class, parenthood, military decency and the indecency of war. It was canny to start with something deeper than cynicism.

 

 

 
Next comes a short, selfconsciously clever Caryl Churchill two-hander in which a young couple have a brief domestic exchange, then repeat it several times with the same intonation but the banal phrases replaced with jargon, slogan-speak and political and commercial clichés. Smart, briefly diverting, a sort of sorbet before the next course. Which is a classic, wicked new number by Alistair Beaton set in the present Labour Party (names rejigged) as Bruce Alexander as a rightish backbencher lurks in a pub backroom orchestrating choreographed resignations, fending off calls from “Laura” at the BBC, excoriating the “Impetus” Corbynistas and failing to plug leaks, one wittily caused by Tinder.

 

 

 

It is horribly funny, tight and credible: but with something suitably yearning about the final acceptance that, the coup foiled, the future of Labour is chaos – but “Chaos with hope!”.

 

 
Only fair, then, for David Hare – in the other new piece – to be within the Tory party, with an imaginary discussion between “Gideon” (you know who) and the Russian-American prophetess of capitalist freedom, Ayn Rand. If free-market theory tends to make you tune out, don’t. Ann Mitchell’s Ayn is a treat: a masterpiece of stoutly sinuous seductiveness, her black frock making her half mamba half Mamma as Steve John Shepherd’s nervous Osborne struggles with internal conflict: conservative control-freakery versus conservative capitalism. Jane Wymark joins in as an unfairly caricatured – but very entertaining – Theresa May, to underline the absurdities of defending British values of tolerance by not tolerating “hate-speech”; she is borne down by the terrifying Rand over immigration.

 

 
And finally, one more squib about party management, Stella Feehily’s sharp little portrait of a Tory Whips’ office grinding down an MP for not reporting a colleague’s groping. When he learns who his replacement is, he squeaks “But she’s Asian! it’s Bury St Edmunds!”. Lovely. So it all hangs together nicely, not world-changing but not smothering either. Just weaving, casually in under two hours, a taut skein of light cynicism with glitters of important ideas. We need one of these every few months or so.

 

 

box office http://www.artstheatrewestend.co.uk / 020 7836 8463 to 2 July. ANd there are midweek matinees.

rating four 
   4 Meece Rating

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May 23, 2016 · 11:06 pm

FLOWERS FOR MRS HARRIS Crucible, Sheffield

A HEART FOR BEAUTY,  A ‘FIFTIES DREAM

 

 

If Daniel Evans means to leave his acclaimed stewardship of Sheffield Theatre on a flood of tears, he’s chosen the right production for his directorial finale. There were definitely Kleenexes involved. Paul Gallico’s novella was an outlet for a bruised postwar nation, yearning over its clothes-ration coupons for the “ideal of civilized happiness” epitomized by the extravagant ballgowns of the New Look. A widowed charlady is content with her humble lot until she sees, in a rich client’s wardrobe, the marvel that is a Dior dress. She yearns to own one – “to come home to, not to wear”. Inspired by a small pools win, she trebles it with years of slaving, scrimping and squirrelling, and travels naive but determined to Paris.

 

 
Where – like the poor-but-honest heroine of a fairytale – she wins all hearts, comforts the also-widowed vendeuse and solves a brittle romantic impasse (fairytale again: top model and shy accountant = Princess and swineherd). Having known the book in childhood I feared a saccharine tone in this premiere from Richard Taylor (music and lyrics) and Rachel Wagstaff . Gallico is an unfashionably brutal plucker of heartstrings, and his “Mrs ‘Arris” sequels are best avoided. Evans, however, steers a canny course: the most notable evidence of this being that Gallico’s Battersea char heroine is patronizingly given heavy Cockney ‘aitches and a “naughty twinkle” in her plebeian eye. Whereas Clare Burt, in this production, emanates credible dignity and palpable sense as well as her yearning. Roll on a few years and she would be one of the ‘60s working-class heroines leading council revolts in sink estates. Her Passchendaele widowhood hits home, touchingly evoked in conversations with the dead husband, who wanders around as a ghost advising her on her pools boxes. And comedy is never far off; Anna-Jane Casey is a right caution as her friend Violet, and so is the revolving ring of demanding clients: naughty major, eccentric Russian emigrée, selfish soubrette, accountant dreaming of being a photographer.

 

 

 

There’s a lively energy from the start: the score, never particularly interesting or catchy, gives point and vigour to patter lyrics (some of which I would have liked to hear better). The scrimping has unnerving pathos: who, today, saves as the ‘50s women did? And there is a moment of real truthful seriousness when Ida Harris sees the client’s (invisible) Dior dress , alone under a spotlight, confronting high art with “It’s like I’ve found a piece of me”. Burt evokes a hunger for beauty which throbs across the still-grey stage, and shines on from beneath her threadbare cardigan even when she gets to snooty, incomprehensible, unwelcoming Paris. So before long even they must speak democracy: “If something is beautiful, it’s beautiful for anyone, no matter who you are”. A proper echo from the founding days of the Arts Council…

 

 

 
Paris is a riot: rose-pink and dramatic, with a dazzling procession of eight Dior New Look dresses: silk and tulle, petals upon petals, crystals on crystals, worn with hauteur by immaculate girls with tiny waists and proper hips. A dream of serene perfection, Lez Brotherston’s designs channel Dior beautifully and are ,I suspect, being eyed up gloatingly by every female on the crew. Mark Meadows is a glorious Chevalier-esque Marquis, naturally doubling as the husband’s earlier ghost; Laura Pitt-Pulford transforms from the ghastly soubrette to an enchanting Parisienne model , with Louis Maskell geekishly adoring as André. And – no spoilers for non-readers – the dénouement is seriously floral.

 

 

 
So me, I loved it. And note that it needs a good provincial producing-theatre to have the nerve to do this with so much style: a middle-aged charlady heroine in a brown cardi and faded print, a story dominated by women, an untried musical of an unfashionable ‘50s book, and no megastars… But it works. I have the soggy Kleenex to prove it.

 
box office 0114 249 6000 to 4 June
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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May 21, 2016 · 5:44 pm

BLUE/ORANGE Young Vic SE1

GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES  ON THE MENTAL  WARD...

 

 
You’re clinically paranoid, you’re black and you’re bombarded on a daily basis with racism and when presented with an orange, you see the colour blue. You’re then sectioned. But within a month your doctor and his supervising consultant are at war. One thinks you must stay for increased treatment, the other sees you as the victim of an ethnicity-obsessed health service. They bitch, they confide in you, they criticise eachother’s methods openly.

Quite the farce.

 

 

Joe Penhall’s play, first seen at the Cottesloe in 2000, is sharp and hilarious. It toys intelligently with the interplay between race and mental health care. It mines decent conflict in places I’d not heard before. But it lacks conviction.The patient is Christopher (Daniel Kaluuya), jibbering and gesticulating just as you’d want him to be. A punchy performance, despite a part erring on the slim side. Is this a mad house he’s trapped in by malignant forces, or is it vital help he desperately needs? Should he leave or remain? (Insert EU joke here).

 

 

But as he paces the waiting room, his psychiatrist Bruce (Luke Norris) and his supervising consultant (David Haig) are left to play. Is his race an unwelcome factor in his treatment, should the lack of beds on the ward be taken into account, is he “just like that” and not a concern for the NHS?Jeremy Herbert’s set is a small consulting room the size of a boxing ring sat atop another room we never see, except when walking to our seats. That doesn’t make sense because it really doesn’t. The director Matthew Xia neatly packs the squabbles in here. Tort performances in a tight space.

But Luke Norris overshoots on the concerned, caring doctor. The troubled professional wrestling with obstruction from the authorities and his hippocratic duty. His performance is a frustrating one; seemingly entirely gesture driven. A series of aghast poses and quizzical expressions.

His opposition is the most fullsome character walking on the stage. Despite a hefty part of me dying whenever any character’s motivation is “to finish writing my book”, David Haig’s consultant is a charismatic manipulator and comic joy.

 

 

 

Penhall’s play uses these two to nicely wrestle with the constructed argument. He expertly disrupts our expectations and shifts our allegiances which each revelation from the patient. But it only ever chews. It doesn’t finish the job. I never felt the jeopardy the patient was in. I didn’t rage with the psychiatrist, and the consultant’s tyranny didn’t terrify me. It’s the intelligence and humour of the argument which makes it thoroughly watchable.

 

 

 

But you’re only ever nodding along as if reading an incredibly lively opinion piece in The Times. But in the end, you put the paper down, you leave the theatre; informed, but not moved.
3 mice   3 Meece Rating
Until 2nd July.
Box Office 020 7922 2922

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May 19, 2016 · 8:23 am

KING JOHN Rose, Kingston

A BAD KING, A PROBLEM PLAY,  BUT A GREAT EVENING

 

Of Shakespeare’s plays this is one of the least done and loved: there’s disputed authorship of some sections, parts of the plot missing and replaced from another text. Sir Trevor Nunn takes it on as the penultimate achievement in his intention to direct all 37 plays: I was agog, since I missed the Globe’s  version (part of the Magna Carta anniversary, though oddly the play ignores that milestone in the life of “England’s worst king”). I especially needed to expunge the memory of an ill-advisedly whimsical RSC version – a sort of Timmy Mallett lark, the warlike Fauconbridge transgendered and giggling in harlequin tights with balloons and a ukelele, and one vital character omitted.  I had wondered whether the play itself was so terrible that it needed this burlesquery.  Turns out, it doesn’t , not at all. I was engrossed for three hours.

 

 

Sir Trevor takes it without gimmicks, and with all the fleur-de-lys and crowns and .girdles the most medievally minded could want , and delivers a pacy, suspenseful, admirably clear and wholly entertaining rendering. Of all the ‘histories’ it is the most intimate and familially tangled: a sort of poisonous proto-Dynasty chronicle of tribal rows. Political too, of course: the cardinal legate Pandulph, a spiritedly bossy and comically affrontable Burt Caesar, reminds us that Boris Johnson  missed a trick in citing only Napoleon and Hitler as  ambitious for pan- European domination. Medieval Popes put in a pretty good bid for the obedience of political “Christendom”. Some of the biggest sighs of sympathy met both King John’s defiance that “no Italian priest shall tether or toll” England; and there’s another one later when John recants, and the French Dauphin irritably refuses to be told to stop the war he was previously told to start.

 

 

 

But in the first half it is the family rows which keep things rolling along. The women’s roles and ferocious tirades are reminiscent of Richard III, but more intemperate. Richard the Lionheart is dead; his mother, Maggie Steed’s old Queen Elinor, interferingly matriarchal as she pronounces John king. Even she is drowned by Lisa Dillon as the furious Lady Constance, widow of the eldest brother and mother of the small, sweetly embarrassed Prince Arthur, who from the start seems well aware that his mother’s pursuit of his cause will lead to no good. Even John’s niece Blanche (Elisabeth Hopper) , negotiated bride of the Dauphin, gets her moment of fury when she roars “On my wedding day?” as he fragile peace collapses thanks to Pandulph, and the war (indicated, unfussily, on overhead screens) heats up again.

 

 

 
It is played with immense vigour (sometimes at first perhaps a shade too much from the illegitimate, warlike Faulconbridge (Howard Charles) as he rants through his dense soliloquies. John himself is Jamie Ballard, with a fine dissipated rock-star arrogance in his face: sullen, chilly and petulant, with flashes of rage from the start, and wonderful sulky reaction-faces during the more intemperate family scenes and episcopal lectures. He becomes genuinely chilling in his quiet “I have a thing to say…” briefing to Hubert to put the child’s eyes out and kill him. When he is finally disintegrating, weepily contemptible in his frightened remorse and at last his death “shameful my life, and shamefully it ends” he is pitiable, human, lost. That Shakespearian moment of truth amid the politics silences the room.

 

 

 

Howard Charles as the Bastard , hard-man and warrior cynic, is powerful, Dominic Mafham as Salisbury impressive. But among that strong cast particular laurels go to Stephen Kennedy for a deep-layered, moving performance as Hubert the loyal reluctant murderer, and to his charge Arthur. The boy’s part is shared, but on the night I went it was a stellar, unaffected, taking, brave performance by young Harry Marcus. When he pleads, gallantly and scornfully, against Hubert’s hot irons he is mesmerizing: his death at the castle wall is the poignant heart of the play. Terrific.

 
Box office 020 8174 0090 to 5 June
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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May 18, 2016 · 10:51 pm

THE INVISIBLE HAND Tricycle NW6

A CAUTIONARY TALE OF TRADE AND TERROR

 

 

It is the modern terror that stalks our interconnected world. You’re shut in a stone cell, alone and far from home, and in a chaotic increasingly lawless land, rife with political and tribal rivalries. So your captors themselves are unpredictable: captives in their turn of ideologies, corrupt government, poverty and a daily jolting adrenalin fear. Unreasoning murders like that of Daniel Pearl, haunt every family whose members travel to work in, report on, or help a developing country.

 

 

Ayad Akhtar, a Pulitzer prizewinner, distils this in a play tense, sour and funny, with at its core a nugget of inescapable and dispiriting truth. Not about politics, or even East-West ideological divisons and harsh history: but about human beings and money. Indhu Rubasingham’s last home fixture before her enterprising Trike spends a year in refurbishment is as clever, as political, and in its last ironic moments as barkingly, darkly, shockingly funny as so much else has been under this director.

 

 
Nick Bright (Daniel Lapaine) is a bright American trading banker, kidnapped largely in error by a Pakistani cell led by the stout, selfrighteous Imam Saleem (Tony Jayawardena, considerably less lovable than in Bend it Like Beckham). We see Nick first in amiable conversation with the lowly jailer Dar, advising him on his cousin’s potato trade and on always turning his rupees into dollars. “More stable”. The nervier, more dangerous jihadi-minded Bashir is Western-educated, following Saleem, and kicks Dar for dealing with the evil world of banks and interest. But Nick is bargaining for his life, and for not being handed over to the real extremists (who Saleem’s lot hate even more than they hate the national government). So he points out that he could help their finances and earn the $10m ransom they want by lending his skills: showing them how to play the markets online, buying and selling and shorting.

 

 
So he and Bashir – Parth Thakerar, unnerving as any angry teenager in his striding, twitching, and ranting anti-Western tirades – are set to do this. Nick may not touch the laptop, and some sharp comic moments occur as – temporarily out of his handcuffs – he frustratedly teaches Bashir to navigate all the windows and make fast bids and sales.

 

 

 
In a series of short scenes broken by blinding lights in our eyes as new groupings form in the cell we witness progress, setbacks, and the growing unease about Saleem’s withdrawals from the trading fund. We witness too some debates about the moralities of global trade – Nick standing up for America and the IMF, Bashir and Saleem cursing it all – and the prisoner’s homesick anxious desperation, and scratching escape attempts.
But most of all we watch something familiar from films like The Big Short and Wall Street: the utterly addictive nature of stock market gambling. Bashir gets too good at it, too committed. And the cell is falling apart. The play darkens as events conspire and this future Pakistan moves towards revolution, and Lapaine’s ever more heavily shackled misery becomes rightly uncomfortable to watch.
But Akhtar has a proper, twisted final scene, which is met with a bark of shocked laughter. And a backwash of realization that human nature being what it is, it was bound to happen that way. Big money on its own is dangerous enough: add resentful, youthful male energy and up goes the powder-keg. Smart, sour, salutary.
box office 020 7328 1000 http://www.tricycle.co.uk to 6 July
rating Four 4 Meece Rating

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May 16, 2016 · 9:22 am

THE TEMPEST Hippodrome, Great Yarmouth

SEASIDE, BUT NOT QUITE CIRCUS 

 

 

It should have been fantastic: a site innately theatrical, a celebration of Shakespeare year at the heart of the always sparky Norfolk and Norwich Festival (which has in recent years led me through deep woods with wolves, dangled me from a tree all night and led me through Dinner With Alice). The 1904 Hippodrome is the only Edwardian circus building still standing in the UK, one of three in the world and the only one capable of being flooded for water-ballets. It was an ammo dump in the war, its cherubs shot to pieces for target practice; it still has extraordinary hand-coloured frescoes of St George, echoing tiles and creepy backstairs. Its vibe is spooky-yet-festive. It’s something to see, a wonder of the East. You itch to put on Dracula or Jekyll and Hyde here.

 

 
Director William Galinksy pays respect to the building’s normal life by recruiting Lost in Translation Circus to evoke Ariel’s magical powers : the stately Jane Leaney at ground level gets a beautifully expressive trapezing avatar overhead, and a troop of sinister faceless spirits in skintight black from head to toe. They mime and dive and vanish through underwater exits once the floor has sunk dramatically to reveal the big deep pool , around which a sloping gold walkway shines like a magic ring.

 

 
Yet somehow, painful to relate, it doesn’t really come off. Galinsky takes it more or less straight, and surprisingly long for this short play (2 hrs 45). Prospero is impressive: Tony Guilfoyle giving him from the start an itchy, angry resentment which is only just quelled in the final scenes; Pia Laborde Noguez is a sweet Miranda, tomboyishly earnest. Of the others, Colin Hurley’s Stephano is genuinely funny, having (appropriately for the building’s age) the air of a vaudeville bruiser in a bowler hat, with a cowed Trinculo. Caliban is Graeme McKnight, interpreted here as a hunched, furious hoodie, not unrecognizable if you’ve just walked past the Great Yarmouth arcades on a Saturday night. Several cast members fall or dive into the pool, though I would wish for the sake of rumbustiousness that the two clowns had done it a lot earlier in their full tweed suits, bowler-hats floating pathetically above them.

 

 

 

But  that rumbustiousness is lacking, and so is the magic: the spirit- feast is ingenious, with a 2ft high floating fruit croquembouche, but the fertility masque for some reason is interpreted as a sort of drunken Playschool baby-mobile, with Juno, or possibly Ceres, as a giant demented bumblebee. The lethal thing, though, is the way the pace flags, often and all through: you start to suspect that there was not enough rehearsal time in the difficult, intricate walkway-and-watersplash surroundings for Galinsky (a famously good festival director here and in Cork) to rethink, take risks, work on the cast’s full passionate understanding of the text, and speed it up.

 

 
The heart of the failure, though, is probably just a mismatch. This huge, weird, majestic, slightly sinister building is built for circus and spectacular, for gasps and cheers and unbridled merriment. It’s a sort of lowlife Royal Albert Hall. So anything you put in it demands high energy, cheek and nerve; this doesn’t provide it.

 

 

box office http://www.nnfestival.org.uk to 21 May
rating two  2 meece rating

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May 13, 2016 · 6:50 pm

LAWRENCE AFTER ARABIA Hampstead, NW3

A DESERT HERO AND THE ROOTS OF TROUBLE..

 

One glory of Howard Brenton as a playwright is his ability to tease out, in very specific history plays (55 Days, Ann Boleyn, Dr Scroggy’s War, Epsom Downs) not only universal emotional cruxes , but urgent contemporary relevance. While, invariably, keeping it sharp and entertaining. This one is both important and engrossing, a valuable addition to theatre’s centenary consideration of World War I and its aftermath.

 

 

It opens in 1922, in the living-room of George Bernard Shaw and his longsuffering wife Charlotte (brilliantly evoked as the sharp-witted decent woman she was, here by Geraldine James). Shaw is fussily, effusively busy dictating his St Joan, a subject which makes a neat parallel with the already iconic status of “Lawrence of Arabia”: the heroic British intelligence officer who fought alongside the Arab rebels against the Ottoman Empire, helping to turn the tide of the war in the MIddle East.

 

 
Into the Shaw’s book-lined room, through a stripe of empty light which will later widen to become a desert (Michael Taylor’s unfussy design), comes our hero. Colonel Tom Lawrence himself, still only 34, crushed by his celebrity and seeking anonymity under the name of “Ross” as a lowly RAF recruit. He is bruised with helplessness , shame and a sense of dishonour because Britain did not – as he had rashly promised – give King Faisal and the Arabs their own state, capital Damascus, after the war. Instead when the Turks were defeated the Paris Conference drew a series of disastrously straight lines, disregarding tribal and cultural boundaries to create French and British colonial “mandates”. An arrogant mistake, which led to later rebellions, shaky nations, and much of today’s extremism and misery in the area. But hey, as Field=Marshal Allenby (William Chubb) drawls when the panicking Lawrence says he promised – “Oh, you say things round a campfire..”.

 

 

 

In flashbacks to his desert travels, and in imagined but credible conversations particularly with Charlotte, the high-strung torment of the hero seeking anonymity unreels before us over the next year, in which he was unmasked in his RAF role and pursued by the American reporter Lowell Thomas for whom his reluctant celebrity became a cash-cow (despite T.E.Lawrence’s refusal to illustrate the journalist’s vainglorious lectures by appearing, ideally in his robes). Sam Alexander gives us a wicked performance as Lowell Thomas, everyone’s nightmare foreign-correspondent jock; Shaw himself, nicely elusive, is played by Jeff Rawle and kept wisely just this side of caricature: never easy when playing that grand old stirrer (“I have written some of my best work in railway tearooms, they are temples of perfect peace”.

 

 

But the shining roles, and performances, here, are Geraldine James’ Charlotte, coolly intelligent, acidly sharp , and Jack Laskey in what should be a defining role as Lawrence himself. He has a nervy, secretive, sensitive yet soldierly edge, a hint of mania and sexual confusion, a credible schoolboy naiveté:. All that, all utterly credible and fascinating, not least in a late dramatic revelation not to be spoilt in review.
I caught this late, having been away. I would have been devastated to miss it, can’t understand the lukewarm tone of press night reviews, and I hope it goes further.
BOX OFFICE 020 7722 9301 to 4 June http://www.hampsteadtheatre.com
rating Four.  4 Meece Rating

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May 11, 2016 · 10:54 pm

THE COMPLETE DEATHS Theatre Royal Brighton, and touring

AS FLIES TO WANTON CLOWNS…

 

 

You don’t often see Queen Gertrude in Hamlet played by a short bearded Spaniard in a rainbow unitard with flamenco frills. But this is the Brighton Festival marking the quatercentary of Shakespeare’s death launching, jointly with Northampton, the latest frolic from Spymonkey. Beloved from Moby Dick, Oedipussy etc – but lately often turning up separately – the quartet are, triumphantly reunited: chunky Aitor Basauri, looming German Stephan Kreiss, anxious straight-guy Toby Park and the peerless Petra Massey (nobody will rapidly forget her CleoPetra belly-dance with asps as nipple-tassels and worse).

 

 

The challenge was to perform the 75 onstage deaths in Shakespeare plays , including the “black ill-favour’d fly” in Titus Andronicus and a number of bafflingly forgettable random nobles in the farther reaches of the lesser History plays (Gough, anyone? Stafford?). So off they go, the four horsemen of the Ridiculypse, armed with rubber axes, chiming cudgels, barmy costumes, rubber noses, horses’ heads, grim puns (“No, Polonius was stabbed in the ARRAS, Aitor!”) innumerable property houseflies on wires tracked by handheld cameras, and some Pythonesque video animation. Plus, of course, property swords with which repeatedly to perform what the Art of Coarse Acting immortally describes as The Royal Shakespeare Company Armpit Death.

 

 
Groan? If you want. If your mouth does fall naturally into a grim line, even at a Festival, and you deep pratfalls fit only for prats, stay away. Don’t go spoiling it for the rest of us. But you’d miss an intriguing oddity. Spymonkey are always armed with fearless physicality and pin-sharp comic timing but on this occasion their adaptor and director is Tim Crouch. Who is a considerable Shakespeare man, intriguing subverter in his own shows I, Malvolio and I, Cinna. In other work (remember An Oak Tree, reviewed on this site http://tinyurl.com/hpgq447 ) Crouch displays a skewed seriousness about life, death and grief, and a fearless meta-theatrical willingness to mess with the form.

 

 

 

His essay in the programme , and one from the Oxford scholar Simon Palfrey, has real seriousness. That gives an enjoyable oddity to the fact that in the opening moments and in interludes, Toby Park’s mock sententiousness – reiterating the need for art to disturb not just amuse – is instantly sent up by the appearance of Basauri in a codpiece, Stephan as a giant fly in a fur tutu (“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods…”) or Massey wailing a demand to play Ophelia. What saves it from the risk of being annoying is not only the helpless laughs – which are frequent – but Crouch’s disciplined timing.

 

 

A massive set-piece, like the mincing machine into which most of the cast of Titus Andronicus are fed to jolly music, will alternate with something quicker, perhaps quieter. There are enough of Shakespeare’s words to give an odd chill, and surreal dark moments like Massey in a hospital gown and drip speaking various death-speeches straight while Park plays “Fear no more the heat o’the sun”.

 

 
But during that, there also happens to be an intense fight between the other two, circling the auditorium. Another running gag has Stephan’s passion for Petra; another Basauri’s delusion that he might become an RSC star by learning to stand with feet apart, “point at things, roll your r’s and shout”. Conversely we have a beautiful parody of German expressionist theatre (“We are all kunst”) with slow stylized moves in baggy y-fronts to Park’s haunting clarinet, and red paint getting gradually out of control.

 

But in reality none of it is out of control: it skips along on tiptoe, with just enough moments of sudden depth to make the sensibility stumble. It knows where it’s going. We, the Spymonkey and Crouch faithful, are happy to tag along.

at Theatre Royal Brighton till Sunday
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/theatre-royal-brighton
Then touring through spring, http://www.spymonkey.co.uk

rating four  4 Meece Rating

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May 10, 2016 · 11:01 pm

I HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE Jermyn St Theatre, SW1

SUPERNATURAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, YET YORKSHIRE ALL THE WAY…

 

 

Of all the lessons theatre has taught us about the backwash of WW1, some of the most fascinating are in 1930’s plays, often here. If you want to feel Auden’s “low dishonest decade”, with its troubled angry survivors, struggling widows and reckless gropings for an individual-centred sexual code, then trawl contemporary plays. Here it is J.B.Priestley, deploying the same mixture of bluff socialist morality and supernatural spookiness as in An Inspector Calls. Antony Biggs puts his audience, quirkily, round a crypto-revolve – a blue arc on which, during the two intervals of this short play, furniture moves along to denote the Ouspensky concept of Time as a curve. I think. It is ingenious, though the paucity of seats on the far side does at times make you wonder why there are seven silent modern people lurking in the sitting room of an inn on the North York Moors in 1936.

 

 

 
But there we are: brisk war-widow Sally (Vicky Binns) and her lumbering landlord Dad Sam (Keith Parry) welcome Whitsun visitors. Dr Gortler a German exile (Jewish, one assumes) is an unsettling presence: a bushy-browed Edward Halsted , restrained and unemphatic, makes the most of his enigmatic, unexplained focus. Young Oliver Farrant (Daniel Souter) is a puppyish schoolmaster, under stress. A blustery, angry, busy industrialist and ex-soldier Ormund is David Schaal, whose journey through the play is remarkably well rendered; his wispy, unhappy, beautiful young wife (Alexandra Dowling) gradually falls for Farrant. Whose job depends on him, as founder of the school. Farrant speaks for the rising generation, the new 20th century me-morality as per Private Lives and Design for Living, and defends running off with Mrs Ormund because “a man and a woman have a perfect right to do what we’re doing”. Sally remonstrates with a gritty Priestleyish Yorkshire reproof – “We haven’t just ourselves to think on!”.

 

 

 

Oh, and the landlord and Sally have invested all their savings in Ormund’s business: so there we have interdependence and war-scars: a widow, a bereaved exile, a mis-married girl, and a young man without a generation of role-models , groping for a new morality. The 1914-18 war is everywhere, though only mentioned in detail by the cynical, hard-drinking, despairing Ormund, who says he emerged from the trenches to find “a whole world limping on one foot with a hole in its head”. His success doesn’t help either: modern “high-value individuals” might nod at his finding wealth ‘a glass wall between you and most of the fun and friendliness of the world”. The closing moments of the play flip you back to that thought, movingly.

 

 

 
But the plot – a slow-burn, its opening scenes very much of a period when people listened to one another’s banalities without flipping out an iPhone – is driven by Gortler’s unwelcome insights into all their lives. He is conducting an experiment in parallel possibilities, lives lived twice a la Sliding Doors, “parallels and instances of recurrence and intervention”, dreamed-futures and déja-vu. But as the fog clears Priestley’s authentic voice speaks through it, gruff as Churchill: your life is in your own hands, you are not a pawn of fate . Peace – personal peace here, but it could be the other sort – “is not something waiting for you. You have to create it”. One at least of my critical colleagues didn’t believe in the odd emotional gallantry of the last scene. But I actually did. I read a lot of 1930’s novels. And Schaal did it really remarkably well…

 

 

Box Office: 020 7287 2875 to 21 May jermynstreettheatre.co.uk
co-produced with the New Actors Company
rating three. 3 Meece Rating

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April 27, 2016 · 11:30 pm

ELEGY Donmar, WC1

SCIENCE AND THE DISAPPEARING SELF

 

 

Suppose neuroscience could cure creeping brain deterioration by taking out whole networks of decaying neurons and replacing them with silicon, guaranteeing functionality, but wiping years of memory. Would you say yes – for yourself or a loved one – as the price of avoiding undignified decline? How frightening is it for the patient to contemplate losing “what binds me to me”, as Zoe Wanamaker’s Lorna puts it in this brief, brilliant, alarming piece? And how wrenching for a long-term spouse to find herself looked at with a stranger’s dispassionate , judging disaste?

 

 
Amnesia and dementia are preoccupying theatres right now. Only weeks ago the Donmar did it a larkier way, as Anouilh’s Welcome Home Captain Fox saw a forgetful soldier confronting his unsavoury previous life; the Park had Alistair McGowan forgetting his gay lover and rediscovering painting, in Peter Quilter’s 4000 Days; Florian Zeller’s The Father won Kenneth Cranham an Olivier.

 

 
The theme particularly suits theatre with its ability to confuse our sense of reality, time, and the reliability of speakers. And few writers are better suited to it than Nick Payne, whose dreamlike, episodic fugue of a play CONSTELLATIONS had great success, and whose extraordinary INCOGNITO was in my view far better, circling around the fate of Einstein’s brain and giving the pain of forgetfulness voice in the unforgettable line “We are a blip within a blip in an abyss”.

 

 
This time Payne is takes on the possibility of deliberately induced, therapeutic amnesia – not(as in the film Eternal Sunlight of the Spotless Mind) just to wipe out unwanted exes but to treat disease. The story is told backwards, beginning with an unnerving encounter between Carrie (Barbara Flynn) a retired RE teacher, and a slightly irritated Lorna (Zoe Wanamaker). Carrie is plying a newly discharged Lorna with questions and reminders; we discover that they were happily married, having met in their forties. Yet now in Lorna, not a fleck of memory or affection remains.

 

 

 

Rolling backwards, under Josie Rourke’s tight direction, we see the stages Carrie went through as Lorna became ever more confused, aggressive, angry and unpredictable. This backward travel is brilliantly effective because – after being slightly embarrassed by the galumphing neediness of Flynn’s heartbreakng Carrie, met by Lorna’s scorn at awkward reminders of their love, we gradually get to see and believe in that love. It makes the loss all the more horrifying: we see caring, kindly reassurance from Carrie as the confusion mounts, with Wanamaker – as ever a packet of electric energy – terrifying in bursts of anguished aggression. Then earlier still, the couple face the grim diagnosis together, loving, even joking, firm in their devotion. It is done with shattering credible honesty, the two women deep in tune. We learn too that Lorna was the more reluctant of the two, protesting “This isn’t progress!” “It could save your life!” “But I want THIS life”. And bitterly, we see that the treatment was given the green light under Lasting Power of Attorney by Carrie: who now must suffer most. The philosophical and ethical questions burn deep.

 

 

In between , Nina Sosanya as the doctor explains, persuades, speaks of neurons and myelin and axons and how memory cannot be replaced because it is non-linear and associative, though there have been experiments on “mice, rats and zebra fish” which sadly became “psychotic”. Behind them, Tom Scutt’s set is a great glass pillar containing a vast, dead oaktree trunk riven as if by lightning, and intermittently obscured by smoke. A metaphor almost too devastating, as the final moments, seventy minutes in, return us to scene one and a crisp, unemotional Wanamaker rejecting her once-beloved’s yearning for one fond word, a kiss, a sign…
box office 0844 871 7624 to 18 June
principal sponsor : Barclays

rating     four   4 Meece Rating

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April 26, 2016 · 11:56 pm

CLYBOURNE PARK Richmond & TOURING

A MODERN MASTERPIECE

 
This is that finely balanced thing: a comedy built around a tragedy. Six summers ago, a newfledged critic for the Times, I wrote about its British premiere: “Bruce Norris’ play is billed as a satire on race and property in America, in 1959 and then the present day, but it reaches wider. Norris is in fact occupying territory somewhere between Arthur Miller and vintage Ayckbourn, and holding it triumphantly.”

 

 
His central idea is the observation that inner-suburban areas which once were all-white, dreading a black influx, find themselves fifty years later dominated by a black community and at at risk of a gentrifying invasion of white people drawn by promiximity to “downtown”… which might ring some bells in our cities. We first meet the ‘50s couple, covering the deep pain of a two-year-old tragedy with banal banter, and finally succumbing to rage or tears in dispute with a pastor and a frightful neighbour who is horrified at their selling to a black family. In Act 2 we meet the 2009 moderns, locked in fraught debate as the white incomers plan to rebuild the same house bigger, and the black locals (upwardly mobile now but descended from the ‘50s incomers) civilly disguise their contempt.

 

 

 

The Court’s version went to the West End, but has pretty much vanished from our canon of modern classics since. So cheer for Daniel Buckroyd of the Colchester Mercury, whose elegant and thoughtful productions tour the land (link below) and redress the howling injustice of Londoners getting all the fun. I only wish that the tour was heading into more towns where, as in Norris’ imagined neighbourhood, there are mingled sensitivities about both house prices and race. Or, as Bev and Russ in Act 1 would say , the matter of “coloureds” – until Jim the dreadful patron1zing vicar says piously ” don’t we say Negro now?”

 

 
The slyness of Norris’ brilliant text mines awkwardnesses like that, in both the 1959 and 2009 acts. Hypocrisy, deep worried prejudice  and self- interested alarm contort language and betray themselves. I had remembered the magnificently shocking second act in which the moderns are constantly on their mobiles, debate hopelessly, and manage, one after another, to offend one another (on race, gayness, feminism, patriotism, disability, rape, vulgarity, you name it). You hear the actual gasps before the laughs: even at the show I saw, a last matinee on a quiet day in Colchester,

 

 

.
Buckroyd’s cast are tremendous: Mark Womack particularly as the enduring, suffering Russ in the first act, and Gloria Onitiri deploying – as the black ‘50s maid and the successful modern woman – first dignity, and then venomous, brittle killer timing. Another shout for Ben Deery’s infuriating malicious geek Karl in the first half; but they are all great, perfect casting and solidly at ease as an ensemble.

 

 
What I had forgotten about is Norris’ satisfying, sly mystifications: you only gradually see what is happening in both acts. The first begins in deliberately banal uncomical chat between the 1959 couple, the second in a committee whose purpose one cannot quite grasp. But clarity grows, and the growing interweaving of themes, remarks, and character traits between the two disparate acts is masterful. Nor does Norris fall into the trap of exaggerating the similarities of then and now: the second Act is not a mirror image of naive 1959 racism, but a tricky modern swamp of hypocrisy, awkward liberalism and lurking unsayables.

 

 
And the tragedy stays at the heart of it. We come poignantly full circle to a final haunting, and a reminder that next to real loves and griefs , all offence is trivial. Brilliant.

 

 
Richmond Theatre to 30 APril, http://www.atgtickets.com/richmond
then touring Guildford, Cambridge, Oxford, Theatr Clwyd.
rating Five   5 Meece Rating

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April 26, 2016 · 12:54 am

SHOWBOAT NEW LONDON THEATRE WC2

ROLLING ALONG, CARRYING ALL BEFORE IT

 
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly – you gotta laugh and you gotta cry. And believe me, you won’t help loving this stunning, flawless, celebratory production. Swooping down from a five-star run in Sheffield, it’s the swansong of its Artistic Director Daniel Evans as he leaves to run Chichester. So anyone in Chichester worrying about its future blockbuster musicals can calm down. This is as good as their GYPSY, though Kern and Hammerstein’s 1927 musical is less focused on one huge star: its joys and dramas and legendary numbers spread across an exuberant ensemble.

 

 
They spread over decades, too: there’s an epic quality to this grandaddy of the modern storytelling musical, as forty years go rollin’ along over showpeople and lovers. In 1887 we meet them on the levée at Natchez, Mississippi, black workers toiling under bales of cotton, white performers primping up for Captain Andy’s vaudeville night aboard the Cotton Blossom. From there to 1927 fortunes rise and fall, roulette wheels spin, hearts are broken , babies born, war and Prohibition and the KKK and the long, cruel backwash of old slavery define an America struggling into the new age.

 

 
It is an epic indeed, operatic and cinematic (old monochrome footage flickers by, setting the moment without fuss). It is funny and melancholy by turns. From the moment when the great paddle-steamer first rolls towards us, and bent beneath baskets and bales “coloured folk work while the white folk play” , the combination of seriousness and spectacle dazzles. But never at the expense of storytelling: innocent Magnolia and dashing Gaylord lock eyes on the wharf, Julie and her man are banished for their negro blood, Frank and Ellie-Mae bicker and seek their stardom, and Captain Andy (Malcolm Sinclair) grows old under the sharp tongue and rigid principles of his puritan wife. Everything happens, every big number rising like a wave and ebbing into gentleness, for the joy of Hammerstein’s book is in the contrasts of mood. Emmanuel Kojo’s deep beautiful renderings of Old Man River flow through the show, sometimes creating an actual physical frisson; the love duets of Gina Beck and Chris Peluso as Nola and Gaylord melt heartbreakingly together (these are fine, fine voices). Alistair David’s choreography gives us joyful, stamping dances in thrilling ensemble numbers. A wrenching farewell from father to child is followed by an angry, sozzled, unforgettable rendering of “Just my Bill” from Rebecca Trehearne’s Julie; abandoned Nola’s growlingly low contralto “Fish gotta swim” is frivolously reworked by the Trocadero’s sharp pianist into a ragtime beat. A triumphant ‘after the ball” actually had the front rows singing along. Sandra Marvin’ s Queenie and her Joe entertainingly define long patient and impatient marriage. More than one star is born in this cast tonight.

 

 
Oh, and one line rings particularly in the mind as Andy, in the new ‘20s world of flapper dresses, admires the ladylike poise of his granddaughter Kim . “When she sits on a chair” he growls “She realizes that the human knee is just a joint and not an entertainment”. That sticks, because when Danny Collins’ Frank dances his superbly bizarre, mad-twisted-grasshopper legwork completely negates that statement. This man’s knees are a entertainment, one you won’t forget.
soon forget. Especially if you go again. Which lots of us, I suspect, will.

 
box office 0844 412 4654 to 7 January 2017
rating Five   5 Meece Rating

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April 22, 2016 · 6:52 pm

JUNGLE BOOK Theatre Royal Windsor & touring

GRIME AND GRACE IN THE URBAN JUNGLE

 
You never know what you’ll get from Poppy Burton-Morgan’s Metta Theatre. I can’t claim to have spotted every venture of her ten years, but definitely remember a site-specific Pirandello in a tiny cafe and updated Scheherezade tales at the Soho by modern Arab writers from Tunisia to Syria during the Arab Spring (Sindbad was a migrant to Italy, forerunner of today’s diaspora). Oh, and there was a haunting Alice in Wonderland spin-off in a tunnel under the V & A. I missed their full-scale Cosi fan Tutte in Oxford, and a children’s show about worms and baby bats. But now, touring towards the London Wonderground in August, here’s a circus and hip-hop ballet with a moral motive, inspired by a (posthumously rather startled) Rudyard Kipling.

 

 

Here’s a female Mowgli, Baloo as a beatboxing bin-man urging us to imagine “bare necessities on a bare stage”, and an urban jungle of skateboarding parkour wolves, a supercool Kaa, a trapezing vulture and an immense, fabulously muscled Shere Khan villain, Dean Stewart: whose CV proclaims him expert in the disciplines of “krump, popping, breaking (b-boy) contemporary, jazz and hip-hop” not to mention dancing behind Sugababes.

 

 

So if it does nothing else, the show will help educate confused middle-aged people like me about krump, grime and whatever b-boy is. Already Mums, Grans and teachers seem to be flocking in with children (including some tiny ones who seem totally au fait with urban culture, cheered Mowgli loudly and dragged their tottering Grans to their feet for the curtain call dance-off). It probably helps if the youngest arrive knowing the story of The Jungle Book; but after Disney and now this year’s new film, the odds are that most of them will. And Burton-Morgan’s version of the plot is compelling, and detailed in the programme (there is only sparse verbal narration, in rap).

 

 
Little Mowgli, a puppet at first and then the tiny, nimbly acrobatic and expressive Natalie Nicole James, loses her mother and is taken up by the wolf-pack and mentored by a gloriously comic breakdancing Baloo in a hi-vis jacket (Stefan Puxon). She escapes the monkeys, wards off Shere Khan with fire in a fabulous Red Flower dance, and when Akela is banished for failing a skateboard jump, goes back to the city – more marvellous dancing as robotic figures in suits jerk around with briefcases . She finds her lost mother who, in the most entertaining number of all, gets her out of her neat red jumpsuit and into a series of skirts, in which Mowgli performs different styles of dance – waltz, Charleston, ballet – each one descending into frenzied street-dance moves, especially striking in a tutu. Kendra J.Horsburgh is the choreographer, with Nicole James herself and Nathalie Alison (Kaa) credited for the acrobatic sections.

 

 

 

I am no dance critic, but can vouch for the excitement, the contrast, and the way that every move serves the theatrical narrative: though I did have to check it out a bit in the interval to be sure of some of the subtleties. The cast, rich in edgy dance and circus experience, are remarkable. Especially young Natalie’s Mowgli, whose lithe red-clad figure will stay in my mind’s eye a fair while : leaping, rolling, somersaulting, trapezing, clambering up the skewed lamp-posts of the set, duetting on an aerial hoop with Natalie Alison as the most graceful of vultures.

 
But if you want the oddest thought which flickered through my head, watching this portrait of the modern urban dispossessed (dance gives you a lot of time to think in sentences), it was about Kids’ Company. I realized that Baloo – friendly, vigorous, overenthusiastic but benign mentor of the lost child – was basically Camila Batmanghelidgh…

Touring: details at http://www.mettatheatre.co.uk
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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April 22, 2016 · 12:14 am

THE COMEDY ABOUT A BANK ROBBERY Criterion, W1

MISCHIEF THEATRE STRIKES AGAIN. HURRAH!

 

 

Years ago, a famous US television show called Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In hit on the strategy – as Ken Dodd had decades earlier, and still does – of firing off really cheesy jokes and puns, as lame as the oddly-famed Four Candles, but so fast and mercilessly thick that they become irresistibly funny and you had to gurgle along.  The prison scene which opens Mischief Theatre’s new venture made me briefly fear that they would stick to this formula, hoping it would sustain a full-length play.  Three to six pun-misunderstandings  per minute hit us, including a reiterated “Neil!” making people kneel, and “I see” misheard as “Icy”. That sort of thing. I fretted. But this is Mischief, I should have had faith: that burst, to get the audience cackling, is only one of the multiple mixed-genre tactics in their farcical spoof of a 1950s heist-noir movie. It settles us down while our antihero Mitch (Henry Shields, one of the three authors)  springs himself from prison assisted by various comedy officers and a startlingly athletic fence-vault, on the way to rob an incompetent Minneapolis bank of a legendary diamond.

 

 

 

This one is a departure for this well-hefted troupe, though marked by their typical leCoq precision, speedy slapstick and alarming physical fearlessness. Abandoning the “am-dram goes wromg” technique which won them an Olivier for The Play that goes Wrong and sustains their even funnier Peter Pan, this time they stay in stage character, classic farce tradition larded with some unexpected atmospheric singing (Elvis, gospel, dum-de-dum) and ingenious human props. The only deliberate sense of actorly struggle this time is in one memorable scene in the second Act, involving dodgy sideways aerialism I will not spoil by describing. The rest is a classic, albeit heavily embroidered broad ’n bandit plot, unashamedly retro at times. Because hey, they’re just not making 1950s screwball movies any more, and someone has to take up the baton…

 

 

 

So here’s Shields as tough Mitch, with co-authors Henry Lewis as Mr Freeboys the bank manager and Jonathan Sayer as the much-battered ageing intern Warren, who in a bald-wig and glasses combo looks eerily like a hasty cartoon of Will Gompertz of the BBC. Other seasoned Mischievites are Charlie Russell as Clarice the slinky moll and Nancy Wallinger (with a fine bluesy voice) as Ruth the amorous bank receptionist whose son Sam (Dave Hearn, a Mischief founder) lusts after Clarice and steals wallets and – Oh, look, you have to be there. Even if only not to miss the scenes in and around Clarice’s fold-up bed, a series of superb physical disasters, instant disguises and perilous tip-ups (how on earth do this company ever get through a run with all their limbs and skulls intact?). It reaching an apogee in an acrobatic accidental threesome, considerably more entertaining to contemplate than the one in the current injunction.

 

 

 
And so to Act 2: the robbery, with some breathtaking staging, lost trousers, more appalling puns, and fast and disciplined physical gags involving police paperwork and swoop-spec’d aunties which made me actually choke with giggles. There’s a recurring seagull gag too, which will stay with me for days in a happy glow of memory. And a nicely underacknowleged Beckettian surrealism in the stubborn inability of any character to notice the difference between a very big man with a luxuriant moustache, and impersonators a foot shorter and two feet narrower with lampshade-tassels stuck crookedly under their noses.

 

 
As a moody Sunday-afternoon old-noir-flick aficionado I also relished the Double Indemnity moment between Freeboys and Warren. It’s got everything a sweaty London evening needs: it’s daft and deft, pantomimic and parodic, physical and fantastical, pure pleasure delivered with dashing precision.

 
box office 0844 815 6131 to 2 October
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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April 19, 2016 · 11:31 pm

THE FLICK Dorfman, SE1

LIGHTS! CAMERA!  SLOW BUT FASCINATING ACTION!  

 

 

We sit as if we are the cinema screen of a run-down fleapit in Massachusetts: we confront the back wall at projector window, and are occasionally dazzled by bright beams in the many blackouts. When showtime music ends, we face 100 empty seats between which two men languidly sweep up popcorn. That’s what we’re here for: to eavesdrop on these ordinary lives in their quiet desperations, desires and diversions, and monitor their interaction with Rose, the only woman: she is promoted to the projection box, lacing up the last 35mill non-digital projector in Worcester County.

 

 
A somewhat baleful reputation preceded Annie Baxter’s play, straight over from New York in Sam Gold’s production, with two of his original cast: it may have won a Pulitzer, but its length – three hours plus interval – apparently freaked out the off-Broadway audiences, some of whom wrote indignant messages about having had to sit for 1 hr 40 in the first half alone (though heaven knows, Mr Spielberg often asks far more of us, some of his films amounting almost to a hostage situation).

 

 

Anyway, they were quite wrong to leave. They’d have missed the drama of the great popcorn revenge, some of the most expressive body-language ever achieved while wringing out a mop, an electrifying recitation from Ezekiel, and one of the most devastating declarations of unrequited love since Viola. A bald, 35-year-old, lumpen male Viola, but its a full willow-cabin throb.

 

 
The two men are Matthew Maher as Sam, a beautifully nuanced unlikely hero. He stolidly holds on to his tiny seniority as he teaches skinny newcomer Avery (Jaygann Ayeh) about clearing up, disinfecting the popcorn machine and – when Rose joins them – about the routine ticket-stub scam which provides “dinner money” (one of our most senior critics admitted in the interval that he remembers that scam well from his distant youth in the old Curzon).

 

 

Slowly, for this is a deliberate, atmospheric play full of silences, we see them reflecting on the mess people leave – Avery shocked to see remains of hot-dogs he sold only hours before, Sam more annoyed at “outside food” sneaked in, until he remembers in a moment of existential revelation that he brings his own tamales in to other cinemas. Avery is edgy, troubled, and obsessive about saving the fragile beauty of 35-mill film and warding off digital: he’s a college boy on a break, the one black character but also the only middle-class one, an academic’s son. Sam, slower, enjoys a challenge of “six degrees of separation” in movie casts (“Michael Caine to Britney Spears” etc) which geeky Avery always wins. Rose is grungy, farouche: Sam worships her in silence, Avery yearns only for a lesson on her projector. Unseen, the owner Steve is selling up.

 

 

It is a delight, a gentle, subtle slow-building parable of how the inflated movie themes are reflected and outclassed by small real ones: race, ambition, sexual confusion, love, suicidality, family disruption and retardation, betrayal, honour and dishonour among thieves. People will call the long silences “Pinteresque” but they are far better, because rather than cynical menace they fill with subtler hopes, doubts and astonishments. Rather than laughing at losers in The Caretaker, here we root for them, want redemption. We nearly get it, and there is certainly a beautiful ironic joke at the end: Avery, wedded to the doctrine of celluloid’s truthfulness, gets some old film cans and they’re all animations or CGI-rich: Rugrats, Star Trek, Honey I Shrunk the Kids. As to why he’s carting them off , no spoilers. It’s a surprisingly good yarn.

 
Box office 020 7452 3000 to 15 June
Rating four   4 Meece Rating

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April 18, 2016 · 11:17 pm

MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD… St James Theatre, SW1

SIXTY YEARS, FOUR GENERATIONS: WHAT THE WOMEN DID

 

 

Say, first of all, that Maureen Lipman was born to play Doris, the Lancashire matriarch at the heart of Charlotte Keatley’s modern classic. In this revival she never misses a beat: without overdoing it Lipman can convulse an audience with a mere word (“Polytechnic” “End Terrace” ), or silence our breathing with a wrenching, gentle monologue expressing a hidden life. She carries Doris through: first a 1940’s housewife born illegitimate in 1900 in “reduced circumstances’ , becoming a mildly disappointed, undemonstrative no-nonsense mother. Then a mellower grandmother, holding family secrets; finally a fearless widowed octogenarian taking evening classes, kicking off her pop-socks in the sun, finally at ease. At times she is also required to be her five-year-old self, playing in a wasteground the farouche, unsupervised games of an earlier age when Doctors and Nurses stood in for sexual exploration. In every manifestation Lipman nails it.

 
The play tracks four generations of women from the war to 1985: Doris mothers Margaret, who grows up as a career woman (though her final promotion is to be PA to a young male graduate with dodgier grammar). Margaret’s daughter Jackie is a sixties kid, has baby Rosie by a married man, can’t keep her and lets Margaret take over while, in the shameful primness of that age, she plays big-sister and becomes a glamorous galleriste. With their various menfolk unseen – old Jack, American Ken, faithless Graham – the four women express much about motherhood and daughterhood which needs expressing: love, resentment, secrets, and the mother-daughter misunderstandings inevitable in a fast-changing century. As Doris says, each generation demands more than the one before, and so finds its own disappointments. Doris had the mangle-bound hardship and a long marriage with no exit; Margaret wage-earning responsibility without prestige, Jackie freedom and adventure but a broken maternal heart. Rosie seems, as the play ends on her 16th birthday, to be the winner, the end of the evolution. But one can’t help working out that she would now be in her forties, battling with IVF or fretting about sexting teenagers, an endless mortgage and a husband with a midlife crisis.…

 

 
That’s not in the play of course, but the fact that one muses on it shows that Keatley’s narrative, through artful time-shifts, still has heft and strength : the rarity of her pitiless focus on ordinary women’s experience made the play a sensation in 1985. Her ear is pitch-perfect down the decades: from Doris’ typical wartime injunction to her piano-bashing daughter “less passion and more perseverance”, to the winceable moment when the busy working mother Margaret – her teenage daughter having had unprotected sex – moans “If you’d asked me..” and gets the devastating reply from Jackie “I did say I wanted to talk to you , and you said we can talk while we go round the garden centre”. Ouch.

 

 

 
There are many such moments, superbly underwritten but devastating, as the story unfolds. Katie Brayben is a strong Jackie: conflicted, heartbroken about the baby but ambitious; Caroline Faber gives Margaret, the most cheated of them all, a weary solidity; Serena Manteghi has a tricky job, since we only see Rosie from a hyperactive eight years old to a bratty sixteen, and the capering and spoilt-kid cuteness make it – in any production – difficult to get the audience to empathize as Margaret and Jackie fight over who she should live with. Manteghi could – maybe will as the show settles – tone down the capering a bit.

 

 
It is set rather bleakly in a white box amid TV screens , flashing newsreels and showing the year and the place (though rather too quickly, you could miss it if you didn’t know the play’s structure) but props warm it up from time to time. A bigger quibble in Paul Robinson’s production for Tiny FIres is that the odd interludes where the cast become small girls playing – necessary in Keatley’s vision to define their innate ferocity – feel intrusive. They smell too much of a 1980s drama-school exercise. But they’re in the play so must be honoured. And Lipman can do that stuff , and make us laugh and believe it, as well as she does everything else. What a marvel.

 

 

box office 0844 264 2140 to 21 May.
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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April 18, 2016 · 9:38 am

LEGALLY BLONDE, THE MUSICAL Curve, Leicester

ELLE WOODS IS BACK,  PINKER THAN EVER

 
Full disclosure: transport , domesticity and a hacking cough meant that on this two-show day in the lovely Curve I had to skip out at the interval. But can happily report that Nikolai Foster’s production reanimated the happy memories of the Savoy one which launched Sheridan Smith to fame, while having a cheerful flavour of its own. Pure pleasure, this show: a top-class marshmallow sundae of a night.

 

 

Matthew Wright’s clean design uses light themes cleverly: pink and purple for Elle’s princessy Californian world, baize-green and sober reds for Harvard. Lucie Jones as the Malibu girl who follows her ghastly lover to Law School, and beats him even at law, is tuneful and likeable with a vivid energy: she makes the most of the pleasingly ridiculous lines like “I”m not exactly trailer trash, Beyoncé is a neighbour!”.

 

 
The ensemble execute violently acrobatic dances, especially in Elle’s dancing application to Harvard: her own vigorous twerking with a terrified, tweedy professor is a particular treat. All the pleasures I remember in Laurence O”Keefe and Nell Benjamin’s lyrics are there, especially the horrified Californian complaint that the East Coast is cold and wet and “all the girls have different noses”. And Ian Kelsey as Callahan makes the most of the predatory, sharkish lawyer’s ‘Blood in the water!”.

 
So yes, the fun’s all there, and this splendidly ridiculous, rom-com-romp of a musical is well worth its revival. It also suits this fine theatre: there must have been some qualms about Ishy Din’s WW1 WIPERS, which in possibly the most perfect contrast any two-house theatre has ever run plays at the same time in the big studio which lies back-to-back with the main theatre. Very loud shellfire could have leaked through. It didn’t. Not even faintly.

 

 

And heaven be praised, those confined by complex long distance travel like me, trailing sadly out at the interval, do not miss the real top hit of the show, one I have been singing to myself on every trip to Ireland since. Tupele Dorgu as the yearning beautician Paulette delivers, to perfection, her longing for an Irish lover : “All Irish men are like heroes / They’re descended from poets and kings / So I swore I’d get married in IReland / In a wedding like Lord of the Rings”” For that alone it’s worth the drive to Leicester, and I left with regret, though knowing that she would find her Irishman in the end.

 
Oh, and the lapdog behaves. Though Jones perhaps wisely does not attempt Sheridan Smith’s famous chihuahua-leaps-into-handbag moment: Smith once told me that the only way to ensure that was to secrete many, many pieces of meat around her pink-clad person, and she smelt quite gamey by the interval…

 
box office 0116 242 3595 to 14 May

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April 15, 2016 · 12:36 pm

ONE MILLION TINY PLAYS ABOUT BRITAIN Watermill, Newbury

THIS LAND IS OUR LAND…

 

 

There are actually only about thirty, out of Craig Taylor’s rather wonderful collection of 94 first seen in The Guardian. But the sense of our millions is there, as Laura Keefe’s joyful, quirky production becomes a mosaic of brief British encounters in the four nations None is especially dramatic, but each is loaded with meaning. Perhaps a momentous one – death, separation, revelation – or simply a strategy to get through a tedious day. Indeed the final one in this selection encapsulates both the mundanity and the immensity of human life: two workers pick up litter in an urban park, and one muses on how he likes to invest every crisp-packet or nasty tissue with what might have been its story. His colleague is just exasperated.

 

 

You could relate it to sketch comedy, but because it is free from the need for unrelenting laughter or smart punchlines, it can embrace pathos and disturbance as well: skimming over everything – love, death, family, immigrant labour, Asian marriage codes, body-image. Tones vary from Beckett to Bennett, Ayckbourn to Anouilh. A conversation between a widow and her daughter about the mother’s first attempted date brings tears to the eyes: even though the widow is played, without so much as a wig, by a middle-aged man.

 

 

Thus in a set resembling a cluttered garage, with handy props lying around, playlets ranging from about thirty seconds to five minutes have us eavesdrop on assorted lovers, parents, friends, colleagues, officials (there is a wonderfully preoccupied GP peering into a computer and failing to listen to her patient, and a brief, stroppy immigration officer berating an invisible baffled immigrant family about how on the form an X is not the same as a tick).

 

 

The two players are Emma Barclay and Alec Nicholls, though as they grab hasty onstage changes each changes gender and age: Nicholls a disconcerting sight in a pink tutu, and both of them at one point drunken hen-night lasses in Newcastle in cosplay outfits as Wonderwoman and Superman. In Keefe’s cheerfully inventive production, designed by Fly Davis, there is a looming, bright-lit Bingo board: each sketchlet is introduced with a booming voice giving the number and location (“a teashop in Harrogate!” “A surgery in Norfolk” etc.). Pleasingly, the two players at each of those moments have an air of faint surprised panic as they hasten towards the appropriate prop or whip off a layer of costume. They’re playing: we’re eavesdropping, flying like watchful drones over the chequered island.

 
It is brisk – two hours including interval – and set up for a tour of small local spaces. But I wouldn’t mind seeing Keefe extend it to give us another dozen of the tiny plays.
box office 01635 460444 to 23 April
then TOURING to 7 May – details here            http://tinyurl.com/zkskkf4

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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April 14, 2016 · 6:11 pm

WIPERS Curve, Leicester

THE HEROES FROM THE EAST

 

A hundred years ago, a Punjabi gunner in the 129th Baluchi regiment, Khudadad Khan, stayed at his post in the machine gun nest, injured and at bay , his commanding officer dead. With his remnaining comrades he held off the German advance for long enough for reinforcements to come, and fend off an invasion across the Channel. Surviving by a hair himself, Khan won the Victoria Cross.
Learning the story, Ishy Din found a focus for Leicester’s important, intriguing dramatic tribute to the South Asian troops who were brought over to fight for the Empire. Which some of them were, frankly, already beginning to wonder about. In Din’s play, though, it is only near the end that Waleed Akhtar”s Ayub dares pose a direct question to the greenhorn young white officer Thomas. “We gave you our values, the railway, our technology…” Says the lad, his accent cut-glass, his initial panic quelled by rest and food. Ayub just quietly askd “Why?”. His parents would remember the mismanaged famine of 1876, during which 320,000 tons of grain were exported by the colonial power…we were not always a caring “parent” to what young Thomas thinks of as childlike colonies.

 
But that is late on. The play, a slow-burn 100 minutes beautifully set in a towering barn and directed by Suba Das, sees three Asian soldiers detailed to hold it with tripwires and small-arms under the young, scared, new British officer, Thomas (Jassa Ahluwalia – who may look like any pink faced public school sixth former but is in fact of Punjabi descent). Distant fire indicates Khudadad’s stand beyond the fields through the long day and night: the respect in which he is held by Lance-Naik (lance corporal) Sadiq and the sepoy AD is movingly witnessed throughout. This is their regimental father, mentor, legend: and also the Company letter-writer for these men thousands of miles from home, knowing themselves “here to soak up bullets” and held together by fierce mutual loyalty and culture.

 
And food. After initial tensions – not least over ambition and rivalries, with snippy exchanges between Simon Rivers’ tough black-bearded Sadiq and Sartaj Garewal’s AD – better conversations grow over the elegant construction of a hot dhal dish in mess-tins. Garewal elegantly dices garlic and chillies with his bayonet: costume and kit detail is magnificent, respect to Isla Shaw. The puppyish English officer is contrasted with the focused, hard-honed Indians, of whom only Ayub is both literate and English-speaking. The tension ,where experience and strength is on one side but authority on the other, is neatly handled: the conclusion strong, avoiding melodrama, acknowledging cultural strengths and honour both sides.

 

 

As i say, the play feels like a slow burn for a while, but finally its strength is just that. Ishy Din is wise not to grope for more plot that is provided by the situation itself. I have written before ( http://tinyurl.com/q53tp5p). about the remarkable ability of theatre, above all other arts, to express the experience of WW1 and let the dead walk before us, individual and human. This is an honourable addition to that education, and I am grateful. It has a tour: British Asians should come, and us their neighbours too.
0118 2493595. http://www.curveonline.co.uk. To 23 April. Then touring to 21 May
Rating. Four.    4 Meece Rating

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April 12, 2016 · 10:01 pm

BOY Almeida, N1

STREETS OF LONDON, SNAKING TO NOWHERE…

 
The boy of the title  is Liam: gormless and runty, lost and unnoticed , scion of a demographic much discussed right now. For he’s a white, working-class, 17-year-old “NEET” (not in education, employment or training). His turf is today’s London, its squalid impersonal bustle quite brilliantly evoked by director Sacha Wares and Miriam Buether’s ingenious set. She turns the Almeida’s centre into a snaking conveyor-belt, on which (by impressively precise stage management) there rapidly appear and disappear shabby council-flat doors, roadworks, bus shelters full of noisy lairy girls, Oyster barriers and park saplings . As Liam drifts around, broke and with no money on his phone, feeding off thrown-away chicken wing boxes, he looks for his friend . Who has an X-Box to play Call of Duty. He makes his way uncertainly from his own ‘hood to Sports Direct on Oxford Street, which he sees as a sort of Valhalla.

 
On the rolling, never-ending, never-rewarding street belt there also appear occasional Londoners with actual jobs, hurrying through the Tube, or drunk and throwing up outside silk night-club ropes when evening comes. Sometimes there are agents of social assistance – police catching him dodging a fare, as middle-aged man exasperatedly offers to pay it for him,; there are doctors, and a jobcentre dealing with confused people worrying about ESA and PIPs and the new benefits regime.
The latter mainly peer at laptops and wish Liam would go away and become 18, or employed, or take up volunteering. Vaguely he says “cool, wicked, yeh” and wanders on. One of his friends tells him to “F—- off home and grow up”; his schoolfriend’s mother, when one of the confusing, whirling doorways is opened to him, expresses much the same. In the opening moments a brisk middle-class woman doctor peremptorily checks his penis for STDs (I think this may be a heavy indication of the emasculation of the old manual labouring classes by the ascent of professional women).

 

 

And so the city whirls on, with a sinister half-heard heartbeat, a pounding remorselessness, and oor wandering Liam – amid his mumbles and argot – makes it gradually, keenly, tragically clear that all he wants from life is something to be “busy” with during his empty days. “Bizzie! Bizness!” he says. But he hasn’t even the go to deal drugs. Or, like his more articulate friend, to blame it all with vague political resentment on “estate agents and immigrants and Syria an’ shit an’ ISIS” .

 

 
Writer Leo Butler and the creative team have created something not quite a play, but ultimately a sort of art installation expressing London’s modern underside and restless, roadworky neurosis. Look at it that way, and it is rather magnificent. A company of some two dozen, mainly young (the lairy quarrelling girls are a hoot, “hashtag bitch, yeah, like..” etc). Seven are on a first professional engagement, including Liam himself, a very assured performance by Frankie Fox, who holds our sympathy alongside our exasperation, and could well have done with a more complete characterization and backstory.

 

 

We deliberately don’t see his parents, which is a pity, though there is a moment with his nine-year-old, contemptuous half-sister. Who, once again, like the girls in the bus shelter and the weary GP, may be sending us a not-too-coded message about how females are doing no good to these lost boys. Probably true. But depressing. It all is.
box office 0207 359 4404 to May
Principal partner ASPEN. Pron supporters Arsenal Foundation / Paul Hamlyn Foundation / Sackler Trust/ Alex Timken
rating: three   3 Meece Rating

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April 10, 2016 · 3:56 pm

LES BLANCS Olivier, SE1

THE  TWILIGHT OF COLONIAL AFRICA 

 

 

Rufus Norris’ embrace of tough black American history theatre continues: an Olivier met MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM by the great August Wilson – who we don’t see enough, though his FENCES was a West End hit with Lenny Henry. I didn’t review Ma Rainey here because I caught it late for family reasons, and there were enough other reviews out there; but for the record I cheered for its Olivier. Not just for Sharon D.Clarke but for the bandsmen, especially Msamati and Giles Terera, whose banter and ultimate disastrous hostility bubble through the play, in the bandroom under the studio. It offers one of Wilson’s starkest, subtlest illustrations of how oppression drives a culture culture to war with itself .

 

 

This play is not about the American backwash from the slave era, but a shattering, important take on Colonial Africa, an unnamed country on the edge of revolution and independence. It is by Lorraine Hansberry (better known for A Raisin In The Sun) who died before it was finished; on the page I suspect would be weaker, though God knows the points it makes are valuable. Norris’ coup is to get director Yael Farber, whose remarkable Crucible shattered us at the Old Vic last year. The result of this staging, working again with Soutra Gilmour’s design of a skeletal mission-house and a starry sky, is spectacular: dark and moody, physically intense, spectacular and haunting: from the opening moments it creates sense of Africa’s vast ancient mystery, under fragile control of a nervy European power . A chorus of turbaned women croon Xhosa harmonies: a single, silent, thin black woman circles the stage, at one point dramatically closing in on the most conflicted character, mounting his back, a burden of ancestry he cannot deny.

 

 

For Tshembe (Danny Sapani) has come home to the environs of the mission after travels in Europe and a first-world marriage and family, to attend the funeral rites of his father, a tribal head. His brother Abioseh (Gary Beadle) is a Catholic priest, idealistic and intense but by his calling on the white men’s side while offstage “the terror” is growing, and white families murdered in their beds. As Tshembe grows more wedded to the cause they quarrel. A third brother Erik is half-caste, a very symbol of the division.

 

 

 

Two patriarchs, unseen, overshadow the men: The Reverend missioner, whose old blind wife – played with sibylline elegance by Sian Phillips, who holds some of the play’s strangeness; and old Abioseh, Tshembe’s father. The mission doctors – xxxx and xxxx x- fall into conversation with an American journalist, Charlie (xxxx) whose simplistic first-world naivete is challenged not only by shocking events but by the declamatory, fascinating alternative visions offered by Tshembe – reminding him how long black Africa begged politely for freedom before turning violent – and by Major Rice, the brutal colonial enforcer who has a remarkable, recognizable (very Rhodesian) speech about his own position “I”m not a racist. I’m devoted to the blacks that work for me and who I help to civilize..I”m not by temperament a harsh man, this is our home, we made the country into something, these are our hills..”

 
This speech follows a horrifying shock moment. It is one of the most remarkable theatrical moments of the year. And so, in a quieter way, is Sian Phillips’ delivery Madame’s last reflection on her life and impending death in the Mission house.

 

And if I may be personal for a moment, I should say that the look, the incense smell, the darkness and mystery and desperate half-unspoken unease of this play took me back to my ‘60s teens in South Africa – which took far too long to explode, and did it with far less terror – and Swaziland. To the absurdity of white colonialism, the patience and anger of black Africa, the terrible but routine calculations in which one white death was worse than a hundred black ones. It felt like a lucid dream. Remarkable.
Box office 020 7452 3000 to 2 June

RATING    four  4 Meece Rating

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April 8, 2016 · 9:40 am

INVINCIBLE Guildford, then Touring

THE STATE OF ENGLAND:  FUNNY, BEAUTIFUL, SAD     Touring Mouse wide

AND TOURING! 

 

Some issues do best as satirical or farcical comedies: English class division, illicit sex, misunderstanding. Others sit less easily with the comic muse: cot death, grief, young lives wasted in war. Torben Betts, in this terrific play, is comfortable handling both, and does so with almost total success. It ran briefly in multi-ethnic, diverse East London: but with this new touring cast will be able to show a wider Britain to itself: at first teasingly, but then with an admirable sad seriousness.
For Oliver and Emma are parlour-leftie southerners with small children who have moved up North to save money and (especially in her case) to fulfil a self-righteous fantasy about living among “real people”. But the real people next door are the vampy Dawn (Kerry Bennett) and Alan (Graeme Brookes). Alan is an immense man-mountain in an England shirt, so untutored in middle-class ways that when they are invited round he sends his wife first, while he finishes watching the England match. He then turns up with a monologue of post-match analysis while the hosts stand speechless.
So far, so funny. Oliver – a redundant MoD civil servant with at least some grasp of practical reality. – attempts gauche friendliness. But Emily Bowker as Emma is a living nightmare in her self-designed asymmetric-chic outfits, pretentious abstract artworks and serene yogic poses. Her meditation and left-of-Corbyn love of the People does not stop her hissing disapproval at Dawn’s tight red dress, or delivering blistering condemnation of Alan’s clumsy paintings of his cat, Vince – Invincible (named after the aircraft carrier on which he was a cook).

 
We get a hint in the first act that Emily is in some sort of grief, from four years previously; but bravely, Betts does not allow her to solicit sympathy for a long time yet. She can’t even bear the St George’s flags on the houses outside in a World Cup year defacing “A beautiful street of 19c stone houses…I AM sympathetic, Oliver, towards the oppressed, but mindless patriotism!” . She is also “trying to move beyond sex”. Dawn, sensibly, isn’t.

 
The postman Alan , though, rapidly becomes one of the most beautiful characters of recent theatre. Boasting to Oliver about his wife’s hotness he says that when he first saw her naked he wept: the supposedly new-man southerner can’t quite take that. And when Alan talks of and shows his paintings – which are splendidly terrible – Emma’s vicious demolition of his work as she prates about how art should “reunify body and soul” and so forth, is torpedoed by his shy “when I paint I don’t feel so lonely”. Merit or no merit, he’s an artist and she’s a pretender. But he still cuts up his paintings, embarrassed. Brookes’ performance is splendid, nuanced, genuine: my only suggestion (and it was a preview at Bury I saw) is for director Christopher Harper to suggest he does a bit less of the maddening laugh in the first scenes. Conveying annoyingness without annoying the audience as well is a tricky ask.

 

 

The fate of Alan’s beloved cat becomes both comic and profoundly sad; in the second half, with good twists, we learn more about him and Dawn , about Oliver’s underlying nature (a lovely cynical concluion here) ; we may respect, to a reasonable degree, nasty Emma’s reason for sorrow. And as a portrait of flawed people in a Britain divided by class and also at war – there’s a painfully sharp line from Dawn about soldiers, which I won’t spoil – it becomes genuinely beautiful as well as sharply perceptive . Honour to Original Theatre and to Theatre Royal Bury, the producers. It’s a good long tour, into June. Catch!

 

tour dates on http://tinyurl.com/zxx76eg
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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April 6, 2016 · 11:31 pm

THE CARETAKER Old Vic SE1

SPALL, SQUALOR, AND 1960  

 
I do not routinely worship at the shrine of Harold Pinter. I can study, appreciate and accept the menace, the unspoken, the rhythmic near-poetry of dialogue : I have served my time with Existentialism, Absurdism, Beckettiana, every generation of push-theatre-forward shockjockery. Pinter has his place and his heirs (Florian Zeller lately a fine one). Get a great director like Matthew Warchus and a top cast and you have an event, for many an unmissable one. But he doesn’t stir deeper currents in me. For all the skill and faithfulness what is expressed is too mired in misanthropy, bitterness, bullying rage and shreds of misogyny.

 

 
But having admitted that personal blindness, it is all the more firmly that I admit tht this is a barnstorming production of his best play, and a career-besst performance by Timothy Spall as Davies the tramp: the cuckoo in the nest who is taken in by the mentally limited, benign Aston (Daniel Mays ) and then both tempted and tormented by his sharp thuggish brother Mick (George MacKay). In three acts with short intervals, power and menace ebbs and swirls between them, provoking laughs both unforced and uneasy, spurting sudden riffs of eloquence , keeping the unspoken shiver in the air. Spall, a shambling grizzled wreck with a querulous drawling delivery, is mesmerizingly good; Mays gives Aston a wounded dignity which comes as near to pathos as Pinter ever allows; MacKay is a slim, lethal blade of darkness, hollow at heart. Warchus, who sees more humanity in Pinter than I generally do, extracts from these three actors every ounce of it.

 

The set by Rob Howell is a marvel: a leprous attic room, peeling wallpaper, boxes, junk, bin-lids, a broken gas stove, squalid beds, drifts of old carpet, tottering piles of newspaper. Indeed the whole play falls into period, the 1960 I dimly remember as a child: Rachman’s slum London , postwar squalor, broken men, unfeasible sullen ambition, teddyboys in ciré bomber jackets like Mick, Pete and Dud eerily prefigured in non sequitur conversations. There are brilliant sequences: Mick’s estate-agenty riffs on interior design, Spall’s hilarilous preenings in the velvet smoking-jacket , and his fleeting attempts to pose with pipesmoking authority or soldierly bravura. The long concentrated silences of Mays as he fiddles with mending the same toaster over and over are perfect, as is his profoundly felt account of the brutal electric shock treatment which disabled him mentally and physically. Yet this is delivered to Davies who is almost asleep, uncaring; though not asleep enough to miss it since when the tramp turns on his host with fearful viciousness later, Spall’s venom makes you wince in your seat.

 

 
As power and abusiveness whirl and shift between them in the filth, all three hold their qualities superbly: Davies querulous, needy, ungrateful, whiningly vicious and always ineffective;; Aston damaged, benign, unhappy, and ineffective; Mick petulant, menacing, manipulative and, naturally, just as ineffective. None of them will fulfil their goals – going to Sidcup, building a shed, remodelling a penthouse. The only completed task is Aston’s provision of wearable shoes for Davies, and even then the laces are the wrong colour.

 

 

So yes, brilliant. Yet there is something uneasy too: a sense of zoo or freak-show in us a cultured theatre-savvy affluent 21st century audience, gathered round to laugh at bygone deadbeats, thugs and failures who in no way reflect us challengingly back at ourselves. It is a cosy sort of discomfort we feel: .like looking at sooty back-to-back terraces from a first class train window.

 

box office 0844 871 7628
principal partner: Royal Bank of Canada
rating four    (though given that set and theme, they’re probably rats..)4 Meece Rating

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April 5, 2016 · 10:23 pm

X Royal Court, SW1

TO BOLDLY GO OFF YOUR HEAD, IN SPACE
We are in the melamine mess-room of a space pod on the dead, black planet Pluto, with a crew of five. Unless one of them is a delusion of the nervy second-in-command Gilda (Jessica Raine). The captain is Darrell D’Silva, always a treat, especially here since he is the only one who remembers living trees and birdsong back on now-blighted earth. He plays around with wooden bird-calls to remember. The others are an intensely annoying teenage Scottish comms techie (James Harkness) and a dour mathematician (Rudi Dharmalingam). Oh, and Mattie who does the “life systems” , and pops in to chat to Gilda, girl-to-girl, about how it helps the tedium if you masturbate three times a day.
Not that anyone’s sure when the day starts and ends, because the digital clock on the wall has gone mad, and it looks as if the relief ship from Earth isn’t coming, being three months (eventually several years) overdue. And maybe Earth doesn’t care anyway, because all the blonde Americans are colonizing Mars as a super-race, and Pluto is for the old, the underqualified and the unwanted.
So it’s political theatre at the Court, Jim, but not as we know it… Though actually, Alistair McDowall’s play is not the first time the Royal Court has flirted with sci-fi: there was 2071, at the end of The Low Road a few years back there was a spaceship, unless I dreamed it. But this is full-on, trad dystopian sci-fi with a rising edge of psychosis and alienation. Fine in principle: I grew up with James Blish and Wyndham and Brian Aldiss, so a stranded spaceship is happy home turf to me. At first the interaction between the crew – a woefully unprofessional bunch once the three-month delay starts to grate – is credible and entertaining enough, with traditional post-apocalyptic chat about the last tree and the overcrowded earth with its vanished nations. Raine is excellent as the anxious snippy Gilda, the unsure new promotee at anyone’s office; D’Silva is solid and likeable as Captain Ray. So a certain dismay attends early news of his funeral , but what with the increasing time-slip, and delusion and memory sequences (very fashionable after the recent Zeller plays) we do see Ray again , hallucinating a scar-faced child (Amber Fernée, admirably deadpan) and cutting his throat.

 

But the rest just gradually go mad, angry, and in two cases dead, leaving Gilda and some cracking sound and light effects to a private dementia involving a giant pulsating dead bird, interestingly worked into a possibly real or possibly delusional pregnancy and more appearances from young Fernée, this time without the scar.
And that’s it. Disappointment hovers over the second half, despite the increasing drama and a gabbled algorithmic craziness between the last survivors. As a study in what isolation and hopelessness does to prisoners it is reasonably interesting, but the absence of any back-story or credibility in any character except D’Silva is a serious drawback. The nihilistic vision in the end is more depressing than engrossing and there is a point when – a rare thing for me – the temptation is to look at your watch and find there are 25 minutes left to run but it’s already mired in sub-Beckettian surrealism.
In the event it wasn’t quite that long, and an effective last speech takes us back to remembering the lost, polluted, drowned, wrecked home planet. Which I suppose was the author’s point. Fair enough.

Box office: 020-7565 5000 to 7 May
rating three   3 Meece Rating
But the third is for the soundscape and lighting. (Lee Curran, Nick Powell, Tal Rosner)

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March 31, 2016 · 11:16 pm

HOW THE OTHER HALF LOVES Theatre Royal, Haymarket SW1

THE CLASSIC COMEDY OF CLASS AND CONFUSION  

 

 

We’re back in the 1960’s, and how! Beyond the jolly geometric curtain a bygone world revives. Shiny pink plastic boots, a ridiculous frilled sub-Laura-Ashley print dinner frock. Nicholas le Prevost doing breathless “Swedish jerks” before setting out for work with bowler and brolly, and coming home to prod suspiciously at an avocado pear , while entertaining a shy colleague for the sake of old-fashioned departmental teamwork. A lost world teeters uncomfortably between postwar formalities and hierarchies and the irreverent modern era. Julie Godfrey’s set straddles lifestyles, one sitting room representing two as cheap clutter and middle-aged Hyacinth-Bouquet gentility interweave: a sofa-cover changes two seats along ,or clothes dry on a baby’s playpen next to a grand French window.

 

 

 

In this we watch three very English marriages in three classes: Frank and Fiona are upper-management, she content with her economic, if not her sexual, fate, he an amiable bumbler with a streak of earnest sentimentality. Bob and Terry are younger, scrappy and sexy: he rising at work, she frustrated by babycare, writing letters to The Guardian and wanting a place in the world. Between them, stuck as it were back in the ‘40s, the Uriah-Heepish William is a meek accountant dominating and patronizing his still meeker wife Mary (“You have no idea how much work I’ve put into that woman”).

 

 

But never mind the social analysis, though in Alan Ayckbourn it is always lurking; this is a hoot, one of the craftiest , most theatrically innovative farces-of-manners we have, from the start of the great man’s career. Director Alan Strachan sets it firmly in its period, not only to make sense of the phone calls which sometimes drive the plot, but to emphasise that it is as much about class and status as mere adultery. That is going on, we rapidly learn, between Bob, fed up with his disaffected young-mother wife Terry (Tamzin Outhwaits), and posh bored Fiona . Jenny Seagrove as Fiona is gloriously poised (worth the ticket to hear her say the word “Woking”) and nicely mean in her dismissive attitude to her husband Frank.

 

 

Who, in the hands of Nicholas le Prevost, is a glorious, downright adorable anchor to the piece. Hapless and well-intentioned, virtuous and kind and disastrous as the complications unfold, exuding a kind of happy doomed optimism, he’s a dream. In a strong cast another standout is Gillian Wright as mousy Mary: respect for some some brilliantly awkward cardigan-and-glove work, apparently genuine hiccups, a credible earnestness when she grows a bit and resolves to “help” after Bob’s meltdown, and a killer delivery of her last line. Apologizing for her husband’s inability to apologize she murmurs “It’s hard for him. He’s never been wrong before”. As to Matthew Cottle’s William, I have never known an actor so good at blushing bright red, to order….

 

 
The remarkable staging is deftly used: way ahead of its time, Ayckbourn puts the actors in two places and sometimes two different days at once, while sharing the set or even the same sofa and table, and seeming obvlivious of one another. The famous dinner-table sequence is matchless: Ayckbourn’s syncopation of mood as elegant as a fugue , our complicity in the pretence just pure, unfilmable theatre. Hard to imagine it being done better.  Head for the cheese, mice!

 
box office 0207 930 8800 http://www.trh.co.uk to 25 June

RATING five   5 Meece Rating

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March 29, 2016 · 11:14 pm

RIGHT NOW Bush, W12

A CREEPY BRILLIANCE  FROM QUEBEC

 
What’s going on? Who are the people in the next flat, why are they so friendly and yet so odd? Are they commonplace swingers, murderers, or a delusion brought on by grief, solitude and thwarted sexual need? Or are they – gulp – actually dead all the time? Why is their adult son Francois covered in scars and prone to Tourettish shouting? For a few seconds you think it’s overacting, but no: this is Dyfan Dwyfor, seasoned chap, very good as Yuri Gagarin five years ago; and the director is Sir Michael Boyd, no less. So it’s Francois who’s deliberately made so odd. Good grief, odder still in twenty minutes’ time.

 
Though hang on, there’s oddity everywhere: is it perhaps possible that the only character who is actually real is LIndsey’ Campbell’s tormented, confused Alice, adrift in a hideous wonderland of white-rabbit husband Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) and the intrusive neighbours. Oh, and where is the crying baby, if that is what it is? And where did the props people source a squeaky rubber duck with such a worrying timbre? Not to mention the fifth and final member of the cast, of whom we shall not speak for fear of spoilers…

 

 
The head spins, pleasantly, and the heart stirs with unexpected shafts of proper pain. New Francophone playwrights in translation are invading our theatre scene, and very welcome too. A sharp fresh playfulness emerges , not Genet-style sadism or glum existential solemnities, but a sort of skewed naturalism which uses the fact of live theatre itself to explore the perilous shores of familiar emotion . And, quite frankly, mess with your head. We have just had Florian Zeller making us experience the edges of dementia in THE FATHER and maternal need and delusion in THE MOTHER, before twisting around into the brilliant near-farce of THE TRUTH. And now here is Catherine-Anne Toupin, another French-speaker (though in Québec) , elegantly translated by Chris Campbell of the Royal Court.

 
On the face of it, here’s a standard urban fiction setup: a weird-people-in the next apartment story. LIke Rosemary’s Baby, The Ones Below, or half a dozen comedies. But from the first moments it deploys a particular unease that theatre is good at showing: it is clear that Alice is depressed or distressed, not sleeping, and her husband Ben, a young doctor, worn out by her crisis. Which has something to do with the – possibly non-existent, or lost – offstage baby. Which in a fleeting moment later, you think Alice may have killed. Or not. But one of the three members of the neighbour family – whose apartment, with metaphorical symmetry is said to be “the same but the other way round” – may also have done a dark thing, long ago. Or not.

 

I would hate you to think it is doomy. Apart from the crazed Francois, the parents are at times and at first, pure comedy : Guy Williams as an urbane, whimsically sociable Gilles, once-famous author of a (probably psychology) text, and Maureen Beattie going for broke, Abigail’s-Party style, as an overbearingly friendly Juliette with Morticia Addams pageboy hair, ferocious maternal authority, and a sequence involving unseen underwear. Which had the whole theatre focusing, in shock, at her white knees in case she fulfilled the threat to part them.

 

 
So on it goes: the tone sometimes erotic, sometimes comic or banal then suddenly inappropriate. At one point (when Dwyfor goes really nuts) quite violent. And at last, the point of the mirror-image flat metaphor is reached in a surreally and really frightening conclusion. Another metaphor hovers then, of the behaviour of parent cuckoos towards weaker birds. And again Lindsey Campbell’s delicately drawn Alice makes your heart turn over in horrified empathy. What is real, what ever has been, was it all a nightmare, how deeply can birth or the lack of it destabilize a woman? Creepy, rather brilliant. Power to the Bush, Traverse and Ustinov for bringing this to us. I have little hope for quiet dreams tonight.

 

box office 020 8743 5050 to 12 April
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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March 28, 2016 · 6:33 pm

SHADOWLANDS Touring

HEAD, HEART, AND HOPEFULNESS

 
“God” says Christopher Riley, donnishly, “has a severely limited intellect”. Jack Lewis, his Magdalen colleague, demurs with affectionate impatience, secure in a religious faith which borders dangerously on the smug. At first, anyway. The port circulates. Their 1950’s Oxford world is scholarly, limited, safe from women. When Lewis strikes up an intellectual friendship with an American correspondent, Joy, she hits this stagnating pond with a splash. Riley attempts his theory that only men have intellect – “animus” – women instead merely have soul “anima”. Sweetly, Joy explains that as an American unused to his culture, she “needs guidance. Are you being offensive or just stupid?” .

 
Wonderful. And perhaps that, in William Nicholson’s wonderful portrait of their relationship, marks the moment when C.S.Lewis, Christian apologist and bachelor, begins to lose his heart to this brave, odd woman intellectual who he was to marry and to lose within years to a savage cancer.

 
The 1990 play is an imagining, but based on close intuitive attention to Lewis’ own writings (notably The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed) It has become a modern classic. But this is by some distance the most arresting, intelligent production I have seen (beating even the BAFTA-winning film with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger). It is a perfect ensemble: Stephen Boxer as Lewis has what I can only call an RSC seriousness: you believe in his belief, smile at his almost childlike delight in the unexpected pleasure of married companionship, and are as shaken as he is at the loss of Joy so soon after his finding her.

 
Boxer never overstates, sometimes almost allowing himself to fade into greyness alongside the more flamboyant Common-room set. Amanda Ryan, a little more glamorous than the real Joy, has a vividness which makes the love affair real, and carries beautifully a sense of the her conflicted feelings – friendship , frustration – when Lewis agrees to marry her purely for visa purposes. Alongside them intermittent moments with Simon Shackleton’s Riley remind us of the tug of safe cynical academia, and there is a more frequent, wholly delightful performance by Denis Lill as Lewis’ brother Warnie. Unintellectual, suspicious of femaleness, gently and half-unwillingly he warms towards Joy and – in profoundly moving moments – towards her schoolboy son Douglas, who was to go on living with Lewis after her death. It is genuinely beautiful.

 
Alastair Whatley’s production never misses a heartbeat: it is simply enough set, but a moment of innovative staging when the child dreams of a magical Magician’s- Nephew cure for his mother is gently but unforgettably handled. Whatley and Anne-Marie Woodley design, with elegant economy. The only quibble I have is that the dons’ suits are too smart. In a West End production some years ago I have never forgotten the obsessive wardrobe care which went into distressing Professor Riley’s corduroys with a worn patch exactly – exactly! – where the Bodleian Library tables rub against one’s leg.

 

 

Is that a flaw? No. Nothing is. And the central message of Joy to her lover – the famous “that’s the deal” – strikes as sharp to the heart as ever. I saw it in an Ipswich matinee with a quiet-breathing rapt audience. The tour goes on: it’s at Windsor now, fittingly for the week of Easter (01753 853 888) and there are at least nine more cities before 30 July. Catch it.

 
tour details http://www.shadowlandstour.com      5 Meece Rating
Rating: five

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March 25, 2016 · 12:16 am

REASONS TO BE HAPPY Hampstead Theatre, NW3

REASONS TO BE UNREASONABLE…

 
I had almost forgotten seeing the first in this Neil laBute trilogy – Reasons to be Pretty – until the looming, hapless figure of Tom Burke as Greg had rambled defensively through his first anxious exchanges with the two women in his life. For Burke played the same big, amiable hunk in the Almeida’s production (directed, like this one, by Michael Attenborough and designed by Soutra Gilmour round a similar giant fold-out crate).

 

 

LaBute picks up the story of the four friends at the point where Greg, the one with college ambitions, has graduated and is going for teaching jobs while the others stay blue-collar in the factory or hair salon. But Greg and Steph have broken up, and she has married someone offstage called Tim; the play opens with her screaming at Greg in a car park for taking up with Carly – who has split from the boorish Kent, is raising his child alone and working the night shift at the factory. Steph, in the opening rant, claims that this puts a kink in the ‘arc of her friendship” with Carly. Though later it turns out that her motives are less purely sisterly, and friendship was never going to get in the way of her deciding to dump invisible-Tim and claim back Greg. Who meanwhile has got Carly pregnant.

 

 

So yes, there we are again, embroiled in the lives of four young Americans who have rashly embarked on pair-bonding and parenthood before getting anywhere near emotional adulthood. And, I cannot lie to you, despite laBute’s famous skill the first half is pretty dull: its only vivacity comes from Lauren O’Neil’s shrieky, needy, flirty, self-absorbed, proudly ignorant Steph, a portrait more misogynistic than most British playwrights would dare. When Greg tries to vary their dining experience by trying a Turkish restaurant all Steph can say is “Turkey – sounds kinda European… we live in America for Godssake, who gives a shit” before moving on to demand shrilly that he declare he loves her.

 

 

Robyn Addison’s Carly is allowed more dignity, what with the three-year-old at home, but has her own brand of neediness, begging (ah, male playwrights!) for the privilege of giving him a blow-job. Greg becomes ever more confused and verbose in trying to sort out his feelings, so that (in the brighter second half) to borrow a feminist trope it becomes like watching two fishes quarrelling over a bicycle. Or recalls a memory of Bernard Levin’s remark about Cecil Parkinson’s affair with his secretary and return to his wife all those years ago – “He seems to adopt a policy of promising to share his life with whichever lady has most recently spoken sharply to him”.

 

 

That second half certainly is better, not least in one good scene between Burke and Warren Brown as the crass action-man football coach Kent , who despises books and is horrified at the ambitious Greg’s decision to get a job in New York “Fuck! Why would you ever go there? Dude, people try to blow it up for a reason!”. The old friends, one moving up the social ladder away from the other, communicate best in the end with escalatingly violent punches on the shoulder, the last language they share. But Greg must face the final showdown with the two women, and contemplate the possibility of actually growing up.

 

 

All in all, though, it isn’t a patch on the first play. We are promised a third in the trilogy – “Reasons to be pretty happy” in which they all meet again at a High School reunion.

Box office: 020-7722 9301 to 23 April
rating three    3 Meece Rating

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March 17, 2016 · 11:50 pm

THE PAINKILLER Garrick, SW1

BRANAGH AND BRYDON GO BANG

 

Well, you’ll never see our Kenneth Branagh more exuberantly violent, nor tumbling into more compromising positions; nor so crazedly drugged, veering from a bout of the  ketamine-staggers to full amphetamine mania with a loaded Heckler and Koch automatic in a hotel bedroom . Or having his neat arse twice injected through his Gents navy s trouserings,  as worn by high-class hitmen when prone concussed on beanbags. .   Nor will you observe many more engaging examples of an infuriated road to bromance than this: Branagh and Brydon, a masterclass in aggressive contrast.  There were moments when I quite wanted to dislike this boys’ own lark, but I never managed it, so power to them both.
For its been a hot week for slightly black–hearted French maitres de farce on the London stage. Yesterday the Menier unveiled the Hampton translation of Florian Zeller’s peerless, subtle four- handed intrigue THE TRUTH, and tonight we got this:  Sean Foley’s version, reset in modern London and directed by himself, of the 1969 Le Contrat by Francis Veber. In adjoining hotel bedrooms, complete with a nicely camp porter (Mark Hadfield) we have our heroes.  Rob Brydon is the suicidal smalltime Welsh photographer , planning to hang himself because his wife has gone off with her psychiatrist. Beyond the handy connecting door Branagh is the suave determined hitman, preparing for his final job manning the window sniper-style and wiping out a gangster on his way to trial .

Only of course the shutter keeps sticking, and the porter enrols him to look after Brydon’s hopeless Welshman after his rope brings the ceiling down. The killer concurs because time is running out and he can always garotte the pest, only it is interrupted and he has to pretend its a shoulder-rub. And all the while Brydon remains innocent, needy , grateful and garrulous.  Indeed for the first half of this neat 90 minutes it is Brydon’s performance which  holds it together: observes the old comedy rule , he takes poor Dudley absolutely seriously: living every despair, need , and moment of sunny vapidity.   Branagh  – before the no-spoilers drug incident – plays against him with earnest irritated solidity, and it is splendid.

 
But then we get a wildly improbable psychiatrist , the disputed wife (Claudie Blakley) , a series of embarrassing apparent gay sexual tableaux to affront and excite the porter, some courageous underpant acting and nifty basic door-work, and that essential farce moment when you think, “hang on, is there or is there not still a concussed police officer in that wardrobe?”

After the ice -cool naturalist messing-with-your- head of yesterday’s five-mouse Zeller,  this is all more familiar turf: but it is a good notch or two up from the – now slightly tired – world of traditional Whitehall or Feydeau sex farces.  As a refreshing sorbet in this serious – and sometime thrilling – Branagh season, it is ideal. Respect to it, skimpy underpants and all.   I got so fond of the duo in the last scene that I really hope they don’t hurt themselves on all those doors.

 

box office 0330 333 4811 http://www.nimaxtheatres.com to 30 April
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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March 17, 2016 · 12:21 am

THE TRUTH Menier, SE1

THE TRUTH GAME. OR NOT. 
Its’ a while since so many shrieks, barks and snorts of laughter shook the seats around me: don’t take your drink in, you’ll risk doing the nose trick in the first two minutes. It may be, given a particularly fine depiction of alpha- male pride and panic by Alexander Hanson, that a bit more of the laughter was – ahem! – female. But there were definite guffaws , sheepish or vengeful recognition from the blokes too.  For this is a punch-in-the-guts, cruelly affectionate,  whip-smart ninety-minute treat.   Seasoned comedy director Lindsay Posner, fresh from the considerably less brilliant The End of Longing, must have thought all his birthdays had come.

 
The hilarity of the peace – for all its potential bittersweetness – is slightly unexpected, since this is the latest of Christopher Hampton’s fine, subtle translations of plays by the Frenchman Florian Zeller . THE FATHER , which gave Kenneth Cranham a career-crowning hit, did allow some sad laughs but is a portrait – an experience, almost – of dementia. THE MOTHER is about fragile maternal obsession.  Both wowed London with odd,  brilliantly theatrical dislocations and tricks of perception, a delicate, deliberate sowing of uncertainty which some will call Beckettian (though Zeller is more accessible and less doomy) and others will call Pinteresque (though frankly the Frenchman is better: not as bullying or as pretentious as our Harold).
 
This play is lighter than the last two we saw, halfway to farce at times though not with farce’s crassness. There are two couples: Michel (Alexander Hanson) is having an affair with his best friend Paul’s wife Alice (Frances O’Connor). This we know for sure, because we first see them in a hotel bed. From then on, however, we are never quite sure in any of the encounters who is lying, who is believing who, which of them is pretending not to know something they do actually know (or do they?) , and who is lying about whether they told another one the truth.

 

 
There is Michel’s wife Laurence (Tanya Franks), sleek and unreadable but suddenly seeming open and friendly; , and Robert Portal as Paul deploying an unnerving deadpan. Between them and Alice Michel – the only one whose feelings are made transparent – rattles in increasing unease. Hanson, reddening in the face, at times almost biting the chic white walls, lurches between blustering overconfidence, defensive outrage , and (very French) chop-logic argument about when it’s kinder to lie.

 

 
The whole is a virtuoso display of zinging lines, laughingly cruel perceptions about male behaviour (oh, the tennis match!) and emotional handbrake-turns and screeching halts. But, to carry on that metaphor: as in the late Top Gear debacle, all the skids and wheelies are never far from a Cenotaph of real pain: real love, real betrayal.  At one point Michel asks “just what sort of a play we are in, comedy or tragedy?” A bit of both. And very classy it is too.

 
box office 0207 378 1713 to 7 May
rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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March 16, 2016 · 1:42 pm

NOTMOSES Arts Theatre, WC2

NOTAHIT

 

On the banks of the Nile, the princess of Egypt lifts a Jewish baby from the Nile waters, but changes her mind, chucks him back and chooses a prettier one. The reject survives, is named Notmoses and winds up among the toiling Jewish captives, under a camp, leatherclad slavedriver who enjoys skipping with his whip as they build the Pyramids (“Its a pyramid scheme, we sell them before they’re finished”). The chosen Moses struts around as a Prince of Egypt until God tells him to lead the people to freedom after inflicting seven plagues on the captors, including a rather pleasing shower of frogs. It is, however, Notmoses and his girl Miriam who prove more effective, and who challenge the psychopathic spite and caprice of the Old Testament God, who booms and thunders from the skies and flickers in the Burning Bush.

 

Gary Sinyor, writer-director, acknowledges his debt to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and it must be said that this play has its heart in the right place, questioning and mocking the more fossilized aspects of religious observance. There are some reasonable gags about dietary and clothing laws and the affinity of Jews and Arabs in the ancient desert. Fine. It is, as Sinyor writes in the programme, hard to imagine a world where Jews don’t laugh at themselves. “the Jews can take a joke only because we have confidence. Where is Jewish humour strongest? In the USA, where the community is more secure in itself than anywhere in the world”.

 

Fine. It could have worked. But it doesn’t, not at full length. A fast-moving, unbroken 85 minutes, culling the worst jokes and polishing the best, could have given it a Reduced-Shakespeare kind of charm, and still made its final point – about rigidity, about conflict, about women. It is an agreeable idea that Miriam has to lead the exodus in a false beard because Moses has Passover matzo constipation. Greg Barnett and Thomas Nelstrop are watchable as the Moseses, Antonia Davies assured as the Pharaoh’s sister-wife; Joe Morrow as the camp slavedriver is fun in a Carry-Onway. But it’s slow, too often juvenile, more like a university freshers’ revue than a professional show. Disappointment creaks through a friendly audience.

 

But – Sinyor being a successful film-maker – I must admit that the projections are very fine – Egyptian scenes, distant labouring slaves, the Nile, the Red Sea. Trouble was taken. More of that trouble should have involved cutting, sharpening and comic timing.

 
box office 0207 836 8463 to 14 May
rating one

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March 16, 2016 · 11:19 am

COSI FAN TUTTE /COSI Kings Head Theatre, N1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI WATCHES MOZART WIPE THE FLOOR WITH THE COMPETITION – AS USUAL

Pairing a copper-bottomed opera classic (Mozart’s Così fan tutte) with an imported Australian play exploring the idea of mounting that very opera in a mental asylum amidst Vietnam war protests (Lowra’s Cosi) is a brave and interesting idea from the King’s Head Theatre. It was always unlikely that the play would ever surpass Mozart and Da Ponte’s painfully callous dissection of infidelity, often billed as a comedy but really a far darker and weirder creature, and the opera definitely comes off best in this duel. Paul Higgins’ modern update of Mozart moves the action to a TV show of the Jerry Springer variety, which proves an ideal vehicle for translating its hysterical atmosphere and strange emotional gamesmanship: a shiny mirrored set, digital screen captions (“Your fiancées will cheat on you”), use of live video feed and even occasional incursion from an in-house bouncer when group tensions threaten violence (don’t we all love those bits?) all contribute to the semi-comic, ultimately heartless ‘human zoo’ phenomenon which is entirely familiar to us, dramatised across multiple channels every day. Don Alfonso (Steven East) is a suitably oily celebrity host, Despina (the significantly gifted Caroline Kennedy) his long-suffering, sassy production manager, boasting a range of comic accents as well as her warm, bright soprano, while our lovers are sung impeccably by a talented young cast including a standout performance from Stephanie Edwards as an exceptional Fiordiligi. I can’t often admit that I don’t actually like Così fan tutte much, but Higgins’ production conveys its strange dynamics with such skill and care that even I found I stopped resisting, and started enjoying it: and this cast, with unstinting energy and noticeably sparky pacing, showcase Mozart’s gorgeous music as the flourishes of genius all night. Warmly recommended.

Pacing, unfortunately, is one of the chief problems of Lowra’s Cosi: although it, too, contains some wonderful performances (particularly from soft-voiced Susie Lindeman as an enchantingly unhinged Ruth, Nicholas Osmond as a withdrawn, yet passionate Henry, and Paul-William Mawhinney as the earnest young director Lewis), there are gaps and flaps everywhere, which nuke otherwise comic possibilities. Sometimes a joke comes across with Pinteresque darkness: “I’ve been having treatment for my pyromania,” remarks Doug (Neil Toon) casually as he lights a horrified Lewis’ cigarette with a Zippo that we’re sure Doug shouldn’t have. But then, instead of gracefully leaving that to fester in the imagination as Pinter would have done, Lowra pushes it too far: this joke soon wears thin as Doug sets fire to the theatre repeatedly. Too often, Cosi takes the easy route, with quick pot shots at its parent opera, not often getting under the piece’s skin in anything but the most obvious way. Consistency is another problem, with some cast members repeatedly tempted (or encouraged) to overact; Wayne Harrison is an esteemed director, but this piece feels altogether misjudged for a world-weary London audience, and badly in need of an edit.

~ CHARLOTTE VALORI

For the opera: Four 4 Meece Rating

For the play: Two 2 meece rating

At the King’s Head Theatre until 2nd April for the play, 3rd April for the opera. Box Office: 020 7226 8561

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March 14, 2016 · 11:10 pm

MISS ATOMIC BOMB St James’, SW1

PLENTY OF ACTIVITY, NOT QUITE ENOUGH RADIANCE
This theatre is certainly fearless about potentially tasteless names – Bad Jews, Urinetown, now Miss Atomic Bomb: the first two of those, however, turned out hits. This one probably won’t, though it’s good to see a British team hurling itself at a big American theme. It’s set in the brief, stunningly ill-advised period between 1951 and 1954 when US Cold-War patriotism and dread of Commies flared – literally – into a positively celebratory series of atomic tests in the Nevada desert. The Bomb became a tourist draw: Las Vegas called itself Atomic City USA, onlookers crowded only ten miles from the blast in plastic sunglasses to admire the extra sunrises and flashes “brighter than a thousand suns”. Soldiers were ordered to crawl close in to observe – and receive – effects, and a “DoomTown” was built, with mannequins of homes and families – and live pigs – to test how the blast affected them and whether it really melted glass. And people. All this, note, less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

 

The musical is by Gabriel Vick, Alex Jackson-Long and Adam Long (who also co-directs with choreographer Bill Deamer). A failing hotel, owned by New York hoods who shoot failures, needs a gimmick and lights upon a beauty pageant. Into this comes the hotelier’s brother Joe, an army deserter on the run, and pretty Candy Johnson the farm girl (Florence Andrews) whose trailer is being repossessed due to Grandma Chastity’s nightlife habit, thus thwarting her ambitions to move to California with her (rather improbable) aspiring fashion designer friend Myrna. Who is played by Catherine Tate with an unaccountable semi-Australian accent and a lot of trademark mugging. Thirteen other cast provide Mafiosi, showgirls, military, a lecherous atom-scientist, a repo man, and some retro Utah rustics whose sheep dropped dead in the “funny snow” (livestock did that, a lot. The US Army would robustly explain that it must be “malnutrition”).

 
So, OPPENHEIMER it ain’t: and as satire, perhaps sixty years late. Though frankly, in the age of Trump one does sense a resurgence of that American overconfidence and gung-ho naffery; and it did open on the day that Kim Jong Un threatened to “burn Manhattan to ashes”. So the Bomb’s still with us. But it’s brash, brutal, blackly comic, and noisy. Structurally a bit of a problem – too many jokey plotlines shoehorned in, such as Joey disguising himself as a rabbi because there are spare rabbi costumes from Easter when his dumb brother ordered rabbit ones. Geddit? There are also, despite some sharp lyrics, actually far too many same-y big numbers – their tone in some cases just musical-theatre-by-numbers. Set pieces are crammed together with too little room for acting and character development in between.

 
The second half is better, once the pageant acts get going (one, patriotic, one endearingly slutty , finally a soulful one from Candy). And there are some standout performances; Andrews herself proves a proper musical star as Candy, though is best served by the more C &W numbers like “How can I be a a beauty queen when all my sheep are gone?”. Dean John-WIlson is a likeable Joey, Gavin Cornwall a boomingly fine basso General (and chief hood). And Stephan Anelli stops the show as the nerdy atom scientist with his “Fallout is your Friend!” number.

 
Catherine Tate herself is oddly underpowered, but has one good comic number in the second half with the hotelier (Simon Lipkin) when they both admit their gayness and vow to marry as “A sugar Daddy and a beard”). And there are good tap routines, one involving a contribution from a corpse; and among the dancers is a Strallen, which is dynastically necessary to any classy Brit musical: it’s Sasi Strallen this time, a new one on me but well up to snuff. So by the end, my third mouse advanced shyly towards the cheese. But it was touch and go for a while.

 

 

box office 0844 264 2140 to 9 April
rating three    3 Meece Rating

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March 13, 2016 · 8:33 pm

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND Eastern Angles, touring

“OVERPAID, OVERSEXED, OVER HERE”…AND NOT AT EASE...
In 1942 the Americans came to rural Britain: the US Eighth Air Force, its members often outnumbering local villagers 50 to 1. Many were black, often from the segregated Southern states. This fascinating starkly set four-hander by Polly Wiseman draws on records and East Anglian memories of how it was: notably (since the older generation is nearly gone) conversations with those who were local children: slipping (as children will) in and out of the bases, making friends across fences, listening to parents’ conversations, noticing big sisters’ flirtations.
So it is about wartime relationships and tensions, but also, inevitably, about racism. And about the counter-intuitive fact that the locals – white, rustic, unsophisticated – often welcomed the “coloured” GIs more than the swaggering young white airmen, to whom they were warm-beer peasants and their lowlier fellow-servicemen just “niggers”. The record is clear, though rarely exposed: last year’s book FORGOTTEN by Linda Hervieux tells of the day in Lancashire when locals fought alongside with black servicemen against the military police. Here in Suffolk, one pub was serving black GIs alongside locals when brash white Americans came in and tried to expel them. The landlord promptly threw out the white guys. George Orwell, in Tribune, actually observed that “The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.” Unfair court-martials and bullying were frequent: Eisenhower himself had to revoke the death penalty on one black GI wrongly accused of rape in 1944.
I relate all this because it would be easy to dismiss Wiseman’s play as politically correct varnish, were it not that such memory supports it. At its centre is a dignified, solid, ultimately immensely moving performance by Nathanael Campbell as Joe: a young engineer from Alabama (“I’m not a cottonpicker!”) who “didn’t join up to be a janitor in uniform” but must dig ditches and shift muck. In contrast is the strutting but increasingly nervous airman Chester (Joshua Hayes). He tries and fails to pick up Viv, a land girl (Georgia Brown). She is half-heartedly engaged to a merchant sailor; when she meets Joe, though, it’s love, touchingly expressed in her sense that his difference makes her world bigger.
Darting around is little Ginny (Grace Osborn, convincingly playing as young as 13), a too-bright farm kid prevented by her family from going to grammar-school. She sees all, and approves greatly, as she has a joshing friendship with Viv’s young Othello. But such a liaison is dynamite: in the background there are WVS stricture on “good conduct for young women”, and – this presumably is researched – a deliberate rumour that black GIs all have VD.
I was, for a while, uneasy that this might be the obvious play to write, with a pat moral. But it moves on, tipping nicely into harsh incident and fresh perception. Chester, at first clumsily patronizing about liking gospel-music and so forth, is torn between his jealous dignity and instinct towards decency; Viv, at first so brave in love, panics at the consequences: a potential “mongrel” baby and the fact that interracial marriage is illegal in Alabama and still tricky in Suffolk. Her fiancé returns from sea, Joe gets arrested for for defending himself against Chester, and the girl’s cry of “I”m not brave!” is heartbreakingly authentic.

Little Ginny, on the other hand, is far too brave, and a naive attempt to save Joe in court-martial makes things considerably worse. In the background we get Hayes and Brown doubling, he as an American anti-racism campaigner , she as the influential Lady Reading, who represents the establishment of the time and its fear that Commonwealth troops would rebel if US forces’ racism was reported. It is perhaps a cartoonish portrayal, and a small flaw in the play.

But with Campbell’s remarkable Joe now prowling the stage “unseen” in fetters, singing the spiritual “Hold on!”, the power of the piece survives it. A final flashback to the child’s first meeting with the black GI is unexpectedly affecting. Joe’s reading to home, censorship rules keeping it vague – “I dug a ditch today. Somewhere in England”.
The play tours right across the Eastern counties till June, often one-nighters in robust Eastern Angles style – but with a good run in Ipswich and site-specific performances in Debach Airfield, which could be thrilling . The cast’s strength can only grow: and Nathanael Campbell is already a name to watch.
http://www.easternangles.couk for dates and contacts. Touring to June

rating Four   4 Meece Rating

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March 10, 2016 · 7:55 pm

LOOK BACK IN ANGER / JINNY Derby Theatre

THE ANGRY YOUNG MAN RANTS AGAIN,  THEN CHANGES SEX

 

This is a sharp bit of work by Derby, marking 60 years since John Osborne’s splenetic debut blew the lid – so theatre legend insists – off a complacent postwar anyone-for-tennis world. LOOK BACK IN ANGER was condemned as “squalid” by some, but hailed by Tynan for pinpointing a depressed, anarchic, resentful class hostility of working-class youth sick of wartime deference but not yet liberated by the ‘60s. It’s especially sharp since Derby – where Osborne was working as a stroppy stage manager in a failing marriage – actually turned down the play first time round.
So here it is again: a theatre monument in itself (how Osborne would hate me saying that!). And here is that dread ironing-board, at which poor Alison stands, berated on a long dull postwar Sunday afternoon by her husband Jimmy Porter , comforted by the amiable flatmate Cliff, rescued by her ex-Raj Colonel father and visited by her posh friend Helena.
Pleasingly, the matinee audience actually gasped at the shocking moment in Act 2 between Jimmy and Helena: that’s how half-forgotten this play is. I have, since a schoolgirl encounter, always felt about Look Back In Anger much the way Alison must have felt about Jimmy: drawn by the energy, wit and invective, but unable to live with the viciousness. Jimmy – chief voice of the play – is frankly a great big ADHD toddler: sulky, resentful, terminally inconsiderate, surrounded by a litter of books but wasting time jeering at the Sunday papers; yearning for “bite, edge, drive, enthusiasm, Hallelujahs” but energized more by laddish brawls with Cliff and contempt for his upper-middle wife’s mother (“Overfed overprivileged old bitch, pure evil”) and her Anglo-Indian father “a sturdy old plant left over from the Edwardian wilderness”. When his own mother dies, and pregnant Alison has left him for a bit, he yowls for his own bereavement while snarking that his wife is a “selfish woman” and dismissing her pregnancy. His“Why do we let these women bleed us to death?” annoyed me fifty years ago, and still does.
But seeing the play again, done with vigour under Sarah Brigham’s direction in a lovingly rundown set, I relished subtler Osborne moments. He allows humanity to the old Anglo-Indian Colonel (Ivan Stott) and posh Helena’s speech on right and wrong has a sharp clarity , something which an audience can fasten onto for support in JImmy’s more tempestuous world which fetishises only suffering and hopelessness. . Daisy Badger is terrific as Helena, brittle poise covering real softness . Patrick Knowles’ square-set, sulky Jimmy is fully in command of the invective, and indeed of the ghastly bear-and-squirrel baby-talk which is the flip side of the weak-willed revolutionary. Augustina Seymour shines as Alison: silent and enduring at first, depressedly pragmatic, finally half- destroyed by grief over her lost baby.
As for its role in reflecting more widely on a lost Britain and the effort to find a new one, I would meanly say that Alan Bennett actually hits that key more cleanly in Forty Years On. But this raging, flawed black diamond of 1955 is worth polishing up, and Brigham does it proud.
And so to JINNY – the hour-long companion-piece Derby commissioned to play in the same scruffy flat (ironing board and all). It is set in 2015, among a newer generation of 25-year-olds frustrated by lack of opportunity and resentment of the posh. In Jane Wainwright’s monologue the principal is not Jimmy but a Jinny, a young woman on a zero-hours contract who aspires to be a singer-songwriter. Joanna Simpkins, with wild red-tipped hair and a Tracey Emin scowl, sings (very poignantly at one point) and, being female, at least does her own ironing. She is no fool, but has stalled helplessly since taking a music degree and fallen behind her ‘uni’ contemporaries, especially the more middle-class ones like “Elinor with an i – who is not only patronizing, but a nutritionist”.
She takes us through a day in which she wakes in the seedy shared Derby flat she shares with a pregnant friend, and bunks off work to meet a potential manager. He is looking for a rough-edged feminist vibe and assures her “menstruation is trending!” . It does not go well, not least because Jinny arrives in bike shorts with her helmet still on, interrupts the interview to take a call from her beloved Nan and therefore isn’t let back in, then runs off home in tears leaving her guitar, pausing only to assault a billboard for having smiley white teeth and being on the side of the shiny winners in life’s lottery. “What does she know? what do any of them know about us?”
There are witty echoes of the Osborne play: the posh resented friend, the sense of outsider status, the helpless angry fruitless inferiority when she encounters a receptionist “wearing those earrings people wear when they hit forty or work in an art gallery, she should be eating a scone or something”.

SImpkins, however, holds our sympathy and the playwright is cunning enough to throw doubt over her world-view . Early on Jinny relates how in her schooldays a friend, Tania, wanted to be a vet but was dissuaded by dull patronizing teachers: a standard educational trope of today: schools putting down ordinary folk’s ambitions, bah humbug. Yet in the last few minutes we casually learn that Tania is a vet now. So it’s about Jinny herself, not the cliché of a generation betrayed. Just as the Angry Young Men were never really Everyman. Just angry. And eloquent.
box office 01332 593939 to 26 March
rating four

4 Meece Rating

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March 9, 2016 · 11:42 pm

BERYL Rose, Kingston

A TWO-WHEELED CHARIOT OF FIRE

 

I suppose there must be some lazy, vacillating, unfocused Yorkshirewomen, but I’ve not met one yet.  And of that tribe of gritty, unselfpitying, fiercely down-to-earth females, few surpass the late Beryl Burton.
Beryl who? How dare we! It is a scandal that any of us need to ask. The final tableau in this intimate, larky, metatheatrical bio-play about the highest achieving of sportswomen sees the cast of four  surrounding her fallen racing bike with innumerable trophies – best British all-rounder 25 years running, world champion more than once, holder still (despite technological advances) of unbroken records including a 12 hour 277 mile marathon  in which she overtook the entire mens race …

 
On it goes.  And if you want more tough, underdog unsung credibility,  reflect that – women’s sport being a Cinderella and cycling in her day mostly a working class club sport – Beryl achieved most of it on shoestring and domestic sacrifice, supported by her faithful husband and soigneur Charlie. She had to cycle to competitions – Yorkshire to London, even – and achieved her early training by working as a labourer on a rhubarb farm (there is a fine educational digression abut the West Yorkshire rhubarb economy). One telling scene shows how – having missed the last train to the world championship at Leipzig – the couple daren’t have the hotel breakfast because their only money is Charlie’s last week’s wage. On being informed by the more appreciative Germans that there is nothing to pay because of her fame, Beryl and Charlie are too embarrassed to change their mind and have the breakfast after all. Very Alan Bennett, that. Less Bennettish is the fact that they’re only late because Beryl stopped off to defend her 100-mile title at home first.

 

This debut play by Maxine Peake for the West Yorkshire Playhouse toured last year and  frankly, the more often it pops up again the better.  Beryl’s story needs no embellishment – weak heart as a child, missed the 11-Plus through illness, emerged furiously determined to “make her mark” and ignore medical advice to avoid exertion. Here is ferocious ambition,  nerves overcome, family stress, injury, triumph after triumph, more injury. Great story, but it does need a lightness of touch: and Rebecca Gatward’s production achieves that in pared down playful style. Samantha Power plays the adult Beryl, Rebecca Ryan her youthful self and then her daughter (who in one race at last beat her, which didn’t go down well). Lee Toomes is an amiable Charlie, and others; Dominic Gately all the rest – mother-in-law, club trainer, assorted waiters, rivals, everything.  Four bikes on stands get vigorously pedalled against projected Yorkshire scenes and cheering crowds, manoeuvered and repaired: during the early part the actors slip out of character with good jokes (when Rebecca Ryan suddenly swaggers pelvically across the stage as a factory- hand the others puzzle “What’re you doing?” “I”m being a bloke!”. Artful, exiguous props cause jokes too, but wisely, as the play grips tighter, Gatward has them lay off that.

 
It’s hugely enjoyable, warm, credible, respectful for all the larking. But I hadn’t expected one private tearful moment: it came when, getting her MBE from the Queen (Gately again, in a tiara) Beryl turns and murmurs awestruck “She knew who I was, Charlie..”. A whole vista of working-class , secondary-modern, farm-labourer-housewife yearning pulsed in those words. This extraordinary athlete had to work punishingly, with furious dedication, to win that moment. In an age of instant celebrity it almost hurt.

 

box office 020 8174 0090 to 19 April
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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March 8, 2016 · 11:39 pm

MOTOWN Shaftesbury Theatre, WC2

IT GLITTERS!  IT SINGS! IT MAKES SENSE. EVEN IN MAD TROUSERS!  

 

I expected a big splashy jukebox musical, a-glitter with tearful Broadway sentiment and popster pizzazz. And indeed the tale of Berry Gordy’s legendary Motown record label is told through fantastic tribute renderings of its back-catalogue, the soundtrack of dates and disasters from 1959 onwards. From the Four Tops and the Temptations – and the Commodores in their fabulously ridiculous trousers – to the Supremes and Jackson Five , it’s all there rendered at gale force twelve in innumerable changes of very shiny clothes (there are fifteen wardrobe and dresser jobs credited, and even so I can’t see how they manage). The choreography even catches with gloriously absurd precision those old-style Vegas moves: all acrobatic jerky unerotic knees-up , snake-hippery and synchronized pointing at the audience. Or, in really high emotion, the ceiling.

 
But rejoice! beyond the retro panache lies a thing of wit, dry intelligent self-knowledge. Berry Gordy himself wrote the book and put the show together with director Charles Randolph Wright. His groundbreaking black music label was – and remains – a serious dream from childhood, when he thrilled as all America – black and white – did, when the boxer Joe Louis beat the German Max Schmeling in 1938. Gordy, who started as a songwriter (“Reet Petite” lies at his door) cites that prewar moment as a seed of his ambition, and is justifiably proud of how Motown powered through in an age of discrimination. Just as in the splendid recent MEMPHIS, set ten years before Motown took off, we see a radio DJ refusing at first to play “race music” but having to capitulate to demand.

 
The joy of this show is that for all the celebration, Mr Gordy does not spare himself : he frames the show – with nicely hokey domestic flashbacks – in the moment of its 25th anniversary in 1983, when artists who had left the label for big money gathered to mark the day, and the miffed 55-year-old founder refused to go. Until, of course, in the final scene he repents. In between, big numbers and small fragments are brilliantly chosen ; the man who insisted ”a song must tell a story” does not spare himself embarrassments. There are small misjudgements, spats with a tricky Marvin Gaye (Sifiso Mazibuko), a lifelong bromance with Charl Brown’s irresistible Smokey Robinson, and the long affair with Diana Ross even including a first night when he fails to come up to scratch in bed. Not to mention her subsequent exasperation with his being keener to give her “notes” after her shows than to take her to dinner. Cedric Neal is a wonderful Berry Gordy, always at the centre of things, showing the conflict of a creative spirit who turned midwife and mentor, and suffered the inevitable blowback when his big stars outgrew the label and left it in trouble. But there is no self-pity: just wry satisfaction in having “led them along a path I didn’t know was there”

 
Neal himself sings like a dream, as do all the vast ensemble who become successive groups in dizzying sequence. Lucy St Louis is pure Diana Ross, both in melancholy Billie-Holiday vein and doing her big Vegas number “Reach Out and Touch” while drawing two front-row punters onto the stage steps and getting them, and us, to sing along (one was a solid Dundonian lady who did fine, the other a very bluesy chap in a purple hat). As for Michael Jackson’s moment – ah, so long before the craziness and lawsuits – out of a tiny 12-year-old emerges a huge sorrowful bluesy voice, startling the 1968 Gordy into spluttering that this infant seemed to have lived thirty years of heartbreak, and protesting that he ought rather to sing something “a kid might sing”. That number is a huge ask of any child, but they’ve found four boys to share the part, all British: who knew we could breed mini-Jacksons so readily?

 
It’s a piece of history. The quarter-century takes in Luther King (Gordy made albums of his speeches), Vietnam, Kennedy’s assassination: in one fabulously funny, telling 1960s scene Smokey sings in Alabama flanked by armed police with batons snarling “No mixing!” to the black and white audience. What he sings is “You really gotta hold on me”.
Nice. And I am proud to have been on my feet when, on the opening night, the cast brought on the real Berry Gordy, 86 years old, laughing and thanking London for being one of the first, in 1965, to welcome Motown’s tour. And then, amazingly, on came the real Smokey Robinson…
Oh how we whooped. Yes, it’s more than a jukebox show.

 

box office 020 7379 5399 to 22 Oct
http://www.shaftesburytheatre.com

RATING  five  5 Meece Rating

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March 4, 2016 · 10:11 pm

THE CAUSE Jermyn St Theatre, WC1

THE DAWN OF WAR,  1914

 

World War I and its aftermath are being well served by theatre (my last year’s reflections, http://tinyurl.com/q53tp5p). But Jeremy James’ play is the first I have encountered which concerns itself with its beginnings. It builds up to the 1914 trigger moment, when the Serb assassin Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Archduke Franz Ferdinand (and his wife) on their visit to Sarajevo.

The Archduke was heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which sprawled over half of Europe. The friction with the other great power bloc – France, Britain, Russia – and the complex disagreements in the Balkan countries led to a diplomatic crisis and then to war. Historians still wrestle with the disastrous, unnecessary immense outcome. But this play runs up to the actual assassination, dealing with two separate “causes” and two sets of conspirators. Andrew Shepherd’s production for ACS Ransom emerges as both fascinating and frustrating.

 

Jeremy James frames it with a 1964 moment as an old Hungarian artist – Tony Wredden patriarchally folksy as Sandor – suffers a stroke. Angela Dixon as his great-niece Margit, a flat-toned prosy psychotherapist and hypno-therapist, leads him to recover his darkest memories. So the centre of the stage is a bold, colourfully realized bohemian artists’ studio where young Sandor (Jesse de Coste, in an intense, charismatic professional debut) meets Tibor (Rbert Wilde) and young Medve, who is a girl cross-dressed as a boy to keep her artistic freedom. Emma Mulkern, in another good West End debut, plays Medve young, sweet, and eventually lovelorn and disastrous.

 
They are Hungarian patriots , and decide to travel to Sarajevo to assassinate the Archduke and free their country from the Austrian yoke. Meanwhile, however, a quite separate plot is brewing (the one which eventually gets the job done) as Alexander Nash as a sinister Colonel recruits Mark Joseph’s Major Tankosik to the Black Hand, a Serbian nationalist group. They want the Slav provinces freed to become a greater Yugoslavia.

 
The two groups of plotters could hardly be more different in tone. The artists centrestage, puppyish and idealistic, argue about Kandinsky and Klimt in between setting up an inefficient gun deal and missing Archduke-shaped targets in the garden of their lodgings. In the darker corner, the Black Hand duo grow ever more Blackadderish, with Nash as the leader ramping up sinister threats about poisoned coffee and drowning hostile editors in their own barrels of ink; while a flustered Tankosik forever reports disasters caused by his six highly inefficient assassins (the final successful shot, it seems, was by chance because the cortege moved backwards and Princip was in the wrong place, having sloped off for a quick coffee). So that’s all quite funny, with lines like “The cows must not come home to roost!”. Meanwhile the artist Medve, aka Sofja, has cold feet and is tempted to betray the other artists; the two sets of plotters clash, despite their common interest, and the idealists come to disaster.

 

Oddly, there’s no problem with having a widely different tone in the two plots, one farcical- but-successful and the other honest and tragic. It keeps you watching: sweet-sour, a reflection on futility which carries you forward into thinking about the futility of the whole Great War. For a début playwright, it’s a daring experiment and a good one.

 

 

But the awful flaw is the framing: the terrible plonking psycho-jargon given to Margit in the 1964 sections – she proses on about even the traitor artist suffering “obsessive compulsion”, and atrociously concludes after the key tragic memory emerges that she and the old artist would “work through it” . Just as if he was some 21c crybaby with self-esteem issues. It is all the more jarring, because the dénouement of the young Hungarian conspirators’ story actually is strong and moving when the remembered events are brought before us. :We really don’t need the clunking reassurance that old Sandor will resolve his “issues”. Come off it: theatre is its own catharsis – it is pity, terror, empathy, silent private reflection. Cut the frame off and this picture would glow brighter.
box office 020 7287 2875 to 26 march

rating three   3 Meece Rating

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March 1, 2016 · 10:43 pm

WELCOME HOME CAPTAIN FOX Donmar WC1

LONG ISLAND, THE WIGS AND THE WARDROBE…

 

The Jean Anouilh plays I devoured as a neurotic sixth-former always had Antigone, Joan of Arc or Thomas a Becket heroically refusing compromise and salvation in the name of moral integrity. Ideal for a furious convent girl. I did not know his first big hit – the 1937 Le Voyageur Sans Bagages, which takes on a classic impostor-adoption theme (these were big in both sets of postwar years: think of Tey’s Brat Farrar, du Maurier’s The Scapegoat).

 

Here, a WW1 soldier with total memory loss after years of captivity is told he belongs in an aristocratic family. But on learning about the bad character and awful deeds of the lost son, he can’t reconcile it with the principles of honesty and kindness his amnesiac self embraces, and manages to fake his way out of it into a poorer but honest family. Therefore, this being early 20c French drama, one might gratifyingly go in deep about identity, morality, and the existential question “Who am I?”.

 
But let’s not bother. This is a new version by Anthony Weigh, set in a 1950’s, Eisenhower-y, Cold War I-Love-Lucy world, and I would much rather tell you about the wigs. Instead of Anouilh’s lawyer here the introducer of “Gene” to the posh Fox family on Long Island is Katherine Kingsley, having a riot of a time as “Mrs Marcee Dupont-Dufort” in a Lucille Ball barnet in hellfire red, cawing and writhing and yearning up the social ladder via fine parvenue malapropisms to the fury of her grouchy-Groucho husband De Wit (Danny Webb, splendid). Then in a rigid Marcel-waved perm wig we have Sian Thomas as the clipped and drawling Mrs Fox, having just as much fun with it in a more tight-gusseted way; and the sexually thwarted daughter-in-law Valerie Fenella Woolgar gets in a ‘fifties flick-up mullet and nasty attitude. When Marcee asks with electric-log warmth “What else is family for?” it is Valerie who replies “Target practice?”.

 

The men don’t get wigs, but Barnaby Kay makes an impressive transition from sullen lump son George to speaking with sudden humane reality the play’s most significant line in Act 2. Rory Keenan, initially underplayed as calmly baffled, catches fire and panics once he realizes that if he is indeed Jack Fox, he was an utter bastard. The family, to ‘remind’ him, surround him with fearful stuffed animals he used to kill obsessively. It’s certainly the first elk I have seen on the Donmar stage, and multiple taxidermy foxes, fawn, fowls, and a rather sinister raccoon (or badger? bit wonky, that one) appear after the interval. Gene panics but George, in that one important line, pleads “Do yourself a favour. Forget him. He was just a kid”.
Gene does better, thanks to an invasion of twenty other families trying to claim him, and a possibly semi-symbolic small boy emerging from a mirrored armoire with news that M.Anouilh has suddenly realized that he has to end this damn play somehow. Mr Weigh is thus enabled to bring back the peerless Katherine Kingsley with her wig even wilder, and throw more 1950’s American class-war jokes. Oh, and there’s a memorable monologue, delivered with thwarted fury by Danny Webb’s de Wit Dupont-Dufort, which may well make a lot of wives hope it isn’t the night to take the bins out. Enough said.

 

So it’ s reasonable fun, a lark, a bit of a cartoon kept romping along (apart from a few slow scenes) by director Blanche McIntyre. And there’s a teeny retro aeroplane to look forward to if you pay attention . Which you can, because the wig-wearers have gone offstage by then, leaving just an impassive, impressive , and mercifully hairless Trevor Laird as the butler.
box office 0844 871 7624 to 16 APRIL
Supported by the John Browne Charitable Trust and season supporter Arielle Tepper Madover

Rating three.    3 Meece Rating

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February 29, 2016 · 5:07 pm

MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS NOEL COWARD THEATRE SW1

GETTING THEM OFF FOR VICTORY, UP WEST

 
I loved this show at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and – especially given a couple of rather snotty lukewarm reviews – thought I should check it out on its transfer, which runs into the summer. And so it should. For me, it still works.
To recap briefly: it’s a newborn musical incarnation of the true story made famous in the film with Judi Dench: how a doughty widow bought the Windmill Theatre to put on “Revuedeville” , with the legendary Vivian Van Damme as her manager, and decided to improve its failing fortunes by persuading the showgirls to get naked. She used her formidable respectability to persuade the Lord Chamberlain that it was going to be art not stripping, because once naked the girls wouldn’t move, but represent classical paintings under filmy light (“subtle lighting and a conscientious hairdresser” on the pubes).

 
And so there is nudity, and very pretty too: I can’t stand alongside those who gloomily regard it as exploitative, not in a world where female nudity of a far more seedy, raunchy variety glimmers at us from every newsstand. The nudity of the Windmill was – and the show makes this beautifully clear – more about an age of comparative innocence, when that nakedness was a precious and sought-after rarity, a dream of love. Particularly for young men who would soon die in war – like the stagehand who falls for the tea-girl turned star, Emma Williams’ sweet Maureen.

 

I also appreciated once more the shape and craft of the show. Terry Johnson’s book (he also directs) gives us a first , longer and at first more frivolous, act, taking us from the mid-30s to the war years, but shades it into a startlingly dark interlude and song when Van Damm (Ian Bartholomew) the Dutch-Jewish impresario, reports the invasion of Holland; then in the Blitz the Windmill is hit, and in a particularly courageous and surprisingly moving moment Emma Williams breaks the no-moving rule – “I’m not standing still for this!” and steps forward starkers as the bombs fall to finish the defiant anti-Hitler number “He’s got another think coming” after the male singer falters.

 

The lyrics by Don Black are sharp, every song serving the story and pushing it forward; the music by George FEnton and Simon Chamberlain is sometimes the best sort of pastiche, sometimes original and moving. And Mrs Henderson herself is the unmatchable Tracie Bennett: lately a memorable Judy Garland but here deploying a sharp, acid wit, convincingly aged as a patron saint for all women determined to get a bit of fun out of their latter years . “I can be anything I want – except young”. That’s an song which could last. So is the memory of the old lady’s dryness, perfectly rendered by Bennett. Up on the roof, wearily firewatching in the Blitz, she is told “You’ll catch your death” she replies “Oh, I think Death’s busy enough elsewhere”.

 
Sweet and sour, nostalgic and sharp, with a kind of unapologetic showbiz honesty, here is another play celebrating the stage (alongside Red Velvet and Nell Gwynn, it’s a bit of an epidemic) . And it celebrates women, too, and defiant ageing. I still like it a lot.

box office 020 7400 1234 to 18 June
rating four

4 Meece Rating

 

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February 28, 2016 · 8:16 pm

THE RINSE CYCLE Charing Cross Theatre, WC2

 

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI GETS UNEXPECTEDLY CASUAL ABOUT HIGH CULTURE

Some people get terribly, passionately serious about Wagner. This shouldn’t be a problem: truly great music of all kinds tends to attract obsessive adulation, especially whenever the artist is a controversial, genre-breaking genius (cf. the recent press reaction to the death of David Bowie). But the sad fact is that too often, this fervent Wagner-worship only alienates everyone else, who are bored, horrified, or even put off, by all that ferocious fandom. Lynn Binstock is on a mission to change this: and her Rinse Cycle brings Wagner’s Ring to us in a completely new way.

Like the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Unexpected Opera take on this mighty classic with a mixture of bravery, madness, and humour. The plot of the Ring itself, now set in a café-cum-laundrette, has been shrunk “in the wash” from sixteen hours to a trim two, shedding a few characters like errant socks, but keeping all Wagner’s essential points of reference and action intact. Nancy Surman’s setting, “Patisserie Valkyrie”, gives us three huge washing-machines (labelled BISH, BASH, BOSH), uses a steam-cleaner to evoke the terrible dragon form of Fafner, and lets Siegfried temper his magically reforged sword by ironing it. Meanwhile, Roger Mortimer’s script condenses the Ring with wonderful directness: the whole action of Siegfried (hero kills dragon, understands bird and sees through lies, kills evil dwarf, finds Brünnhilde and falls in love with her) zips along in minutes, not hours.

As a secondary storyline, we also have the story of the characters who are actually playing for us: a middle-aged couple whose marriage is on the rocks, a pretty mistress, and two young lovers. The players’ story acts as a crucial vehicle for clarifying plot points in the Ring: “You know in a sci-fi film when they always have some idiot on board who doesn’t understand how the rocket works, so they have to explain it to him? That’s where you come in,” they tell Tim (the token ‘daft tenor’, played with winning innocence by Edward Hughes). The Ring thus gets annotated as it progresses, with players helpfully breaking out of character to remind us who is who, or why someone is where. With two complete casts to choose from, each fields strong operatic talent on stage; for all, the periodic challenge of ‘straight’ acting is a stretch from their usual singing presences, but the cast gain in assurance all evening, inhabiting Binstock’s quirky and enthusiastic world with vigour.

Wagner’s music, delivered (in Andrew Porter’s excellent English translation) with profound sincerity, rather than the disarmingly cheesy one-liners and music-hall banter which marks the spoken exchanges, has been reduced even more than the plot, to crisp piano accompaniment. Though significantly cut, this ‘tasting menu’ gives a nice, brief sense of the myriad musical moods and textures of the Ring. Unexpected Opera’s approach is characteristically unstuffy, even casual: some critics have been sniffy about this, but they’ve missed the point of the project. The self-proclaimed exclusivity of Wagnerites does Wagner no favours. This fresh, funny and utterly original take on the Ring is a joyful celebration of Wagner’s great Gesamtkunstwerk: definitely worth a spin.

~ CHARLOTTE VALORI

At the Charing Cross Theatre until 12 March 2016. Box office: 08444 930 650

Rating: Three 3 Meece Rating…but with an added musical mouseMusicals Mouse width fixed

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February 26, 2016 · 7:17 pm

THE PATRIOTIC TRAITOR Park Theatre,

BANG THE DRUM FOR THIS ONE:  AN INTIMATE EPIC OF WAR AND FRIENDSHIP

 

This premiere for the Park is a cracker: a serious, grownup, constantly entertaining light on history with fine-drawn characters, and some acidly sharp philosophical resonances for today’s troubled Europe and our divided government. Jonathan Lynn wrote and directs: as co-author of the Yes Minister series and the recent (less impressive and even more cynical) stage play we know he has a sharp political eye. But this one is richer and more acutely perceptive than mere satire.
It deals with the relationship between Charles de Gaulle and his old friend and mentor Philippe Petain, Marechal of France, national hero, victor of Verdun in the first war but collaborator-Premier in the Vichy government during the second. When, of course, de Gaulle was the leader of the Free French resistance. The play is framed with Pétain, 89 years old, in a cell in 1945 awaiting trial for treason after the Liberation. It flashes back to the eve of World War 1 and the first meeting between the peppery, dry-witted senior officer and the gangling, awkwardly scholarly, intellectually arrogant and humourless cadet De Gaulle. It takes them in sparring friendship through that war’s attrition, the uneasy 1930’s, and Pétain’s rise to an aged and disastrous political career as head of the puppet government, signing at one point a death warrant on the Resistance leader who was once almost a son to him.
I can’t recommend it strongly enough to newer generations, not least in a time when questions of sovereignty, patriotic feeling and the very nature of nationhood underpin less bloody but equally emotional political divisions in our own land. Pétain, the pragmatist who reckons they could rub along with the Germans and save more deaths, at one point says impatiently that “For de Gaulle France is a dream. A romance. For me it is the land, the cheese, the people”. De Gaulle just says “I am France. If I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself”. And, austerely impatient of those slow to join the Resistance, “What can you expect from a nation which elevates food ,wine and fashion to national preoccupations?”. Nor is he impressed by the deals offered by “perfidious Albion” and its Churchill who is every bit as stubborn and arrogant as he is himself.

 

The key performances are superb – amid a versatile ensemble giving us soldiers, collaborators, Nazis and a nicely pompous Lord Halifax (very Yes Minister, that bit). But it hangs on the leads: Tom Conti, with a neat white moustache, is Pétain: instantly likeable, clubbable, dryly humorous, lecherous, stubbornly commonsense, amused by the earnest de Gaulle. Who is Laurence Fox, equally fabulous casting in the role, all Thucydides and poetry-books and arrogant social ineptitude and irritable strategic brilliance. They men are nicely defined by their broad leather military belts: Fox’s always straight as a die on his rigid up-and-down frame, Conti’s always at a bit of an angle, with comfortable bulges above and below.

 
Sometimes it is blisteringly funny: a scene on the eve of a WW1 battle has them growing drunk together, jerkily discussing the concept of the Nietzschean Superman until the older man grows bored and lurches off to the whore he’s ordered. Sometimes it lets us see the edges of horror, as the wily old pragmatist signs off the “repatriation of political dissidents” to Germany – meaning, Jews. Sometimes there is real pain in the mutual disillusion of the friends. Always it is intelligent, well-researched but imaginative about human struggles and choices. It’s sparely set, as between sandbagged wings a great map of France reminds us how fatally the Maginot Line stopped at the “friendly” Belgian border . But Andrea J Cox’s vivid soundscape gives us bombardments, bands, bugles, and a moment of the Horst-Wessellied. And so the two men circle one another, magnets both drawn and repelled, as France endures her darkest and proudest hours.

 

It’s terrific. Honour to the Park, but this deserves a rapid transfer. Hope so. A commercial theatre ecology – which after all sold Ben Brown’s “Three Days in May” in the big Trafalgar Studios to illustrate our own end of the 1940 dilemma – should welcome it in.

box office 020 870 6876 http://www.parktheatre.co.uk to 19 march

rating five    5 Meece Rating

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February 25, 2016 · 12:34 am

THE TEMPEST Wanamaker at Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

A FAREWELL TEMPEST, RICH AND STRANGE

 
For a departing artistic director, especially here, Shakespeare’s last plays are a natural choice: great poetic anthems of reconciliation and renunciation.  Hence this winter Cymbeline, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale and now the Tempest, with the poet’s strange final moment of burying the book, abjuring rough magic, abdicating.  Dominic Dromgoole, after eleven adventurous, globe-circling years here, is the first to stage a farewell in winter, in the little candlelit Wanamaker playhouse completed so beautifully on his watch.

 
So it’s an event, and bears all the marks of a classic Globeish night.  The storm sees staggering, shouting, Ariel on a swinging lantern overhead and particularly poignant added cries of “Farewell!” from every direction as men, we think, drown. Ashore, the two drunkard clowns play it for all it’s worth if not slightly more – Dominic Rowan a larky Trinculo baiting the pit, and Trevor Fox a preeningly posh Stefano: both are prone to chuck in lines about fish fingers, the Jubilee line, etc in order to serve the spirit rathe than the letter of Shakespeare. Some of  their physical gags with Caliban and the blanket are sublimely, daftly timeless, especially a moment when three of them appear to be playing Twister underneath it, random feet everywhere.

 

. The nobles – especially in their first politicking and dissenting scene after the shipwreck – are admirably vivid, especially the nastily camp Sebastian (Christopher Logan) playing against the flatfooted earnestness of Joseph Marcell’s Gonzalo and a quiet intense Alonso – Paul Rider – whose grief for a lost son quivers in the air around him.  But it must revolve round Prospero, and at first I had qualms about Tim McMullan’s orotundly preachy patriarch: this is not a Prospero whose pain you feel; more of a schoolmasterly figure. Easy to imagine that he formerly retreated to his library and fatally ignored his dukely responsibilities. His authority over Miranda borders on Barrett of Wimpole Street parenting. But it’s all in the text, and by the time the magician forces forgiveness on himself, it works. Phoebe Pryce’s Miranda, in good contrast, is a simple delight: marvelling, obedient but vigorous, curious as a child approaching her Ferdinand at first sight to touch his face uninhibitedly, only gradually falling into modest diffidence. She’s a treat.
 

Pippa Nixon’s Ariel – and again this slant is in the text – is unusual: not quite human but seeming sometimes to yearn towards that fullness. In early moments she is visibly, agonizedly traumatized by reminders of her old captivity under Sycorax. There is pain and tension under her submission, an odd envious curiosity in her gestures as she drifts among the humans as if she knew something was missing in her. It gives power to that odd “I would, were I human” near the end. In the harpy scene – flying overhead in 20ft ragged batwings – this pained Ariel delivers a sudden harsh rage. Again, I took to her after faint misgivings, and learned new things about the play.  Caliban’s colonial-victim indignations are, in contrast,familiarly human: Fisayo Akenade is a one-man tribe displaced, angry and abased, learning to curse and drink but stilled, movingly, by the “sounds and sweet airs”.

 

So, as it should be, it is a poem, a dream, a myth. Stephen Warbeck’s score and songs wind through with music soulful or raucous, sweet airs and drinking songs. The candles glimmer, ghostly masked figures creep, and even in the always unwieldy masque of Ceres you just about manage to stop worrying that the  bearded bloke flying down as Ceres in an exploding wheat hat will catch his nightie in the  candelabras.  Poetry, mystery, absurdity: its the full Globe-Dromgoole experience distilled and concentrated, lit with many flames.

 
box office 0207 401 9919 to 22 april
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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February 18, 2016 · 5:33 pm

NELL GWYNN Apollo, W1

A RESTORATION OF HIGH SPIRITS..
Looking back at this play’s first outing – in the outdoor, summery, rackety pleasure that is Shakespeare’s Globe – I remember actually liking it far less than Jessica Swale’s last play there – the excellent BLUESTOCKINGS. Somehow I seem to have emerged in a mere three-mouse mood, despite all the fun, froth and bracing feminism of our heroine: low-born mistress of Charles II, orange seller, actress. Was even a touch dubious despite all the happy sentimental references to theatre itself, reborn and daring after the dreary Cromwell years (there’s always a cheer for the King’s “Playhouses are a valuable national asset! Down with austerity!”) . At the time though, I seem to have found its jokes a bit too knowingly Blackadderish, its bawdy too obvious.

Well, to hell with me. Now it’s come indoors, I must beg you to ignore all that and be assured that this is a Restoration riot to restore the spirits: a hoot, a perfect winter treat. It’s gorgeously set in courtly gold tassels, velvet and the tacky backstage paraphernalia of Mr Killigrew’s theatre where Nell becomes one of the first women onstage. The show is still larger than life, very Globeish, rumbustious, jokey and joyous with great running gags like the gloomy presence of a ginger-wigged Dryden forever trying to knock out a new play in the corner and coming up with unusable plots (one of which is Titanic).

But for some reason, Christopher Luscombe’s production works better here than at the Globe. Maybe because it feels more intimate than it did from high above, since we are all (albeit seated) groundlings able to enjoy the glances, grins, flounces and double-takes. The “Cheapside whore” harnesses her tough rude street wit to light up the stage, affronting the horrified Mr Kynaston who previously had the women’s parts to himself with his fake linen books , and charms the restless insecure King with her insistence on being a girlfriend – a defiant and mouthy one – rather than a courtier.

David Sturzaker reprises the role of Charles II, showing a nice edge of vulnerability amid his shrieking competitive entourage of one Portuguese Queen, one arrogant British mistress and one politically necessary French one. Swale makes it credible that his need to add Nell to his life was a hunger for earthiness, honest bread-and-butter love and cheek alongside these overdressed toxic meringues. Gemma Arterton, in her best stage role yet, reveals a gift as a comedienne: sexy and mischievous, light as a feather and nonpareil at delivering a truly dirty song, yet able in the second half, to expose vulnerability and seriousness in her pregnancy, banishment from her lover’s deathbed, and shy saddened return to the stage family. She is, in her own words, a woman uninterested in “flopsome fops” but genuinely drawn to the reality of the lonely King. Any man she takes in company must, as she says, accept that women are “just as nutty and tangled as you are”.

Greg Haiste, I am happy to say, reprises his role as queeny Kynaston jealously guarding the female lead roles: when he flounces offstage it is with all the comic affront of Stephen Fry leaving Twitter. Michele Dotrice is pure delight as Nancy the dresser, who unexpectedly can translate the French whore’s insults because she once “‘Had a Thing with Moliere’s dresser”. There are jokes about Swift and cross-Channel politics, spirited songs by Nigel Hess slyly referencing the music-hall of two centuries later, a real life King Charles spaniel, and a gigantic comedy hat. It is pure essence of fun. And if only the RSC would bring into London its fabulous Queen Anne, those of us who were taught history really badly could skip on 17 years from the end of this play, and improve our education no end.

Box office 0330 333 4809 http://www.nimaxtheatres.com to 30 April
Rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 17, 2016 · 11:53 pm

WAR OF THE WORLDS Dominion , W1

THEY CAME, THEY CONQUERED

 

Call me a patsy and a soft touch, but you won’t find me sneezing at anything which – within twenty minutes of a deafening, blinding opening – offers me a giant flame-throwing Martian octopus, emerging onstage from a 50ft screw-top capsule with full orchestral backing. Though mind you, a bit of well-directed sneezing would have saved mankind some angst, since in H.G.Wells’ classic novel, the “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” of the invading Martians fall victim to earth’s smallest creatures: bacteria.

Which is not a spoiler, since the story which Jeff Wayne retells in his prog-rock concept album has been spooking the world since Wells published it as a partwork in 1897. It is the emperor of sci-fi tales, apocalyptic and terrifying and moral, vivid with late-Victorian doubt about imperialism, the super-race idea and the dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution. As for Wayne’s lush string-splendid album, with sections of Wells’ splendid prose narrated by Richard Burton, it has been renowned since 1978. For Buckley himself to conduct it here – not just in some concert-hall or arena but as a full-staged operatic musical – is quite a coup for producer Bill Kenwright.

And, frankly, quite a risk. There’s a 23-piece orchestra onstage (gallant players presumably dazzled and deafened by the leaping flames, laser-eyed green monsters and blackouts). There are nineteen adult performers plus at one point innumerable children; Liam Neeson in video and hologram descends from the roof to narrate. There are assorted rolling gantries, giant cogwheels, a real stumping 40ft Martian war machine with green shining eyes crossing the stage (in front of the split orchestra and the gliding conductor, and over the cast). There are constant, stunning CGI video backdrops : design is by the rock-video master Ric Lipson of Stufish.

So the risk is not of things going wrong (they don’t) but the simpler, theatrical danger that the music and design and flames and searchlights would make it just a rock video: overwhelming any possiblity of intimacy and us actually caring about the characters – George the journalist hero, his wife, a combative artilleryman, a parson, and mankind in general represented by the ensemble. Being mere humans they risk being dwarfed by the huge goings-on behind and above them. Neeson is OK because he is a huge image overhead: but Michael Praed, Maddalena Alberto and the rest, despite their solo numbers could seem too small for the big, big scale of it. Staging could have worked against our imagination, rather than for it.

But here’s the wonder: that doesn’t happen. I was swept up, involved, awed at times. The visual effects are indeed stunning (even down to coloured leaves falling on the stalls during the rare romantic ballad “Forever Autumn”). But there is always a powerful sense under director Bob Tomson that the music really is conjuring it all up: that the demonic vigour of Wayne’s orchestra is somehow making these fierce visuals happen. The attack looks exactly as one would imagine (possibly in a light fever) that it would. The choreography is strong (Liam Steel) especially in the first attack with bodies flying high aloft, helpless; and later when the Martians overwhelm the earth with the Red Weed dancers under hellish light squirm and become terrible human tumbleweeds. When the hero walks through a dead London the corpses rise, black shapes against his living solidity, to dance despair around him.

The restless backdrops – whether Victorian sepia, open skies or squirming horrors and monsters – are never allowed to overwhelm Praed, Alberto, Jimmy Nail, Daniel Bedingfield, David Essex and the rest of the human players in their various important moments: the panicking clergyman who can only see Satan’s work, the Artilleryman dreaming of an underground empire, the hero himself walking towards death. And all the time the pounding, possessed, exuberant orchestra carries us from naiveté to terror to despair to hope. I had my doubts, but this extraordinary show does actually work. And there is even a wonderfully cheeky up-to-date coda which I definitely won’t spoil. Though it might startle some science correspondents.

 

box office http://www.dominiontheatre.com 0845 200 7982 to 30 April
rating four 4 Meece Rating

 

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February 16, 2016 · 11:21 pm

THE ENCOUNTER Barbican and touring

McBURNEY ON, AND IN, THE BRAIN
If there is any theatre artist reliably able to draw you into a world of disorientation, time-slip, near-death and a sense of licking hallucinogenic frogs in a dislocated space-time contiuum and speaking the language of the jaguar, it is Simon McBurney of Complicité. He will mess with your head and shiver your heart.

In Edinburgh last summer, having missed its premiere myself I kept meeting colleagues emerging, blinking dazedly, from the premiere of this solo but high-tech production: muttering about binaural headphones, rainforests, theories of Time, and how on earth they were going to explain it in 400 words for the morning edition. Those free of such a duty were just radiantly pleased to have been there and to have experienced something rich and strange. Which ,of course, is an emotion familiar to most of us after any Complicité production.

So here it is at the Barbican, with a tour soon to ricochet between home and European cities , and a live-stream on the Guardian website on 1 March at 7.30. In brief, what McBurney is doing is relating the adventure of the late Loren McIntyre, an eminent National Geographic photographer who in 1969 was looking for the “unacculturated” Mayoruna tribe in the upper reaches of the Amazon. Following them, losing his trail, he lived among them without a common language for weeks or months, he no longer knew. They travelled, uprooting temporary villages, towards a ritual called “the beginning”. The westerner’s possessions – including camera – were taken or burned, leaving him “reduced to just a body”. He knew fear, exhaustion, near-starvation, panic, certainty of immediate death, and something beyond that: a strange telepathic communication with the headman and a philosophic broadening of his sense of time, space and reality.

He only related this journey later in his life; it became a book by the Romanian Petro Popescu, which Simon McBurney read twenty years ago and (after a journey of his own to experience the Amazon and the modern Mayoruna) resolved to make into theatrical storytelling.

But it is no mere ripping-yarn: trippy in another sense, it is presented by the teller (physically alone on stage but with a web of high technology) as an aural adventure. We must wear headphones; onstage are several microphones including a head-shaped “binaural”. In a light-hearted spirit he first roams round this, demonstrates how he can seem to move close to our heads, breathe on our neck, cross the “electrified paté” between our ears, make himself or others appear overhead or behind us, trick us into feeling rain and wind and fear and movement, and the geography of his own flat where he pre-recorded some sounds and voices.

Even during the most intense moments of jungle storytelling – some in McBurney’s normal voice, most though adopting the explorer’s deep American tones – there are interruptions: reminders that this is a tale we are being told by one man roaming around a big stage shaking, rattling, hitting things, losing himself in the story and being jerked back to the present. Perhaps a babel of expert voices calmly discuss the philosophy of time, oil exploration, or tribal fragility; or perhaps his five-year-old daughter enters the flat – where he suddenly is again – and wants a drink of water even as the explorer in the story is half-dead from thirst himself.

It’s mesmerizing. Sometimes you shut your eyes and think of it as an especially intense stereo broadcast; then open them and there is McBurney, sweating and moving and eating crisps (“Walkers – you’d think they’d lay on something better for press night”). But as it builds to the strange ritual frenzy and a rainstorm swells the imaginary river, the bland acoustic backcloth seems to shake and dissolve the universe, and we are drawn helplessly into sombre, sempiternal meditations on rebirth and reality and our tiny corner in nature. And we shiver, and as it ends realize that over two hours have passed.

box office barbican.org.uk to 6 March, then touring – UK sites Manchester / Brighton/ Oxford/
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 16, 2016 · 9:30 am

UNCLE VANYA Almeida, N1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI DISCOVERS SOMETHING GREEN AND FRESH BEHIND A LOT OF DEAD WOOD

Robert Icke’s new adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is best summarised as an update – and an Anglicisation. Played in contemporary clothes, with sprinkled swearwords (so often touted as modern shorthand for “relevance”), Uncle Vanya is now ‘Uncle Johnny’, Professor Serebryakov is simply ‘Alexander’, Dr Astrov is ‘Michael’. So far, so emphatically un-Russian; which, given the nation’s recent whirlwind love affair with War and Peace, seems just a slight pity, and any lingering “peasant” references in the text do now feel clangingly out of context. Nevertheless, Alan Ayckbourn had luck with his own 1930s Lake District setting of this play, Dear Uncle, and Chekhov’s cast of misfit characters, each lost in a lonely world of bitter unfulfilment, certainly translate smoothly into awkward, pent-up English gentry. What translates less well is Icke’s text on stage: when the adapter is also the director, the vital role of editor can get subsumed amidst general enthusiasm.

We are consequently presented with an enormous evening (with no less than three intervals) which sprawls and rambles like one of the overgrown forests the ecologically conscientious Michael is fighting so hard to conserve. The first and final acts, particularly, are begging for a sharp-edged axe: the first act moved into being with such titanic slowness that I wondered how we would ever get to the end of that, let alone the play, before the last Tube had swished away. The final scenes, though benefiting from wonderful cumulative power, begin to feel like one of those friends who spends half an hour on your doorstep saying goodbye repeatedly after a three-hour lunch. It’s all great: you just wish it would stop.

But happily, in the middle, there is much to marvel at, and the play gains in majesty and tension all night: it doesn’t so much command our attention as cajole us, gradually, into submission. Particularly fine performances from Tobias Menzies as the outrageously attractive, brooding doctor Michael, and Jessica Brown Findlay as a superbly gauche and troubled Sonya, can lift Icke’s adaptation into legend. Brown Findlay’s deliciously accurate observation of agonsingly shy adolescent movements, and her vivid natural delivery, feel brilliantly fresh. Paul Rhys’ delicately drawn Uncle John, trembling with elegant frustration, eventually reveals a fabulous (and very frightening) final rage. Strong support comes from Vanessa Kirby as a febrile, fascinating Elena, with Hilton McRae giving an object lesson in exquisite, sculptural phrasing as the elderly Alexander, though smaller characters can be less successful.

Hildegard Bechtler’s simple set, a steadily rotating open-sided cube with a few dotted pieces of old furniture, offers Icke the worst directoral temptation of all: characters literally jump through the invisible 4th wall to pour out their hearts to us, a trope as tired as it is obvious. But again, the quality of the resulting soliloquies goes far beyond such coarseness; thanks to the sheer quality of his actors, Icke just gets away with it. Similarly, while ensemble scenes can drag and stutter, private exchanges between pairs of characters are forensically intense. Worth staying for.

– CHARLOTTE VALORI

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating

Until 26 March 2016 at the Almeida Theatre: Box office 020 7359 4404

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February 15, 2016 · 11:11 pm

HAND TO GOD Vaudeville Theatre, SW1

AND THEY CALL IT PUPPET LOVE….

 
“Avenue Q meets The Exorcist” claim posters for Robert Askins’ Broadway hit, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Or “The Muppets play The Omen”. But for this West End cast – fabulously led by Janie Dee, Neil Pearson, and a remarkable turn from Harry Melling – we need a more British line. Just say that if Joe Orton had, perish the thought, got his hands up Sooty it might have turned out like this.
The opening moment is a bravura, stunningly foul-mouthed speech from a sock-puppet with a wide Muppety mouth, about how ideas of social and collective morality emerged from a lost “golden age when you could just shit anywhere”. But then we are in the mild surroundings of an American church basement classroom, where neat mumsy Marjorie – Janie Dee – is rather desperately preparing a Christian puppet show because “I can’t sing and I can’t preach”. The truculent teen Thomas (Kevin Mains) fancies her, her own son Jason (Harry Melling) is shy and troubled, and Jess (Jemima Rooper) is suspiciously keen to give her sock-puppet breasts.

 

It is not going well: Jason manages to have his puppet, Tyrone, sing “Jesus Loves me”, but already Tyrone has developed a deep bluesy sound that bodes no good. Pastor Greg – a sweetly wet Neil Pearson trilling “have a blessed day” and swearing “Oh, son of a biscuit!” declares his affection to an unresponsive Marjorie. We discover she is widowed, her husband having overeaten himself to death, and palpably losing her grip. Her controlling needy bossiness of her son Jason distresses them both, and when priapic teenage Thomas makes his move she goes – well, tonto. You’ve never seen Janie Dee this nuts, this destructive, violent, sexually voracious and prone to lunatic wrestling. Believe me, it’s a treat.

 

But meanwhile poor Jason is tormented by the puppet Tyrone, which never leaves his hand but grows an alternative Satanic personality, both defending and mocking him. Melling does it brilliantly, simultaneously performing both the boy’s timid horror and his hand’s anarchic evil. Lying in bed he quavers like a good church-boy ”I wanna be kind and respectful to women and care for my body and my mind”, whereon Tyrone in his other voice yells “No you don’t! Ch-er-rist!”. The Tempter’s lines are subtle too – this is actually a pretty subtle play about adolescent inner conflicts – observing mockingly “When your mother says to you sit still, be quiet, she is saying to you -stay small!”.

 

In company Tyrone is ever more violent and aggressive; his dominance over Jason is mirrored in another church room by Marjorie’s inner demons provoking another crazed aggressive-lustful encounter with Thomas. Who himself – a reflection in turn of Jason – is confusedly deep in calf-love. Pastor Greg can’t exorcise any of them, as Tyrone – Melling’s voice ever more deep-devil roaring, his sock hand gaping and gabbling — shouts unrebuked ” You’re a piecea shit, Pastor!” and grows teeth.

 

 

It is very funny at times, yet oddly tense and touching as Melling’s Jason cringes from the atrocities wrought under a wash of red light by Satan raging in glory at the end of his arm. A remarkable interlude of puppet sex with Jess’s busty blonde equivalent sees both the teenagers – who have never managed to speak their attraction as nervous young humans – standing side by side like embarrassed onlookers while their hands hump and quiver and gasp, seemingly of their own accord. Yet it is Jess, in her own voice, who asks the core question facing all confused angry teenage boys : “D’you wanna be a shallow violent puppet all your life?”.

 

Jason doesn’t. Not in the end. But there is more virtuoso , terrifying solo conflict as Melling nerves himself to reject Tyrone, in moments reminiscent of the Bible’s “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off”. The moral – and it is such a moral comedy that even American evangelicals haven’t attacked its vigorous obscenity – is that demons are not external, and driving them out is entirely up to us.

 

But apart from the moral, admit that demons do have a sexy vigour denied to sweet pastors like Greg. In a coda, sockpuppet Satan neatly defines the play’s core by observing yeah, we need him, “but then we need him to go the fuck away”. And there’s no point “solving our problems by putting horns on them”. Nice.

 
box office :     vaudevilletheatre.com to 11 June
rating     four cussed puppet mice    4 Meece Rating

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