October 25, 2016 · 11:08 pm

A PACIFIST’S GUIDE TO THE WAR ON CANCER Dorfman, SE1

TUMOURS, RUMOURS,  A BIT OF HUMOUR

 

The cancer thing finished off another old friend at the weekend, the call coming between the official press night and my getting to Bryony Kimmings’ show. Even before that, having lost a brother this summer and several friends beforehand , I was among those who flinched at the title and was ready to question the auteur’s voice-of-God announcement that we don’t talk enough about cancer: another thirty years’ attrition, girl, and you’ll know different. But I suspect this play’s real strength is in addressing a millennial generation and – importantly – one more at home with cabaret and fringe performance than traditional theatre. Fair enough.

 

 
It as divided critics sharply, the grumpier reviews provoking defiant tweets from the creator “I think I just care about other things to lots of people in this theatre lark”…”I am feeling protective of the space we are trying to create… The alternative stories we are trying to tell. The truth”. and tellingly, “reviewers have little time for performance art”. Oh come on! We’re all fringe-hardened, quite at home being pushed through car-tyres in the dark or forced to role-play as talking cucumbers. There’s a place for kicking down the fourth wall . And this is a partnership with Complicité, and we trust that.

 
With some lovely bluesy and harmonic songs by Tom Parkinson (lyrics by Kimmings), it follows the first day of an unwilling pilgrim in the “Kingdom of the Sick”: a hospital set with seven baffling exits, and a nicely diverse dozen playing as patients at various stages, some occasionally nipping into bulgy colourful costumes as cancer cells (the young Imperial medic next to me said they are pleasingly accurate). Sometimes huge inflatable cells come out of the walls in fantasy dread sequences, hemming them in; sometimes the ensemble realistically wait on plastic chairs, or nightmarishly jerk and stamp like zombies. Sometimes they express to our heroine – Amanda Hadingue as Emma – recognizable gripes. Like ripping up the hospice leaflets in denial, or having friends putting on the soupy “cancer face”, enjoy the drama too much or offer quack cures. In the most convincing song (to my mind) they all just furiously sing a hissing chorus of “Fuck thissss! Fuck thissss!”.

 

 
A problem , though, is that (because of her own experience with a sick baby, which Kimmings recounts in voiceover at the end) she makes the main protagonist not a patient but a single mother, apparently without friends, bringing her infant for cancer treatment. Now a new mother’s agonies are specific, violent and unique: not the experience of a diagnosed adult. And this, I am afraid, unbalances the piece. It’s not unconvincing – the second half opens with five minutes of a roaring, throbbing, spotlit stillness of waiting, and a crazed ritual of maternal grief. But it oddly dilutes the more common cancer experience, the quieter truth we all get to know as hardened supporters and funeralgoers. Because it is so much a young person’s piece, my generation may miss what we see more of: the black humour, the stoicism, the focused desire to understand the science, the lassitude, the quiet talk of the past with old friends.

 

 
The tone moves from furious zombie energy to nursery platitudes: let me hastily say I have nothing against that, sometimes a warm-milk platitude is just what an invalid needs: a jingle like the one the cast sing at the end after revealing that they are representing research subjects whose recorded voices come out of the air: “Fingers crossed! Make a wish! For myself! And those I miss!”. The audience was not entirely on-side when asked to speak the name of someone with cancer they love or lost, and a survivor invited onstage to express her hopes for the NHS etc. was represented by a gallant stage-manager reading her message.
That bit really annoyed some critics, but in the general oddity of the piece as a whole, I was fine with it. The conclusion may be  soupy, but it is heartfelt. For some, it may prove important.

 
box office box office 020 7452 3333 http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk to 29 Nov
rating three

3 Meece Rating

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October 18, 2016 · 11:27 pm

A MAN OF GOOD HOPE Young Vic, SE1

AN AFRICAN ODYSSEY

 
Not all refugees are in Calais or aiming for here. This enthralling piece from Mark Dornford-May’s Isango Ensemble of Cape Town tells another story, an African epic beating and yearning with the voice of a great continent. Musically magnificent, poignant and joyful and vigorous, it is based on Jonny Steinberg’s book, the true story of Asad Abdullahi al-Yusuf, a stateless Somali refugee of a proud tribe – “thirty-five generations!” – cast wandering across the troubled bosom of Africa.

 

 

Steinberg met him in the Blikkersdorp township five years ago, hustling, running errands, surviving in a shack with his family. He learned the story and step by step we watch the unfolding of a life. First the modern Asad, Ayanda Tikolo, is seen: nervy, on alert for attacks, nobly sad-faced. Our awareness of that haunts all his younger selves, as they dance and travel past us. There’s the eight-year-old Asad (an irresistible small child performer , Siposethu Juta or Phielo Makitle) who saw his mother shot in the civil war in 1991, escaped to Kenya to a UN refugee camp, learned scraps of English. He finds brief protection from an adult woman cousin (Pauline Malefane) but when she is shot must nurse her, forced to clean her intimately even through her periods “I had no choice” and keep her alive.

 

 

Chased on alone to Ethiopia the boy grows up – Zoleka Mpotsha then Luvo Tamba take on the role in this skilled, relaxed, freewheelingly disciplined barefoot ensemble. Asad finds casual work, marries, and travels to the promised land of wealthy South Africa. Where, as an asylum-seeking migrant “stealing our jobs, bringing crime”, he meets hostility and violence from a black community, itself embittered by the souring of the Rainbow Nation promise.

 

 
It could be grim: and there are moments almost unbearably moving, especially in the deep silence after the child’s mother is shot, broken by the chirping of crickets and then a high wailing note from the boy, taken up in deep harmony , almost reminiscent of a Byrd lament, by the rest: hairs rise on your neck, as soul of Africa keens for its losses. The music by Mandisi Dyantyis and Pauline Malefane, on six huge marimbas and any number of percussion junk, is complex, sophisticated and hugely operatic. And there is a dignity in Asad, and his sense of tribe and culture, which underpins the whole story. Asked for his name, from childhood he sings his tribe’s tune of identity, and through the tale he finds succour in the diaspora of his kin.

 

 

But it is unsentimental and tough-minded about this too: at one key point a relative refuses the child help, being only by-marriage; in South Africa the hostility of a people disillusioned and degraded by generations of apartheid weighs heavy on the struggling Somali small-tradesmen. In a strange moment of pride Asad says he will live in the suburbs; the South Africans mock him, only white people live there; and he protests that he is not black…his lineage is long and noble, that “blackness’ means something different to him. But after losing his first wife and son because she cannot stand the prejudice, he is the one who finally rejects tribalism by marrying a woman of outcast, ‘unclean’ tribe. The theme of clannishness and culture which can be either pride and protection or imprisoning prejudice is subtle and strong and honest. It echoes with many things, from ISIS to UKIP and raises the piece above the mere glory and uplift of music and dance, to a serious moral significance.

 

 
The final moments reflect Steinberg’s tale of Asad’s final remarks. He gets his American asylum papers at last, ruefully remembering how as a little child he dreamed that “America is always safe, there are no guns, everyone is rich”, and faces another future as a migrant there. But he won’t read the book. Too many lost loved ones, too many rejections. “The story is not for him” Steinberg writes. It’s not therapy for a man who survived and grew noble without it. It’s for the rest of us to learn from. Grave, exhilarating, honest, unmissable.

 
box office 020 7922 2922. to 12 Nov
rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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October 17, 2016 · 11:24 pm

THE RED BARN Lyttelton SE1

NOT A BARNSTORMER. NOT THIS TIME..

 

About 65 minutes in, the willowy monotone Mona sighingly asks her lover “Don’t you get tired of your character? I think I do”. So civil is the National Theatre audience that not one of us muttered “Yep! Definitely tired of yours”. Disillusion flowered even though the ever-moaning Mona is Elizabeth Debicki, the Australian caryatid who hypnotized us – visually at least – in The Night Manager.

 

 

That this new play should be a lemon is a serious disappointment. It’s by David Hare; it’s got Debicki’s physical glamour, Mark Strong’s authority as Donald the antihero, designer Bunny Christie making elegant use of the Lyttelton’s sliding ability to frame and reframe significant moments, deafening storm surround-sound and sinister music by Tom Gibbons, and in charge – with many a bang and flash – is Robert Icke. The much-awarded star director rashly gave an interview last week saying how a lot of other people’s theatre is “boring” , so he often leaves at the interval. Ironic that he promptly socks us an underpowered 110-minute gloomfest with no interval at all.

 
Pile all this literary, directorial and performing talent together , in a tale taken from Simenon – the Maigret author, moody master of crime fiction – set it in restlessly glamorous 1959 America, and the result should at least be a bit of classy noir. Even if , with the cast heavily miked and mechanically cinematic frames and cuts, at moments it feels more like cinema. We are put in the mood for a thriller with the blacking-out of shiny exit signs and a warning that there is no readmission because of the tension. And it starts promisingly enough in an impressive Connecticut storm, through which struggle the four principals – Debicki, Strong, Hope Davis as the sweetly saintly Ingrid, and Nigel Whitmey as someone called Ray. They have been to a party and left their car in the blizzard, groping towards Ingrid and Donald’s house. But Ray never gets there.

 

 

We settle in, hoping for shocks and revelations , only mildly disappointed that despite the wind-machine gale from the wings whenever the door opens, nobody does the Morecambe-and-Wise trick of throwing handfuls of fake snow in. There’s a police Lieutenant deploying an unaccountable Pinteresque menace, and a couple of flashbacks of the culpably smart party they left (I think this is a social message about American values, though not sure what). Otherwise we just get a series of gnomic conversations as the group wait in vain for Ray, hear the bad news, and move on several months to an improbably, ludicrously chemistry-free rapport in a chic New York apartment with dangly perspex chairs.
This affair is between Strong’s Donald, struggling to escape his smalltown sports-jacket life and saintly wife, and the impassive, not to say crushingly boring, Mona , dangerously upstaged by her own zebra-print kaftan. Obviously, no good comes of it but my God! it comes very slowly indeed. Chekhov it ain’t, Raymond Chandler it ain’t, though it seems alternately to be aiming at both. Not the actors’ fault, but t for all the fancy soundscapes too many scenes are just fist-gnawingly boring. Let kinder spirits dig for silk-purse words : melancholy, noir, nuanced, delicate, Beckettesque. But honestly, and with real disappointment, I rate it a sow’s ear.

 

 

box office 020 7452 3333 http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk to 17 Jan
rating two  (crediting, mousewise, set design and sound..)

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October 15, 2016 · 11:29 am

OIL Almeida, N1

CO-CRITIC  LUKE JONES,   VIRTUOUSLY UNLUBRICATED,   DEPLOYS THE DIPSTICK OF JUDGEMENT..

 

What I like about the Almeida is that is that the audience smells as if they’ve been bathing in red wine right up until entering the auditorium. Good stuff, mind. But troubling when the shimmering projections of oilfields, fighter jets and motorways on stage give way to a set lit only by candles.

 

Ella Hickson’s play is essentially two concerns; Oil and family. It’s the question of why we feel we have the right to be warm when it’s cold outside, combined with the turbulence of a mother/daughter relationship. To mine this, Hickson drills into lives across a 200 year period.

 

 

A late 19th Century farm in Devon, appalled and intrigued by an American visitor’s kerosene lamp (“It stinks!”), runs straight through to somewhere at the back-end of this century. A mother and daughter, sat freezing, are appalled and intrigued by a Chinese visitor’s cold-fusion home energy kit. Neat. Along the way we drop into Persia, 70’s Hampstead (let’s give the audience a little bit of what they know) and an unnamed Middle-Eastern war in 2021.

 

In the finger-burning cold of the candle-lit farm, Anne-Marie Duff’s May is the one seduced by the oily man’s demonstration. We’re “bleeding it, sweating it”. She’s ambitious, pregnant. It’s lit something in her, so she runs away. The gripping drama is off. Duff gives us a painfully powerful performance, but is persistently dragged back to trot through quite bland dialogue about energy policy, OPEC, Libya and China. All interesting, but there’s a better show going on, and it’s on the same stage.

 

 

For the first half this drip drip drip of oil is nicely managed. It informs, but doesn’t control. The play gives a mixed picture and isn’t the Green Party political broadcast some of us were expecting. We’re given wittily drawn portraits of destructive government types and idealistic young lovers. Carrie Cracknell’s production lifts the humorously human, but indulges in strange flashing projections of oil fields and fighter jets. Stock imagery doesn’t make a strong message.

 

But running through all this confusion is Duff’s troubled pragmatist; compromise, responsibility and the most expressive face on the English stage. Duff’s performance is like combustion, sparring beautifully with lesser mortals on all sides.

 

So far, so good. When we return from the interval, noticeably refuelled on Rioja, we find a lesser play. Yolanda Kettle, as May’s daughter Amy, is given the glibbest scene about the middle east I have ever heard and her performance arrives in primary colours of whining. The pull of their relationship sours in the surroundings of glib China gags, nonsense futurism and tired nods to the cyclical nature of the play creaking to completion.

If you left at the interval, you’d probably have better conversations in the car home. It had a fiery start, but unfortunately ran out of fuel.

 
Box Office 020 7359 4404  To 26 Nov.

Rating three 3 Meece Rating

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October 13, 2016 · 11:20 pm

THE DRESSER Duke of York’s, WC2

A DEVOTED DIGNITY

 

I was a little wary of this, the last two productions I saw (including the TV one) having left me mildly irritated and almost bored. For all its skill and wit, there is a slight risk today in programming Ronald Harwood’s backstage play about a monstrous, declining actor-manager and his camp devoted dresser, pitting an etiolated touring Shakespeare company against bombs and near-bankruptcy in 1941. We are at a distance both from the war and from the barnstorming theatrical characters of the 30s and 40s, with their doublet-and-declamation school of Shakespeare and their headlong rep schedule. We are less prone to tolerate domineering self-absorbed monsters too (though a few survive, high-functioning psychopaths in executive or editorial chairs).

 

 

But under Sean Foley’s direction, and with a particularly fine and sensitive cast, this time the play speaks clearly of wider human truths as well as sparking and stabbling with irresistible wit (Foley admits surprise on re-reading it at how much he laughed). Reece Shearsmith is perfection as Norman the dresser: gallantly camp, swooping, teasing, a lightning mimic and acidly devoting nanny, the Fool to “Sir”’s Lear. He finely balances the character’s neediness, shafts of sourness and eventual despair against his sparkling ability to entertain not only Sir, but us. Norman dominates the opening, as he will the ending, which is as it should be.

 
As “Sir”, Ken Stott at last shambles in, unfresh from discharging himself from hospital: orotund and threatening, tubby , dishevelled and disintegrating yet booming still, a disintegrating half-demented Churchill. He sobs, despairs , “I have nothing more to give, I want a tranquil senility” yet does not really believe it is time – despite the please of his despairing, weary, stately middle-aged Cordelia: Harriet Thorpe magnificent as “Her Ladyship”. And when some well-tried stimulus reaches through his self-pity (“A full house you say?”) a grin breaks through his ravaged, crudely painted face like the sun itself and for a moment we can join the worshippers. Who are Norman himself, Selina Cadell as the plain, clumping, long-devoted SM Madge, and sycophantic opportunist ingenue Irene (Phoebe Sparrow).

 

 
Foley gives every joke its chance, not least the recurrent dead-weight-of-Cordelia theme, nicely appropriate in a year when the RSC allowed its Lear to wheel her on with a cart. The Act 2 opening shades towards Play-That-Goes-Wrong territory as the cast desperately extemporize “Methinks the King is coming?” while Sir sits thunder-browed and unreadable in the wings. Two glorious cameos flare from the war-surplus cast of “cripples, old men and pansies”: Simon Rouse drooping in the Fool’s livery and a furious Oxenby (Adam Jackson-Smith) . Both are enhanced by designer Michael Taylor’s aptly fearful retro costumes ( his set, neatly revolving, turns the theatre inside out before us).

 
The evening never ceases to entertain, engaging us with knowing theatrical self-parody. But its success finally depends too on respect: on the moments when Norman and Sir lose themselves in blissful mashup quotation of Shakespearian lines, and on acknowledgement of that hardworking idealism about theatre which soldiered on in years of hunger and fear and was propelled, in the end, by something besides mere vanity and habit. The respect is there. Even if, for Norman himself in Shearsmith’s devastating final scene, it wasn’t accorded to him.

 

box office 0844 871 7627 to 14 jan
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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October 11, 2016 · 10:36 pm

ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI Donmar, WC2

AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS, 1964

 
When Teresa May at the Tory Conference quoted the Sam Cooke lyric “A change is gonna come” , many on the left suffered, not unreasonably, a violent conniption of indignation. A Conservative hijack of a civil rights anthem from the US 1960’s, by a soul genius shot dead not long afterwards!   Yet hey, anyone may respond to a great, wild, yearning song of hope. And by glorious serendipity, the Donmar brings us Kemp Powers’ play, imagining the genesis of that song: a startling, powerful, moving hour and a half directed with heart by our own Kwame Kwei-Armah.

 
It is the February night when Cassius Clay, only 22, becomes heavyweight champion of the world. He spends it with three friends in a hotel room: the host is Malcolm X, of the black-power “Nation of Islam” , guarded by the devoutly humourless Karim at the door, he is nonetheless shortly to break with it for a less radically racist and segregationist faith and ideology. They’re joined by the football star Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. The four argue, joke, and needle one another. Malcolm, older, watchful and serious, has converted Cassius; they pray together, and the famous name-change to Muhammed Ali is imminent. The other two laugh about the impossibility of giving up Grandma’s pork-chops and white girls, so muh more “obstreperous” and fun than X’s ‘temple sisters’.

 

 

Moreover Jim is working towards parlaying his sporting fame into a film career, though as ‘sacrificial negro’ his character gets killed early on, and Sam is in love with the idea of connecting with the soul of his white fans as well as his black brothers. Malcolm X taunts him, citing Bob Dylan – a white kid from Minnesota – expressing more anger and rebellion against injustice than Sam. The men leap, joke and fight, lithe as panthers; the Reverend Minister Malcolm, sometimes visibly irritated, pushes the radical, vital revolutionary line, excoriating the carefree athletes as “monkeys dancing for an organ-grinder.. bourgeois negroes too happy with your scraps”. Sam protests that he liked JFK and that Malcolm’s “chickens come home to roost” comment about the Dallas murder was wrong.

 

 

In one fascinating row, the gleamingly black Jim hits back at him with “kinda funny how you light-skinned cats always end up the most militant”. When Sam storms back from a row with a brown-bagged bottle of whisky, the preacher’s sanctimonious “You haven’t considered the offence to brother Cassius, who does not drink now” is met with “You haven’t smelt his breath in the last hour”.

 
Comic laddishness and earnest idealism, thoughtless energy and political extremism clash and mix at a key moment in America’s struggle towards racial justice. The cast are wonderful: Sope Dirisu as Cassius scampering, dancing, reliving his bout, elastically athletic and merrily bumptious, “OMG why am I so pretty!?”. David Ajala is solid thoughtful Jim, Arinzé Kene a Sam conflicted, angry at insults, creative.  Twice, with startling brilliance, he stops the show with real numbers: once leaping through the audience and flirting the front row into giggles with a soulful fully-backed love song, while his young friends fall about hysterically onstage. Then, when he admits he has been writing something different, he delivers a tremendous a capella rendering of the big song. Francois Battiste – the lone American – is a striking, contained Malcolm X: finally moving as his own political change becomes clear. What could have been a static, one-room piece throbs with life and soul and the complexity of the road to justice. Terrific. Sing!

“I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I’ve been running ev’r since
It’s been a long time, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will ..”

 

Box Office: 0844 871 7624 to 3 December
rating    4 Meece RatingOh, and another one just for Arinzé Kene , as troubadourTouring Mouse wide
Supported by Barclays MS Amlin Simmons & Simmons, Clive & Sally Sherling

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October 11, 2016 · 5:10 pm

STRAIGHT TO THE HEART Arts, WC2

LIVES IN A LUNCHTIME 

 

 

Having swerved going to the Edinburgh Fringe this year (costs, personal issues, exhaustion , don’t ask) I felt I was owed some hour-long daytime sessions listening to monologues by people I’ve never heard of, on hard chairs in black-draped scruffy studios. Gotta keep that muscle going.  Also, my generation can remember the Almost Free Theatre just off Trafalgar Square, and its lunchtime experimental performances, whether inspired or dire. So with some glee I signed up for 70 minutes above the ARts, to see three short plays by Ken Jaworowski , a staffer on the New York Times . Directed by Alex Dmitriev, the three players are Alistair Brown, Daniel Simpson, and Nadia Shash. And as I have indicated, I expected no great pleasure.

 

Wrong! The hour was an absolute delight: literate, subtle, humane, insightful and touching, the use of antiphonal monologues building pictures of the real pains and banalities of life, turning-points and absent characters, pain and progress. The first, Pulse, is an exploration of fatherhood: Brown as a nervy, resentful gay man astonished by the reaction of his ex-Marine, fiercely religious father; Simpson powerful and convincing as a father who tries to protect his bullied small son by teaching him boxing moves, with disastrous results; Shash as the daughter-carer of a father trying to let her go.

 

 

The second, One to the Head, one to the Heart, shows Simpson and Shash as parents of a seriously disabled child, he a tough guy struggling with shame at his “defective” offspring, she producing a funny and touching twist; and the third, The Truth Tellers, less serious, is a charming miniature rom-com, funny and sharp about the singleton world, with Shash and Brown failing – for a while – to get it on. Oh, and despite Jarworowski’s background, he first and last are British characterizations; the middle one American. A proper lunchtime treat. Non-fattening, too.
Box office 020 7836 8463
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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October 11, 2016 · 4:42 pm

THE AUTUMN GARDEN Jermyn St Theatre, SW1

AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER…SOUTHERN ACCIDIE..
Lilian Hellman – tough, personally unconventional, a liberal ahead of her time – counted this as one of her favourite works. Most of us admire her more for The Children’s Hour, The LIttle Foxes and her fierce 1940’s anti-fascist writings. This one ran only a few months, and is pretty well forgotten: but Antony Biggs of the Jermyn Theatre specializes in forgotten classics, and has opened many doors into past sensibilities for us.

 

 

 

Having said that, the 1951 play has problems. It is set in 1949, the restless postwar time when society was changing and the deep south – it is set, in a boarding-house near New Orleans – was changing slower than New York and Europe. Gregor Donnelly’s design is on the face of it an intimate drawing-room (everything in the Jermyn is intimate: your feet may be on the very carpet on which emotions are unrolling). It has distressed wallpaper, though, in almost camouflage-colouring, a reminder of that war. As is General Griggs – Tom Mannion – glum in a wicker chair, studying a Chinese grammar and planning to divorce his wife and attempt a new life. She, played with vigorous deliberate absurdity by Lucy Akhurst, has somehow escaped from a Tennessee Williams play: a southern belle past her best, flirting absurdly, the kind of pretty girl a man marries suddenly in a war. As the General sadly says ‘All professional soldiers marry Rose. It’s in the army manual”.

 
In another corner is the pleasingly sour old Mary Ellis (Susan Porrett, sharp as a tack), her overpossessive daughter-in-law Carrie dominating a deeply wet son Frederick; he is engaged, in a lukewarm fashion, to the most mysterious of the group, Sophie: a French waif from Europe, adopted with good intentions by Constance, who runs the boarding-house. Constance is a likeable, layered, gentle performance by Hilary Maclean, a woman who for years has failed to notice the devotion of old Ned, but nurtures a nostalgic affection for her girlhood flame, the truly awful Nick. Who is imminently expected with his wearily fed-up wife Nina.
So there’s a big cast, a complex set of relationships, and a theme of middle aged disillusion poised between tough old age – Mary holding the purse-strings – and youth, represented by wet Fred and Sophie. Ah, Sophie: Madeleine Millar on her first professional job has the most interesting part to play: slight, emitting a rather sour European realism , folding up her face into tight unreadability, world-wearily European, a child of war, she bats off the ultimately disastrous drunken advances of Nick; and finally, in a sharp twist, reveals that she knows perfectly well the vulnerabilities of the affluent Ellises and their Southern fear of “scandal”.

 

 

The trouble is that it doesn’t quite get the grip and pace and complex involvement of such a group which Chekhov can. It does in its centre drag a bit, for all Biggs’ delicate direction and Hellman’s acid sharpness and compassion for failures (Mark Aiken’s Ned has little of interest to do until the end brings a profoundly moving speech about a lost life: MacLean too is memorable then. The second half is the best, though the drunken dissolution of Nick only catches fire in his dealings with the remarkable Sophie. Who is of another world: my favourite line is from absurd, atavistic Southern Rose: “A nice girl woulda screamed!”. Too late. The world was on the move, with or without Louisiana.

 

box office 020 7287 2875 to 29 October
rating three  3 Meece Rating

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October 7, 2016 · 9:33 pm

A ROOM WITH A VIEW Theatre Royal, Bath

SEX AND SOCIALISM:   AN EDWARDIAN ESCAPE 

 
The view E.M.Forster sought for his heroine in the novel is more than a pretty Italian backdrop or a Surrey hillside – though this unfussy, delicate setting offers us both. Views are projected behind an uncluttered stage which transforms from pensione to backstreet, riverside, cathedral, conservatory and a reedy English pond which (for the first time here since the theatre’s gorgeous Mrs Henderson presents) goes nude. A brief and splendid scuttle of bare-arsed embarrassment by three men enlivens Act 2, the eldest – Simon Jones as Mr Beebe – in nothing but his clerical collar. That’s our happy view. The metaphorical and important one, as sought by the innocent, half-defiant half-reluctant Lucy Honeychurch (Lauren Coe) is a view out of the stifling decorums of Edwardian England. Beyond their sheltered circle, she says once, lies “poverty and vulgarity, orange peel and broken bottles”. And, in another direction, headlong and fulfilling love affairs.

 

 
But alone she cannot raise the nerve to assert her unacknowledged desire for the wilder rougher shores of life and love. It takes a catalyst: the rough-spoken parvenu socialist Emerson – a splendid Jeff Rawle – and his chippy, brooding son George (Tom Morley). Opposing Lucy’s escape – or is she really? – we have the cousinly chaperone Charlotte, one of the great female grotesques of literature given full absurdity, and ultimately redemptive pathos, by the exquisite timing of Felicity Kendal. Pleasingly, she is out-grotesqued and thus humanized by the presence of the far more dangerous character, the lady novelist Eleanor Lavish being given equal brio by Joanne Pearce. The quintessential British snob-tourist despising her countrymen, feet up and fag waving, Lavish proclaims “I revel in shrugging off the trammels of respectability!”, but takes no risks. Whereas spinster Charlotte, in her own way, does…

 

 
Forster’s story of the holiday encounter and its Surrey aftermath is rich in his yearning themes : of art’s importance and a sexual energy which alone can connect the beast and the angel in man. In plot it is slight enough: in the novel it was deepened by a slower pace and prose. Yet Simon Reade’s adaptation makes a highly entertaining evening, and underlines Forster’s beautiful humour and drily observed dialogue. “Is he a friend of yours?” “We are friendly” “Then I shall say no more!”. Charlie Anson’s Cecil Vyse, posing and writhing elegantly above his ridiculous spats like a Beardsley drawing come to life, is marvellously funny, and a good foil for the awkward intensity of his hot-eyed rival (Tom Morley).

 

 
Some, admittedly, may feel that a masterpiece of a novel has been bleached of its seriousness (especially politically) and turned into a mere Edwardian rom-com – a wrong man, a right man, a slow realization of which is which. But enough of its essence is there, performed with energy and honesty by this fine cast, to draw a new generation to this marvellous writer. For like Tennessee Williams and Rattigan and Coward and Bennett, Forster belongs to that odd and significant company of gay men who, oppressed themselves, created some of the most memorable female characters we have. For that I give thanks. It’s touring, last night tonight in Bath; off to Brighton and Richmond next.

 

 

box office 01225 448844 http://www.atgtickets.com for tour
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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October 5, 2016 · 12:05 am

TRAVESTIES Menier SE1

A SURREAL SPRITZER  

 

Zurich a century ago: the still centre of a wheel of war, neutral refuge of “spies, exiles, refugees, artists , writers , revolutionaries and radicals” . James Joyce was there writing Ulysses; Tristan Tzara was pioneering the redefinition of Art in Dada events in a nightclub, breaking things and cutting up sonnets and having Concerts of Noise. The exiled Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was beavering in the library on his book on imperialism. And there too – mentioned in Ulysses – was the insignificant figure of one Henry Carr, invalided from the trenches with a leg wound, under protection of the British Consulate. So Joyce – grumpily, we are told – did actually direct Carr in an am-dram performance of The Importance of Being Earnest.

 

 
Well! What richer soup of personalities could be offered to the acrobatic mental, verbal and parodic skills of a younger Tom Stoppard? He revives it now, with director Patrick Marber making absolutely the best of its vaudevillian surrealism (I am happy to say there is a stuffed beaver at the edge of the stage, wholly and correctly unexplained) . And the author muses that actually the dates don’t quite fit, and he couldn’t face much research, so the answer was “to filter the story through the recollections of a fantasising amnesiac”.

 

 
The result is a glorious intellectual spritzer, with Carr at its centre in a magnificent, defining, wittily commanding and endearing performance from Tom Hollander ( fresh from acting Tom Hiddleston off the screen in The Night Manager). As Carr in senility he frames the tale, a stooping querulous old mole in a ratty brown dressing gown and long-dead straw boater: in between times he and the hat reclaim their youth and the Zurich days. As old men and dreams will, he reinterprets memory, so that all the characters drift in and out of the war and of Wilde’s world together: Lenin, Joyce, Tzara, the play’s Gwendolyn and Cecily, Lenin’s Nadya and a bolshevik butler (a saturnine Tim Wallers) who maybe was actually the consul that Carr in reminiscence thinks he was…

 

 

Treasure the moments: James Joyce suddenly Lady Bracknell, Clare Foster’s prim Leninist Cecily doing a bump-and-grind with a volume of dialectic over her crotch,; sudden brief musical numbers decaying into nonsense as dreams do. There’s Hollander’s yearning riff about a magnificent series of Savile Row trousers he ruined in the trenches; his clipped gentlemanly confusion about the new age (“A socialist revolution ? You mean unaccompanied women smoking at the opera?”). Cherish Freddie Fox’s spiritedly arrogant Tzara, decomposing Sonnet 18 in Joyce’s hat to woo Gwendolyn, or the Irishman’s first appearance talking entirely in limericks and the two girls’ Wildean row in rhyme. Pause for a curious, sharp solemn moment as Lenin and Nadya board the secret train which (it really did) smuggles them to Russia to join the revolution.

 

 

This is Stoppard the entertainer, constructor of glittering yet oddly logical follies, silly and serious at once, roaming in the half- imagined chaos that made modern Europe. It’s a joyful stew of word and thought games, determined frivolity,white-hot belief and terrible limericks. But it is also studded with great arguments: angry Marxist fervour oddly topical now in the age of Corbyn and Momentum, and – inextricable from it – the argument about art: whether it is or should be useful, its endurance and the importance of beauty to the human soul. Art is championed by Carr and by Joyce, and debunked sometimes by Lenin’s words (real ones) about its only use being social critique, and sometimes by Tzara the dada-iste averring that the age of genius is past and “now we need vandals”. See? Topical again, in the age of Serota, Saatchi,Emin, Hirst, the Turner Prize.

 
And a lovely hard hit , at a time when affluent artists have bewailed the Brexit vote and excoriated those who did it, is Carr’s lucid observation that it’s like having a chit from matron to avoid real work : “To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war”. Ouch! It takes a deft playwright to kick himself in the crotch. Gotta love it.

 

box office 020 7378 1713 to 19 Nov
rating four.  4 Meece Rating

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September 27, 2016 · 10:48 pm

THE LIBERTINE Theatre Royal Haymarket, SW1

COMIC DARING, DILDO-JABBING, PHILOSOPHICAL DESPAIR…

 

 

It is not surprising that theatre falls in love with the Restoration : the stage itself springing back to life after Puritan austerities, real actresses, free with their ways, extravagant dress, flying plackets and petticoats, flaunting periwigs, whorehouses, orange-girls rising from the mud and aristocrats declining into it. And – to consolidate the modern parallels – after a few years of Charles II , a cynical disillusion with politics , authority, religion and the Divine Right of Kings. We have had the merry Nell Gwynn at the Globe and the Apollo; now roaring up from the Theatre Royal Bath comes a revival of Stephen Jeffreys’ darker, dirtier account of a real figure: the great rake and jeering poet John Wilmot, earl of Rochester.

 

 
Dominic Cooper, symbolically wigless in his own long hair amid many luxuriant wigs, strides forward over rough benches before a huge projection of a puffed, silken cleavage (one of many strikingly fleshy backdrops of the evening) to sneer “You will not like me..I demand not your affection but your attention”. We are plunged into bawdy (yes, very) literary chat between him, Mark Hadfield’s George Etherege, an innocent wannabe Billy Downs, and the preposterous figure of another earl, Sackville : Richard Teverson in clay-whitened face and cascading ginger wig , comically providing an ordinary sot as a foil to Rochester’s restless, intelligent, philosophically determined libertinism.

 

 
It is for a few minutes as Georgette Heyer fell into unwilling collaboration with Joe Orton and Kenneth Tynan: Before long we have King Charles (Jasper Britton) enthusiastically rogering Big Dolly on a balcony while conversing with Rochester as he lies below being “gobbled” by his faithful favoured tart Jane, while random layabouts lurch and curse around them.

 
But the point of this subtle, tough play, for all its larky comedy, is that Rochester is not really one of them. He is an emerging modern: clever and sensitive and out of place and disillusioned and bored: “Our boredom is so intense we make dangerous things happen”. Dangerous to his cynicism though is a sudden fascination with the unusually tough-minded actress Lizzie Barry (Ophelia Lovibond) . She like him has an instinct for more truthful playing, rejecting the broad stylized dramatics of the day. He needs theatre because unlike his life it makes narrative and emotional sense: “I cannot feel in life, I must have others to do it for me” he cries, and later observes that theatre in shaping stories lies – “life is not a succession of urgent “Now!”s – it is a listless trickle of “Why should I?s”. Commissioned to write a play about the King, he enrols Lizzie, Jane, and others to rehearse a heavily pornographic, dildo-heavy, explicitly sexually scornful piece (a sort of proto- Ubu Roi) . From here by way of a brawl, the philosophical vandalizing of a sundial for not working at night, flight and internal exile, he declines all the way to a final renunciation of it all. And of his own vitality.

 

 

Cooper puts in a commanding, convincingly troubled performance but what shines out from Terry Johnson’s production (ravishingly composed, designed and lit by Tim Shortall and Ben Ormerod) is the strength of the women. Lovibond is a defiant, feminist Lizzie Barry; Alice Bailey Johnson moving, decent and determined as Lady Rohester; Nina Toussaint-White as Jane the prostitute again toughly moving; and as Big Dolly and a magnificently robust stage manager Lizzie Roper gives us yet another aspect of womanhood. What began as a romping period imagining develops real seriousness and sadness.

 

box office 020 7930 8800 to 3 Dec
rating four

4 Meece Rating

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September 27, 2016 · 8:07 am

THE WIPERS TIMES Watermill Theatre , W.Berks & touring

 

OH, WHAT A WITTY, AND PITIFUL, WAR

 

There is greatness in joking at the mouth of Hell; especially if those jokes are part of comradeship, a gift to those alongside. A hundred years ago in the ruins of Ypres, a weary, dusty group of the 24th Sherwood Foresters were scavenging for things to shore up the battered trenches, and chanced upon a hand-fed printing machine and some trays of type. A sergeant knew what it was, so a couple of young officers – Captain Fred Roberts and Lt.Jack Pearson – decided to produce a magazine. Not informative, certainly not piously or patriotically inspiring: a jokey satire-sheet, poking fun not just at the Germans but at the General Staff, the absurdities of military life, the war itself. Spoof ads and agony-columns, parodies of Kipling, Belloc, and cushioned war-correspondents: jokes about gas, and mud, and death; the script for a cabaret (“Music by R.Tillery”). Or “Questions a platoon commander should ask himself: Am I as offensive as I might be?”.

 

 
Forgotten for years, there was nonetheless enough surviving material and history for Ian Hislop and Nick Newman to mine and produce what – after a shorter TV drama-doc – has become a quite magnificent stage play. It is another evidence of what I have said before (http://tinyurl.com/q53tp5p) that theatre in the last two years, has taught more vividly about the realities of WW1 than any other medium. In a claustrophobically, brilliantly realized trench and office set, eight nimble players scuttle, shift, hunch, joke, and evoke both the awful reality and the redemptive way that young men will use black humour and samizdat flippancy to survive. Both the leaders won the military cross, so there was no hiding from the reality of war; they tussled with authority but – again, a tribute to soldierly spirit – were defended by General Mitford despite the outrage (very entertainingly done) of his prim Lt-Col.

 

 

 

The officers – James Dutton a round-faced optimistic Roberts and George Kemp a dry, saturnine Pearson – are perfect foils for one another, and Dan Tetsell as the Sergeant (and the General) particularly fine: but all eight deftly double or treble, the one woman, Eleanor Brown, sliding from Temperance campaigner to Madame Fifi to Roberts’ wife.
Caroline Leslie directs , and the design, lighting, sound and use of music are of the highest production values, perfectly conceived. But then the whole enterprise has the marks of long, seriously loving, perfectionist conception, having grown over fifteen years. Particularly striking is the way that Hislop and Newman, with 30+ years of Private Eye joke conferences behind them, have been able to study the actual gags in the surviving Wipers Times editions and work imaginatively backwards to imagine the incidents and the banter which gave birth to them.

 

 
Theatrically, odd pop-up moments and music-hall moments give the sketches life, but the writers have the brains not to fall into expressionism or sub-Brecht gimmickry. It’s very straight. It tells the story.  It is profoundly respectful.    It has a more powerful punch than on TV, and is funnier too, with a live audience to gasp and laugh. It does not, especially in brief dark moments after the Somme, gloss over the reality of death and grief , or the dislocated bafflement of return to civilian life after the Armistice. It is, in short, very very good.

 

 

box office 01635 46044 to 29th October
Then touring: Sheffield, Ipswich, Salisbury. Deserves more. http://www.uktw.co.uk
rating Five   5 Meece Rating

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September 24, 2016 · 8:27 am

IMOGEN (Cymbeline) Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES DOWN WID DA SHAKESPEARE  KIDZ

 

 

Someone find Mark Rylance and distract him. Take him far from Bankside so he can’t see what they’ve done. Not only are the ruffs not starched in the traditional method…there aren’t even any ruffs.

 

Instead it’s rough. It’s a new look for the Globe. It’s equallY stylised, just a modern palette. Instead of lutes and harpsichords, this Cymbeline is Skepta, Stormzy, Addidas tracksuits and bags upon bags of drugs; grime London. Perhaps a little heightened, but for his first outing on the Globe stage the director (Matthew Dunster) had to be bold.

 

The play (renamed Imogen to reflect the fact she has three times as many lines as the usual title character) is a leaner text on a bigger stage. Instead of decorative walls and the classic balcony, there are giant flappy plastic curtains you’d get in an abattoir or a big B&Q. A translucent curtain wraps the stage, and the great orb is finally lit in gleaming technicolour.

 

The stuffy nonsense over which previous Artistic Directors presided (no lighting, ancient costumes and impenetrable finale jigs) has been blown away. Now it’s sharp modern dress, colour, dynamic movement and actual pieces of scenery. It’s like bringing 3D animation to a playhouse that’s survived on 2D pencil drawings.

 

Imogen is forcibly separated from her lover and he is briefly turned against her. That, along with long lost siblings, a customary sex change and near death by stepmother, is usual fare. But with a leaner text Dunster has the space to wield greater visual elements.

 

The opening scene, detailing Imogen’s separation from her siblings and falling in love with Posthumus is laid out visually. Beautiful movement, a tightly mixed soundtrack and ballet-like precision are brought in, doing away wooden, spoken exposition. The result is outstanding.

 

Also refreshing is the cast, who for the most part, make the meeting of Elizabethan text and 2016 gang London seamless.  Ira Mandela Siobhan as the banished lover Posthumus and Joshua Lacey as the rival Cloten deliver Shakespearean dialogue as if quoting Kanye.

 

Likewise the ferocious Queen is played by Claire Louise-Cordwell not as some sketchy EastEnders nutter but as turbulent real woman, who is surely in Brixton somewhere terrorising someone.

 

Unfortunately the new lead, Imogen (Maddy Hill), still has the whiff of drama school training. She’s head to toe in Adidas but sounds like an anxious middle-class undergraduate. Each poetic couplet chewed for every vowel, rather than spat out as her more-urban colleagues do. It’s a strong performance, but a little out of place.

 

My only other complaint: the Globe is still the Globe. Tenderness and emotional depth are always wasted on this barn. It must be fumes from the wood varnish because every subtle moment, any attempt at quiet romance results in laughs or gasps. It’s a stage built for bawdiness, and that detracts from some hard-won romantic moments.

 

But we’ll never change the Globe in that respect. We haven’t the nerve to burn it down as they did in 1613. But but thankfully something young, a little more Radio 1Xtra and a little less Radio 3, has stepped onto the boards to try and punch it up a little.

A perfect club night for modern Bards.

RATING:  FOUR

Box Office: 020 7401 9919
Until 16th October.
(BY THE WAY – THE NORMAL THEATRECAT IN THIS SPACE LOVES THE ‘BARN” , REVERES MARK RYLANCE’S GLOBE-MAGIC,  CAN EVEN TOLERATE THE ODD RUFF AND IS MOST INSULTED ON ITS BEHALF…!! )

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September 21, 2016 · 10:42 pm

NO MAN’S LAND Wyndham’s, WC2

AGE, MEMORY, WHISKY AND DEATH… DRINK TO THAT

 
“But you see, its ABOUT being rather bored and baffled. Thats the POINT” said a pleading voice in the interval scuffle. She wasn’t entirely offbeam: Pinter is not everybody’s cup of bitter, clouded tea. But boring it could not be, this revival of one if his best plays from the turbulent 1970’s: a time perhaps of even more than usual dissatisfaction and upheaval for this most angrily morose of playwrights.

 

 

 

 

Not boring, because it is a piece requiring – and getting – two superlative, ageing, unshakeably confident and dryly perceptive actors to make sense of the principals. We have the dapper Hirst in a Hampstead drawing -room framed in flickering heathland leaves, and Spooner, a random, rumpled , camply garrulous old stranger (or is he?) who he has asked in for a drink.  Famously they were Ralph Richardson and Gielgud when it was first played at the NT and Wyndham’s: now, matching them absolutely in quality ( so Benedict Nightingale says and I always believe him) it is Ian mcKellen and Patrick Stewart, theatrical knights of our own century.

 

 

 

They put not a foot wrong, and in the case of McKellen’s long opening  rambles about his poetry, his averred strength (“because I was never loved”) , and how he never stays long with others “they do not wish it”, his feet are vital. Insinuating but vulnerable he sashays, weaves and writhes  his sinuous form around  he room inside those most distressful suitings, one stained old trouser-leg tucked into his sock, as if the trousers perhaps came off earlier in his heathland wanderings. Despite his protestations at being too old even to “peep”at such things.  Stewart is more solid, at first dropping only immaculately timed responses (After some useless personal probing of his host Spooner protests “I have gone too far”, to which Hirst “I expect you to go a great deal farther”. The pair ricochet off one another’s damaged, depressed, very masculine carapaces with remarkable virtuosity. And it’s a joy to watch.

 

 

 

Pinter, however, rarely can resist larding his airy Hampstead neuroses with bullyboys, menaces, leatherjacketed thugs from some feared, incomprehended, but fascinating underclass of his imagination. The servants of Hirst – rough Owen Teale and camply swaggering Damien Molony – .preen, menace and curse their way to no particular effect during the end of Act 1: although the despairing helplessness of McKellen around them is superb, Hirst having crawled off drunk. The play for me dips drearily here, probably provoking that interval remark nearby.

 

 

 

But fear not. The second act, still as odd and deliberately dislocating, is studded with comedy gold: notably the pastiche-bufferdom of the morning after as the two old men appear to know who each other are (or not) reminisce about possibly fictitious old pals and affairs .“I would be taking nothing of yours” avers Stewart amiably, of some old adultery “only that portion of herself all women keep for a rainy day”. Typical, that.. And with the return of the menacing servants they move into a final poignancy of decline -but a decline you can “drink to”, a no-man’s land of hope so long lost that it doesn’t matter. An an astonishing long riff of pleading from McKellen ushers us into the final twilight.

 

 

 

 

And it does in the end mean something profound and not at all dull, about age and memory and approaching death . Goodness knows, Pinter takes an idiosyncratic route to get us there, but there are lines that burn into your head. Pinterite or not, it’s something to see: the quintessence of acting, a poem about life.

 

 

box office 0844 482 5120   http://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk to
rating:   five. 5 Meece Rating

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September 21, 2016 · 4:51 pm

HOW TO DATE A FEMINIST Arcola, E8

 LIBERATION AND COURTSHIP IN A HEAD-ON CLASH

 
Not long left for Samantha Ellis’ knowing, teasing little comedy of modern manners and delusions, and it’s well worth a look. It was a pleasure to sit among a predominantly young audience – still at the dating stage and pretty hip, this being Hackney – and hear the hoots and shrieks of recognition in laughter. For Ellis has hit upon a pleasing paradox of modern Western life. Which is that there is a strand of feminism – not, luckily, the only one – which runs awkwardly contrary to certain innate instincts of heterosexual mating.

 

 

 

The teasing flick of a flirty fringe, the all-day grooming for a special date,, the delight of being swept off your feet giggling by strong male arms – these things still exist somewhere in female nature. So if like Kate in this play you have a sneaky taste for bad-boy Heathcliffs, it can be hard being wooed by a man like Steve: raised largely in a tent on Greenham Common by a fiercely feminist mother. Especially when he proposes on his knees and has to prefix it with an apology for centuries of patriarchy all the way from ancient Egypt to modern FGM , by way of footbinding. To which Kate , modern enough in trainers but longing for something more fiercely flavoured, can only say “my feet are fine!”

 

 

 

Yet they’re in love, and the progress of their relationship is charted in 90 minutes from the first fancy-dress party (he is Robin Hood, for eco-feminist reasons as Maid Marian had a sword, she is Wonderwoman). It is often very funny, as she remembers her mother telling her to blot her lipstick carefully and jump into a cloudy spray of perfume, and he can’t even bring himself to sort out her Google maps for her because it would be patronizing. He runs a bakery, she can’t cook; he meticulously asks “may I kiss you? Your collarbone? your shoulder” and is disappointed that she is not “up for explicit verbal consent”. She, unforgivably but in one of their worst moments, even mutters that she would lie him “a bit more rapey”. Oh dear. Off he goes.

 

 

 

It all works out fine in the end, by way of not one but two weddings, both equally disastrously disrupted. Matthew Lloyd directs, and Tom Berish (gorgeously innocent-eyed) and Sarah Daykin adeptly change costumes at speed to play the two lovers, plus her refugee Jewish father who thinks it’s all nonsense, and his Greenham Scottish mother; less successfully (because it can get momentarily muddled) he becomes her former lover, and boss, a randy editor, and she stands in for the appalling butch-bitch Carina, his hyper-PC girlfriend who hates fiction, and mystery, and romance and thinks love can flourish only on “shared ideas”.
.But when I say momentarily muddled, I mean just that. It’s fine. But worth saying that Samantha Ellis’ spirited writing, and her sharp perception of the absurdities of the day, deserve fuller casts and bigger spaces.

 
box office    www.arcolatheatre.com 020 7503 1646 to 1 October
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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September 18, 2016 · 4:56 pm

GIRLS Hightide Festival, Aldeburgh

CHILD PRISONERS OF TERROR

 

 

The faces of Nigerian Chibok schoolgirls – kidnapped en masse from school or in smaller village raids – haunt the world. Bright teenage faces compulsorily veiled look out of the bullying videos: destined for prisoner exchange if they’re lucky, for rape, enslavement or suicide bombs if not. Theresa Ikoko’s acclaimed debut, a Talawa / Soho / Hightide production, is ironic programming against the other Hightide play I saw last week: the feminist angst at psychological “colonization” in Elinor Cook’s “Pilgrims” feels uncomfortably first-world next to this.

 

 

 

For Ikoko simply gives us in 90 minutes a classic POW drama, in which the prisoners are schoolgirls. In a simple, arresting set by Rozanna Vize, forest turning to hut in seconds the three girls chat, worry, bicker and even giggle as girls will, talking about families, lessons, anatomies and TV shows, sometimes role-playing everything from “games about weddings” to soap opera to award ceremonies and Pop Idol. That they are intelligent, halfway through a serious education, is subtly but firmly indicated. Schoolgirls anywhere will recognize them. But the girls’ differences resolve as the months pass, via growling blackout noises, separately and starkly as they fall into three archetypal prisoner modes.
Ruhab (Yvette Boakye) takes up with one of the unseen captors, veils herself, convinces herself that prayers to Allah are no different to the Christian ones she learned at home, and becomes pregnant: but still captive within the hut. Tisana (Abiola Ogunbiyi) , the youngest and most naive, is flogged for not praying as instructed, and for a time entertains showbizzy fantasies of her return as a heroic “living martyr”. But Haleema – a skinny, angry, arrogantly heroic Anita-Joy Uwajeh – is determined to escape, at any cost, and tries to pull the others with her : one collaborating, one terrified.

 
There are light moments: talks about sex, Ruhab’s pleasure in losing weight, even in the hints of horrors outside a sudden conviction that the “trail of fire and flesh” the captors leave will lead rescuers to them. But the picture grows darker: talk of other girls being sent away, of their fates, and of scared Tisana being destined, as Ruhab tells her, to the prepared “to marry tall Arab”. Halima protests “she hasn’t even had her periods…”.

 

 

It is to the credit of Ikoko, and her director Elayce Ismail, that the horrors are fleeting, and all the worse for that: the best prisoner stories show us how in a terrible way appalling things become routine. All three performances are focused, distinct, passionate and convincing; the hour and a half in the claustrophobic hut is intense. My only quibble is with the final scene: unrelentingly un-redemptive, a final horror for Tisana. The moment just before that when the girls – escapers and remainer – pray together could be a sharper, more questioning conclusion. So would Tisana’s line “This world is not for girls”.
Two days before I saw it, reports came from Nigeria of more negotiations for whatever girl-children have survived this unpardonable theft of youth.

Touring to Birmingham Rep 20-24 Sept, then Soho Theatre

Rating Four   4 Meece Rating

 

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September 12, 2016 · 6:30 pm

PILGRIMS Hightide Festival, Aldeburgh

TWO UP A MOUNTAIN, ONE LOOKING UP IN ANGER
From Wales to this easternmost festival Tamara Harvey – newish artistic director of Theatr Clwyd – brings a new play by Elinor Cook. It’s about two young men – celebrated climbers, Everest-conquerors, bonded buddies – and their interaction with a young woman engrossed in a PhD about “folk songs, war, travel, heroes, the romantic era..”. Indeed, by the sound of it a bit of a muddle: one is not especially surprised at the later suggestion that her academic entanglement between the ballad Tam Lin, colonialism and feminist theory is running into the sand.

 

 
They’re very watchable, though: Amanda Wilkin Roche, striding, bubbling, confident, is Rachel. In a punchy opening she is conversing, in imagination, with the men as one (Stefan Donnelly as the exuberant Will) lies apparently dying 18,000 feet up on a mountain with Dan (a quieter Jack Monaghan) at his side. Sometimes one or other of the cast becomes a narrator, delivering stage directions “Two men alone on a mountain. Tall, Caucasian..” “He hands her a gift” or moving us back and forward in time – “Six weeks earlier”. Sometimes this experimentalism works, and keeps you focused; at other moments it distracts, as if the three of them were enacting some sort of moral fable which we should listen to for our own good, rather than lose ourselves in.

 

 

 

This tone, indeed, is the weak spot of an otherwise ingenious play, nicely staged on a flat jagged platform enabling the lithe, spidery chaps to express the edginess of their mountain trade. We discover in the flashbacks that Rachel was first the girlfriend of one, then of the other; that they each in their own way find it impossible to give up the dangerous life though she might have got Dan to try; and that she suffers both a fascination and a revulsion about their heroic ideals. There is a sudden anti-colonialist rant from Rachel – who is black, which I suppose is the point here – about “cruel arrogant wicked people in helmets and medals who dared to impose their way of life..” Later on, when the disaster has happened on The Last Climb, she translates this into feminist relationship outrage worthy of a Rob-and-Helen Archers storyline – “ Sometimes it felt like an invasion. I was losing whole chunks of land to you”. And “Must there always be a girl, must she always be the prize?”.

 

 
Both good points, but neither sharp enough to hurt; nor are the men drawn with much conviction. There are two sorts of passionate mountaineers – the conquerors, who score summits and routes – and the romantics, who find more joy in their beauty. This pair appear to be the first, and therefore don’t quite fit the romantic PhD; but we’re still not sure what goes on in their minds. In other words, it’s all about Rachel, and the poorer for that. But Elinor Cook can certainly write, and I look forward to whatever she does next.
http://www.hightide.org.uk transferring next to Yard Theatre and Theatr Clwyd Cymru

rating three   3 Meece Rating

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September 8, 2016 · 12:52 pm

LABYRINTH Hampstead Theatre, NW3

THE HISTORY WE DON’T SEEM TO LEARN FROM..


Beth Steel, who turned Hampstead Theatre into a coalpit for her miners’ strike play Wonderland, does her research slowly and in depth; but here again she shows the discipline – together with director Anna Ledwich – to craft a fast-moving show without preaching , giving individual characters a properly gripping personal evolution. Here, she tracks the big push of American banks in the late 70s, lending to South American countries seemingly in the grip of an unstoppable boom (it keeps happening: remember how people talked about the “BRIC” economies including Brazil, now so troubled?). That many of the loans were for dubious, profiteering, corrupt, unnecessary or unfinished projects , enriching local despots and overpaid American consultants more than the peoples of those nations, was sparsely reported. Those journalists who did suffered the wrath of powerful bank interests.  So when Mexico defaulted in 1982 , a bailout was inevitable and rebounded on the American taxpayer already in recession.

We watch this through a handful of bankers: Martin McDougall as folksy, yoyo- twirling Howard the boss, all a-brag about his Yankee ancestors: there’s the appalling cynical Charlie – Tom Weston-Jones swaggering superbly, all Harvard and Brooks Bros suits – and at the centre of it, innocent ambitious John, desperate to shake off the shame of his imprisoned fraudster father, who nips in and out tormenting him. Which is ever more more painful as it becomes clear that the newly confident John is no better than his Dad: manipulating loan analyses to the banks advantage rather than reflecting cautious reality.

Sean Delaney is perfect as John, a wounded child desperate to be successful and “respected”, sucked in to a world where it is better to be simply “envied”, and torn implicitly between conscience and the imperative to carry on carrying on with the absurdity.  A strong nimble ensemble, often expressing the mounting chaos in flash freezes and movement, become finance ministers, joshing young bankers and at last rioters. Few women – this is a mans world, and no credit to them – but we have Alexia Traverse-Healy as a disdainful lawyer and IMF chair, and Elena Saurel as the journalist who taunts John with uncomfortable facts.

The big lie collapses; in a perfect moment Charlie whines ‘I’m not having FUN any more” and lowers his nose to the inevitable cocaine. Howard’s yo-yo dangles helpless at the end of its string, stripped of momentum. John’s suffering is greatest: the welter of surreal nightmare and personal meltdown is arrestingly staged in flashes and choreographed riot. The neon, noise and stylized movement makes it feel akin to ENRON, and in a good way. And the horrid historic realities of failing, bankrupt peoples and the panic of richer government does not distract from the central incredulous voice in every onlooker’s mind. Which is saying “Hang on, this was all last century! Reckless lending for big bank profits, defaults, tax baleouts, austerity, misery, exemptions from pain for the  richest.. It was 24 years ago!. So how the f— did we let it happen again with the subprime loans crash, and then again to Greece?’

Answer comes there none. History isn’t an upward curve, it’s a yo-yo.

Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com to 26 Nov.

RATING four 

4 Meece Rating

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September 2, 2016 · 12:18 am

KING LEAR Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

A SERIOUS, DARK-TONED MORALITY

 

 

The court is ancient, formal, superstitious. Hunched and huddled figures, anonymously poor, scuttle aside for the courtiers to assemble. When the King arrives it is beneath a great gold disc: this is a gilded, jewelled monarch glittering in a glass-box litter. There is in Niki Turner’s design perhaps an echo of Oriental power style: one remembers Gregory Doran’s haunting ANJIN and ORPHAN OF ZHAO. The King Lear he gives us in directing here us is certainly majestic, detached: pointedly uninvolved with the scuttling masses under their disguising hoods. His court though is all too human. In one of the intelligent touches of detail, Gloucester’s joking speech about his bastard son Edmund sees Paapa Essiedu’s Edmund well in earshot, his back view visibly irritated by the parental joshing about the fun his Dad had conceiving him. The moment of body-language explains his imminent treachery. So does Goneril’s: parroting her speech of devotion Nia Gwynne seems to dry momentarily, gulps, carries on: already, the weight of this intimate tyranny is too much. Kelly Williams’ Regan, younger and so perhaps less damaged, is smoother, snakelike, sadistic (it’s her debut RSC season, and a sharp one). As for Edgar’s first appearance, kicking a football around in insouciant contrast to his clenchedly angry brother, character instantly rises to the surface here too.

 

 

 

 

This is not a King Lear which tugs urgently at the heartstrings as some do, nor one in which the king’s rising dementia is broadly signalled. Antony Sher’s king is old, certainly, and arrogantly regal but slow-spoken at first, high on his throne. Only the sudden fierceness of Antony Byrne’s vigorous Kent gives us an indication that the great Oz up there is mad already, crumbling from within his dignities. It is a production in which, without scenic fuss (though with some startling devices in the storm scene) Doran characteristically drills down to the odd, unsettling essence of the text. Here ,in its monochrome visual tones, is emphasised the nihilism: those chiming repetitions of the word “nothing”, and the way that Lear, and others, constantly turn upwards to invoke , entreat or blame ‘gods’. Which invocation does nothing at all for them. There are no gods, whether making instruments of our “pleasant vices” , killing us for their sport, or (in Lear’s terrible malediction) bringing sterility on thankless daughters.

 

 

 

The only hope lies is in ourselves: in Kent, bluff and angrily Yorkshire, in the camp, helpless Fool (Graham Turner) again using northernness to mock his master; in naive faithful Gloucester, and above all in Edgar: a particularly vivid, moving performance by Oliver Johnstone, who handles the unnervingly modernist Poor-Tom madness while maintaining in moments aside a touching, decent-schoolboy, dismay. I have rarely seen the clifftop scene more moving. “Thy life’s a miracle” says Edgar and his father, “Henceforth I’ll bear affliction”. It is the pivot of the play, the one gleam of hope, the affirmation of mere naked endurance. The gods won’t help, so men must endure their going forth.

 

 

 

And Sher himself? As ever, hard to take your eyes off, whether in his gilded opening, striding through his daughters’ homes in heavy furs and heated rage, or sitting momentarily thoughtful and afraid joshing with his Fool. His eyes glitter between grey thatch and bristling beard, his steps falter, his urgency grows to listen in madness to the naked Poor Tom – “Is Man no more than this?”.
At last, his final scenes let your heart move. But not before, in this production rich with intellectual seriousness, you have been made to think.

 
0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 15th Oct in Stratford, then Barbican. In cinemas nationwide from 12 Oct.

rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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August 31, 2016 · 3:30 pm

ALLEGRO southwark playhouse, SE1

A RARITY, AND A TOPICAL TREAT

 

 

It’s an American story and a universal one: choose money and status, or idealistic service? Big business or big heart, slick city or smalltown values? Or, if you must, Trump or Hillary? All the way from Louisa May Alcott to Its a Wonderful Life, the old tension has provided drama. And with its usual brilliance Southwark Playhouse has spotted a forgotten morality-tale : a soaring, serious little musical which suits its intimate scale, putting sincerity above spectacle. Its ensemble – the choreographer is Lee Proud – featly dance the bare-stage scaffolding and ladders around, and the piece rolls along with the characteristic deftness and wit of director Thom Sutherland (scroll here to TITANIC or GREY GARDENS for more Thomophilia).

 

 

 
Astonishingly, this is the European premiere of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical from the mid-1940s. They had broken the mould with the dramatic stories and integrated music of Oklahoma and Carousel,  and had the idea of a new sort of show : a greek  chorus commentary urging on the protagonists as they related a life, its childhood influences, marital decisions and moral dilemmas in a Smalltown American setting.  It wasn’t a great success, but Sutherland turns it out as something rivetingly engaging and emotionally honest.

 

 

 

 

The story is simply that of a young man, Joe, studying to be a doctor like his dedicated Dad and grandfather, and yearning for his childhood sweetheart all through college but finding her harder-edged than he thinks. Envying her friends who marry quick-buck businessman, Jenny proves a mistress of passive-aggressive manipulation (entertainingly egged on at one point by the chorus with “be clever!” and hints on how to win a husband round). She wants chinchilla coats and status, not the life of a country doctor’s wife. Joe is haunted, even after their beautifully directed, melancholy deaths, by the idealism of his grandmother and his mother (a gloriously melodious Jula Nagle ) who stalk through the set as he dithers and decides first whether to go into the lumber trade with his arrogant father-in law, then whether to leave the sober paternal medical practice to be a society doctor in Chicago, prescribing drugs for demanding ladies who have “20 million and still can’t sleep” .

 

 

 
The great Depression figures briefly, bringing down the rich father-in =-law and making Jenny still more discontented: “Money isn’t everything. Well, I don’t want everything, I’ll just take money!”. The music is mellow, emotionally risk: some terrific numbers are choreographed close-up and witty by joyful girls in Mary-Jane shoes and lads in waistcoats, the wedding number dropping nicely into a minor key to presage trouble; one extraordinary standout aria “Come home!” is placed so tensely in the drama that it doesn’t even draw its own well-deserved round of applause. This is the musical as drama, which is what R & H wanted after all.

 

 

 
There is a lovely lighthearted portrayal of Joe’s posh friend Charlie, Dylan Turner all two-tone shoes and two-timed girlfriends; and possibly the only big musical number celebrating an infant’s first steps as a metaphor for life’s journey. For all the jerks of real pain – as intense as in Carousel – it feels finally like the most durably uplifting kind of ‘40s movie: America working out its values and hoping for the best. It’s a good year for that.

 

box office 020 7407 0234 to 10 Sept
rating Four   4 Meece Rating

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August 30, 2016 · 10:45 pm

THE ENTERTAINER Garrick, SW1

KENNETH BRANAGH IS NO KEN DODD…

 

 
If you find yourself in an audience of maturer years , flee quickly at the final curtain, or someone will creakingly inform you that they saw Olivier as Archie Rice, John Osborne’s failing music-hall performer  in 1957. Or maybe it was the 1960  I, on the other hand, can offer for what it’s worth the perspective of one who never saw this glum, angry metaphor for Britain’s decline into 1950’s pointlessness and Suez disgrace played at all.

 

 

 
So I come fresh to this finale of Kenneth Branagh’s season, starring the man himself directed by Rob Ashford. On the other hand, after Derby’s revival of Look Back In Anger, the Finborough’s rather marvellous “A subject of scandal and concern”, and the Donmar’s Inadmissible Evidence, the theme is familiar: Osborne’s men, especially Jimmy Porter and Archie Rice, are ancestors of a long (and generally tedious) line of ranters who confuse their own depression, sexual incontinence and inadequate misogyny as a state-of-the-nation vision. One meets them at the Fringe, or sidling into the mainstream with a light metrosexual-confessional gloss.

 

 

 

So it was interesting. But for all the professionalism, the marvellous seedy ‘50s backdrops of peeling gilt and holiday postcards by Christopher Oram; for all the standout brilliance of Greta Scacchi playing blousily despairing and helplessly angry as Archie’s wife Phoebe, it doesn’t really work. Not even with Archie’s truly terrible music-hall jokes and Branagh’s truly admirable admirable tap dancing – feet syncopating like the last faltering drumbeats of the Empire . It is not a great play. It makes you dismally wonder whether it isn’t time to ring down the curtain on angry-old-Ozzy for a while, saving only his Luther. As Archie would say, it “played better first house”.

 

 

 
One problem is a slow start: Gawn Grainger is splendid as grandad Billy, ranting about Poles ,Irish , male ballet dancers, railway food and how people used to take their hats off passing the Cenotaph (“even on the bus”). Yet there’s nothing striking there for a post-Alf-Garnett generation, and the one-note delivery of Sophie McShera as granddaughter Jean, supposedly the modern voice, is disconcertingly dull. Scacchi is terrific, giving Phoebe real depth and pain below the absurdity ; Jonah Hauer -King as the draft-refusing son is fine too, sharply touching when not forced to spout the usual nihilist-atheist-depressive Osborne shtick about how we’re all alone and nobody cares, especially Tories.

 

 

 
But the central problem is Archie. Branagh delivers the stage routines competently, but without the mesmeric conviction and control which even a middling music-hall veteran deploys. Perhaps too keen to justify his later claim of being “dead behind the eyes” he has an air of ironically knowing how awful it all is, even while he’s doing it. It doesn’t ring true: nobody keeps it up as long as he is supposed to without being addicted to rapport and laughter. He is far more convincing in the domestic rants and vituperation, but the halves don’t stick together . The Osborne misogyny grates too: nuns, tarts, barmaids, Phoebe herself are despised, and even when he gets tearful about a “negress” who sang a gospel song he can’t stop sneering at the “fat cheeks” of the “old bag”.

 

 

 
It is hard to care about his despair. And without that, the play’s own despair at the state of Britain rings hollow and dated. Osborne gave up on the nation too soon. And, indeed, on music-hall. As a silently ironic audience scoffs at Archie’s awful routines, note that in 2016 the great Ken Dodd is still touring, selling out vast houses and entrancing us for four hours on the trot with just the sort of bad jokes Osborne despaired of sixty years ago. I don’t know what that proves, but it feels important to mention it.

 

box office 0844 482 9673 http://www.branaghtheatre.com to 12 nov
In cinemas nationwide 27 Oct
rating three  3 Meece Rating

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August 17, 2016 · 12:49 am

GROUNDHOG DAY O ld Vic, SE1

MINCHIN MAGIC.  ONE TO SEE AGAIN. AND AGAIN.

 

 

The film by Danny Rubin gave us the expression for eternal déja-vu: Bill Murray played Phil the arrogant celebrity weatherman, sent grumbling to smalltown Punxatawney for the folksy ceremonies of February 2nd . That (as well as being my birthday!) is when the groundhog’s shadow predicts the next six weeks’ weather. The folklore is old English: “if Candlemas day be fair and bright, winter will have another flight”. But, mysteriously condemned to wake every day to find it is still the 2nd, weatherman Phil must learn to live it again and again until he grows kinder and earns a future.

 

 

 
The film is clever and funny. But a musical? Well, MATILDA showed that it pays to trust Tim Minchin – music and lyrics – and Matthew Warchus’ direction. And with the book reworked by Rubin, and Minchin’s quirky brilliance and fearless willingness to oompah when it’s needed, somehow the music explodes the smart little story into a big shining cloud of philosophical and moral questioning: laced with killer jokes, wickedly clever lyrics and joyfully witty choreography by Peter Darling (I have never seen a stage revolve so elegantly used). Ellen Kane co-choreographs, and also designs the intricately calculated set of tiny lighted houses and gliding walls; not to mention the wonderfully hokey smalltown winter outfits of the townsfolk.

 

 

 

These matter because the ensemble is really the co-star. Of course Andy Karl is quite fantastic as Phil, driving every scene with a high-energy, perfectly judged journey from furious sarcasm, through bafflement, cynicism and suicidal despair to eventual redemption . Carlyss Peer is likeable as Rita, the producer he hits on and eventually falls for. Others get solo chances: Minchin also lets rip his romantic soul in two unexpected, very beautiful songs from Georgina Hagen as Nancy the wistful one-night-stand girl and Andrew Langtree as the geeky insurance-man Ned. There is a marvellous scene with the town drunks, “Pissing, often missing” and an even better one when Phil seeks help from alternative Reiki-enema’n psychiatry healers all carolling – “I dunno what I”m sayin’, but this guy’s desperate an’ he’s payin”! “

 

 

 

For all that ,though, it is the big leaping, revolving, singing human stew of townsfolk who turn your heart over: officials, workers, bandsmen, carnival revellers, old ladies, slobs, shmucks. The ensemble sing big joyful anthems to spring, and hope, and groundhogs; they express all the innocent human smalltownery which Phil despises. Their magnificence makes Phil’s initial contempt stand out more strongly: “”I have been broadcasting too many years . To talk to these hicks about magical beavers!”.
Minchin playfulness romps through – I love a man who can rhyme toxin with “constipated oxen”, producer with juicer, and give a sad bimbo the reflection “No point protestin’ – cos if you look good in tight jeans that’s what they’ll want you dressed in”. The episodic repetition of Phil’s day speeds up so fast in the first half that you get dizzy, then the second half surprises you first with melancholy, and then with sulphurous darkening to rage, suicide, and a nightmare sequence of despair (with Karl flying aloft in his underwear, and uncannily bi-locating thanks to Paul Kieve’s illusion). The feelgood ending involves massed tap-dancing and a high-speed redemption involving a circling piano,a giant groundhog and a sunrise. And, dammit, a tear in the eye. Minchin magic.

 

 
box office 0844 8717628 to 17 sept Principal Partner: Royal Bank of Canada
rating five   5 Meece Rating

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August 5, 2016 · 5:49 pm

YOUNG CHEKHOV Olivier, SE1

A TREMENDOUS TRINITY   

 

This trilogy, transferred from Chichester is an epic: a thrilling voyage through time to the earliest days of Anton Chekhov. And, if it is not too philistine a thing to murmur, it will draw to him even those people who don’t fire up with exciteent at the later masterpieces – especially the often morosely played The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters. There are still a few chances to take in the ‘three-play-day”, and however hot and tempting the summer day, it will demonstrate even to doubters that eight hours of 19th century Russian drama can be a perfect way to spend it.

 

 

 
Three three theatre giants – Chekhov, adapter David Hare and director Jonathan Kent – with a brilliant cast create a world joyfully funny, vigorous, real and ruefully familiar to anyone who ever had a family, a neighbourhood and a heart.   Those who already love Chekhov will find all the themes there – passion, disappointed lives, debts, women emerging aflame with opinions and demands, and a 19c Russia trying to work out whether to look ba k to an age of peasants and leisured  landowners or to face a modern, vigorous but perhaps less ethical commercial age. The  set by Tom Pye is gloriously romantic: a woodland, reedfringed  garden with a stream which in the final play becomes a lake.

 

 

 

These are very early plays:  PLATONOV is a rumbustious chronicle of an educated, thwarted widow Anna – Nina Sosanya – and a Byronically handsome man who creates havoc in a family and within himself –  James McArdle, a magnetic presence whether satirically teasing poor dim Maria, passionately wooing Sofya, suddenly regretting it, bumming money off the local rich man and throwing it away, or finally succumbing to men-behaving-badly depression in grimy underwear. Irresistible.   At 20, Chekhov never trimmed the work down from six hours, gave it a name or saw it performed: but Hare’s version is tight, wickedly witty , emotionally honest and rife with snortingly funny one-liners . It is not as confusing at it might be, but fabulous entertainment, increasing pace with sudden entrances of all and sundry, often shouting and in ridiculous hats. It makes you reflect that this Chekhov – able to mix broad observational comedy with harsh shafts of painful feeling – is an ancestor of Ayckbourn and sitcom as much as of the greater modern names.

 

 

 
IVANOV was the young Chekhov’s first produced play , more tightly focused on the central character:  Geoffrey Streatfield is depressive, disappointed , self-lacerating, self-pityingly remorseful and broke:   out of love with his dying Jewish wife and beguiled by the lovely Sasha, his creditor’s daughter.  Olivia Vinall (who is in all three plays) is luminous, blondely angelic and gloriously tempting, but here firmly bossy – a one-woman “ambulance corps” for hopeless Ivanov – “My job in life is to understand him!”.  Her family elders , in a memorable upmarket party scene,  are variously awful and hilarious and rampagingly hungry, but Chekhov always allows gleams of redemptive humanity:  Jonathan Coy is superb as the put-upon father, begging the pair of them just to live a normal flawed life and get on with it.  Darkness rears up in one horrifying three-word shout which makes the audience gasp: then room and wife sink through the floor as if in despair  and Ivanov reels off, wrecked,  into the trees, reeds and water of the bleak beautiful set which serves all three plays.

 

 

 
The last is best known, but still vibrates with youthful melodrama and fury.  THE SEAGULL is the tale of geeky struggling author Konstantin  (an intensely felt performance by Joshua James) , his love for innocent Nina (Vinall shining again) and his diva mother, a bravura Anna Chancellor  with  a pretentious, weak, famous lover Trigorin  (Streatfield again).  The moment when she has rugby-tackled him to stay with her, and he stares helplessly over her shrieking head mutely appealing to the audience, was met with   gales of laughter.

 

 

 

 
All three plays have fireworks, real and emotional; all end in a single pistol-shot; all have glancing references to the figure of Hamlet, both embraced and toughly challenged. All three show us Chekhov not – as we know him from plays like The Cherry Orchard –  as a gentle dispassionate observer,  but as a fierce youth.
He was starting on his lifetime themes of frustration, debt, passion, escape, city versus country values,   human absurdity magnified by vodka, and suicide .  He is young, not afraid to mix hilarity and satire with deep shafts of complicated feeling.   The final curtain call on the three-play day brings everyone on:  McArdle (I am happy to say) back in his long underpants as the battered Byron of the first play , not as the a sober prim doctor he plays in the second.   We cheered them all to the echo.    If you’ve time for only one play,  Platonov is  funniest and The Seagull the most wrenching.  But all three are wonderful.

 
Box Office 020 7452 3000 through September. 7 more 3-day-plays on sale.
rating FIVE   5 Meece Rating

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August 5, 2016 · 5:13 pm

YERMA Young Vic, SE1

A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR ALL TIMES AND NATIONS…

 
“Allow for a three-gin recovery period” advised a tweeter, during the previews of Simon Stone’s take on this perennial theme of baby-hunger leading to marital, mental and murderous disaster. Quite right. It is the most shattering night at the ever-intense Young Vic since the psychiatric-hospital Hamlet with Michael Sheen, which kept me away till four in the morning groping for comfort-reading – Jilly Cooper, Wodehouse, anything. But it is certainly brilliant, and for much of its length horribly, recognizably, contemporarily comic.

 

 

 
Billie Piper’s smile is the thing which stays in your head: magnetic or piteous, likeable or terrifying, She smiles a lot , in the big bare glass box where this terrible tale unfolds, hushed audience ranged either side as if in an arena, characters faintly reflecting so we seem to see them from two angles. But each time her smile is different. A larky, confident sunnily sexy grin as she romps with her Australian partner (Brendan Cowell) in their new house, hinting at a baby. Months, years, chapters of their lives go by, flashed up by surtitles as the smile becomes defiant, forced, satirically bitter , angry, and at last – after crumbling into terrible grief for the loss of someone never born – downright demented. Can’t take your eyes off her. Piper is one of the most intense and exciting creatures on any stage: could be Medea, Lady Macbeth, Richard III, King Lear himself.
It is simply the timeless sorrowful story of a woman wanting, and failing, to get pregnant. The Australian Simon Stone adapts and directs a 1934 play by Federico Lorca – assassinated by Fascist Spain 80 years ago this month. It’s a very free adaptation indeed : Stone gaily says he “vandalized” it.

 

 

 

Lorca’s Yerma was a childless woman whose obsessive longing for motherhood and descent into violence was fuelled by pressure and contempt from rural Catholic Spanish society. This sharply witty, slangily modern updating makes the community our own , sometimes even more censorious and nosey, online world: she’s a lifestyle confessional journalist who blogs (“no, I post posts”) at every step of her struggle, betraying unsayable feelings of resentment, sorrow, jealousy, dark hope that her own sister will miscarry, and frustrated contempt for her husband.

 

 

 
Modern realities dart through, though no one of them can explain the failure, which IVF (twelve cycles and more!) reveal to be in her own desperate body: there’s the husband’s business travels and porn habit, her own former abortion, her smoking and party lifestyle, even her own mother’s character. Scenes chop and move on as she is with the increasingly desperate (and beautifully played) Cowell, with a sexually free and easy colleague, with an ex=boyfriend and a dryly funny Maureen Beattie as her mother . They are interspersed with intense, whirling chants in blackness, as the glass box changes to a garden or a rainstorm. Some chorales are Spanish songs from Lorca’s period, once a poignant lullaby, one a grand deceptive Gloria as a real very new baby briefly appears. The terror of the last scenes (one is very grateful for the glass wall) is mitigated by the delicate, painful, truthful weaving of web of longing which destroys her. It is a tale for all ages.

 

 

box office 020 7922 2922 http://www.boxoffice@youngvic.org to 24 September
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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July 29, 2016 · 7:01 am

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S Theatre Royal Haymarket SW1

GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES LIKES LOTT A LOT…

 

 

It’s easy to get worked up by celebrities and big names crowding out the talented-but-unknown usuals. ‘They’re just there to get bums on seats’, is the most common cry. But somewhere along the line we have to accept that these people – these stars – are some of the most charismatic people to ever walk the planet. And when the rock-star du jour is Pixie Lott – impossibly attractive, entrancingly charming and dramatically fluent… BOOK THEM BOOK THEM BOOK THEM. Slap up the billboards, pay they whatever they want, just get them behind that curtain in time.

 

 

 

What alchemy then, when the part waiting at the end of the red carpet is Breakfast at Tiffany’s Hollie Golightly (see descriptions above, impossibly attractive, entrancingly charming etc). She’s the mystery neighbour who we want to know everything about. It’s a perfect, heady mix. It’s not a classically tuned theatre performance, but that’s not what you want. Lott’s Golightly is emotionally versatile, seductive and youthfully talented. 5 stars.

 

 

Such a shame, then,  that the rest of the production goes heavily. The superstar has shone so brightly across the stage, the rehearsal room and the desk of the producers, that the rest has been forgotten. Nikolai Foster’s production smells as if it started life as a musical. A shiny and glitzy number, which was forced to empty it’s pockets of songs as it walked across Haymarket.

 

 

 

Some tunes remain, and because Lott is an exceptionally talented singer they’re a joy. But the sheen of Broadway has translated into a needlessly mechanical and chunky set, which screams and whirs when moved, disco lighting which shines slutty, and incredibly irritating background music. It’s like seeing your favourite late-night bar with the big light on; good grief!

 

 

 

The cast too keep up to some speedy beat, despite their being none. They zip around and chatter, but lose all control and end up flat and cartoonish. Matt Barber (the frustrated neighbour Fred, our lost guide) is shrill and uncomfortably unfunny. Capote’s dry humour (direct narration carved out in chunks by the adapter, Richard Greenberg) goes stale in his mouth. The rest of the cast roll and rollerblade in and out of the stage aimlessly but achieve little. But when Lott gracefully walks in ,much of this seems to lift. You understand the infatuation the rest of the characters have for her. You see why they’re all turned to mush trying to understand her motivations and moves. But when you can’t see that glorious puzzle in front of you. You’re just left with the mush.Thank you, celebrity casting.

 
Box Office 020 7930 8800   In London until the 17th of September, then on tour.

Rating;  three3 Meece Rating

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July 27, 2016 · 12:51 am

HALF A SIXPENCE Chichester Festival Theatre

FLASH BANG WALLOP..

 

 

This 1963 show – based loosely on H.G.Wells’ semiautobiographical KIPPS – was originally a vehicle for Tommy Steele. And there were moments, as curly-haired young Charlie Stemp capered, frolicked, twirled, grinned with a whole keyboard of gleaming teeth and strummed a manic banjo, when I thought “Help! Some bastard has gone and cloned Tommy Steele. Where will this end?”.

 

 
For the part of Arthur Kipps, humble draper’s assistant who comes into money and nearly marries a posh girl, is pure quintessence of Steele in bad ways as well as good. Agile, likeable, fizzing with energy but shallow as a saucer. Becoming rich by inheritance, he forgets the childhood sweetheart to whom he gave half a broken sixpence as a boyish love-token, proposes to a posh and controlling girl whose family only want his money, realizes his mistake enough to be glad when the money’s embezzled, and returns to his old love. And that’s it.

 

 

 

The original work by Beverley Cross and David Heneker has been tweaked as to story by Julian Fellowes, the go-to man on Edwardian snobbery, with some new and revamped songs by Stiles and Drewe and loving oversight by Cameron Mackintosh. Immense fun has been had with the design by Paul Brown – an elegant diorama revealing English Edwardiana dripping with atmosphere whether in chandeliered drawing-room or ‘umble pub . Even wilder fun rules the choreography by Andrew Wright, which particularly in the second half is exhilaratingly witty. There’s a tremendous set-piece musical evening in which a nicely dreary bassoon solo by Lady Dacre morphs, with crazed psychological improbability, into a wild mass percussion event in bustles, led by Kipps on the banjo and culminating with the butler swinging from the chandelier. And of course the flash-bang-wallop wedding photo number ends it with dazzling precision and proper joy.

 

 

 
But for all Stemp’s valiant effort at character as the deluded hero, despite Devon-Elise Johnson as his beloved Ann (she has one fine moment of invective which got a small cheer), plus a dignified bland Emma Williams as posh Helen, the thinness of the story makes it un-engaging. Certainly it feels oddly dated, and devoid of the emotional kick we are used to in musicals all the way from Showboat to Sweeney Todd and Gipsy, and indeed Bend it like Beckham and Mrs Henderson Presents. Musicals can deliver a visceral, engaging, breath-holding thump but this one, overpacked with big numbers following relentlessly boom-bang-a-thump on one another’s heels carries you no further than foot-tapping and technical admiration. And there are some hellishly embarrassing lines illustrating Kipps’ social gaucheness: really, nobody on a public stage in 2016 should have to perform exchanges like “I suppose you like Bernini” “I don’t drink much”.

 

 

 
It would have been possible to drop a meaningless song or two to give us a lot more of Jane How’s magisterial Lady Punnet and Alex Hope’s Sid the Socialist (very HG Wells, but perhaps not very Fellowes). And I could have taken a great deal more of Ian Bartholomew’s bohemian actor-playwright Chitterlow, who beneath some very Donald Trump hair plays it genuinely funny with sparks of real eccentricity. It just needs something to throw a hook into our hearts, or at least our funnybones. But it’s fun, it’s vigorous, and the choreography and band are great.  And Stemp is a real find.   If you’d never seen a musical, it might dazzle.

 

 

box office 01243 781312
rating three  3 Meece Rating

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July 25, 2016 · 11:50 pm

HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD 1 & 2 Palace Theatre, W1

  JUST WHAT WE WAND-ED?

 
It’s not only Henry IV who gets two plays. Cry God for Harry, Hogwarts and St Joanne: the woman who (whether you love the tales or not) admirably got a telly-softened generation hooked on big, fat, complicated books with Latin words and old-fashioned moral values.  Moreover the two plays (in collaboration with Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany) not only take the story of the orphaned boy magician into a new genre after those increasingly tedious quidditch-CGI action movies, but enterprisingly nudge the narrative on a generation. We must be very, very careful of spoilers – everyone is issued a Keep the Secrets badge, and remarkably, the long previews have seen little leakage. But a few things may be told, and reflected on.

 
For Harry – Jamie Parker – is now grown up, married to Ginny Weasley (a disappointingly bland part in the main for Poppy Miller) and has children. He is seeing Albus, the awkward middle-child, off to Hogwarts, where the lad risks possible disappointment under the Sorting Hat (it’s a bowler, this time), may not even be as keen on Quidditch as his very famous Dad, and will have to make new friends. Sam Clemmett is nicely teenage at Albus, but his new surprise best friend – played by Anthony Boyle – frankly steals the show. Both the shows, actually. See how carefully I’m not even naming the part he plays: but let it be said that Boyle is a delight. Fresh to the West End, he’s funny and credible, awkward and brave and dry in his comic timing and wholly unexpected. The two of them are a sort of Hogwarts Jennings and Darbishire, not least in their ability to do dangerously awful things while meaning touchingly well…

 

 

 

 

That’s what they do. And Harry meanwhile is not terribly good at being a parent – what with having grown up being emotionally abused in a stair-cupboard – so that is another emotional engine of the plot. Around him are familiar figures: the adult Draco Malfon, Nazi-blond with a menacing ponytail, is Alex Price; the marvellous, solid, decent but edgily mischievous Noma Dumezweni is Hermione, now Minister of Magic and married to the still-quite-annoying larky Ron Weasley (Paul Thornley, nails it). Sandy McDade is a splendid, and not-yet-retired Professor MacGonagall, and doubles as – well, another person entirely. There’s a turn from another West End debutant, Annabel Baldwin in the “roles include” ensemble. And she too will not easily be forgotten: anyone else thinking of casting a faintly nymphomaniacal ghost who lives in drainpipes, you may have to wait a while as this will run forever, but she’s your girl .

 

 
That’s enough about actors. The staging is, of course, brilliant: there are illusions which, though Victorian and traditional, are so well done and with so little high-tech trickery that you gasp: but cleverer still is the way that Tiffany rations them to casual use early on, so that you genuinely get an impression that this is a world where magic tricks are as normal as cleaning your teeth. So when big magic is needed – remarkable prop work with books, shelves, trains, lakes or the whole set seeming to half-melt – we are ready to believe. There is also a rather splendid dominatrix in Part 2 to pep up the flagging Dads in the audience, and at one point a hilarious interlude in an OAP dayroom where the old bastards hex one another to pass the time. As you would.

 

 

 

The two plays both have to be seen to get the whole story: indeed the end of part I could send a sensitive child ,unbooked for the next, over quite an emotional cliff. Even without that flock of extremely effective Dementors moving in. And up. And over. But this double-barrelled demand of ticketbuyers is something I have a slight quarrel with: actually, the whole story could be one barnstorming 3 hrs 30 more effectively – and cheaply for punters – than the present 2 x 2hr 40 format. Because there are longeurs, occasional but regrettable, mainly due to the intricate back-story related plotting (bone up on the Tri-wizard tournament, do!) and the very Rowling-esque flatfooted spelling out and repeating of moral lessons (be brave, be loyal, listen to your children).

 

 
But never mind. It’s philosophically menacing, with a  barnstorming ending and of course a happy one: it even takes us back into a sort of Harry Potter creation-myth deep in the past, involving a vaulted church and a lot of flames. Think Gotterdammerung for millennials. And for those of us who are older and more careworn, it is piquant to see Harry snowed under with paperwork he hates, and Hermione presiding over Ministry of Magic meetings as disorderly as a Labour Party NEC (“Those of you with the Dark Mark, think carefully..” etc). Not to mention the fact that the whole magical world is in crisis because “trolls are travelling towards us across Europe and werewolves have gone undercover”. How true, how very true…perhaps a Muggle electorate rashly voted Hexit…

 

 

Box office 0330 333 4813 to – well, eternity probably

rating Four    4 Meece Rating

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July 16, 2016 · 9:58 am

FRACKED Minerva, Chichester

THE NEW F-WORD (AND A FAIR FEW OF THE OLD ONE)

 
You can trust Alistair Beaton to keep a cast learning last-minute lines. Here, just as grace-notes alongside the main theme, are jokes about Brexit , Southern Rail, and the new Foreign Secretary. His central theme, though, in this new satiri-polemico-sitcom, is the cynical, corrupt, socially divisive hypocrisies, political manoeuvring and reasonable anxieties surrounding the technology of shale gas extraction: fracking. It doesn’t quite achieve the dark brilliance of Beaton’s Blair-era “FEELGOOD”, but makes for solid and horribly instructive entertainment.

 

 

Elizabeth, played by Anne Reid, is a retired academic who is opposing fracking rigs and lorries in the fictional Fenstock. Her husband (James Bolam) gently resents the time and attention this takes from shared gardening and Scrabble: both bring their genius for combining sharp sitcom timing with real depth of personality: particularly Reid, whose journey through the play takes her from well-mannered civic indignation to a willingness for direct action. Against them stand the fracking company. The MD Michael SImkins (again, catching a sense of human depth below the absurdities) is a straightforward oilman with – a nicely credible touch – a prim reaction to the torrent of f-words habitual to the real villain: Oliver Chris as a PR man. Watching Chris’s sinuous, supersmart panther grace and nicely balanced alternation of charm and menace, one can only reflect how deep the idea of Malcolm Tucker / Alastair Campbell has sunk into modern mythology: the foul-mouthed cynical ruthless spinner as a hate figure now stands alongside the “very fat man who waters the workers’ beer”.

 

 

 
Alongside these players we have Andrea Hart as a fortysomething activist cougaring in a tent in Elizabeth’s garden with a Swampy-type 22 year old: a pagan vegan environmentalist with green dreadlocks. In the part Freddie Meredith – and indeed the lines he is given – seemed for a while so unconvincing that I became convinced he would turn out to be an undercover stooge of the oil company, hired to make protesters look violent and stupid rather than well-informed citizens like Elizabeth. Whether this proved right or wrong, no spoilers, the performance was too cartoonish for comfort. There are indeed several nice twists and unexpected betrayals towards the end, never mind whose.

 

 

 
Beaton’s researches are admirable: on the technology of fracking, carbon emissions, pollution risks, and the degree to which we may need it to stop the lights going out. It is, as I say, instructive. Maybe a touch too much so at the expense of deeper social observation: I would, for instance, have liked to see some of the neighbours who, offered the oil company’s financial sweetener, would oppose Elizabeth and Jenny and cause bitter rifts like those we are currently suffering over Brexit.

 

 

 

But it is an engrossing and fast-moving evening under Richard Wilson’s direction, with a neat revolving set by James Cotterill which beautifully underlines the contrast between a glassy glossy PR office and Elizabeth’s homely beamed cottage. And you know it’s the great Beaton at work when you get wonderful observations like the PR man’s habit of always asking people “How was New York?” when they’ve only been to Scunthorpe or Newark. Apparently – one horribly suspects this is true – in his world people are always so flattered that they respond as if they had indeed just flown back. That’s good.

 

box office 01243 781312 to 6 August
rating three  3 Meece Rating

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July 13, 2016 · 11:51 pm

INTO THE WOODS Menier, SE1

ONCE UPON A TIME, WHICH COULD BE NOW…

 

 

What a marvel is this Sondheim / Lapine classic musical: playful and deep, absurd and earthy, mocking and wise. And what a piece of luck to plunge into its eventful world of fairytales entangled and askew, just when we are stumbling through the tangled woods of nightly news – wolves, lies, witches, giants, temptations, choices, alliances, guilts, remorses, forgivenesses, necessary wars and dark revenges. As I went in, checking the newsfeed, Chancellor Osborne was wandering off alone into the distant trees. By the interval Boris was Foreign Secretary. Drunk with storytelling and news the head reeled: all it needed was Michael Gove offering to sell Sarah Vine for five magic beans. Maybe I need more sleep.

 
Yet by the end of this wonderful piece there is more than story, a deep human complexity and moral reflection: “I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right!” says the witch, and one longs for her to take command. Here are the great arias and choruses about bewilderment and choice (“Is it always or, is it never and..?”) and the witch’s warning that “Children will listen…be careful”. I had seen Into the Woods before, long years and sorrows ago: but now the depth of Sondheim’s understanding felt far stronger. Maybe in another few years it will change again.

 

 

 

Yet it’s all done with folk-tales, the stories we offer our children (albeit in the grimmer versions, and with adult admissions that happy-ever-after may involve disillusion, princes falling for other princesses, blinded Ugly Sisters still needing looking after by someone, and Rapunzel getting post-natal depression and blaming her mother.

 

 

 

Fiasco Theatre ’s off-Broadway production has a pared-down vigour which makes 2 hrs 40 fly past, so that you can hardly bear being separated from the joyful, energetic cast in the interval. Ben Steinfeld – who co-directs with Noah Brody as one of the Princes (and the wolf) himself plays the central role of the hardpressed Baker , and greets us informally at the start with the observation that Jessie Austrian as the Baker’s wife is visibly pregnant. Which since the core plot is about her not being so, we were asked to excuse. No problem there: her touching, gutsy performance and gently soaring voice are worth it on any terms. But all the actor-musicians , who wander to the side to pick up instruments from time to time, play seamlessly and joyfully together. Andy Grotelueschen is a particularly expressive and hilarious bearded cow (and a prince)’ a dumbly deadpan Patrick Mulryan is Simple Jack. There’s a marvellously tough, street-smart Red Riding Hood from Emily Young, and of course the Witch: Vanessa Reseland, possessively human over her daffy, ariel Rapunzel (Young again) . Reseland has superb attack and a shattering voice as she moves from burning , terrifying need to blame, pragmatic ferocity and the uselessness of remorse.

 

 
Framed by old piano keyboards and crazy montages of twisted instruments, Derek McLane’s set emphasises visually that it is Sondheim’s music which carries the emotions and truths: never a note wasted or a word lost, lyrics as tangled as undergrowth or soaring above the forest canopy. In our woods of war and change and quarrel, wolf-harried, mistrusting our magic beans and trembling at distant giants, it was both a magical escape and a lesson.

 

Box office 020 7378 1713 to 17 Sept
rating five      5 Meece Rating

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July 13, 2016 · 12:59 pm

KARAOKE THEATRE COMPANY Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough

AYCKBOURN AT IT AGAIN..OR IS IT

 
There’s tennis without a ball (audience requested to do plock-plock sound effects on drums), a mini-farce, thriller and horror story also supported by audience playing birdsong, creaks and sirens. Oh well. Theatre begins after all with the idea of play, and needs an audience to complete it. Modern “immersive” work is all the vogue and one must play with the genre, must one not? Hence this mixture of cabaret, charades, improv and a particularly inventive family Christmas game with a dash of Victorian illusion at the end.

 

 

 
Not everyone may realize straight off (I only just did) that it’s a spoof; Alan Ayckbourn himself relates in the programme a solemn story of taking the ensemble under his wing, first meeting spoofy magician Oliver Nelson and Karen Drake “of Frenzied Flyweheel” in a fictional fringe theatre, and pub encounters meeting the others – Rufus Wellington and Anna Raleigh , the invisible Kenneth Benbow and Alyssia Cook, whose names (plus their dutiful stage manager’s) spell out KARAOKE. Ayckbourn’s story ends with him having offered to direct and being told “Sorry, we feel we don’t really need a director”.

 

 

 
Yet must assume that he did direct this. In which case, the spoof has gone too far in its pretence at non-direction. Directors are aware of the importance of pace, and the small annoying austerities which, gently inflicted, keep shows moving. And this featherlight, meringue-sweet offering could have been, without spoiling the gag, made into something properly special with a bit of snappy authority.

 

 

 

The ball-less tennis is delightfully funny, especially when one audience member entrusted with a drum fails to do it and the player has to grunt. But it goes on too long. The setup for the farce, with Anna instructing the audience in sound-effects, takes too long, praising every volunteer and block so that self-applause slows it terribly. The 15-minute playlet itself is OK, if silly. In the period drama spoof with brilliant Georgian wigs and a nice sharp plot (borrowed, I suspect, from a Saki short story) we suffer the same slow-burn setup, and then the damn thing is repeated, with an audience member as a key character reading from boards. The Scandi-noir murder takes a different tactic, using volunteers as talking subtitles and muting the actors, and works far better, partly because on press night a middle-aged man in a tartan tie and glasses did a superb vocal turn as the glamorous maid, top screaming there, mate. And the Victorian Gothic is enlivened by some ingenious traditional spot-effects – coconuts, wind and rain machines and a thunder-sheet: the sort of stuff Ayckbourn and us theatre-nuts love.

 

 

 

The very able cast throw themselves into parody-acting with gusto nicely send up the rather impressive find-the-lady trick with three secret cabinets for a finale. And the audience laughed a lot, especially the young. I’d bring along any child or teenager with a taste for larks and theatre games, and sit them close to the front to get involved. And the props are great fun. But a spoof on theatre and theatricality has to be – well, properly theatrical. And, ideally, hold an edge of insecurity. This doesn’t. I love Ayckbourn for his contrariness and adventurousness, but this is a baffling use of nearly three hours…

 
box office 01723 370541 to 8th October
rating two

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July 7, 2016 · 5:37 pm

FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS Orange Tree, Richmond & touring

EIGHTY YEARS ON:  MEN BEWARE WOMEN

 

At a moment when both female leaders and would-be leaders are rampaging across the news – May, Merkel, Leadsom, Eagle – it is pleasantly instructive to see this revival have a second Richmond season: it’s a comic squib from the young Terence Rattigan (before the dark sensitivity of Deep Blue Sea and Cause Celebre). And as women in our century wield real power, it is a time capsule, a period piece reminding us that not so long ago, the culture created a real male terror and misunderstanding of women: at least, of women whose main route to power was through being maddeningly seductive.
.

 
The play vanished from the canon for decades, eclipsed first by Rattigan’s greater works and then by the years when he fell right out of fashion. But the Orange Tree’s production with English Touring Theatre has proved both fascinating and endlessly amusing: a meringue with a drizzle of lemon sharpness. A group of public-schoolish young men are staying in a villa in France to improve their French so that some at least of them can pass the exam for “The Diplomatic”.

 

 
Brian (Alex Large) is a basic male, insouciantly going off with local tarts with names like Chichi. Kit (Joe Eyre) thinks himself in love with the vampy, flirtatious Diana, whose younger brother Kenneth (a very sweet Alistair Toovey, giving just that edge of camp which reminds us moderns what really was on Rattigan’s mind all his conflicted life). Alan, (Ziggy Heath) tries to stand aloof from all this cynically; especially when the older, all-too-briskly Royal Navy, Commander Rogers arrives and proves Kit’s rival for Diana. Tim Delap takes the crisp RN manner almost too far, but rather movingly in the second act explains why: nervous of the cooler young, he was consciously performing the role. But it’s very funnily done. Old M. Maingot huffles around Frenchly, and his daughter, the unflirtatious and altogether sensible Jacqueline (Beatriz Romilly, a lovely warm dignified performance) sighs for love of Kit.

 

 

 

 

It is neatly and wittily woven , and gallops merrily along under Paul Miller’s brisk direction and some lovely roundhand blackboard-scrawls of schoolboy French. Florence Roberts’ Diana, around whom the whole business revolves, is perhaps dated in her obviousness, but frankly no more than many women who are still around: there’s nice chill in her confession to Jacqueline that she just likes making men fall for her because after all it’s the only skill she has.

 

 

 

But the point is the men’s behaviour: ardent, enslaved, seeing resentfully but helplessly the deficiencies of their idol, held at bay where real sex is concerned, altogether tormented, and in the case of the one she eventually lights on plain terrified. Rushing for the nearest train. Whereas Jacqueline – in a sentimental coda – wins by being plainly human, unmanipulative, a women of character and a kind of modesty.

 

 

 

But the panic, the combat and the nerve-shredded nonsense of the other men is a delight to watch. Some call it misogynistic, though the character of Marianne suggests the opposite. But one cherishes lines of male panic like “You can’t judge women by our own standards of right and wrong..How can you, they don’t have any”. Not to mention Alan ’s cry of “I shall fall, God help me, I know it. Never leave me alone with that girl!”.

 

 

box office 0208 940 3633 to 30 July. Then touring Sept-Nov
orangetreetheatre,co.uk and ett.org.uk

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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June 28, 2016 · 10:56 pm

FAITH HEALER Donmar WC2

FAITH . FAILURE AND THE GENIUS OF FRIEL

 

 
A veil of rain surrounds the stage where three narrators will appear, each with their own version of a shared life “shabby, bleak, derelict” . Yet, in Brian Friel’s eloquent profound vision, it is a life as heartshaking and important. Frank Hardy is an itinerant faith healer, huckster and mountebank working the Celtic fringes; the others his robust old-school vaudeville manager Teddy, and his mistress Grace, who ran away with him despite her father’s fulmination about “chicanery”.

 

 

 
And it is chicanery, mostly: except for the rare strange moments when something happens, and a miracle happens. Or ten miracles, on one never-forgotten night in a Welsh meeting-house. Otherwise, unrolling leisurely but gripping before us, there is an account of the bickering, broke roadside life in the shabby van, a career without breakthrough or redemption leavened by gleams of humour, even glory.

 

 

 

The form of the play was startlingly new in 1979: four monologues, the first and last from Frank himself, these sandwiched, amplifying or clear his mistress, wife (or widow?) and Teddy the manager. Each, as in life, misreports the other and the three central events: one a triumph in Wales, one a squalid tragedy in northern Scotland, one a terrible consummation in Ballybeg. Between them these three weave an account of their intertwined lives which becomes a meditation on charisma, spiritual yearning, flawed, thwarted or exuberant love.

 

 

 

Stephen Dillane is Frank, low-key, sardonic and troubled, half-philosopher half-drunkard, confused by his unreliable gift. Gina McKee is Grace, who we meet in the aftermath of a trauma we only slowly discover, talking of a love which “obliterated me, me who tended him, fed him, debauched myself..”. She tells of a child’s grave; but it is, startlingly, only the seemingly cynical Teddy who tells us that tale in shattering immediacy. Yet that comes only on the far side of an account of his life and philosophy of showbiz management which brings unexpected, almost shocking gales of laughter after the sombreness of the first half. Few comedy writers could have invented the saga of Rob Roy the bagpiping whippet; and I cannot imagine anyone better to create Friel’s Teddy onstage than Ron Cook. Dapperly rundown in a bowtie, Cook delivers a quite brilliant forty-minute monologue, taking us from rollicking cynicism about his travails with Frank (reckons he should have stuck to “something nice and easy like a whistling dolphin”), all the way to a painful, briskly understated sensitivity. When he lays out the harshness of Kinlochbervie and hints at the dark terrible Ballybeg moment, the house holds its breath. And then Dillane’s Frank is back: still with one unforgivable lie , but ascending to a strange sad dignity in his own grim redemption.

 

 

 
Lyndsey Turner’s cast cannot be bettered; the veil of rain and sparse props of Es Devlin’s design suggest just enough, never too much. It will haunt me for days and weeks.
Box office 0844 871 7624 to 20 August
Principal Sponsor: Barclays
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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June 27, 2016 · 11:41 pm

THE TRUTH Wyndham’s, WC2

ZELLER ZOOMS UP WEST, SHARP AS EVER

 

 
The Menier, back in spring, brought grave delight and snorts of laughter with this zinger of a play by Florian Zeller; its rapid transfer up West is more than well deserved. My earlier review is here http://tinyurl.com/zzpno6y – but it was irresistible to see whether an elegant, chamber four-hander at 90 sharp minutes ,which convulsed the small theatre, would transfer to the pomposities of the West End.

 

 

 

And it absolutely does. It makes many other plays feel overwritten and laboured: Lindsay Posner’s cast, now well dug in, present a masterclass: a string-quartet, a fugue of misunderstanding, confusion, falsification, obfuscation, attempted diversion and – in the case of the glorious central adulterer, Alexander Hanson’s Michel, a mounting hilarity of male outrage. His cry near the end, wanting to know “what sort of play we’re in, comedy or tragedy?”, is a question for us as well as the blustering deceived-deceiver and his deadpan best-friend and cuckold, Paul.

 

 

 

Zeller’s fascination with identity, confused reality, audience manipulation and the way emotional rugs slip unexpectedly from under our feet brought us the soberer THE FATHER and THE MOTHER in London recently. Here, he takes the traditional adultery farce firmly from the hairy old hands of the Feydeau generation, sharpens it unrecognizably, and overlays it with his existential preoccupations and spikes of real pain. The two men – Hanson and Robert Portal (Paul) – have on this second viewing grown to a particular brilliance in their big confrontation, when none of us can be sure whether Paul is brilliantly acting or genuinely angry, shocked, vengeful or just manipulative; Hanson here, a cornered buffalo, finds his very limbs hardly obeying him as layer after layer of potential truth hits him.

 

 

 
Frances O’Connor as Alice has a sexual sophisticate’s smoothness overlaying shafts of uncertainty and guilt; Tanya Franks as the other wife a deadpan chic cool, which gives way shockingly in the final moments to a remarkable piece of silent intense facial acting. They all, to some extent, lie; are all to some extent deceived. It zings, it turns on a sixpence, confuses, delights, prods pretensions. It has no mercy but a headshaking compassion. Brilliant.

 

 

 

box office 0844 482 5120   http://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk to
rating: still five…5 Meece Rating

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June 26, 2016 · 10:53 am

WE DIDN’T MEAN TO GO TO SEA Hush House, Bentwaters

IN RANSOME’S WAKE, A NORTH SEA TALE OF TOUGHER DAYS

 

 

Eastern Angles having a cleaner mind than BBC Films, Titty gets to keeps her name in this faithful, ingenious, charming and oddly moving re-telling of Arthur Ransome’s best sailing book. Best, because while the others are fine chronicles of childlike playfulness and imagination this one places the four siblings – John, Susan, Titty and Roger – in genuine and unforeseen danger, at ages presumed to be from 14 down to about 9. There is a seriousness about it; and because of that what Ransome calls, as John steers alone “a serious kind of joy”.

 

 

 
Crewing overnight on the Orwell and Stour for young Jim on his little yacht Goblin, they are briefly left alone but when an accident stops the skipper returning, the anchor drags in the rising tide and is lost, and the ebb sweeps them out to sea. Decisions, based on Lakeland dinghy experience and conversations with a naval father, have to be made. The safest course, much debated between the alarmed elder siblings, is to stay out at sea, sailing a safe course downwind. They reach Holland. Ransome’s detail and seafaring probabilities in are impeccable: the only dissent came from the young woman alongside me in the interval with an indignant “Who would leave children alone on a boat?!”. I explained that was the 30’s, and that her generation raised in cottonwool were never briskly told like the book’s characters “Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won’t drown”.

 

 
Whether you know the book or not this reprise of the Angles’ acclaimed version under Ivan Cutting is a delight: an ingenious compact set by Rosie Alabaster evokes the little boat perfectly, above and below decks, with clear sightlines both sides. It is framed as a re-telling by the romantic among them, Titty: the four cast briefly stand in for the parents, JIm and the Dutch pilot when necessary, Rosalind Steele’s Susan is very fine as the naval Dad at times, and Joel Sams’ John does a nice, boyish caricature of Mother. Matilda Howe is touchingly dreamy as Titty, and Christopher Buckley on his first professional job is a name to watch in future: he stands in as the rustic skipper Jim Brading but mainly is hilarious as Roger (well, he gets the one-liners a small brother always deploys at the wrong moment) . All four as children carry the wavering emotions perfectly – fun, fear, quarrels, elations, sudden achieving of near-adulthood, and scratchy family solidity.

 

 

 
But to be honest, what brought tears to my eyes at times was the way that the story, and the fidelity of the play, reflect the realities of small-boat sailing familiar to those of us with a life of it astern of us (and I hope a bit more to come).

 

 

All the truths are there: the pleasure in merely coiling a rope and the legacy of ingenuity in rigging and canvas and the simple subtle physics of the seaman’s art.   But there is also the collapse of morale in seasickness, the unwelcome necessary decisions, and the fear which abates when you actually do something for the ship. Here too are the shrill moments and the arguments , and the healing acceptance of comradeship and of loyalty and gratefulness to the boat herself.
It’s all there: the changing sea you travel through with rope and cloth and hope, trying to do the right thing.

 

booking via http://tinyurl.com/h3pfw7g easternangles.co.uk Touring to 9 July

rating four  4 Meece Rating

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June 22, 2016 · 3:10 pm

SUNSET AT THE VILLA THALIA NT Dorfman, SE1

 VACATION,  EXPLOITATION,  ACCUSATION…

 

I caught up a few days late with this (cheap seats aloft, excitingly closer to the rock-face in Hildegard Bechtler’s Mediterranean-terrace set than the stalls people below, representing the waves). I was drawn to bag a late ticket by huge respect for Alexi Kaye Campbell’s last London play – PRIDE – with its skilful interweaving of past and present in the treatment of Britain’s gay men. And given his Greek family ancestry, there was intrigue in the idea of a play set in 1967 – when the junta of Colonels took power – and nine years later with democracy restored . What could go wrong?

 

 

 
Early reviews of Simon Godwin’s production were lukewarm, tending to find it a bit wordy, politically declamatory and slow: indeed the first half tends a bit that way. And given the present Greek crisis some wished that it had stretched closer to the present. But now (well bedded in) the play grew on me, offering multiple layers of thought and pinpricks of proper indignation, right through to a sharp final twist of the political knife.

 

 

 
It opens in 1967 in Ayckbournian style with a British middle-class playwright Theo (Sam Crane) and his actress wife Charlotte (Pippa Nixon) laughingly dreading the arrival of holiday acquaintances: a brash US State Department “floater” Harvey – a senatorial Ben Miles – and his Barbie wife June, Elizabeth McGovern in a period-perfect flickup blonde hairdo. They are lodging in a lovely old villa whose owner Maria and her Dad are emigrating to Sydney, away from political upheavals. Harvey, with American gusto and flattery for Theo’s writing, talks the English couple into buying it for a song from the fairly desperate Greeks. He is full of large statements about how “democracy and theatre are twins, born here at the same moment”. Running through the play, an understated but useful theme, is the curiously strong magnetic effect which – even as we mock – American optimism and overstatement often have on weedier, more doubtful liberal Brits.

 

 
Nine years later, after the interval, Theo and Charlotte have two small children scattering crayons and bounding around with “uncle” Harvey; inter- and intra-couple relationships are thinning perilously, not least since Barbie June finds Harvey hasn’t been the same “since Chile”, or slept with her, after an innocent, musical young Chilean neighbour was rounded up and “disappeared” in the American-backed anti-Communist coup against Allende. She is drinking heavily (McGovern catches beautifully her borderlne loss of control) and gives away the fact that her husband paranoiacally carries a gun everywhere. So Charlotte goes nuts in a predictably anti-gun rant. And Harvey, full of bravura, attempts a Greek dance with the children she Charlotte shrilly gives him the full Guardianista rant about wicked “cultural appropriation” of a music born out of exile and poverty. So he rounds on her with a story devastatingly underlining the fact that their whole takeover of Maria’s house and very dinnerplates is rather beyond a mere dance.

 

 

 
Nixon and Miles are superb in confrontation: Sam Crane’s weedy uncertain politically-correct playwright pales in comparison with the American’s honest acknowledgement that he, and all of us, carry a first-world guilt and should be wary of throwing the first stone. Pippa’s excoriation of American world managment – “Your definition of democracy is a selective one” is twisted back on her. And a lovely grace-note, prefiguring today’s mess, is that Theo and Charlotte are selling the house on to a German. And buying a Cornish holiday cottage: whose price has, of course, itself dispossessed locals. And they can’t see that either.
It’s a finer play than its slow first half promised. Glad I didn’t miss it.
box office 0207 452 3000 to 4 August
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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June 20, 2016 · 10:25 pm

WILD Hampstead, NW3

REBELLION AND REALITY IN A SKEWED WORLD

 

 

God bless a playwright you can’t predict. Mike Bartlett’s Charles III was founded on a pretty simple idea, and a frankly rather jejune imagining about the Royal family; it transferred up West and to America amid huge plaudits. This one by contrast is rich in important, complex ideas and riskily surreal conversations, and is most unlikely to transfer : not least because of a certain extraordinary, unexpected technical coup de theatre in the last ten of its hundred minutes. Only a detailed scan of the credits will give you any clue to that. So good for Mr Bartlett, and for his director James MacDonald, who keeps even the more oddly structured conversations watchable; and let us add a bouquet of freshly-picked hydraulics and spanners for designer Miriam Buether and the techies.

 

 
Bartlett draws inspiration from the Edward Snowden case, but it is no bio-play: rather, he is gripped by the odd novelty of this particular “traitor”s position. You don’t need to be a Philby or Burgess these days: one day you’re a quiet , nerdy ordinary chap working at a screen and eating at KFC with your girlfriend yet within a week you’re an exile in a hotel room in Moscow. Your passport’s gone, you’ve no status anywhere on the planet, your own country threatens the electric chair , and the world is in turmoil over your revelations about secret government surveillance which has, in a digital age, crept up on us all. What you have done is unprecedented, huge, shocking, risky to all. “The USA” observes one of his interlocutors matily “doesn’t have a proportionate punishment for this..you only have one life”.

 

 

 

She also muses on the likelihood of the hero Andrew – Jack Farthing, who is credibly half-defiant and half-scared throughout – killing himself, as people often do when in a position which defines them forever. She cites Dr David Kelly and the nurse who took the spoof call about the Duchess of Cambridge. “Never to be known for anything else, for art or music or sport or charity…”. Daunting.

 

 
Two interlocutors visit Andrew’s bland hotel room, with its cut-off phone and confiscated laptop. The woman – Caolfhionn Dunne – is foxy in black, irritatingly provocative, deliberately confusing; we are never sure if she is Russian at all, for she seems to be Cambridge-English. The man , who at first denies having heard of her, is dourer, pointing out that Andrew is now a prime assassination target. Gradually the leaker’s naive idealism is mocked, challenged, stripped: we reflect on the extraordinary fact that digital information and its handlers can create a situation where the key, massive leaker might not actually be very bright or politically savvy. The dubious moralities of the modern age seep through: the USA, says the woman matily, has lost its USP of good behaviour and is “a spy state, a torture state, a terrorist”. The man (John Mackay, beautifully lugubrious) points out the paradox that democracy requires security, but then undermines itself with the surveillance needed for that security – “there are things that have to be done in the dark, to protect society, that society does not want to hear about”.

 

 

 

There is a wonderfully creepy thoughtfulness about it; but gradually the political points ,as the confrontations go odder, are shaved away until we are in a Beckettian, Pinterish, surrealism with a side order of Schroeding and existential doubt about the nature of reality itself. And you start to think, “ho hum, this is all Philosophy Club chatter”… but then the extraordinary coup de theatre happens, and that’s a real treat. And is quite possibly the reason they had to delay the press night by three days. Well worth it.

 
Box office: 020-7722 9301 to 16 July
rating Four. The fourth is technical. Oh yes. The mouse that ran up the grandfather clock…you’ll see what I mean.    4 Meece Rating

 

 

 

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June 18, 2016 · 8:38 am

RICHARD III, Almeida N1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS CHILLED, THRILLED, DAZZLED

 

 

Ralph Fiennes is a menace. An utter menace. Other actors beware. He will cheat, stab and simply out-act you right off the end of the stage.
His command of the audience, the material and everyone else around him is terrifying.
Around the bright Fiennes, the small Almeida stage is dull iron, backed by a curtain of chain mail. Above us, a large crown looms large over the action and below, an awkward grave muddies it. As we find our seats men in hard hats inspect the hole in the ground. This is 2012, rather than 1485. This blessed plot has been car-parked over, and the confused people of Leicester are surprised to find the warped skeleton of a Monarch has been living beneath them.

 

 

 

 

Rupert Goold has pulled off an absolute triumph in making something which on paper seems trite, actually play out as delicately moving. In the final moments of the play, as Richard dies and Ralph’s spiney, limpy frame falls back into the hole, and the hard hats come crawling back out, the weary scene almost brought me to tears. It was Shakespearean history dragged kicking and screaming into relevance. The ruthless backstabbing looked like the most recent of corporate dramas, the battle was a fresh slice of action, the humanity as relevant as ever.

 

 

 
Richard is the quickest of wits. Fiennes, the consummate comedian, gives the
most technically precise, charismatic and chillingly charming of performance.s The glint in his dark eyes could boil water. He is not a olde king tyrant living on the page: he is your worst nightmare, stood breathing in front of you.

 

 

 

And his peers slot excellently in around him. The most memorable , the women. Perhaps more functional,  the men. Vanessa Redgrave dusts off her best shattered lioness as Queen Margaret, Joanna Vanderham gives a screamingly heartbreaking Queen Elizabeth and Susan Engel as the Duchess of York makes a complicated character the easiest of watches. The men – partner -in-crime Buckingham, quickly-dispatched Clarence and loyal Catesby – grip tightly, but never really draw blood. Maybe the superhuman glow from Fiennes dulls their performances, but in a production as good as this that is far from criticism.

 

 
I am usually of the opinion that any play over 2 hours in self indulgent, but at 3 hours 15 minutes this is worth every minute. Long live the king.

 

Until 6th August.
Box Office: 020 7359 4404
This production will also be screened in cinemas on 21st July.
Rating: five  5 Meece Rating

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June 16, 2016 · 11:29 am

HOBSON’S CHOICE Vaudeville, WC2

THE FIRST MAGGIE…
A hairdo can be eloquent. When Bryan Dick as Willie Mossop first emerges quaking with humility from a trapdoor under old Hobson’s shop, above a flapping leather apron and ragged shirt his dishevelled hair sports the nerdiest of centre partings – borderline imbecile indeed, with sad flapping black locks either side. But the redoubtable Maggie, sick of paternal domination, hoicks him out of servitude, marries him by sheer force of character, (“I’m engaged to Ada Figgins!” “Then you’ll get loose of her!”), channels his talent into a rival business, and by the closing scene gormless Willie confronts the drunken old tyrant Hobson in a smart business suit and – crucially – a neatly Brylcreemed side parting.

 

 

It’s a nice detail, and Bryan Dick as Willie steals the show with his moments of terror at Maggie’s resolute advances -“I’ve got my work cut out, but you’ve the makings of a man about you!”. One cannot help thinking fondly of Bernard Levin’s immortal description during the late Cecil Parkinson’s crisis with another Maggie – “He seems to follow the principle of promising to share his life with whichever lady has most recently spoken sharply to him”. Naomi Frederick’s Maggie, brilliantly deadpan in her commanding ways, deals superbly with his very funny wedding-night jitters: I do like a woman with the resolution to haul her diminutive groom to bed by the ear.

 

 

 

So there are great delights in Jonathan Church’s revival of Harold Brighouse’s 1916 play: last time it was in London Nadia Fall updated it to another time of social change and womanly revolution, the 1960s, but Church keeps it resolutely in Victorian period, when fine boots were a pound , clogs a few pence and censorious fathers thought a bustle indecently provocative (“a lump added to nature”). There’s a marvellously evocative set by Simon Higlett (particularly the Salford cellar where Maggie and Willie set up business).

 

 

 
And of course the latest return of the septuagenarian Martin Shaw to the stage is a delight, especially as he storms around in a tornado of outrage and whiskers in the second act when his dissolution has fully set in. He is slightly less convincing – too amusingly lovable – in the first act, and his daughters seem more exasperated than afraid of him; so that when he threatens Willie with his belt, it doesn’t ring quite true. But the second Act’s drunkenly semi-comic Lear rings truer, as do his Goneril and Regan (Florence Hall and Gabrielle Dempsey) when they refuse to move in and look after him, and there a notable, understatedly powerful presence (equivalent I suppose of Lear’s Fool) in David Shaw-Parker as Tubby the clogmaker,

 

 

 
But as ever, it is Maggie who holds the stage, whether dominating her quaking groom or, oddly touchingly, insisting that the rest of the family respect him.
It remains an entertaining evening, a period piece and honourable in the WW1 centenary, reminding us that it was written in a time of social turbulence and female rising as well as carnage and heroism. Though set in the 1880s, its spirit is fiercely, hintingly Edwardian: Brighouse knew what he was doing.

 

 

 
Though of course what he was mainly doing was comedy, in a direct line from Shakespeare’s Shrew and Much Ado. It shows its age, and might have benefited from a trim in the Priestleyesque wordiness of the second act; but Maggie Mossop – née Hobson – remains one of the English stage’s great characters, and it was good to see her back.

 
box office 0330 333 4814 to 10 Sept
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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June 10, 2016 · 10:59 pm

ILLUMINATIONS Snape Maltings

STRINGS, SWINGS, A SOPRANO SOARING

 

 
In E.M.Forster’s HOWARD’S END, the dreamy Helen Schlegel can’t listen to Beethoven without imagining heroes, goblins, dancing elephants and shipwrecks. If you are prone to a similar synaesthetic response, here comes 75 minutes of bliss. If listening to Britten’s Young Apollo makes you wish for a man juggling bowler-hats and a woman in a long tutu cartwheeling amid dark sinister goat-men, book in now : there are only two more performances. If a really good John Adams glissando brings visions of an artiste’s glorious slithering in aerial silks, Struan Leslie’s remarkable melding of string orchestra with expressive circus will enchant you. And of course if like me you then recklessly add another layer of seemingly unconnected art-memory, the suspension of a dark male figure descending on a trapeze to scoop up a sleeping soprano can have you murmuring Keats’ The Eve of St Agnes to yourself (“Awake, arise my love and fearless be..”).

 

 

 
Nicholas Collon, conducting (and once briefly getting crowdsurfed backwards by the Circus ensemble) shares the wide Maltings stage not only with the strings of his Aurora orchestra but with a dramatic set by Gary McCann, which looks at first like a New York skyline in silhouette but reveals itself as more like a disorganized furniture warehouse, where someone has put the chairs on top of the wardrobes and balanced a bed impossibly overhanging a 10ft void. Into this precarious bed, admirably self-possessed, climbs the glamorous operatic-baroque soprano Sarah Tynan in a sea-green robe and blue cloak. Under the latter, on what looks like a very hard plank, she rests seemingly asleep until woken to sing by her Britten cue and the dark erotic forces of nine circus performers around her trapezing, aerial-hooping, menacingly stalking and crazily cartwheeling.

 

 
If there is an award for gamest soprano of the Aldeburgh Festival, she’s won it: some artistes, even operatic ones, would stiffly remind a director of their eminence – “For this I train ten years?” – if asked to spend the first twenty minutes feigning sleep, then get dangled upside down, and manhandled by a chap in fur leggings and numerous elvish figures in tight newsprint Lycra, all while singing Britten’s Les Illuminations . Not to mention getting dizzily hauled 50 feet up on a flimsy hoop into the pitch darkness of the Maltings rafters. What a trouper.

 

 

 
Mais serieusement, as we Francophiles say, is it worth doing, is it good, is it art? This is, after all, the opening flourish of the tres serieux Aldeburgh Festival. So yes, absolutely, it is tremendous. The music which Struan Leslie has put together with the Britten settings of Rimbaud’s weird, surreally sensuous French poems is Debussy and John Adams, and somehow it creates one odd, fantastical dreamscape; to my ear it is all immaculately played, and the circus skills, synchornized almost eerily with the mood and pace of the music, are high in every sense (there’s a segment on two trapezes and a swinging strop which made me grip the seat). Tynan’s voice of course is astonishing: pure violent vigour, breathtaking sweetness, goddess authority.

 

 

 
And it’s witty: the orchestra move around the stage between sections with an air of great enjoyment, and one at least has no inhibition about having a quick swing on the aerial strop himself on the way across, dangling his double-bass in the other hand. An odd, wild, engrossing 75 minutes.

 

 

http://www.aldeburgh.co.uk running this Sat and Sun
Cheapest tickets £ 16 and all half price to under-21s. Who will love it!

rating:  five mice for audacity  5 Meece Rating

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June 9, 2016 · 3:45 pm

THE DEEP BLUE SEA Lyttelton, SE1

A CLASSIC OF THE DESPERATE HEART

 
“We’re death to one another, you and I”. The great cry from trapped, degraded macho Freddie, struggling to leave the desperate demanding Hester Collyer as she clings to his very shoes, marks a turning-point in what – as any fule kno – is one of Terence Rattigan’s greatest and most intimately felt plays. Her “Don’t leave me alone tonight!” rips through the air as the door slams. She has already tried suicide once.

 

 

 
That in the short second act she finally rejects tragedy is, again as Rattiganites know, wishful thinking from the playwright. The inspiration for Hester’s gas-fire attempt was the death in that way of his own ex-lover, Kenny Morgan: indeed currently at the Arcola is a fine play about him, echoing this . (my review below, or http://tinyurl.com/hbvwy7x ).

 

 

 

That interval moment, on press night, saw me having to leave Carrie Cracknell’s new production for a pressing family need, so I may not in honesty offer a final rating . But it is one of Rufus Norris’ first wholly ‘classic’ productions in his NT tenure, and worth noting: so here is what we learn from its first longer half. Typically for Cracknell, it is done without unnecessary flourishes or updatings but with artful, revealing twists, an intense central performance, strong support and a powerful dramatic line .

 

 

 

The play consists of intense conversations in one room – Hester and Freddie, Hester and her abandoned husband the Judge, Freddie and his drinking friend Jack, landlady and neighbours, and not least the dry, mysterious struck-off German Jewish doctor Miller who is the emotional deus ex machina. So Tom Scutt’s design of the seedy boarding-house uses the full width of the stage as characters move apart and together, and walls become transparent indicating the other lives beyond, to heighten the isolation of Hester. : Peter Rice’s low, sound design is another subtle, moody clue: the richness of production values draws in a cinema generation without losing vivid theatrical immediacy. When Freddie casually searches his lover’s dressing-gown pocket for cigarettes and the audience knows a certain note is there, there is an audible hissing sigh. It’s that good.

 

 

 

Helen McCrory’s Hester neatly indicates from the start the hopeless social back-story of a clergyman’s naive daughter who married a man too paternal and too straight, then fell for the =seemingly lost overgrown schoolboy, the wartime pilot in aimless peacetime. It became for her “too big and confusing to be tied up in a parcel named lust”. Even in the earliest scenes as she is revived from the first attempt, her brittle civilities mark her class just as Freddie’s cheerful saloon-bar manner marks his. The sexual chemistry between them is electric, despite his obvious growing reluctance to succumb again to it. (“I can’t be a ruddy Romeo all the time”.) Tom Burke gives Freddie , too easily played as a heartless beast, a real conflicted identity, immature and trapped; Peter Sullivan as the judge is straight, not unattractive or unsympathetic: his angry plea for duty and “sanity” from the yearning Hester is the right kind of shock. Like the sardonic Miller he might well echo “Nature has not endowed me with a capacity for inspiring suicidal love”.

 

 

And there I must leave it. A fine production, all reports suggest that the last 45 minutes I missed were very fine, intense faithful to Rattigan’s anguish, search for redemptiveness, and ttransformation of his own life’ reality into one of those astonishing, perceptive portraits of women. Which, ironically, have been so often written lately by gay men: Rattigan, Coward, Tennessee Williams, Alan Bennett…there’s a thesis in that.
box office 020 7452 3000 http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk to 21 Sept

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June 8, 2016 · 6:11 pm

TITANIC Charing Cross Theatre SW1

A DREAM AND A DISASTER:  TRIBUTE WORTH PAYING

 

 

Full disclosure: I really care about the Titanic story, love maritime history, have met one of the last living survivors of the 1912 disaster, and visited exhibitions about it here and in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The rediscovery of bandmaster Hartley’s violin stirred my depths. I was enraged by the dreadful eezi-pleazey James Cameron film, with its catchpenny inverted snobberies and schlocky Winslet-diCaprio rom-com; not to mention the shameful slur on First Officer Murdoch.

 

 
So I approached this one with caution. But within ten minutes was head over heels in love with it, not just because of Maury Yeston’s stirring music and lyrics (this man knows how to use the human power of a chorale). It was also because of a kind of fidelity: to the period’s Edwardian style, musical and visual, to its vaulting ambition and belief in a new world of engineering and opportunity, and to the simple fact that on a sea voyage however firm the class distinctions every individual has a right to hopes and dreams.
In a damp sparse midweek matinee (a tricky time at home, one leaps at chances) it blew me away. A bit embarrassing, that, since now two days running two modest new musicals have dazzled me into multiple mice: but after all Yeston’s score and Peter Stone’s book won a hatful of Tonys in the US and great plaudits here three years ago. So it isn’t just me. That director Thom Southerland (who just scored again at Southwark with Grey Gardens) should have brought it home to this cosy spot under Charing Cross station is something to rejoice at: though it seems a pity that a more prestigious theatre didn’t fight for it.

 

 

 

 

Because it is, I tell you, rather wonderful. Honestly. Go see it. Some very good price tickets.
Yeston says that it was the idea of dreams and ambitions that drove him, and it certainly drives the tremendous opening: David Woodhead’s set of decks, rails and moving companionway is neatly echoed by the little theatre’s balcony rails and retro lampshades, and the company of twenty swarm onto the ship, excitement mounting. Glee and pride and astonishment and thrill shake the house, from the scuttling stewards loading 1100lb of marmalade and countless potatoes to the sixty-shilling Irish girls in third class running away to a better life, the aspirational second-class Alice (Claire Machin) determined to stand next to an Astor or Guggenheim if it kills her, the first-class passengers who are also given their humanity, and the labouring stokers in the engine-room.

 

 

 

 

The use of big, joyful choruses is tremendous throughout – though individual arias stand out too, notably Matthew Crowe as the nerdy, snooty wireless operator warming into benevolence at the marvel of his dee-dada -dit trade, Alice’s dream of ambition, and several moments of marvellous macho belting from the strong men at the heart of the crisis. Philip Rham is the Captain, Sion Lloyd designer Andrews from the Harland and Wolf shipyard, and the nearest thing to a villain on board is Bruce Ismay (David Bardsley) from the White Star Line.

 

 

 
For under the glee and the exposure – neatly indicated – of private dreams and circumstances among the passengers, musically and verbally throbs always the approaching doom, the reward of hubris. Ismay was determined it should be a six-day ship on the transatlantic route (“even the Krauts can do it”) and urged high speeds and the short, icebound northern route. The others uneasy concern joins icy mist swirling around the bridge, human preoccupations swirling below on a calm moonless final night, the music swelling every few minutes into a great chorus of hope we know is hopeless. We strike the iceberg at the end of the longer first half: the rest is a dramatic foundering, and finally a decently quiet memorial to the 1503 who died, with a sheet of names and the memories of real survivors. Stirring, decent, strong.

 

 

 

http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk
Box office: 08444 930 650 to 6 Aug
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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June 7, 2016 · 11:30 pm

THE GO-BETWEEN Apollo W1

INNOCENCE, EXPERIENCE, MEMORY, TRAUMA

 

 
Around a derelict room and abandoned trunk, Michael Crawford prowls, a tweedy, damaged old man at the heart of this low-key but unforgettable new musical: singing, remembering, haunted by a diary . It opens with no showy feelgood overture but an almost liturgical harmony as an ensemble of pale ghosts torment him with “We are still here…” . No band: a lone grand piano with Nigel Lilley the musical director , draws harmonies , discords and operatic recitative from the ever-shifting ensemble; who also become , through understatedly beautiful movement, not only characters but a strawstack, flights, a row of shops in 1903 Norwich. The music is sometimes lushly romantic, sometimes borrowing from Edwardian comic-song and ballad, sometimes as eerie and threatening as in an occult thriller. It is a hypnotic show: Sondheimish, in a good way.

 

 

 

 
So this new British musical (from Perfect Pitch with Northampton, Derby and West Yorkshire Playhouse) is special. L.P.Hartley’s 1953 novel became a famous film and lately was a BBC drama, but to make it a musical felt foolhardy. A tormented memory-piece about an Edwardian schoolboy’s loss of innocence, remembered by his damaged older self fifty years later, falls neither into the realm of rom-com or high drama. But the composer is Richard Taylor of Whistle Down the Wind, who has just astonished and delighted us with the equally intimate Flowers for Mrs Harris. And, crucially, the book and lyrics are by David Wood. As our leading children’s playwright (remember Goodnight Mr Tom) he naturally homes in on the boy, the baffled innocent at the story’s heart. Roger Haines’ direction, deceptively simple, is in movement and emotional control a piece of pure theatre.

 

 

 
Crawford is the old Leo Colston, anxiously watching his past unreeling around him and arguing with his younger self, sometimes rapt in memory of the good times, sometimes horrified. The story (for newcomers) deals with a naive, awkward schoolboy Leo, invited by his far grander friend Marcus to summer at Brandham Hall in Norfolk. His shy adoration of Marion, the sister, gives him the task of carrying messages between her and a rough tenant farmer, Ted Burgess, without understanding how transgressive this is. The final disaster, for which the child feels responsible, has blighted Colston’s afterlife: the question is whether in memory he can find redemption. In an age very conscious of childhood trauma and dangerous memory it could hardly be more topical.

 

 

 

 

Although it is, of course, also thoroughly Edwardian. Wood’s text catches all Hartley’s period atmosphere: not least in the language and unawareness of the two schoolboys (peerless on press night – William Thompson as the sensitive Leo, Archie Stevens as the rumbustious, very funny Marcus, very Molesworth in his prepschool slangy “come on, old turnip-top!”). They sing like angels, especially Leo, Thompson more than holding his own in duets with Michael Crawford. But Gemma Sutton’s Marion is pure magic too: arrogant in her beauty, recklessly in love, manipulating the boy’s adoration, daughter of a time when, as her gentlemanly fiancé says, “Nothing is ever a lady’s fault” but she pays for that with her freedom.

 

 

 

The sombre, disfigured Viscount Trimingham is Stephen Carlile, again catching the period manner exactly, and Issy van Randwyck, correctly matriarchal, finally explodes into terrifying fury as her plans unravel. As for Stuart Ward’s Ted, he conveys enough crass roughness to underline the social impossibility of the affair, and enough solid decency beneath it to serve the tale’s climax and conclusion.

 

 

 

There are some stunningly beautiful songs – not least Leo’s yearning sense of emerging as a butterfly in the hot, hot dangerous summer, and Crawford’s redemptive finale;. The set-pieces, swimming-party, cricket match and denouement, are climactic. But it is the line of the story, the urgency and emotional truth Wood and Taylor bring out of it, which sends you away happily startled.
box office 0844 579 1971 to 15 october
rating five

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June 3, 2016 · 8:58 am

THE ALCHEMIST Swan, Stratford

THE RSC IN ROMPING MOOD 

 

 

Credulity and the con-artist, blinding-with-science and the selling of snake-oil, belong to all human eras. Ben Jonson’s play is set in 1610, when a householder flees the London plague and servants illicitly use the premises for their own ends. But as Polly Findlay’s deliciously daft, high-speed farce of foolishness develops, some of the pleasure lies in recognizing modern parallels.

 

 

The foolish Abel Drugger , a gloriously daft RSC debut from young Richard Leeming , begs the “alchemist” Subtle (Mark Lockyer in ratty flowing locks and assorted magic robes) for astrological advice on where to put the door and shelves in his new shop: pure feng-shui. Other customers drawn in by Subtle and the butler Face (Ken Nwosu) might as well be moderns being sold fake legal highs, dating services, horoscopes, and – in the case of the magnificently ambitious Sir Epicure Mammon – financial advice. Ian Redford in a vast beard and vaster leather breastplate gets a private round of applause for an oligarchically barmy riff on what he will do when the Philosopher’s Stone brings him vast wealth : feasts of dolphin-milk butter, carps’ tongues, camels’ heels dissolved in pearls and eaten with amber spoons, fish-skin gloves perfumed with Paradise, all that. He’d fit in beautifully with the modern superyacht set. Kastril, “an angry boy”, delivered with insane energy and lunatic moves by Tom McCall, just wants to learn to deliver a showy quarrel without personal risk: today he’d be on Top Gear. There is even, amid the cant about Ptolemy and Paracelsus, a reference to Temple Church, so Dan Brown believers can nod sagely at that…

 

 

 

Nobody is virtuous in a Jonson romp and everyone quarrels, including the male con-artists, forever being hauled back into line by their formidable female partner Dol Common, and two Anabaptist monks from Amsterdam (yes, it’s that sort of show, Monty Python can teach it nothing) . Surly, who comes with Sir Epicure to scoff and then disguises himself as a dazzlingly garish Spaniard to expose the con, wants his own cut of the proceeds (a rich widow who by then is being fought over by most of them). Even Hywel Morgan’s returning householder turns a blind eye in return for a slice.

 

 

 

The pace increases scene by scene and the physical comedy is stunning, even without the Act 2 explosion: to the point that poor Mark Lockyer had to be helped offstage for ten minutes on press night with a torn knee (he came back, unbowed, despite artistic director Greg Doran’s sporting offer from the stage to “tell you the rest of the story myself” ) . And the costumes help no end: a bustle you could set out a tea-party on, pantaloons the size of Smartcars and in one of the more chaotic interventions Joshua McCord being smothered in The Petticoat Of Fortune.

 

 

 

There’s a standout performance too from a second RSC debutante Siobhan McSweeney as Dol Common, culminating in her dangling irritably overhead in a delightfully unmanageable aerial sequence, a fairy godmother in bloomers, crinoline and a faux-posh accent. Normally it’s a stuffed crocodile up on that rope, a creature which I keep thinking I have seen dangling over the Swan stage before (was it in Arden of Faversham?? or The City Madam? help!). And Ken Nwosu – who in an elegant final moment of meta-theatre sees us off – gets to use Crocky’s jaws as a moneybox.

 
So a happy night. I hope Mr Lockyer’s knee gets some good physio, and he knows it was worth it. For us, anyway…
box office 0844 800 1110 to 6 Aug, then Barbican in autumn
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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June 2, 2016 · 8:08 am

KENNY MORGAN Arcola, E8

ADRIFT ON ANOTHER DEEP, BLUE, LONELY SEA…

 
The Deep Blue Sea is Terence Rattigan’s masterpiece (and about to play at the National Theatre). A young woman who has left her eminent older husband for an alcoholic young fighter-pilot is found at the start lying by a gas fire, being revived by down-at-heel neighbours after a suicide attempt in a shabby boarding-house. It is, in the end, redemptive. But in real life the three ill-starred lovers were men: young Kenny Morgan had left Rattigan for a younger lover and was being left in his turn by Alec Lennox. And Morgan died; Rattigan, after long minutes of silent shock at the news, resolved to make a play.

 

 

 

He changed the gender of course: Kenny became Hester. Homosexuality was illegal, imprisonable. As was attempted suicide.Years later, the playwright deplored this need for “Lord-Chamberlain-induced sex-change dishonesty”, and wondered whether to rewrite Kenny’s story as it was. He didn’t: so Mike Poulton, in homage to a past master and justice to those bitter pre-Wolfenden days, gives us Kenny’s story.

 

 
Like Rattigan’s play it is set in one room, in one day: a seedy Camden of 1948, a Patrick-Hamilton world brilliantly evoked in Robert Innes Hopkins’ stark room, scuffed and threadbare below a glimmering urban window. Director Lucy Bailey draws out some stunning performances including sharp cameos from the two women: Marlene Sidaway’s judgmentally fussy landlady (“His sort…musicians…theatricals.. least said soonest mended”) and Lowenna Melrose as Norma Hastings, cynically perceptive part-time girlfriend of the bisexual Lennox.

 

 
The core though is with three men: Kenny, the heartless Lennox, and Rattigan himself as he twice arrives, fastidiously appalled by the flat, trying to help and reclaim his young lover. Each has a different view of love. Kenny, painfully sweet and helplessly needy, wants a real relationship but also the impossible public validation of it : he still simmers with affront that in his years with the famous and socially lionized “Terry”, he had to live in a secret separate flat ,and once got introduced as his golf caddy. With Lennox his neediness becomes disastrous, because the younger man “just wants everybody to have fun”. Pierro Niel-Mee plays it with black-browed, bisexual brio, and a cruelty only available to the very, very young. And Rattigan too is perfect: senatorial, big in his grand overcoat, offering help and money and wanting his Kenny back, but on the same discreet terms. “Everything comes back to shame!” cries Kenny. The theme of gay shame and that long legal persecution and hiding runs through the play, alongside the close reflection of The Deep Blue Sea, darkening it with that history even as it affirms that love, desire, disappointment and betrayal are not confined to one gender or orientation.

 

 

 

Another close reflection is that Poulton borrows entire the figure of the struck-off, Austrian Jewish doctor who rescues Kenny first time round and lectures him on endurance and survival; George Irving is a dry, powerful Ritter. But Poulton adds another lodger too: Dafydd Lloyd, an Admiralty clerk who, shy and gauche and well-meaning, reminds Kenny of two things: the recent war (“We lost a lot of shipping, a lot of good men, there’s no going back”) and endearingly pleads that beyond racking emotion lies life. “S”not that bad being ordinary, old chap..”.

 

 
I wondered at times whether the play was a little too long (two and a half hours with its interval), and needed a Rattigan discipline: we hear a lot of repetition of Kenny’s hopeless need for public acknowledgement. But a day later, I think not. It was all necessary, and very fine.

BOX OFFICE 020 7503 1646
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TO 18 JUNE
RATING FOUR   4 Meece Rating

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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.
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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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