February 11, 2016 · 11:48 pm

THE END OF LONGING Playhouse, SW1

IN THE END, AN HONOURABLE PLAY

 

Its fame rolls before it: a debut play, premiered in London by Matthew Perry. To a generation of young adults (and to many far younger, thanks to ceaseless repeats) he is “Chandler from FRIENDS”. Moreover, Perry has openly talked about his alcoholism, amphetamine use and rehab, and contributes to allied causes. And the play itself, in which he stars, is about four of his contemporaries – the Friends generation now rising forty – living in New York and still not settled in life.

 

Small surprise, then, that the audience is young, prone to go “whoo!” at Perry’s first appearance in the bar-room set as the defiantly debonair Jack, declaring his unswerving dedicated to drink. Small wonder that some, near us ,were young enough to go “aaah’ at pushbutton romantic or touching moments. And, to be brutal, small wonder that the first half is low on subtlety or ambiguity (the four characters all, in US sitcom style, tend to say both to one another and sometimes direct to us, exactly what they mean and feel: no scope for guessing or revelation).

 
So there are moments of flat dismay in that first half, which had too much of a first-draft feeling for comfort. What happens is just that Jack the drunkard falls for Stephanie the beautiful, cynical high-class prostitute (Jennifer Mudge) and her neurotic, baby-hungry friend Stevie (Christina Cole) hooks up rather contemptuously with the apparently dim Joe (Lloyd Owen) even though he is, she moans, so stupid he doesn’t even have a therapist…

 

Thus there are moments in that first act when you glumly think that it’s just Sex and the City without the wit and one-liners, or Friends run to seed. The uncommitted might abandon it at the interval. But they shouldn’t. The second act catches fire, as at last some reality burns off the sitcom fluffiness. Stevie and Joe tentatively commit, because she’s pregnant, but Jack’s drinking becomes no longer cute and knowing but ugly and disruptive. An angry stalemate with Stephanie brings a rift when he won’t give up drink and she won’t give up escort work. In a telling line about drink he lays it out: without it, he is “needy, not funny and constantly afraid”.

 
A real crisis occurs around the pregnancy and the four find themselves in a hospital. The jokes become bitter; Perry is a terrific comedian (his gloomy announcement to an offstage nurse “You are not a nice person” is a delight). But when he leaves his distraught friends because he needs a bar, there is a real bitterness. Owen’s dim Joe, meanwhile, grows in decency and strength before our very eyes – a joy to watch = and this ironically means that the comedy around his comparative unsophistication is funnier (when he uses the world “vicissitudes”, the others stare in astonishment).
And it is Joe who finally bursts the bubble of frightened compulsion in the other couple. “There are ten million alcoholics in the world, talk to one of them! Life is not as complicated as you two make out. Stop being such fucking morons and sort your shit out!”.
So at last, in a moment of such genuine value to his generation that the play’s early weaknesses are forgiven, Perry steps forward as if at a first AA meeting, and delivers a speech which is wrenching, honest, deeply felt and lived. And if some fans leap to their feet in applause, you feel he earned it. As the author protectively says, it’s fiction, he is not Jack. But he knows him pretty damn well. And the use he is making of him is honourable.

box office 0844 871 7631.  http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/playhouse-theatre/
to 14 May

rating three

3 Meece Rating

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February 10, 2016 · 10:11 am

THE HERBAL BED Royal, Northampton then touring

SHAKESPEARE’S TOWN LAID BEFORE US

 
The year 1613: somewhere offstage old Shakespeare is dying, and in her husband’s physic-garden, competent and dignified, his daughter Susanna assists her middle-aged husband Doctor Hall. She manages her small daughter and the maid Hester, laughs with the neighbour Rafe Smith who comes by to sell ribbons, and impatiently fends off the young buck Jack, a local grandee’s son who is supposed to be learning herbal medicine from the doctor. Jack, bright but unreliable, rattles off his lessons about worm-poultices, women with “irregular lunar evacuations” and the use of lead and turpentine against “Signor Gonhorrea, the Italian disease”. That is, when he is not sticking his hand in Hester’s skirt or conjuring up unwelcome memories of boyhood days when he, Rafe and Susanna all larked together by the Avon.

 
Peter Whelan’s play, revived with perfect timing in the quatercentenary, draws you in with effortless grace, evoking from the start both the period and the intimate family tensions . Emma Lowndes’ Susanna seems almost an Ibsen heroine, married to an undemonstrative academic and more than tempted by Rafe (Philip Correia) who is in an unhappy marriage after the death of his two children. Lowndes gives Susanna a spirited individuality, at first seemingly wrapped in duty, but wilder, on the edge of infidelity when she finds herself alone in the night-scented garden with Rafe, and “Love’s alchemy” makes wrong things right. He is the one who, gripped by honour, hesitates.

 
Their desire, though unconsummated, is almost her downfall when the irritated, sacked and arrogant Jack (Matt Whitchurch, every inch the Hooray Henry) drunkenly denounces her in the pub for adultery. Clerical court records of the year show that Susanna did defend such an accusation. The doctor reacts with disbelief and horror and defends her honour vigorously yet – with a marvellous, layered, ambiguous performance by Jonathan Guy Lewis – he knows deep down that his wife’s heart is not quite his. Susanna, only technically innocent, suborns Hester to a whiteish lie about the order of events on that evening. Again, the two women’s relationship is beautifully evoked (and Charlotte Wakefield’s Hester gets her great scene later on).

 
When it becomes clear that the Church court will not sit before the mellow old Santa-bearded Bishop but his Vicar-General, a suitable shudder runs through us because in an artful opening scene Whelan lets us glimpse Michael Mears’ Goche: a tall grim figure in Puritan black and tight cap who looms and shudders like a tall disapproving ferret as he condemns the morality of the doctor’s trade, since illness is clearly a divine punishment. We foresee trouble, and indeed when Jonathan Fensom’s pretty garden set abruptly becomes an echoing Worcester Cathedral, Mears gives a terrific pouncing, chilly, hypnotically alarming interrogation as poor Hester the country girl sways with cathedral vertigo, looking up at the soaring God-filled vaulting overhead.

 

So we have a society in change: passionate modern lovers, a dutiful decent scientist (“I am no bigot, I treat Roman Catholics, even a Popish priest”). We have the arrogant gentry hooray-Henry making trouble, and the cold Churchman grasping atavistically at Godly power. Director James Dacre, who leads this theatre, a few years back memorably directed another Whelan play , the WW1 story of The Accrington Pals. Here the same sense of careful respect of period combines with universal recognizable humanity in a tight, instinctively connected ensemble.

 

In his programme notes Dacre reflects on modern parallels: intrusion, private lives hypocritically exposed, a dramatic inquisitorial public inquiry. But for me the greatest pleasure was the sense of 17c smalltown England, lovingly and domestically evoked. Scientific effort and religious power, private desires defying convention, serious debates about honour and the heart: Shakespeare’s world. He may have set Othello and Iago in distant wars and made jealous Leontes a king, but he had seen their archetypes in just such a Stratford as this.

 
Box office: 01604 624811 / http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk to 27 Feb
then touring to 7 May – Cambridge next.
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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February 6, 2016 · 10:39 am

RABBIT HOLE Hampstead Theatre NW3

THE DEEPEST GRIEF OBSERVED

 

Pretty much everyone agreed – here and on its West End transfer- that the American David Lindsay-Abaire’s GOOD PEOPLE was a masterpiece, with its defiant, vigorous lead played by Imelda Staunton on barnstorming form, and a dryly humane treatment of class divisions putting it streets ahead of most recent British attempts on the theme. Now, this time under director Ed Hall, we have a slightly earlier play by the same author and there will be more division. Some may find blandness in its understated naturalism and want more firecracker emotional outbursts. But I honour it, and suspect that anybody who has lived through a deep and shattering grief, and seeks commonality of understanding, will do the same.

 

The playwright admits that he wrote it when he first became a parent, to face down the worst fear. Here Becca and Howie lost their five-year-old Danny in an accident eight months earlier: torpedoed by grief, with no blame to attach, they are treading separate paths of sorrow, perilously unable to converge. In restraint and in growth, Claire Skinner and Tom Goodman-Hill play it faultlessly. We first find Becca, a smart college-educated Sotheby’s girl turned full-time Mom, carefully folding two or three years’ worth of little Danny’s dungarees and T-shirts for the charity shop. I kept thinking of Shakespeare’s Lady Constance in King John:
“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and own with me…
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form…”

 
But no such lyrical expression comes from Becca. Controlled, patient, tensely sensible, she has to listen to her rougher-edged sister Izzy (Georgina Rich) peering at her refined desserts – “Is that a pie?” “A torte” – and recounting a bar-room brawl with a woman whose boyfriend has – oh yeah – made Izzy pregnant. But she refuses the offer of Danny’s beautifully kept clothes because it would be “weird” if her child wore them. The bereaved mother flinches. Meanwhile she is gradually stripping the house of reminders, and wants to move. But Howie takes the other track, cherishes marks of his son, and wants the comfort of embraces and lovemaking which his wife refuses: even a shoulder massage is too dangerous, it is the very tension holding her together. So the father sits alone watching the last video of Danny; the mother upstairs in the dead child’s room. Ashley Martin-Davis’ scrupulous, intimate set underlines their division: she aloft, he far away alongside the stage in a tiny den, kitchen and living-room their arena of conflict. Penny Downie, as brash as Izzy, is the two women’s mother; a deus ex machina is Sean Delaney as the high school senior who drove the car when the child ran out, and who bravely needs to meet them for his own peace.

 

 

He does, finally, and we get the metaphor of the rabbit-hole, the wormhole in the universe down which we all peer for a better, parallel universe. That meeting is just about the only event: most of the play is finely judged and beautifully nuanced conversations over months. The grandmother torpedoes Izzy’s birthday with a laboured discussion about whether the Kennedy family was cursed, and whether Onassis died of grief, in order to challenge Becca’s attitude: Howie’s hurt emerges in a demand to let him have his exiled dog back home because Granny is overfeeding it.
Bathos, absurdity, foibles and class clashes are allowed into the mix; strong laughs as well as painfully attentive silences.

 

Familiar side-effects of grief are admitted: the irritation of comparison (the family also saw an adult brother’s addiction and suicide, and Becca won’t accept that her mother’s loss is like hers. There’s the classic offstage friend who can’t bear to get in touch so the grieving family is unfairly forced to make the running; the other kind of wrong friend, who enjoys “sharing” grief but doesn’t assuage it. Emotional outbursts are brief and deliberately curtailed, as in real life. It is subtle and truthful and wise, sad and funny and beautifully paced and acted. The resolution it offers is not insultingly simplistic, only a small hope that one day you can crawl out from under the grief and just carry it “like a brick in your pocket”.

 
Box office: 020-7722 9301 to 5 March

Rating   four

4 Meece Rating

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February 4, 2016 · 8:21 am

THE MASTER BUILDER The Old Vic SE1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS OLD IDEAS COMING BACK TO HAUNT THEIR CREATOR

The Master Builder, Halvard Solness, is universally acknowledged by his townsfolk as a lucky man: self-made and supremely successful in business, his good fortune is not due to skill or merit, but to a terrible accident many years ago, which also killed his twin sons and destroyed his marriage. However, it also gave him the ability to build and sell houses on the land where his wife’s treasured ancestral home once stood; local competition soon crumbled away, “making me the builder of homes, but at the price of never having a home of my own again.”  Rob Howell’s design surrounds the stage with shattered timbers, creating a precarious, imaginary world in which Ibsen examines the exhilaration, and guilt, of getting just what you wish for. Solness is not a man who has survived life’s trials, but rather one who is permanently enslaved by them, haunted by shameful memories, yet clinging defiantly to the position he has gained, convinced increasingly that whatever he wills will irrevocably come to pass. Ibsen processes this existential paradox through references to the trolls and demons of Norwegian folktale, linking this late play to his earliest works and bringing a tinge of surrealism to this otherwise viciously real human drama. Ralph Fiennes gives us both Solness’ callous cruelty, ruthlessly and deliberately insensitive to the plight of others in securing his aims, and his extraordinary personal vulnerability: almost mad with unresolved grief, his fortune poisoned by the absence of children, the word “nursery” stabbing repeatedly through his lines as those little rooms lie, forever empty, upstairs.

Much has been made of Solness’ intense relationships with the young girls on stage, his secretary Kaja Fosli (a warm, intense Charlie Cameron) and the mysterious arrival Hilde Wangel (a passionately sustained and self-possessed Sarah Snook), which have ready parallels in Ibsen’s own life. For director Matthew Warchus, it is not the bonds but the gaps between old men and young women that come across most forcibly: the constant mismatching, the fundamental misunderstandings, the unsatisfactory self-deceptions which only ever provide temporary, delusional escape from reality. It is Solness’ broken marriage with his wife Aline (Linda Emond) which reveals the most: he calls her “a greater builder than I… A builder of souls,” yet pain has frozen their continuing love for each other, now always, tragically, expressed to others – never to themselves. Eventually, exhausted by “being chained to a corpse”, Solness hurls himself towards Hilde, who proves herself to be the tragic inheritor of his power to wish ideas into reality: Hilde’s ten-year girlhood obsession with Solness is destroyed as it is finally fulfilled in a powerful climax which shatters the stage, as well as characters’ lives.

From its subtle opening scenes to its bloodcurdling finale, David Hare’s faithful new adaptation of The Master Builder takes us well beyond mid-life crisis into full-blown existential crisis. Occasional falters in pacing early on cannot detract from the ultimate power of this piece, mainly thanks to the strong cast, with fine supporting performances from James Dreyfus as a serious, compassionate Dr Herdal and Martin Hutson as a tremblingly furious Ragnar Brovik.

– Charlotte Valori

Rating: Four mice 4 Meece Rating

At The Old Vic, SE1 until 19th March. Box Office: +44 (0)844 871 7628

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February 2, 2016 · 10:17 pm

RED VELVET Garrick SW1

RED VELVET:   DEEP AND RICH AS EVER
This (I sneaked in to an early preview , because I am on holiday) was my third visit to
Lolita Chakrabarti’s play, starring her husband the matchless Adrian Lester (my Times review, paywalled, is on http://tinyurl.com/nbfj6dl – an earlier review is on this site. I liked it from the start, , as everyone else did; was please to be one of those who voted both Chakrabarti and Lester their awards at the Critics’ Circle a couple of years ago. I called it “sharp and entertaining”, and was delighted by the tribute to a largely forgotten theatre hero: Ira Aldridge, a black American actor who in the 1830’s, even before slavery was anned ,replaced the ailing Edmund Kean as Othello at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. For two nights the “negro” strangled the milk-white Desdemona onstage before shocked, racist Victorian opinion stopped him. It is always fascinating to observe how much extreme racism has an element of sexual dread in it, a white man’s fear of the powerful black: living in South Africa as a teenager for an awful year, I remember that well. And you’ll find it too in that splendid musical MEMPHIS.

 

 

Anyway, I loved Lester’s performance – who wouldn’t? – and enjoyed the secondary theme – amusingly illustrated – of how acting was moving from Kean’s declamatory, stylized style towards more naturalistic and passionate performances. Thinking back, I remembered those things, and also moment when an embarrassed cast suddenly realize that the manager has bravely cast Aldridge and that he is black. I appreciated, too, the slyly feminist device of book-ending of the play with a scene in Poland as a young woman reporter, herself underrated and patronized, inveigles herself in to interview the aged actor whose successes across Europe never quite wiped out the memory of humiliation in London. I remembered the final scene when we see with a jolt that even this victory has required him, nightly, to “white-up” grotesquely with panstick to play King Lear, and the apposite rage of his final “I’ll not weep!” and threat of “the terrors of the earth”.

 

 

But seeing it yet again, and on the far side of Adrian Lester’s stunning and thoroughly modern Othello at the National Theatre – and, what is more – in one of those plushy Victorian theatres where it all happened – I can confirm again that as sometimes happens the play has grown bigger: stronger, more remarkable, finding deeper feeling in the deep red velvet folds of bygone theatricalia. There is now a more shocking magic in Aldridge’s deep, dark dignity and bitter banked-down rage; more charm and mischief of his lighter moments and the edgy intelligence of his discussions with his co-star Desdemona : once again a splendid, sparky Charlotte Lucas giving Miss Tree a courage and sexiness while maintaining our understanding that she has grown up Victorian. There’s real brilliance as the two meld stylized 1830s mannerisms with real emotion in the terrifying handkerchief scene which closes the first half. And there’s fascination – for us theatre anoraks – in comparing it with Lester’s interaction a couple of years back with his modern Desdemona, Olivia Vinall…

 

 

Mark Edel-Hunt is splendidly affronted as young Charles Kean, as is Emun Elliott as poor Laporte, the manager. There is real power and misery in Aldridge’s final row with Laporte, and generosity in the author’s letting him express the frustration of those who, faced with a moral choice, decide to keep their job rather than be Spartacus. Indhu Rubasingham’s production is a jewel in this Branagh season: we should all be grateful.

 
Box Office: 0844 482 9673
Online Bookings: http://www.branaghtheatre.com
 to 27 feb

rating five   5 Meece Rating

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January 28, 2016 · 9:53 pm

JEEPERS CREEPERS Leicester Square, Lounge WC2

MARTY FELDMAN:  A GREAT COMIC’S ENDGAME
Next week at the Jermyn there opens a play which is a memorial to a late-life friendship with Lucille Ball; already on the far side of the Charing Cross Road we have this; Robert Ross’ 90-minute imagining of the last years of another even more troubled comic who struggled with success, its burden on a marriage, and a frivolous persona which tended to take over. Marty Feldman’s was a brilliant performer but also a key 1960’s comedy scriptwriter – for everyone from Archie Andrews the vent doll to Michael Bentine and the Bootsie and Snudge sitcom. He worked with, or knew everyone, in the last years of old-style Variety, even Max Miller; he drank with Dylan Thomas and compared “insanities” with Spike Milligan.

 
But then he was picked up to play Igor the hunchback in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, and there came a lethal few years attempting to scale the heights of Hollywood and become an auteur-director himself . It ended in alcoholism and a lonely death far from home. Ross makes much of that dangerous distance; the Marty he portrays is always tugged by “an umbilical cord to the European tradition of comedy”, as his career falters and dies in that sunny, hotly commercial, perilously irony-free world way out West.

 
It is an imagining by Ross, though based on the researches in his biography; the first half consists of a late-night bedroom conversation with Marty’s wife Lauretta, and the second sees the relationship stressed, with him finally alone, drunk and depressed in New Mexico in 1982 during the filming of the excoriated film Yellowbeard he made with a few ex-Pythons (interestingly, it is a different ex-Python, Terry Jones, who directs Ross’ play.)

 
At first there is unease in watching this slow-motion crash: David Boyle plays Feldman, curly-haired and nimble, so well that you forget you are not looking at the pop-eyed reality, even when real Marty-jokes about his appearance crop up: like his claim that the studio insured him against falling over and getting “figured” rather than disfigured. Lauretta, supporter and patiently exasperated wife, is Rebecca Vaughan; she actually emerges faster than Boyle’s Marty does as a rounded and credible personality.

 

In fact Lauretta is in some ways the more interesting to watch: in the first half the rather pushy, determined backer who enjoys Beverly Hills and is keen to keep her wayward man’s erratic prattle from torpedoing his career on American talk shows, and therefore their new life. In this section there is a bit too much of his gagging and posing (indeed the play does not need its interval, and would tighten up beautifully at about 70 minutes).

 

Later, though, Vaughan shines as the wife’s brittle confidence dissolves into pain at his adulteries (“success went to my crotch” says Marty breezily, adding “…they all remind me of you, anyway” . We see a genuinely touching love and comradeship under strain. As he returns from another girlfriend with a gag, she grits “Not everything is a joke, Marty!’ to which, tellingly, he can only reply “It really is..”.

 

The endgame in a New Mexico hotel room is, of course, grim: but then, it was. We have been watching, in this close-up studio below Leicester Square, 100 minutes of comic, alcoholic self-destruction and ultimately self-pity, and that is wrenchingly sad. But Marty deserves remembering. The pity is that it is only his decline that makes drama.

box office 020 7734 2222 to 20 Feb
rating three

3 Meece Rating

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January 26, 2016 · 9:56 pm

THE MOTHER Tricycle, NW6

THE EMPTY NEST, THE TROUBLED MIND

 

Hold tight. It’s the French genius litterateur Florian Zeller messing with our heads again. We are confused, wary, deceived and unsettled by the tricks of emotional distress and delusion, imaginary conversations which might be real, and real ones reimagined, all in a bleak white space. Gina McKee is a mother in her forties: sulky and resentful, desolate and impossible, demanding and lost and provocative and depressed and increasingly crazy. We first meet her when her husband – Richard Clothier, businesslike and weary, comes home talking about a seminar in Leicester he is to lead at the weekend. We learn that she is depressed, obsessively missing her adult son Nicholas and resenting his girlfriend; that life seems to her to cheat women, as now the children are grown she is lonely and unoccupied, pitying herself because “you all leave, after using me up”.

 

So far, so familiar. We have all heard the plaints of unimaginative mothers about the empty nest which they somehow never foresaw. But this one is shot through with flickers of oddity: vicious asides, startling admissions that she never liked her daughter, only the son, and thinks her husband is having affairs. The same scene recurs, only with differences; suddenly we are unsure how much of it is real, how much in her head.

 

The son returns – William Postlethwaite, lanky and sullen and oppressed, and she is sometimes cooingly maternal, sometimes unnervingly flirtatious, sometimes worryingly dotty. The husband’s departure for his seminar recurs, sometimes fulfilling her suspicions, sometimes not. The absent girlfriend appears. But she is also the father’s secretary, the absent daughter, a nurse: all young and therefore threatening. There is a red dress which two characters wear at once. Time sllps and slithers. Sometimes characters say things – or seem to – with startling violence. The suggestion hovers (possibly just in her mind, but who knows?) that the best gift a young man can give his lover is matricide: putting an end to the incubus who bore him.

 

McKee, ever more lost, seems to hear a mocking young female voice: “You will grow old on your own, unhappy and alone”. But what with the blackouts and the jangling noises of memory, children’s voices, a school bell, discordant piano (Jon Nicholls’ sound design), we are not sure we anyone, other than her own brain, says it.
It was the gallant little Tricycle which brought in – from the Bath Ustinov – Florian Zeller’s The Father: a devastating, wilfully confusing portrayal (one could almost say, a shared experience) of dementia: a pure stark use of theatre demonstrating how it might be to live from minute to minute unsure of who is who and how much of it all is inside your head. Since then, Kenneth Cranham’s unforgettable performance has moved into the West End and gathered more five-star excitement: now the Trike brings us this, which Zeller wrote two years earlier. Again Christopher Hampton translates, and we can observe in another 90-minute tour de force how the playwright’s technique of alienation was being refined. So Zeller-minded has London theatre become that his latest is due to premiere soon in the Menier. His talent is a more than welcome revelation.

 

box office 020 7328 1000 to 5 March

rating Four   4 Meece Rating

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January 23, 2016 · 8:23 am

THE PIANIST OF WILLESDEN LANE St James Theatre, SW1

A MEMORIAL IN MUSIC

 

This is a solo show, a memorial to a mother and to a generation. It is performed not by an actor but by the American concert pianist, Mona Golabek.  Yet as a piece of theatre – 90 minutes long – its simplicity and immensity create one of the greatest impacts of the year so far.. If you don’t shed, or at least suppress, one or two tears I may have to disown you.

 

It is done with gentle simplicity:  great gilt frames, a grand piano and the narrator. But there is Grieg and Chopin and Beethoven, snatches of Scriabin and Debussy , thundering Rachmaninoff and gentle Bach: all woven seamlessly into the stark, terrible, courageous, touching tale of one girl’s journey through the 20th century’s greatest ordeal.

 

Golabek introduces herself, and thereafter speaks as her mother, Lisa Jura. The frames become portraits or scraps of monochrome newsreel as we are taken into the world of a little Viennese girl in the ‘30s, who always dressed up smart to skip down the road for her beloved piano lessons.  Until one day her Herr Professor tells her, looking at the floor, that the new law says he cannot teach a Jewish child.
Her father , a successful tailor, loses business and goes out gambling in desperation. On Kristallnacht, stripped and spat on , he manages to keep hold of a scrap of paper. A single ticket for the Kindertransport.  And Lisa is chosen, her mother adjuring her to go to England, find a professor, and “always hold on to the music”. She is fourteen years old when she takes that train to Liverpool Street. Through her next six years, and through the story as told on stage by her daughter Golabek, it is the music which sustains both her and us.
It is easy to forget, in pride at the Kindertransport rescue and the selfless heroism of parents who sent their children away, that mere safety is not all a child needs. Lisa, holding in her head forever a memory of the lost home and the lost lessons, was sent as a skivvy to a grand manor where she crept downstairs by night and pretended, hands hovering over the keys, to play the grand piano. When the silence was too much to bear and she played, the servants gathered marvelling but the head housemaid reproved her: going alone to London to protest, she found a berth in a crowded hostel – 17 girls and 14 boys, in Willesden lane. It happened to have a piano, so she stayed.
It is told often with great humour, Golabek’s voice and narrative gradually becoming more mature (the adaptation by Hershey Felder is skilful, economical and understated, wisely leaving the huge emotions to the music).   The child plays alone in the basement in the Blitz, trying to drown the bombs with Grieg.  War news on the radio and readings from other children’s letters mark the anxious days, but they are all sent to work, she sewing uniforms in a factory.  The hostel is destroyed, the young refugees scattered, adjured by Mrs Cohen always to “Show the British people your utmost respect and gratitude”.  She rebuilds, brings them back together, urges Lisa to a scholarship at the RA.  Lisa sees Dame Myra Hess at the stripped National Gallery , playing Bach so that, as the great pianist says, “through all the dark times we never forget our humanity”.
And all through it Golabek keeps returning to the piano, sometimes not for five minutes or more when Lisa is exiled from it, but always returning triumphant, to send out waves of faith and defiance and longing, the spirit of lost Vienna.   A technical note: Golabek is sometimes narrating, even as she plays, and the sound balance is, mysteriously, perfect.

She plays her Wigmore Hall debut at last, and the VE bells ring; but Auschwitz is uncovered , and more news must be borne. Yet still there is humour and hope, for the young must look forward. She  fancies a boy in the hostel, Aaron who joins the RAF; she meets her future husband ,a Free French officer, when she plays hotel piano to soldiers before D-Day.  In this bygone teenager’s story, and the music which pervades it, the veil of time rolls back.
box office 0844 264 2140 to 27 February.
Rating Five.   5 Meece Rating

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January 22, 2016 · 10:01 pm

GUYS AND DOLLS Savoy Theatre, SW1

ANOTHER CHICHESTER SMASH COMES WEST
This is a revisit, to a partly recast Chichester show: and I must admit I had qualms about losing that generosity, that overflowing vigour you get with the classic musicals on the Festival Theatres’ great three-sided arena. Back in the retro, ornate proscenium world of the Savoy I feared it would be somehow constrained by the square magnificence. And, not least, whether the amazing 3D choreography by Andrew Wright and Carlos Acosta would feel cramped.
But the magic is still there: how could it not be, in Frank Loesser’s exuberant 1950 fairytale of gamblers, showgirls and tambourine-banging missionaries out to convert them. The book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, drew on Damon Runyon’s world: a sunny, larky, airbrushed almost Wodehousian interpretation of New York lowlife. Even Big Jule (Nic Greenshields) is lovable in his gun-toting menace. And Peter McKintosh’s great illuminated arc of nostalgic advertising posters – pure Disney, in a good way – works remarkably well, especially in the clever use of deep darkness upstage, a chiaroscuro effect which makes the stage look bigger than it is. So Gordon Greenberg’s production sings and soars pretty well unfettered. And the choreography – especially the Cuba scene and the leapfrogging, hurtling, somersaulting gamblers in suits and ties – is positively Acostacrobatic, spectacular. “Siddown you’re rocking the boat” is a bit less overwhelming than at Chichester, but still one of the top sights of the London spring. Selina Hamilton is London’s Havana diva, and brawls a treat with the missionary – Siubhan Harrison magnificently taking over as Sgt Sarah with fearless drunken hurtling. And Sophie Thompson’s Miss Adelaide is back, as at Chichester : adorably crazy, whether amid her Hot Box hoofers in gingham corsetry or bewailing her reluctant fiancé. Irresistible is her high Bronx twang swoops gloriously down to a dismayed baritone, her stooping S-shaped anxiety the flip side of her bravura career.

 

In this London production her paramour is David Haig: back in his trademark moustache (we sort of missed it in his magnificent performance in the Madness of George III a couple of years back). He is a lovely Nathan Detroit: a middle-manager of the underworld, one minute assured in his crap-game management, the next cringing at Big Jule, but intensely likeable (and an unsuspectedly fine singer). And Jamie Parker reprises Sky Masterson – chiselled and cool, letting the the character breathe, hesitate, and genuinely change as he falls in love. the laughing cheer when he reappears with his Mission uniform had a real audience warmth to it. And Greenberg’s detailed, loving production keeps its fine passing jokes: my favourite being the moment when he makes momentarily solid the women’s dreams of a ruralized Nathan and domesticated Sky. It takes only seconds, that, but adds to the sum of happiness; so does the real steam from the New York pavement gratings and the momentary appearance (twice) of a wobbly nun on a bicycle with a collecting-bucket.
So yes, the Chichester magic is still there. It can keep its full tally of happy, hoofing, dancing mice. It’s romping on into March, and a fine night out.

box office cft.org.uk 01243 781312 to 12 March
Rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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January 20, 2016 · 11:52 pm

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY Trafalgar 2, SW1

MORE POIGNANT THAN POISONOUS: A 125TH ANNIVERSARY MARKED

 

One wit called it ‘the first French novel in English’, with its seductive evocation of exotic decadence and corrupting wickedness. Critics in the 1890’s sputtered “poisonous…heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction” and fit only for “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys”. In other words, homosexual. But it has outlived them, this Oscar Wilde fable of the beautiful boy Dorian who keeps his fresh appearance while in the attic his portrait snarls, sneers and withers to monstrosity. It has a power beyond its snappy epigrammatism and slightly embarrassing passages of late-Victorian opium-dream exoticism. It deserves respect in the revisiting, not least as a cry of pain from the age of homosexual persecution.
In this version it gets that respect, because Wilde’s only grandson, Merlin Holland, with John O’Connor, has adapted and dramatized it, consulting unseen manuscripts and crucially reintroducing the more explicit homoeroticism which Wilde and his editors prudently removed. Basil Hallward, the decent, vulnerable artist who paints the portrait, now declares himself openly to the scornful Dorian, and does it at the moment when he is pleading with him to give up his decadent criminality. It’s about love: and Basil – not the witty corrupting Lord Henry Wotton or even Dorian himself – is the heart of it. Wilde , who of course was married with children he loved, and not yet exposed as gay, himself admitted that Basil was himself, though Wotton was “what the world thinks me”. There’s a melancholy in that.

 

 

So one approaches the show itself with respect, though it is a mere studio-scale four-hander and – despite some nimble direction by Peter Craze – not as lavish as other attempts have been. Holland and O’Connor’s shaping is effective, and the fragments of additional dialogue are sharp; there’s a lovely moment, not in the book, when the tradesman who carries the picture upstairs is told he can’t look at it, so assumes pornography and hopefully offers Dorian some “French” pictures he has out the back. Wilde’s endless contrarian epigrams in the mouth of Lord Henry (John Gorick slick-haired and bowtied, an overripe Oscar) can become  bit tiresome when one knows them too well. But not everyone does, so that is fine.

 

 

Fine in a more positive sense is the characterisation, notably by Rupert Mason superb as Basil Hallward. He gives restrained painful reality to the painter’s fear of his own helpless worship, mingled with real unease at Wotton’s influence on the boy’s innocence.   Guy Warren-Thomas as Dorian is blond and chiselled enough to make worship credible; though not the conventionally prettiest of youths he has a striking memorable oddity about him, and a slightly wooden stillness and soft romanticism in the first half which works. At least, if you accept that Dorian is “plastic”, corruptible by Wotton’s yellow-book witticisms.  Helen Keeley’s Sibyl Vane is breathily sweet, with a nice humour, and genuinely poignant in her moment of fatally renouncing stage pretence for love.

 

 

All good. A problem though in this four-hander (which might profitably have been framed in artful meta-theatre style to defuse the awkwardness ) is that the doubling and tripling of casting forces three principals to diverge repeatedly from their fully felt main performances and dip hastily jnto caricature acting –   Gorick has to be Sibyl’s Mum, a butler, a blackmailed medic, and an opium-crazed victim of Dorian’s decline; Mason must abandon his troubling, profound Hallward to be a Duchess, a dodgy theatre-manager, Sibyl’s vengeful sailor brother and the framer. As for Helen Keeley, she flowers into seven other characters of diverse ages, all with the same elaborate hairdo as Sibyl, and yes, that is a problem.

 
But it’s only a problem because, below the ripping-yarn quality there is a seriousness in the tale which Holland honours. It’s not just a horror-story – though the smoke, green light, opium pipes and a pleasing creepiness in the second half tend that way.  Dorian’s hedonism is a tragedy, and Wilde knew it. Wotton’s epigrams and praise of fleeting pleasures are just fragile armour against the disappointments of life in the emotional shallows: Wilde knew that too. For where can you live but in the sparkling shallows, when society would damn and imprison you for expressing your deeper self?

 

BOX OFFICE 0844 871 7632 TO 13 Feb

rating three  3 Meece Rating

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January 19, 2016 · 10:39 pm

4000 DAYS Park Theatre, N4

AMNESIA AS A NEW START?

 
In a hospital bed lies Michael: Alistair McGowan, motionless in a coma, we learn, for three weeks. His mother Carol (Maggie Ollerenshaw) holds his hand, has been sleeping in a chair and tending the flowers on his nightstand. Enter – with competing flowers – the third player Paul (Daniel Weyman).

 
Younger, in his lunch-hour from a banal job, Paul is awkward in the frozen presence of the mother, appalled that she is lighting a fag. “Oh” she says airily “He’s been breathing in my cigarettes since he was a baby, he needs familiar things”. Hers is the first shot in an ongoing battle for possession of Michael. For Paul has been, we gradually learn, living as Michael’s partner for ten years. Carol demurs at his offer to take the night watch with a pious “He’ll want to see his mother’s face first” , and the young man’s bald “Why?” gets a good laugh. He observes that actually, Michael only went to see her every three months. Carol ripostes that this is because Paul alienated him and (we shall learn) stopped him from painting in favour of paid work. Although she loves her son , “We mothers do reserve the right to be VERY disappointed”. She refuses to give up the chair. Paul clambers defiantly on the bed to embrace his lover.

 

 

Peter Quilter (who wrote the marvellous “End of the Rainbow”) has placed this timeless mother-in-law conflict in a piquant situation, because when Michael wakes all three are disconcerted to find that he has lost nearly eleven years of memory. He thinks it’s 2005, that his mother has inexplicably got wrinkly, that he is still a painter, and most unnerving of all, he doesn’t know who Paul is. McGowan, so recently a stellar Jimmy Savile in this theatre, evokes the puzzlement and repressed fear of the situation brilliantly; not least because he has, from the first moments of consciousness, revealed Michael as a brittle, sarcastic, amusing and defensive personality (very much his mother’s son, actually, which is satisfying).

 

And so the battle goes on: Carol keen that this should be a fresh start for him, because she reckons Paul made her bright son beige and boring. Paul tries to get his baffled former inamorato up to date with the alarming measure of trolleying in ten years’ worth of copies of The Guardian. Between that and the blasts of ward-TV footage of disasters, bank crashes, Ebola, and Ruby Wax, the poor man has a task ahead of him.

 
Quilter raises  interesting philosophical and psychological questions: might it be good suddenly to believe oneself younger, still hopeful and vigorous before the attrition of maturity and compromise? And how real are any of our memories anyway, since we edit all the time? The dialogue slows a bit in handling this, but the solidity of the three characters and the finely balanced sarky charm of the invalid hold firm.

 
The second act sees a sub-Kandinsky mural being half-finished on the ward wall (actually, its debt to the master’s 1925 Yellow Red Blue is a little too close, given all the lines we’re hearing about the excitement of fresh creativity, but let that pass). It also brings an unexpected, emotionally heroic gesture by Paul. And with a series of memory flashes comes a resolution which I for one found genuinely moving. There is even compassion for Ollerenshaw’s enjoyably bitchy Carol, who betrays at the end the real bleakness of her need to control an adult son. Matt Aston directs, deftly (though a bit more trimming would help) and it’s good to see, once more, the brave upstart Park offering new work. Never dull.

 
box office 0207 870 6876 to 13 Feb
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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January 13, 2016 · 11:10 pm

THIS WILL END BADLY Southwark Playhouse, SE1

BARE AND BLEAK:  A YOUNG MAN’S CRISIS 
The playtext of Rob Hayes’ monologue austerely insists that performance “should not exceed 60 minutes in duration”. This author doesn’t want it larded with significant pauses or dreamy mannerisms: and in honouring his intention, the remarkable Ben Whybrow (directed by Clive Judd) brings it in just under. No mean feat: for all its emotional intricacy and verbal subtleties, the play at that length requires rapid-fire delivery bordering, quite often, on gabble.

 

And that is its strength, and a reason why this 2015 applauded Edinburgh production richly deserves its trip south. It is both terrifying and intermittently funny, unnervingly perceptive about a particular young male crisis. It is deadly earnest in its determination to strip bare some, at least, of the reasons why at Anna Haigh Productions’ show the seats need to be strewn with pamphlets and cards from the  charity CALM: Campaign Against LIving Miserably, which offers peer support to men in crisis.
The protagonist, unnamed, is pacing like a nervy zoo animal, in a state of tense distress and on the edge of suicide. His girlfriend has left him; he is struggling – explicitly and with bleak effective laddish humour – with the physical symptom of an extreme eleven-day constipation. He has a job, which he is losing because he won’t go in, and dreams of writing jingles for advertisements because of their short but unforgettable perfection. He has tried Seroxat, but won’t go back to the GP because of an unreasonable, OCD dread of germs, which also makes him leave his shopping in bus shelters rather than carry bacteria home. He is sleepless, distressed, griping, sorrowful, desperate: suicidal, but uncertain of achieving even that.

 

 

The character grows round and likeable though. He is saddened by porn’s brutality, a “beautiful person providing this profane service for me”, and remembers the loving, decent relationship he has lost. But at extremes he veers off into violent fantasies of killing and predation, crying how little is left for men and their hard-wired need for ascendancy. “We’ve been fixed by society, neutered. By the markets, by diversity, by unwarranted shame, by these loosey-goosey ideas like equality which push exactly not just every single structure mankind has ever built, but also against human nature itself”. He cries “Shaming us won’t work, nothing will work…you’re only pushing us deeper underground, making our conviction all the more venomous. And we will win, we will do anything to win”.
If that, to a feminist reader, seems horrible I can say that it doesn’t actually feel that way on the stage. Because the young man is in front of us, suffering greatly, trapped between an old message telling him he is a lord of creation and a real world which informs him that he isn’t. He needs a father, an elder brother, a mentor, an adult woman who loves him and laughs with him about the cosmic joke of it all. Not every suicidal young male draws his pain from this precise source. But some do, and it was good to see so many young men – and girlfriends – in the audience.

 

box office 0207 407 0234 to 6 Feb
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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January 12, 2016 · 6:43 pm

STONY BROKE IN NO MAN’S LAND Finborough, SW10

A CENTURY ON, THEY WALK BEFORE US

 

 

It was gruesome, politically problematic, tragic and heroic and wasteful; it was a turning-point in history. I have written before about how live, (very often fringe) theatre more than any other media has provoked fruitful reflection on the effects of WW1 (that article here, http://tinyurl.com/q53tp5p ). Now the Finborough, with its eclectic specialization of long- forgotten or brand-new work, briefly brings back last May’s two-man play written and directed by John Burrows.

 

Very fine it is too, framed as a tall tale from ex-Tommies busking with banjo and fiddle in the grim broke years after the war. It was a time when homes and jobs for the “heroes” failed to materialize and Lloyd George’s government genuinely feared a revolution to mirror the Bolsheviks who halfway through had taken the Tsar’s Russia out of the war.
David Brett and Gareth Williams are the men, bemedalled in a stony outdoor bleakness before a tattered Kitchener poster demanding “another 100,000 men”. Their first number (there are a few, though it is far from being a musical) catches that resigned, upbeat melancholy of WW1 songs. Proudly they identify themselves as volunteers, from the two first years before conscription started, but then embark on the story of one fictional conscript: Private Percy Cotton and his fickle girlfriend at home, Nellie. The yarn covers four years, culminating in an odd involvement in the brilliant, conciliatory government gesture of bringing home one “Unknown Warrior” from the fields of death for a grand, communal funeral at the Cenotaph. The stories interwind: the spiritualist fraud Nellie and her willing seduction by a titled official at the War Office, the bereaved parents of a young officer and their servants, Lloyd George himself in anxiety and calculation during the war and its aftermath.

 
It is told with remarkable wit, the pair sliding in and out of characters with consummate skill: Brett is often young Percy but becomes the lecherous politico Sir Gregory and – with particularly effective stiff poignancy – the bereaved mother Lady Elizabeth. Williams is a splendidly affected and self-serving Nellie and a host of others. They use no costumes except two tin hats for rapid moves to the trenches, and only brisk narrative moments, but the clarity is exemplary. As for the payoff, Burrows creates a double irony in the first ever Two Minutes’ Silence, and we gasp.

O844 847 1522 to 26 Jan, Sun-Tues only

rating four   4 Meece Rating

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January 8, 2016 · 1:34 am

GREY GARDENS Southwark Playhouse, SE1

THE BOHO BOUVIERS:  REBELLIOUS RECLUSES

 

Hot on the heels of THE DAZZLE (about the New York Collyer brothers living in hoarderly squalid isolation) this is about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Little Edie half a century later, living in even more eccentric squalor in the Hamptons. Both interpret true stories. Even more thematically satisfying for the playgoer, no sooner has Imelda Staunton bowed out as Mama Rose dominating her daughter in Gypsy, than we can contemplate the equally showbiz- thwarted Edith senior sabotaging hers. Delusion, eccentricity, toxic but irresistible family bonds, musical obsession and memory: great themes, played out with satisfying difference on stages either side of the Thames.

 

GREY GARDENS is inspired by a 1975 cult documentary, exposing the reclusive lives of the first cousin and aunt of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Indeed “Little Edie”, who had a sort of cabaret career, became a cult herself, camp fancy-dress often referencing her dashingly chaotic outfits and the headscarf she wore after reportedly setting fire to her hair. In the opening moments of Scott Frankel’s musical (book by Doug Wright) an announcer sententiously intones “How could American royalty fall so far, so fast?…”

 
Far indeed. There’s a wonderfully distressed, atmospheric wooden set (by Tom Rogers) of rafters, gallery and prop rubbish including a fallen chandelier, birdcage rubbish and broken mementoes. Moody lighting and echoing sounds evoke the broken-down house at Grey Gardens with its 52 cats and feral raccoons in the attic. Squalid, yet the pungent personalities and insouciant one-liners of the women make it weirdly liberating. When Edie complains that the health authority keeps putting leaflets through the door about the mess and is thus just adding to it, you’re on her side.

 

 

We glimpse this 1970’s world first, Sheila Hancock like an old lion beneath a great mane of grey hair and Jenna Russell as the daughter in the first of her barmy outfits, calling the cats. But during the first song it becomes 1942 and Jenna becomes the mother, quarrelling with a younger Little Edie (Rachel Anne Rayham sprightly in daring pink culottes) over how many songs Mama can inflict on the girl’s engagement party to Joe Kennedy Jnr. . The real Edie, by the way, used to claim she would have married Joe and been first Lady if he had not been killed; in sober fact she barely knew him. But for the fiction the romance is solid: Aaron Sidwell perfect as the smart young airman his family planned to be the first Catholic President: “Me and the old man mapped it out. First pick up some medals overseas..” then the Senate.

 

 
The lovers sing happily, but the rackety glamour of Edith senior is a threat: poor Edie protests “the parents of the groom are a li’l bit formal, let them think that we are normal..”. Sure enough her match is torpedoed by the mother’s “proud” account of Edie’s past; to ram the point home, Billy Boyle as old Bouvier instructs his schoolgirl granddaughters Jackie and Lee: “Hit hard, little girls, marry well!”. and excoriates Edith’s pianist George Gould Strong, as “an unsavoury fella, tickles the ivories with fingers as white as a ten-dollar whore”.
Michael Korie’s lyrics are witty, sharp, every song to the point: Thom Southerland, nonpareil director of fully-staged big studio musicals, keeps it roaring along with a nine-piece swing band above. The exuberant rebelliousness of Russell’s Edith senior underlines the theme of the price paid by female eccentricity. Little Edie, eager still for a normal marriage, is part of that price: doomed both by expectations of “aristocratic responsibility” and by her mother’s delusion that her own marriage is solid, though really “marriage is for tax codes and morons, not free spirits like us”.

 
And so to Act 2, 1972 and the pair living as social outcasts in a cloud of flea-powder and cat hairs, eating erratically, bickering, uttering the deathless one-liners with which the real Bouvier-Beales entranced the documentary makers, plus some sharp lyrics (“I had a life I thoroughly enjoyed – an absent spouse and cats to fill the void”.) Sometimes the first half’s characters reappear : as cats, as ghosts, as dreams swirling in the dim light. Sidwell becomes the vague helpful teenage Jerry who wanders in to eat sweetcorn and mend things. Jenna Russell’s Little Edie, only half-immersed in the twilit world her mother enjoys, yearns for freedom but can’t break out; they bicker but depend on one another.

 

Not a happy life, though not as grim as The Dazzle: strong flavoured individuality and sour wit make even its darker moments provoke a laugh or a cheer. Russell carries the heavier burden – the final, heartbreaking lament and heroic moment. But it is Sheila Hancock, triumphantly grimy and defiantly dishevelled in the bug-ridden bed, who becomes a kind of queen. The cast found it hard to stop the audience roaring for more curtain-calls. Another smash for the Southwark.

Box Office: 020 7407 0234
http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk to 6 feb

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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December 27, 2015 · 2:48 pm

QUEEN ANNE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

A HALF-FORGOTTEN QUEEN RISES…

 
School history was terrible. Terrible! We got the Tudors, and a bore-in about the Thirty Years War, but a fog of confusion and a sense of 1066 And All That has long surrounded the Glorious Revolution, Willamanmary, the Spanish Succession, Whigs versus Tories, and why Blenheim mattered. Shamed but invigorated, I now owe much enlightenment to the RSC; this time to playwright Helen Edmundson, whose marvellous The Heresy of Love threw light on Spanish religious despotism.

 

Now she turns her attention to Queen Anne, associated previously by us ill-taught ignorami mainly with fine square brick mansions. Poor Anne – heir of William of Orange, daughter of the deposed Catholic James but herself a staunch Protestant – reigned only from 1702-1714, weakened by her duties and by seventeen pregnancies resulting in only one survivor; a son who grievously died at eleven. The Georges succeeded her and “Georgian” became an era of fame. We do not speak of the Age of Anne.

 
Yet this fascinating, strongly based reimagination of her years acknowledges a woman who, on the face of it far feebler than the great Elizabeth, held the balance in difficult times and through painful personal relationships, not least with her beloved friend Sarah, wife of the Blenheim victor John Churchill, first Earl of Marlborough. Cannily, Edmundson has us meet her first (and several times again) via satire – rampantly rude skits, songs and droopy false breasts deployed by Tom Turner as a hawkish sneering Swift, Carl Prekopp as Defoe, and Jonathan Christie as the pampheteer MP Maywaring. Her friendship with Sarah is mercilessly guyed; so we are primed when we first see her (Emma Cunniffe) dumpy and sad in a nightie as she recovers from the latest miscarriage, suffering the manipulation and power-play of her glamorous Sarah (Natascha McElhone). Future Queen and subject are more like the needy friendless schoolgirl with a crush on the dashing Head Prefect.
The development, and collapse, of this unequal friendship is the backbone of the play, with a third and equally interesting (and historically real) woman in the background: Beth Park as Abigail a poor relation introduced to the new monarch’s household as a personal maid by the scheming Sarah. Her genuine care and gentleness finally rival Duchess Sarah’s influence, to the latter’s intense rage. Some marvellous snarling insults unveil Sarah’s shallowness: excoriating Anne’s “dumb stupidity..a grub! A lump!” as she sides with Whig pamphleteers against the influence of the unprepossessing but artful Harley (Jonathan Broadbent). Emma Cunniffe’s determined, stolid dutiful growth in stature is immensely moving to watch, duty and faith oddly, poignantly recognizable even in the happier life of our own Queen.

 
It is thrilling and always gripping, Natalie Abrahami’s direction wonderful in pace and variation. As in The Heresy of Love, Edmundson brilliantly creates a sense of an older, historic world by using an old rhythm – a great deal of iambic pentameter – without selfconscious archaisms of speech. So these early 18c people spring violently to life before us, in their rows about money, the cost of wars, scandal and blackmail and political finagling and the fragile Act of Union (“What mean the Scots? What irks them now?” got a laugh). There is pathos, danger, character, fury (not least from McElhone when foiled). It pays tribute to an overlooked woman with Abigail’s defiant final riposte to Sarah’s mockery of the determined little Queen. “She’s kind, she’s wise, she prays and tries to do right” .
Fourteen more performances. Hope it transfers. Might go again…
http://www.rsc.org.uk to 23 January
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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December 19, 2015 · 8:35 pm

THE TALE OF MR TOD Avenue Theatre, Ipswich

DARK DOINGS IN THE BURROW

 

 

I hope that the great Beatrix Potter, out of copyright just last year, would be pleased at the pointing, bouncing, giggling and gasping in Red Rose Chain’s little theatre. At the sharing, too, of jokes between the smallest children, their big siblings, and the parents at their side. For of all “nursery” authors, this sharp-eyed and mischievous illustrator, author and naturalist is one of the most rewardingly dramatic. Peter Rabbit – orphaned by Mr McGregor’s pie habit – escapes, as does Tom Kitten from the awful roly-poly-pudding fate: but even the most innocent of children know, and want to know, that there are real dangers and fates out there.

 

 

Joanna Carrick’s roistering, artfully pretend-improv adaptation launches with relish into one of the more thrilling ones. Tommy Brock the badger feigns friendship with daft old Benjamin Bunny in order to steal his helpless baby-rabbit grandchildren, and gets banished from the house by tearful Mummy Flopsy (we’ve all had relatives like that). Brock breaks into Mr Tod’s fox-earth to use his batterie de cuisine for rabbit pie, but falls asleep with his boots on; the fox comes home indignant (but nervous, for badgers have bigger teeth), and makes such a mess of his revenge that under cover of their brawling, two heroic rabbits rescue the babies from the oven. Dramatic? Star Wars, eat your heart out!

 

 

It’s a three-hander, with hasty costume-switches which amused the children greatly. Carrick frames it as two disgruntled urban kids exploring their new attic in the countryside: Lawrence Russell and Kirsty Thorpe kick around old dust-sheeted toys, cookpots and random furniture and find the old books “Baby stuff!”. The ghost of Beatrix Potter appears – Rachael McCormick – grumbling at their bleeping, rackety modern ways, and counters their scornful “nothing ever happened in the olden days” with a few hair-raising Victorian headline tales – kidnappings, a baby set afloat in a cradle, a woman buried alive, dogs boiled up for margarine. That made the older kids sit up a bit.

 

So they all set out to act the Tale of Mr Tod, and great fun it is: plenty of physical jokes, pratfalls, unexpected props (an epidiascope, for heaven’s sake, projecting shadow-pictures) and inspired improvisation: the rabbits’ tunnel needs front row co-operation, which I was proud to join, holding up the wall. Some knowing gags too: the wicked badger turns TV presenter of “Baking with Brock”, Russell as Mr Tod is rather camp and preoccupied with the state of his soft furnishings, and McCormick does a saucily twerking Mrs Tiggywinkle. Nor does Carrick shy away from Potter’s grand vocabulary : Tommy Brock is still ”an incurably indolent person, snoring industriously”.

 
So we all had a grand time. And most strikingly, this being Ipswich, and only 90 minutes, many parents (including our local MP Ben Gummer with his alert small Wilfred ) had brought technically too-young children, a few under two. And they probably didn’t get the whole drift, but crowed and pointed and laughed and stared at the capering adults and daft hats. Result.

 

box office 01473 603388 http://www.redrosechain.com
to 3 Jan
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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December 17, 2015 · 11:49 pm

LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES Donmar, WC1

A WHIFF OF SULPHUR UNDER THE BROCADE…

 

There are certainly crinolines, but Quality Street it ain’t. How smart of Josie Rourke to offer adults, worn down by fairylights and panto duties, a tart, sour and thrillingly unwholesome morsel. It is Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of a 1782 shocker, an epistolary novel of high society and low sex by Choderlos de Laclos, his only work. As is the Donmar habit, it is faultlessly and unfussedly set: characters stride diagonally across the space moving props as scenes change, and until the final cruel dowsing of flames and merciless daylight all the intrigue happens below flickering real candelabras, amid Louis XV chaises-longues and big 18c landscape paintings (plus one small canvas, briefly and chillingly carried before her belly by a particular character).

 
Despite the costumes, Rourke wisely directs her cast without ‘period’ stiffness, so they spring into appalling, modern life: I did wonder whether the ideas of sexual corruption and détournement de jeunesse could still work in our age of commonplace sexual exchange, but the whiff of sulphur is still there all right. Particularly in Janet McTeer’s smoothly alarming performance as the prime conspiratrice: a voice like poisoned velvet, eyes glowing with an elegant malicious despair which deepens as the more violent second Act develops. Dominic West is Valmont, convincingly charming with an edge of savagery: the classic bad-boy who makes women think they can change him, and whose moral emptiness can sometimes ring like a summoning bell.

 

 

For those who never saw the various film adaptations (the classic Vadim with Jeanne Moreau, the Frears one with Glenn Close which was based on this play) the plot is simply, arrestingly damnable. At its heart former lovers Valmont and Mme Merteuil, bored and discontented, play sexual games with innocents. He wants to bed the famously chaste and married Mme de Tourvel (Elaine Cassidy, whose resistance and succumbing are both superb). To Valmont, though, it will only be truly satisfying if by doing it she feels she is betraying her principles rather than discarding them. Sulphur? Oh yes.

 
At the same time Merteuil has challenged him to take the virginity of her friend’s fifteen-year-old daughter Cecile, fresh out of a convent, to spite the girl’s intended husband. Since Cecile herself fancies the music-master, Valmont finds it easy to cast himself as a trusty messenger and get hold of her bedroom key “to deliver letters”. The scene where he overcomes the frightened teenager with blackmail and a hand thrust up her nightie is genuinely, nastily uncomfortable (young Morfydd Clark as Cecile plays it with awful sincerity). Worse is the faux-maternal satisfaction of Merteuil telling the shocked girl that it’s all good “education”, and Valmont’s laughing boast that he has trained the child to do “services one would hesitate to ask of a professional”. Then just as you think he is going to get his comeuppance by finally falling in love with the surrendered Mme de Tourvel, the fatal dominance of Merteuil, even more powerful in her dissolution, takes revenge on them all.

 

 

The alarming thing, well served by fine performances, is the psychological acuteness of Laclos and an underlying sense almost of feminism: outrage at the inequality of sexual power in that society and the consequently nasty tactics women may adopt to even it out. There are comic moments – not least Valmont writing an earnest seducing letter to Mme T, using a courtesan’s bare bum as a desk as she sprawls on the harpsichord. But nobody, innocent or not, ends well. Brrrr!

 
box office 0844 871 7624 to 30 Jan
Rating: four   4 Meece Rating
Principal Sponsor: Barclays
Live cinema transmission http://www.ntlive.com on 28 Jan.

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December 17, 2015 · 12:20 am

THE LORAX Old Vic SE1

THNEEDS MUST WHEN CONSUMERISM DRIVES…

 

It’s a heartfelt welcome. The Old Vic, for a long while fiercely grownup, throws its arms open to children under Matthew Warchus’ leadership with a fabulous pre-curtain soundscape (25 minutes of it as they settle) . Whooshes, bangs, tinkles, hisses, crashes, buzzes and cracks echo all around, followed by an avuncular announcement from “Old Vic” himself about turning phones off and behaving reasonably well.
And when the show does start, in Max Webster’s production there is immediate evidence of something close to love. Dr Seuss’ less-known rhyming fable of the Lorax is slight enough. The protective, yellow-moustached purply-orange blob of the title is a creature who “speaks for the trees’ and the wildlife among them. He tries to stop the Onceler from chopping them down; but the latter discovers that he can make their fronds into useless but heavily desirable Thneeds – sort of ragged knitted nothingnesses – and builds an arid, polluted industrial empire where once was paradise. The environmentalist moral is so sharply and unforgivingly pointed that I was tempted to buy a novelty Lorax-‘tache in the interval (so much for condemning consumerism) and post it straight to George Monbiot.
HOWEVER – the wit, absurdities and extra dotty rhymes of David Greig’s adaptation , combined with some great songs by Jon Clark (especially the protest song, very Les Mis) , the fabulous design (Rob Howell), headlong ensemble work and enchanting puppetry by Finn Caldwell of Gyre and Gimble all together make up for the tale’s moralistic simplicity. Great multicoloured trees grow from the stage, fabulous golden swans flap over the stalls, big-bottomed loopy bears dance with comedy fish. I could watch it for hours. And there was a good bit when the lawyers turn up to back the villain, with barristers’ wigs and sparkly pink cocktail dresses, and the nice five year old next to me asked “Mummy, are they actual real lawyers?”. Alas, no..

As to character, a brilliant Simon Paisley Day as the Onceler holds a share of sympathy, being no cartoon villain. Thrown out by his green-haired industrial family of Moof Mufflers (no idea) to earn his own living far away, at first he realizes that his knitted Thneeds are pointless, and accepts a rebuke from the baggy but authoritative Lorax. Which has a highly expressive moustache and a fine baritone singing voice (respect to Simon Lipkin who has to produce this while in the awkward position of a puppetteer bent double over a wonky 3ft moustachioed flourbag). When greed takes over the Onceler and he builds the dark Satantic factory, all dustbin-lids and pipes and smoke) we see where he’s coming from. When he delivers a sermon of regret for the pollution and advises us all to give up buying stuff and go back to the stone age, he follows it with a roistering product launch of Thneed 2.0 , a very fine gag indeed.

 

And in his final exile, reduced to two baleful yellow eyes and green-wooly paws peering from a dark tower, he has a near-tragic pathos. And so has the child who plants the first new seed of hope in the bare soil. Lump in throat. Didn’t expect that.

 
box office 0844 8717628 to 30 Jan Principal Partner: Royal Bank of Canada
rating four    4 Meece Rating

 

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December 16, 2015 · 1:32 am

THE DAZZLE Found 111 WC2

SUICIDE BY THINGS...

We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin’s School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock-ish iron lift-shaft. Our rickety random chairs surround a domestic interior: piano, junk, a chaise, the litter of a never-tidied hideaway. Andrew Scott, farouche and “méchant”, a man-child oddity with a painfully fastidious musical ear, is the concert pianist Langley Collyer: David Dawson, already haggard with care and half-infected with his brother’s impossible mentality, is Lang’s brother Homer. We will watch their deterioration: not without laughs but ultimately with a disturbing pity.

In America the Collyer brothers are a legend: recluses and hoarders at the turn of the century, both found dead in 1947 amid 140 tons of collected objects and rubbish, having set up tripwires and booby traps to fend off (not without justification) the persecution of their neighbours after the area went downhill in the Depression. The author Richard Greenberg blithely says that his award-winning play – a dark, disturbing imagination – is based on the lives of the brothers “about whom I know almost nothing”. Yet there is a compelling truth in this odd claustrophobic evening, the latest enterprise from the Michael Grandage Company directed by Simon Evans. Convincing truth, that is, about the sort of damaged psychology which does grow into hoarding and – you must conclude – in Lang’s case a condition well into the autistic spectrum.
For Andrew Scott is extraordinary: part childlike, often sharp, with repetitive gabbles and pauses he clutches for sameness and clings to the very tassel he first saw from his cradle; but adult too, and suffering a poetic yearning for normality. A speech about his seven o’clock evenings, looking out at the blowing curling leaves and the slow happiness of homecoming businessmen, breaks your heart. He is reaching out too, though jerkily and unreliably, towards the wholly imaginary character of Milly (Joanna Vanderham), a rich Fifth Avenue heiress who has taken a fancy to him, and who Homer feels Lang should marry, to move their stuck lives on and pay some bills rather than rely on the pianist’s “policy of caprice with booking agents”.

Vanderham – whose awful home back-story emerges, terrifyingly, in the second act – plays it wonderfully: Lang insultingly speaks of her as being “like an unremarkable narrow body of water” which it would be tranquil to live alongside, and initially her socialite psychobabble and politeness are cruelly ludicrous. But Homer’s plan, a bit like a rather madder Henry James novel, collapses in chaos due to her inclination for “a renovation” . The interval sees the prop team fill the room to the ceiling with sitll more junk – cooking pots, suitcases, drifts of paper, a birdcage, a lacrosse stick, a softball jammed in a typewriter. And Vanderham’s return in the second act is startling, alarming and tragic.
All three performances are shattering at times: the first half belongs most to Scott, with his social impossiblity and savant concentration on remembered detail (“Nothing is ever lost on me, nothing ever leaves”) . In the second, Dawson rises to a truthful grief for their isolation and co-dependence, addressing us through the fourth wall, lunging for normality, falling back, wanting “a tiny thing to happen”, anything. Scott nw becomes his albatross, simian, angry, insistent and needy; Vanderham speaks the slender hope that “We might have a final time, we three…”
Disintegration, trapped lives, slow suicide by Things. I never want to see it again but am glad I did. And glad, too, that our own too-cluttered house-move with its sentimental clinging and discarding was over before it opened.
box office http://www.thedazzle.co.uk to 30 Jan

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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December 15, 2015 · 11:06 pm

THE DAZZLE Found 111 WC1

SUICIDE BY THINGS…

 

We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin’s School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock-ish iron lift-shaft. Our rickety random chairs surround a domestic interior: piano, junk, a chaise, the litter of a never-tidied hideaway. Andrew Scott, farouche and “méchant”, a man-child oddity with a painfully fastidious musical ear, is the concert pianist Langley Collyer: David Dawson, already haggard with care and half-infected with his brother’s impossible mentality, is Lang’s brother Homer. We will watch their deterioration: not without laughs but ultimately with a disturbing pity.

 

 

In America the Collyer brothers are a legend: recluses and hoarders at the turn of the century, both found dead in 1947 amid 140 tons of collected objects and rubbish, having set up tripwires and booby traps to fend off (not without justification) the persecution of their neighbours after the area went downhill in the Depression. The author Richard Greenberg blithely says that his award-winning play – a dark, disturbing imagination – is based on the lives of the brothers “about whom I know almost nothing”. Yet there is a compelling truth in this odd claustrophobic evening, the latest enterprise from the Michael Grandage Company and Emily Dobbs Productions,   directed by Simon Evans. Convincing truth, that is, about the sort of damaged psychology which does grow into hoarding and – you must conclude – in Lang’s case a condition well into the autistic spectrum.

 
For Andrew Scott is extraordinary: part childlike, often sharp, with repetitive gabbles and pauses he clutches for sameness and clings to the very tassel he first saw from his cradle; but adult too, and suffering a poetic yearning for normality. A speech about his seven o’clock evenings, looking out at the blowing curling leaves and the slow happiness of homecoming businessmen, breaks your heart. He is reaching out too, though jerkily and unreliably, towards the wholly imaginary character of Milly (Joanna Vanderham), a rich Fifth Avenue heiress who has taken a fancy to him, and who Homer feels Lang should marry, to move their stuck lives on and pay some bills rather than rely on the pianist’s “policy of caprice with booking agents”.

 

 

Vanderham – whose awful home back-story emerges, terrifyingly, in the second act – plays it wonderfully: Lang insultingly speaks of her as being “like an unremarkable narrow body of water” which it would be tranquil to live alongside, and initially her socialite psychobabble and politeness are cruelly ludicrous. But Homer’s plan, a bit like a rather madder Henry James novel, collapses in chaos due to her inclination for “a renovation” . The interval sees the prop team fill the room to the ceiling with sitll more junk – cooking pots, suitcases, drifts of paper, a birdcage, a lacrosse stick, a softball jammed in a typewriter. And Vanderham’s return in the second act is startling, alarming and tragic.
All three performances are shattering at times: the first half belongs most to Scott, with his social impossiblity and savant concentration on remembered detail (“Nothing is ever lost on me, nothing ever leaves”) . In the second, Dawson rises to a truthful grief for their isolation and co-dependence, addressing us through the fourth wall, lunging for normality, falling back, wanting “a tiny thing to happen”, anything. Scott nw becomes his albatross, simian, angry, insistent and needy; Vanderham speaks the slender hope that “We might have a final time, we three…”
Disintegration, trapped lives, slow suicide by Things. I never want to see it again but am glad I did. And glad, too, that our own too-cluttered house-move with its sentimental clinging and discarding was over before it opened.
box office http://www.thedazzle.co.uk to 30 Jan

RATING   four   4 Meece Rating

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December 14, 2015 · 11:54 am

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS St James Theatre, SW1

A LORDLY FOGG  WITH  UNDERSTAGE COGS AND A  FAITHFUL FROG…

 
If you can’t face another panto (oh no you can’t) but want to share a treat with the young, this is one to head for: classic yet daft, constantly playful, even faintly educational if you insist (well, you could discuss Victorian Britain afterwards), and directed with holiday relish by Lucy Bailey. Whose designer Anna Fleischle has taken crafty advantage of the ultra-steep rake of the St James to create a glorious view into a pit in front of the stage: here are Heath-Robinson contraptions, bike wheels, cogs, brass levers, a piano, a kettle and innumerable small trapdoors through which hands of unseen workers briskly pass up – or take away – props.

 

As the auditorium darkens there is even a violent hissing and a steam whistle going POOP! on top of the proscenium. Thus the whole stage is a machine, with a stretch of treadmill for running along city streets. Later , with equally jolly home-made-looking adjustments, the framed stage becomes a train, various ships, and an elephant (big flappy sheet ears, flexible tubing, sound-effects). In a nicely pointed manner the Reform Club card-players who challenge Phileas Fogg to the high-speed (for 1872) circumnavigation sit right outside this vivid little rectangle, perched in high club chairs on the wall beyond the wings.

 
It is pointed because Laura Eason’s adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel is at pains to mock the mechanistic exactitude of the hero’s affluent clubman life: he sacks a valet in the first scene for delivering his tea three degrees too cold, thus enabling Passepartout (SImon Gregor, neatly nimble, every inch the French acrobat) to get the job. The fact that Fogg’s life is underpinned by others’ unseen efforts is indicated by the hands rising through trapdoors from below; sometimes the engineers on ships and trains huff visibly below him. Eason is also, the programme anxiously says, keen to point out that such Victorian Englishmen had an armour-plated sense of Imperial entitlement, and little respect for foreign cultures.

 

 

One’s PC alarm goes off at this, but in the event it gives Robert Portal, who looks very fine in snow-white spats, a lot of opportunities to be ludicrously stiff. These he takes with relish (I specially like his refusal to go and see the Pyramids because “I have seen it all in the journal of the Royal Geographical Society” and has a date to play whist. The gradual unfogging of this semi-autistic savant (he has Bradshaw railway timetables by heart) is surprisingly touching. And one of the best laughs (not in the script, I notice) is when he has hijacked the tramp steamer and the skipper growls “there’s something of the docker about you” and Portal replies “Sweet of you, but I think not”.

 

The journey itself becomes increasingly fun, as he is pursued by Tony Gardner’s gloomily deadpan policeman who thinks he is a bank robber, and encounters foreigners and rescues the glamorous Indian widow (Shanaya Rafaat) from suttee, in a stiff dutiful Baden-Powell spirit which she gradually melts. It reaches a crescendo in the second act with a stormy, noisy struggle across the Atlantic; there’s even a moment of cast clambering through the stalls (Passepartout panhandling afte rhe misses the ship home after being stuck an opium den), in which Gregor climbed over me in the matinee pointing to the notebook and shouting “Une critique! Une critique! Zey can close shows! Zis never closes!” .

 

But the physical comedy and the small supporting cast’s quick-change characeters t make it most fun and playful (children love shows which they think they can go home and do themselves, with sheets and an upturned kitchen table) . The various interludes on swaying decks are done with great precision and there are some priceless moments of deliberate upstaging , especially by Eben Figueiredo and Tim Steed, who are hilarious. It’s all just far over the top to reassure you that yep, it’s Christmas…
box office http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk | 0844 264 2140
to 17 Jan

rating four4 Meece Rating

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December 11, 2015 · 4:00 pm

A CHRISTMAS CAROL Noel Coward Theatre, WC1

BROADBENT & BARLOW BRING BACK THE BIG BAD BANKER… 

 

Tom Pye’s design of Victorian découpage creates a toy paper-theatre within the stark stage area: the scenes revolve like worn pages of an old storybook; 2D, apparently lashed-up cutout props are dragged vigorously on and off – doors, fireplaces, a gramophone, a London panorama, a newsboy’s banner saying QUEEN MARRIES GERMAN. Basic puppetry pops up, including some very entertaining human-puppetry as Scrooge and the ghosts fly through space and time with fake legs. (at one point Scrooge protests “Oh no, not the legs again!”). It all lies within the playful metatheatre world of Patrick Barlow (National Theatre of Brent, The 39 Steps, the Tricycle’s current Ben-Hur). Scrooge is the irresistible Jim Broadbent, in great white candyfloss sideburns.

 
It is almost wonderful. In a less grandly West-endy theatre it would be. Director Phelim McDermott and Steven Edis make fine use of music, old carols in particular. Broadbent starts off as a smooth, payday-loanish financier, whose hostility to Christmas is diluted by the fact that he has just discovered marketing, and put up a big banner wishing compliments of the season to his clients. He is pleasingly defiant of Marley, whose yawning, decomposing mask like a Munch scream has him saying “keep your chin up!”, a nice black joke. He adopts, initially at least, a rather wonderful cod-Edwardian accent (“Decrease the sarplus population”). As the back-story of his sad beginnings and lost love is unfolded, he offers some real moments of feeling, and there is a sharp Barlowesque tearing-down of the fourth wall as the Ghost of Christmas Future shows him dead, and the rest of the cast tell him it’s all been a play and it’s over.
But some problems never quite resolve. You’re not quite sure whether it is sincere or send-up; the language jerks between modern realism and sudden “thees” and “thous”, a device which worked fine in Ben-Hur because from the start we knew they’re just playing at it. Here, we’re less assured of that. The larky home-made look of the production is endearing, and I greatly approve of shows which give children the feeling they could do it themselves at home that night because a play is just play: but it may disappoint some families who reckon you pay huge West End prices for something that looks seriously expensive. Even if it’s a bit of a turkey.

 
There are some terribly overdone passages too : the brutal schoolmaster goes on way too long, twice, and the wenchy, squalling Ghost of Christmas Present is Samantha Spiro, doing an ooh-get-me! Ruby-Waxish brand of chirpiness which made me want to leap up and throttle her with her crinoline. Though to be fair, Spiro is rather sweet in her other five roles, and some of the audience palpably thought she was a scream. Maybe one has to be a bit drunk. Never underestimate the fatal need of critics to be soberer than the rest of the audience.

 
And let it be said that the other bit of OTT works splendidly: is Keir Charles’ turn as Mr Fezziwig, doing a crazed Irish dance with his wig falling over his eyes. Now that, I loved. Wanted to love the whole show really; in a smaller venue I probably would have done.
box office 0844 482 5130 http://www.noelcowardtheatre.co.uk to 30 Jan
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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December 10, 2015 · 12:01 am

HAPGOOD Hampstead Theatre, NW3

 

UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLES AND UNPRINCIPLED CERTAINTIES

 

It is a mildly shaming reflection that  Tom Stoppard plays generally dismissed by his cadre of scholarly admirers as “not his best work”, str going to be the ones I enjoy most. While I am often left cold by those cited as masterpieces. Never mind. This one – written and set in the last days of the Cold War 27 years ago – is a thoroughly enjoyable espionage comedy-thriller. Ideal for a John le Carré fan and Cold War kid fresh from enjoying BRIDGE OF SPIES, who also enjoys fleeting moments of thinking she understands particle physics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Which is to say, it was just my bag. A pre-Christmas treat.

 

Stoppard gleefully picks up all the spook jargon about ‘joes’, safe houses, American CIA “cousins”, drops, assets, and dead Bulgarian pimps at “Athens station”. Though he does take care to mock himself for all that, in the person of the Russian double (or possible triple or quadruple) agent Josef the physicist who points out that in the end the villain is always the nice guy everyone liked. With equal magpie pleasure the playwright also picks up the physics, as a complex double-triple-crossing plot rejoices in parallels with electrons. These can seemingly be in two places at once, just as one – or possibly all – of the main protagonists may actually be twins. Or may not. Anyway, there is much verbal play with the ideas of positive/negative, matter/antimatter, presence/absence , truth/lies, science / art, etc.

 

The heroine Ms Hapgood is (presciently for the ‘80s) a senior spook and agent-runner, known as “Mother” to the men alongside or below her. She is also mother of a nice muddy little prep school boy, and therefore uses the red scrambled telephone regularly for messages about his rugger boots and hamster. Lisa Dillon gives Hapgood a sort of sharp intelligent anarchy, making wholly credible the situation she has landed in – a single mother, involved professionally and personally with one of the key men, with inevitable complications. Dillon is also – no spoilers – required at one point to perform something quite different and intensely entertaining, possibly as part of a deceit against one colleague, or perhaps another.

 
Tim McMullan, deploying a perfect Establishment face, is dryly funny as Blair, described by the engaging Josef (Alec Newman) as “a Bachelor of Arts First Class with an amusing incomprehension of the sciences” yet who has less soul than the Russian physicist. Gerald Kyd is the more gun-happy, macho Ridley, and Gary Beadle brings just the right air of affronted CIA arrogance to the “Cousin”, who reckons these damn Brits are leaking particle-chat to Moscow but doesn’t know how.

 
Howard Davies’ production is elegantly set before a changing video-wall and some sliding steel cubicle doors, sometimes representational (it starts with assorted spies and their shadows creeping around with briefcases at a swimming-pool) sometimes semi-abstract, expressing the equations and diagrams of Josef’s secret antimatter research. Which, in the most serious twist of all, is revealed as a completely pointless non-weapon in what was fast becoming a pointless spying war. It’s all the opposite of the deadly seriousness of Michael Frayn’s COPENHAGEN, if you like. Which is the last time that this arts graduate sat in the stalls getting properly excited about electrons.
Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com to 23 January
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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December 9, 2015 · 5:48 pm

CYMBELINE Wanamaker at Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

ALL IS FORGIVEN   (UNLESS YOU’RE DEAD, AND DON’T DESERVE IT) 

 
This is part of Dominic Dromgoole’s candlelit farewell to his tenure at the Globe: a set of late Shakespeare romances , and follows his own fine PERICLES the other week. This one is directed by Sam Yates, and with its geographical wandering, improbable happenings, and odd lumps of possibly-non- Shakespeare text it is even knottier. But in the end, a fine and satisfying knot, finished with a  neat bow.

 
The plot is borrowed from a mixture of Holinshed’s chronicles of ancient Britain, mixed up with the sexier bit of the Decameron. Some scholars have thought that by now Shakespeare (int 1611) was actually in a mood to parody his own earlier work: there are strands of Othello-esque misunderstanding and Leontes unreason, Learish kingship, a defiant daughter, lost children recovered, a murderous wife, a cross-dressed innocent, a wrong corpse and confusion over an apothecary’s sleeping-draughts. In fact, it is hard to find an earlier Shakespeare play which does not somewhere foreshadow it.

 
So in brief: King Cymbeline and his second wife (who is trouble) want his daughter Imogen (here Innogen, more correctly) to marry her loutish stepbrother Cloten (great nominative determinism, the innocent and the clodpoll) . He is the Queen’s son. Our heroine however has secretly married Posthumus, who is lower born but decent. Until he isn’t decent at all , because when he is banished the Iago figure, Iachomo, tries to seduce Innogen and then pretend he has, and Posthumus falls for it, just about credibly. Meanwhile there are two missing princes, raised as rustic huntsmen., and a row with the Romans about tribute.

 
Of all the ‘romance’ plays this one requires the steadiest directorial nerve in turning on a sixpence from comedy to horror, tragic loss to ludicrous absurdity and back again. Yates holds it together beautifully. Not least because at its heart is Emily Barber as Innogen: graduated only last year and a real find. She is gloriously at home with the verse: can with equal naturalness rant it, prattle it, argue in it , weep or yawn to sleep it, all with proper enchantment. Moreover, she makes an adorable crop-haired boy when she is on the run; not least in the rough-and-tumble, deeply endearing reunion with the brigandish lads who turn out to be her long-lost brothers. Her affronted line that the life of a man is tedious, what with sleeping on the ground, brought the house down.
Jonjo O’Neill is her beloved Posthumus, Eugene O’Hare a sneaky Iachimo (who is, unusually, actually rather credible when he finally repents) But they’re all a delight, playing the emotions and the absurdities with equal relish: notably Trevor Fox’s Pisanio, always the right-hand-man, and Brendan O’Hea as the gruff old Belarius who stole the boys. Joseph Marcell is a fine King, matched with a fabulously nasty Pauline McLynn giving the bad Queen the full Cruella de Vil treatment. Calum Callaghan as the clottish Cloten plays it Tim Nice-but-Dim, but gives the often undervalued character a real air of offence. He may be an aspiring rapist and a Mummy’s boy, but you see his point. .Callaghan also gets the honour of having been made a fully detailed and wholly convincing (if bloodless) decapitated head, waved in the face of the startled Pit audience.
And so finally with battle, smoke, clashing shields, and misapprehensions so entangled that they require Jupiter himself to descend “on a thunderbolt” from the very high painted roof (the programme suggests that it was the exciting new mechanism at the Blackfriars theatre which made Shakespeare do that stage direction). Jupiter in this case is female, briskly spoken, wearing a bedsheet toga, pompadour wig and what looks like a gold bra. McLynn again…

 
And all the joking, beheading, brawls, heart-deep grief and entanglement ends in a very deft treatment of the long final explanation-and-forgiveness scene. Which could be boring, but here, as every character throws in their shillingsworth of dramatic revelation and Marcell the King gawps at each one, Yates’ cast permit us (amid the moving embraces) to shake with gales of laughter. That’s the way to do it.
box office 0207 401 9919 in rep to 21 April
rating Four   4 Meece Rating

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December 8, 2015 · 5:05 pm

SLEEPING BEAUTY Bristol Old Vic

SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL…GET OUT OF BED AND PULL HIMSELF TOGETHER…
It is almost comically calculated to stir up timid traditionalists. The enchanted sleeper is a bloke – David Emmings the cheerily Woosterish Prince Percy  in plus-fours . His rescuer is a lairy black modern streetwise girl from a hovel : Kezrena James as Deilen. She doesn’t kiss the centennial snorer for his beauty, but in a heroic attempt at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She then reluctantly allows the rather wussy, cottonwool-raised Prince to join her heroic quest for something from a different fairytale altogether; she shares her bivouac and saves him – and some enslaved fairy- godmother aunties – when he is turned into a pig by the bad fairy though “actually I rather like you as a pig”. That the couple share a final kiss does not imply any surrender of her fierce feminism, perish the thought. They go off adventuring, and she is still the leader.

 

All of which is fine by me, since I know at least one real Bertie Wooster saved by a tough street girl. But some have taken the gender-swop amiss, especially from director-deviser Sally Cookson whose wonderful Jane Eyre on scaffolding also upset a few hardened bonnetophiles.   For me, a bit of vigorous PC and reconstruction is welcome in the saccharine season of Disneyish princesshood. And Cookson’s conflating of the rather exiguous Sleeping Beauty tale with an odd old folktale of “leaves that hang but never grew” , plus a dash of Hansel and Gretel, is ingenious. So is the odd framing of the whole play, fore and aft , in the plight of the prince having been made amnesiac and depressed until Deilen brings back his lost diary.

 

Emmings’ softie Percy gradually becomes likeable, although pretty irritating at first: frankly at the point of crisis a jaundiced adult might mutter that the achievement of the bad fairy’s pin is not the only prick in the room. Kezrena James is a fearless likeable Deilen, Stu Goodwin a more than satisfactory drag villainess fairy, the music is jolly and the design by Michael Vale clean and atmospheric. The chorus of comedy aunty frump-fairies (which the principals hastily change to join) is colourfully Pythonesque.

 

So, much to approve. But theres a problem,  most un-Cookson, of pace. The first half is often worryingly static, people standing talking in straight lines, nobody scampering or energizing matters. The logical flaw of it being not a “true love’s kiss” that does the waking bothered some children at the interval who take magic seriously (Cookson could have left the true-love line out and just said kiss).  The songs also tend to stop the action dead in this first half.  Whats gone wrong?

 

I dunno.  Maybe it is deliberate, a posh-panto ploy to make the school parties sit still and concentrate for once, before the clapalong whoopee and considerably more exciting wickedness of Act 2. Which does work, and include satisfying emotional development for both the leads and scope for Goodwin to dress up as Bo Peep over his ciré cocktail frock and do amusingly evil things involving sheep and domestic slavery. So I cheered up, and the kids visibly left in a good mood. But I hope they all get to a really noisy panto this year as well. Can’t be too genteel.

 
box office 0117 987 7877 to 17 January http://www.bristololdvic.org.uk
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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December 6, 2015 · 4:04 pm

BEN HUR Tricycle, Kilburn

WHO NEEDS CHARLTON HESTON? 

 
I have a weakness for schlock-historical movie epics, due to a regular childhood treat when I was at school in France and my Dad and I would sneak down the Rue de Bethune in Lille to find one: Quo Vadis, The Long Ships, The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra… Of course the emperor of them all was William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur – a Tale of the Christ”, based on a stonking great overblown 19c novel by the Civil War General Lew Wallace, in which a heroic Jewish boy Judah Ben-Hur triumphs over Roman imperial bullying. It is all set between the Nativity and the Ascension, with Jesus popping up at various points to inspire. It won eleven Academy awards, cost $ 15m dollars, employed 50,000 extras, 365 actors and 78 horses for the nine-minute chariot race. It makes today’s CGI epics look wussy. But apart from epics, another weakness I admit is for larksome, apparently hasty and low-budget performances like The Reduced Shakespeare Company.
So when Patrick Barlow – famed for The 39 Steps and the National Theatre of Brent – decided to do Ben Hur with four actors and a few props, framing it as a misguided megalomanic’s project with an emotionally fraught cast, I naturally threw myself at it.

 

It does not disappoint. Tim Carroll directs with brisk wit, and Michael Taylor’s designs ensure happy visual moments, all the way from the Magi’s stuffed camels awkwardly kneeling at Bethlehem as plywood angels are noisily cranked over the stable, to the stuffed galley-slaves, entangled toga-sleeves, overhasty quick-changes, lawnmower-powered chariot horses , collapsing pillars and spectacular Ascension. The text meanwhile mingles beautifully awkward backward-Latinate syntax and faux archaisms (as indeed does Lew Wallace’s book). And, as traditional in these performances, the internal disaffection of the cast provides an underplot.
John Hopkins plays the hero, Ben Jones hops in and out of being the villainous Messala and half a dozen others, Alix Dunmore plays (among other things) the two key women and is very funny too: but the greatest joy of it for me was the veteran: the comedically nimble Richard Durden, playing an elderly RSC retiree dragged back by Hopkins to play the elderly matriarch, a Roman admiral, various others, and the weary voice of sanity when the young cast members get their love-lives in a twist. The school parties around me at the matinee loved every minute, and so did I.

box office 020 7328 1000 to 9 Jan
Joyfully joint-produced with Fiery Angel and the Watermill
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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December 2, 2015 · 11:58 pm

FUNNY GIRL Menier, SE1

THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE  OF ALL…

 

For half a generation there has been a truism in the musical theatre world that nobody can do Jule Style and Bob Merrill’s FUNNY GIRL, because Streisand played the 1920’s eccentrically comic Ziegfeld star and nobody can beat her. So why try? Thus not many have done so: one Broadway revival got “postponed”. But nothing daunts the Menier, fount of daring musical revivals. Michael Meyer from New York directs, the Savoy transfer is already in the bag, and the starring role is our secret weapon: Britain’s own high-voltage electric waif, Sheridan Smith.

 

She nails it: every wisecrack and every nuance, and she takes several opportunities for sly, new and very British moments: for instance when the dashing Arnstein (Darius Campbell, looking about 8ft tall) has first impressed her with his ruffled dress shirt, she coos that even his fingernails are polished: and then allows herself the tiniest moue, as a girl does when a heart-throb seems potentially too camply groomed for safety. She acts every song, hurls every long money-note into a gasping auditorium, and brings truth to every emotion, turning on a sixpence from brash jokey confidence to anxious selfconsciousness as her love-match flowers (what a seduction scene!) and then goes sour.

 
Matthew Wright’s costume and hair design artfully make Smith look dumpier than she could ever be in real life, closer to the dynamic plain-girl that Brice must be. Next to a superbly tall ensemble of chorus girls and boys, and even more alongside Arnstein, she is almost dwarfed. Her early galumphings and deliberate ungainliness – remember Smith’s masterly deployment of ‘comedy legs’ in Legally Blonde all those years ago – can shade into professional grace, and comedically snap back again.
Mayer keeps it moving, the ensemble neatly dancing scenery and props on and off with Lynne Page’s choreography whirling, tapping, offering sudden glorious jokes like the Rat-tat-tat-tat soldier number, a brilliantly absurd bit of ballet and above all the Henry Street party . Where the old ladies Meeker, Bride and Srakosh are glorious: Valda Aviks, Gay Soper and Marilyn Cutts, the latter celebrating fifty years onstage. Joel Montague is a touching, skilful Eddie, Bruce Montague the great Ziegfeld (“The headdress is too tall for the arch? Raise the arch!”).

 

Alan Williams leads a ten-piece band, and – well, we all left very happy. Obviously we did: Sheridan Smith made us all, for a brief moment as we stood to cheer, join in the last bellow of “…are the happiest people of all!”

 

Sold out at Menier 0207 378 1713: booking fast at Savoy Theatre till July
rating five  5 Meece Rating

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December 1, 2015 · 11:44 pm

LINDA Royal Court SW1

 YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL! SURE YOU WANT IT?

 

 

Revolving sleek as a spaceship is Es Devlin’s multi-layered set: the office and neon slogans of Swan cosmetics: bottles and jars, seductive smartness and ethical boasts of “changing the world one girl at a time”. Making a sly point, the white futuristic plasticity also contains the heroine’s home, where her husband Neil grunts unresponsively at the kitchen table to her teenage daughter. At fifty-five Linda has risen to “have it all”, and it’s all-of-a-shiny-piece. Much good will it do her. Penelope Skinner’s artful new play, alternately hilarious and alarming, makes sharp feminist points but dryly suggests that while 2015’s women and girls do have a lot to contend with, some of the shitstorm is (if not totally our fault) encouraged by the ways we tackle it.

 

It opens with Linda, senior and award-winning brand manager, doing a presentation about a new cream to be marketed with realistic images of women over fifty, rather than showing women who don’t yet need it. She speaks of the middle-aged problem of “vanishing”, not being whistled at by builders, etc: I jibbed. Some of us find the vanishing restful, don’t envy the catcalled young and think the beauty industry is a bit of a ramp anyway.

 

But Skinner is well aware of all this, as becomes clear when Linda’s family swim into focus: Imogen Byron a delight as the stolidly sane14-year-old who isn’t interested in that stuff, or in her mother’s gushy tributes to her ‘beauty’. She has other ambitions, involving everything from armed robbery to travel, shipwreck and shark attacks; for a school audition she plans to do a male Shakespeare speech and resents the drama teacher’s view that in plays about men the stakes are inevitably higher because, unlike us, “men, like, actually kill each other”. There’s a lovely ironic scene near the end reflecting that line: won’t spoil it

 

Then there’s Alice, a truly stunning performance by Karla Crome. She is 25, depressed, and actually wants to vanish: dressing fulltime in a skunk-themed onesie because of a peculiarly awful bit of female victimhood she suffered at fifteen. Linda has unwisely got her work-experience (without admitting the relationship) in her office. Where we find the horrifying corporate-Barbie Amy (Amy Beth Hayes) who definitely wants to have it all. Wedding now, then “Three years to get promoted before optimum baby age, if you go much past 29 you risk being phased out in the workplace and your body doesn’t ping back into shape. And if you don’t ping back into shape you could end up being fat for the rest of your life and if you’re a fat woman you actually earn less…”

 
We laugh. But my companion , a former corporate executive winced in recognition. We laugh a bit at Linda too, though her misjudgements are subtler – ordering her daughters “don’t take racist of sexist people too seriously” ,being fixated on staying size 10, and rushing home to make risotto superwoman-style rather than actually listening to her daughters. Her nemesis approaches: Amy undermines her at work, there’s trouble with the CEO Dave (Ian Redford nobly sacrificing vanity to look tubby, grizzled and unlovely while patronizing “a woman your age”). Neil has a fling to feel like a rock star not a middle-aged schoolteacher, and Linda’s mental cracks culminate in a properly apocalyptic King Lear moment, with the revolving set flashing in a rainstorm. What has been a funny, sharp, satirical comedy of manners darkens satisfyingly , with some really cruel twists well laid down in the first act.

 
Excellent. But come last to the headline story: Michael Longhurst lost his star Kim Cattrall to health issues only ten days ago. Noma Dumezweni stepped in as Linda. On press night – impossible at this time of year to delay – she was script-in-hand for some sections. She is superbly nonchalant with it (after all, women execs do carry paper around a lot). And she inhabits the central role with dry wit, crackling energy, lovely comic timing and real heart. What a star. The play is actually better than HANGMEN (lately transferred) so let’s hope the Court scores another West End hit.
box office 020 7565 5000 http://www.royalcourtheatre.com
to 9 Jan
Rating four   4 Meece Rating

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November 28, 2015 · 2:32 pm

THE KNIGHT FROM NOWHERE Park 90, NW23

THE BELLS!  THE BELLS!  THE BOOMING!
“Where else” says an exasperated Sir Henry Irving , asked at the gates of Heaven to justify the profession which estranged him from his religious mother and cost him a wife and children, “Where else could a stuttering, sickly, bandy-legged boy from Somerset play kings and heroes?”. Fair enough. And he goes on to point out that his contribution helped to make the profession more respectable in a society still too prone to regard players as riff-raff.
Cards on the table, I nipped up the Piccadilly line to the Park theatre’s smaller studio, and Andrew Shepherd’s play partly because my own great-grandparents in family legend shared a stage with Irving once (no doubt somewhere near the back). My Granny, on her wedding night, was told by her upright spouse that it was lucky she remained “pure” in this low theatrical world and she must never speak of The Theatre again. Even after the knighted Irving, suspicion hung around it.
So what with the swagged red curtains and the fact that Shepherd, playing his hero himself, adopts a weird (though sadly accurate) prim Edwardian accent (“I will play Hemlet!”) it was one for me. It’s double-billed with an hour-long version of the melodramatic hokum which made his name – The Bells – but I saw only the 90-minute biographical piece, directed by Lucy Foster with many a flourish.
From his first entrance with a cry of “It is I!”, Irving is taken through his life’s highlights and disasters by the prim heavenly clerk (Simon Blake). His mother preaches hellfire on finding his volume of Shakespeare, he stutteringly forgets his only few lines as a “walking-gentleman” at the Sunderland Lyceum, slogs through twenty-plays-a-month rep, meets his various women, and marries one who disapproves, so he walks out on her and his unborn child when she snaps that he’s “Making a fool of himself” just after his big night emoting through The Bells.
He meets Ellen Terry, played as an appallingly actressy showoff by Angela Ferns (though she shows proper quality when she does an Ophelia scene). Most importantly, Shepherd gives us glimpses – though not enough – of what real novelties of quality Irving brought to the stage: his quieter-than-Kemble Hamlet, his controversially dignified Shylock, his reluctance to boom for booming’s sake. There are some nice lines (“If Shakespeare was meant to be farted you’re using the wrong hole”) and a good indication of the ongoing insults he received from George Bernard Shaw.

 

 

It’s not the first time this landmark late-Victorian moment in theatre has been material for modern imagination: Michael Punter’s spooky squib STAGEFRIGHT at Bury St Edmunds saw a petulant Irving and his house manager Bram Stoker (of Dracula fame) locked in the Lyceum overnight, and the same GBS tension was referred to there. Shepherd’s piece is interesting for lovers of theatre history , but becomes a bit too narrative “and-then-and-then”, and could profitably leave out one or two incidents.
But it’s Christmas, a time to call up ghosts and remember what lies beneath and behind the age of Rylance and McKellen (and indeed of Brian Blessed, when it comes to booming). And you get The Bells for the same ticket, if something even spookier, more retro and darkly murderous is your bag.
http://www.parktheatre.co.uk to 19 Dec
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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November 26, 2015 · 11:41 pm

LITTLE EYOLF Almeida, NW3

SUNRISE TO STARLIGHT, A NORTHERN TRAGEDY

 

Under a bleak black mountain panorama, this is a shattering play about selfishness, mismatched love, and how grief and guilt can make you monstrously cruel unless it redeems you. It is not Henrik Ibsen’s best-known (though Antony Biggs at the Jermyn did a fine revival a few years back with Imogen Stubbs). But Richard Eyre, following his Hedda Gabler and a still-haunting adaptation of GHOSTS, brings the same deep sorrowing intelligence to bear in adapting and directing this.

 

 

He runs it (as before) straight through in eighty fine-balanced, emotionally gripping minutes. The same design team: Tim Hatley, with Peter Mumford’s vitally important lighting design, take a spare white stage from an opening sunrise beyond the peaks to the final starlit hope. Ibsen was an old man when he wrote it, well versed in its themes: inadequate marital love, the “law of change” which makes all things crumble and re-form, and the terrifying emotional vacuum of fin-de-siecle atheism. But here his catalyst is rawer and deeper: an innocent death.

 

 

Geeky writer Alfred (Jolyn Coy) has never quite meshed with his wife Rita (Lydia Leonard) ,a blazingly sexual, unsatisfied ball of need. He is still babyishly close to his half-sister Asta (Eve Ponsonby, touchingly conflicted beneath a sensible exterior). Rita resents her, and Asta herself finds it difficult to surrender to an adult love of Borgheim (Sam Hazeldine). As a practical road-building engineer the latter is the only sane and happy one – “the world is wonderful!” to him and he wants to share it.

 

Rita’s is desperate for Alfred’s embraces: needy, prowling in a thin wrapper, at one point she opens it to him hurling her desire like weapon, while with superb tiresomeness he chunters of packing up writing his vapid philosophy book about the nature of human responsibility and devoting his life to education their small lame son Eyolf, who alone can “Fill his life with purpose”. She, with shocking openness, cries that she wishes Eyolf had never been born, because she can’t share Alfred. “I want to be everything!”

 

He backs away from her advances. Coy and Leonard make this properly excruciating. “We had a love that wrapped us in flames!” she cries, and he “I wasn’t wrapped in flames”. We learn that he married partly for her money, to give his orphan half-sister security; later, that the child is only crippled because he fell off a table as a baby while they were making love.

 

 

Into this tangle of discontent falls a real thunderbolt, after a very unsettling visit from the Ratwoman : Eileen Walsh a horribly matter-of-fact Irish crone, the travelling pied-piper whose art is to lure to their drowning the “squeakers and rattikins, crawlers and creepers that scamper and plop into the milk-pails” . She gleefully says “Bite the bitter apple, little master!” as she leaves. And while the adults variously vent their anger and delusional ideas, Eyolf drowns in the fjord, watching her row away.

 

 

The rest is grief, a working-out of horror and cruel accusations, and realization that the cruellest thing of all when a child dies is that banal, whats-for-dinner life will go on. “We are stuck on this earth, both of us”. For all his bleakness Ibsen does usually offer a glimmer of dawn, and here Eyre and his cast serve it with delicate, unemphatic precision. Rita is the one who finally sees that even in the last horror, life may, if you can look outward, still be conducted with “something a little like love”. No flames, but a dim, flickering starlight hope.
box office 0207 359 4404 to 9 Jan
Sponsor: Aspen
rating five   5 Meece Rating

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November 26, 2015 · 12:51 am

PERICLES Wanamaker at Shakespeare’s Globe SE1

SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE…
Another flickering evening in the candlelight of the Globe’s Jacobean theatre: engrossing, melodramatic, comic, epic. Ben Jonson was disparaging about Pericles – c “a mouldy tale” . And even compared to A Winter’s Tale with its “gap of time” in the interval, this is diffuse and episodic. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, ricochets round the ancient Mediterranean and Aegean between kingdoms: fleeing for his life from the incestuous riddling Antiochus, saving a land from famine, being shipwrecked, finding his armour washed up and winning a fight , marrying Thaisa, losing her in childbirth in a storm at sea, casting her coffin adrift, enduring his daughter’s apparent death while he sails home to duty, roaming long years in his grief, growing his hair till he resembles Ben Gunn.

 

Meanwhile the wife’s and daughter’s fates in nunnery and brothel must be related too, plus the treachery of trusted friends and some random necessary pirates. Then the three must be reunited, with slight assistance from the Goddess Diana descending from the roof in a dream sequence. To keep the audience on-track it has a narrator, speaking as the medieval poet Gower. Add to that the fact that Shakespeare pretty certainly didn’t write the first eight or nine scenes (his colleague George Wilkins is mainly responsible for those, and indeed the early verse does rather plod along in comparison with later glories) . And all this adventure, rom-com, tragedy, romance and redemption must fit in tiny theatre required to be many shores and seas.

 

 

But Dominic Dromgoole’s production has wit, pace and beauty. Three hours fly past in suspense and not infrequent interludes of laughter. There is perfect atmospheric music by Clare van Kampen and a surprising degree of spectacle. Dromgoole – and designer Jonathan Fensom – positively relish the Jacobean challenge of sails, ratlines and ropes descending amid the flickering candelabras, thunder-effects, an altar fire and portable tree, and the creation of an instant brothel with rude picture and naff bead curtains. The Gower narration is, brilliantly, given to Sheila Reid as a diminutive crone, relishing the ancient story as if at a fireside, wandering in and out excited at each new development, scuttling out of the cast’s way to let them do a scene. And the offstage joust, startlingly, happens behind us in the circular corridor as the shutters fly suddenly open to the light.

 
James Garnon is Pericles, journeying from boyishness to manhood and on to Lear-like despair; Jessica Baglow a dignified, soberly virtuous pragmatic Marina: her scenes with her would-be rapists and her shaming of Lysimachus are done with defiant fire, and her trembling revelation with a hysterical father is properly moving. The play’s themes pulse through: hope, endurance, chastity and fatherhood (Simon Armstrong plays both the incestuous Antiochus and the hilariously jolly King Simonides; Fergal McElherron enjoyably doubles the decorous honest Helicanus and a hawking, spitting priapic brothel-keeper) .

 

 

The Shakespearian beauties of language multiply – “Born in a tempest where my mother died” says Marina sadly “The world to me an everlasting storm”. The magic intensifies. And for all the foolery, asides and absurdities, Dromgoole never lets us lose sight of the central strange beauty: amid late Shakespeare plays this is unique because Pericles is innocent. No tragic flaw: this is not an arrogant Lear or Cymbeline , jealous Leontes, nor even a plotter of vengeance like Prospero. He is just tossed by fate like his ships in the sea-storms, grieving but unblaming, pure in loving sorrow. So when the redemptive resurrections come, high emotion dissolves into laughter at the absurdity of his delight, pure relief without remorse. “New joys wait on you” says old Gower, signing off with satisfaction. Beautiful.

 

box office 0207 401 9919 to April
rating four4 Meece Rating

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November 25, 2015 · 6:53 am

EVENING AT THE TALK HOUSE Dorfman, SE1

ARID, PRETENTIOUS, POINTLESS
The last American import Rufus Norris brought to the National – The Motherf—-er with the Hat – was a five-mouse delight, a bold choice which rightly just won a Best Play award. Less welcome is this Wallace Shawn premiere, with the author himself bagging the weirdest and probably the most rewarding role, as a moribund old has-been TV actor , Dick.

He doesn’t turn up for the first fifteen minutes, which are occupied by a long narrative monologue by Robert (Josh Hamilton) who explains that it’s a ten-year reunion of the team from his play “Midnight in a Clearing with Moon and Stars”. It was convened by Ted, who wrote the music and now does occasional advertising jingles, and includes Annette the wardrobe mistress – large , glum, and broke – and Bill the producer, now a “talent agent”. The only other one who is still successful is Tom (Simon Shepherd in matinee-idol mode) as the hero of Robert’s ongoing TV soap. Robert now feels, and smugly announces, that theatre “came to seem a rather narrow corner”, and that the 30-minute TV show is the thing. Coming to this endless monologue cold, you muse that the man is a right prat, and worriedly hope that this is deliberate. Then Dick (Shawn himself) materializes, pretty drunk and lately “beaten up by some friends, a short battering, informal” , and finally the rest of them arrive.

 

 

 
And indeed they are all pretty frightful, endlessly and circularly discussing (in a sort of Beckett-and-soda manner) who liked who, who was a good actor, and which of their acquaintance has dropped dead. Some relief is offered by the landlady (Anna Calder-Marshall, playing it just sufficiently odd) and the maid, the wonderful Sinéad Matthews, always a treat. The tedium of the men’s conversation – mostly woefully static, despite being directed by Ian Rickson – is relieved a bit by Shawn’s surrealism: there is a government somewhere which is doing a universally approved “programme of murdering” people who “pose a threat to us”. Topical, at least. It transpires that the maid has just got back from a murdering job “mainly in Nigeria and Indonesia”, and Matthews’ account of this – and her final meltdown- provide the few streaks of arresting sincerity in the piece.

 

 

It’s all too artfully knowing and nudgingly self-referential to engage you much, despite the best efforts of a fine cast. It would help, perhaps, if he went the full horror-movie,  and had Calder-Matthews poisoning the lot of them with her Emerald Surprise punch.

 

At one point, at least, it is properly confirmed that Robert is indeed a prize prat , with Dick doing a reading from his celebrated play. It is pure Game-of-Thrones or sub-Tolkien nonsense, full of names like Beltramidon and Queen Ameldra of Garmor, and warriors eating “the meat of the golden antelope” after defeating some Marmidons.

Shawn’s play lasts 105 minutes. It is more than enough.
box office 020 7452 3000 to 30 March
rating one. 1 Meece Rating Just. For Sinead Matthews. Otherwise,  verging on  Dead Rat

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November 24, 2015 · 9:23 am

The Homecoming TRAFALGAR STUDIOS SW1A

STILL SHOCKING,  STILL SEXIST !    GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES SMACKS HIS LIPS OVER A VINTAGE PINTER…

 

 

I get the itching feeling that if anyone else had written this play we’d call the police. But they didn’t – Harold Pinter wrote it – so we won’t. Like all the best thrillers it is absolutely outrageous. Prostitution, death, perversions of every aspect are indulged  and laughed at and we’re all 100% complicit.

 

 

Teddy has been away for a number of years (in America , being a Professor in Philosophy of all things) but has returned to visit his family, new wife by his side. And what an awful place to bring a woman. His father hates women, his uncle has  an aversion to them, both his brothers are boasting rapists and one is a pimp. The poor dead mum is a conversational vigil and punch bag – all very Freud.

 

For all its chilling flights of lunacy, Jamie Lloyd has compacted this troubling, tense, intriguing, sexist and furiously crackers play into something incredibly lean and precise. Everything is incredibly measured, making the flashes of anger even more terrifying.   Soutra Gilmour’s brilliant set is a deep, abstract room which zooms backwards as if looking down the barrel of a gun. A single door gloomily stands at the end. Home sweet home.

 

Ron Cook as the furious father Max gives the kind of terrifying performance only someone under 5ft could. He’s planted in the middle of the empty living room, sitting in the only armchair, spitting about sluts, hatching disgusting plans and presiding over his perverse family. The dialogue between him and his brother Sam (Keith Allen) is where Pinter’s lines really get cooking. Both have that excellently distracted, hauntingly calm  Pinter delivery, without sounding like actors doing Pinter. Keith Allen is camp as tits, and nails every gag.

 

Gemma Chan is thankfully one of the sturdiest performances on stage. Everything in the play is geared to make her the victim but with the few lines she’s given she chills the rowdy male atmosphere in a brilliantly icy fashion.Gary Kemp as her odd, odd husband (Teddy) and John MacMillan as his younger, simpler, brother (Joey) slice through the comedy and the darkness well. John Simm as the third of the boys (Lenny) has moments of sheer perfection, but occasionally slips into ‘I’m speaking Pinter lines’ mode.

 

 

Despite a distracting interval (they should just run it 1h45 straight through), Jamie Lloyd has pulled of yet another tightly wound and wildly chilling Pinter revival. The duller moments are quickly glided over and the awful sexual and jealous tension is fully indulged in. We all felt at risk.

 

Box Office 08448717615   to  13 Feb  (alas, a day too early for a Valentine’s Day outing for the brave…)

rating  four   4 Meece Rating

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November 20, 2015 · 10:23 am

FLOWERING CHERRY Finborough, SW10

DREAMS WITHOUT DETERMINATION: THE DEEPEST TRAP OF ALL

 
Mid-life, an insurance salesman who will never be a big enough man to fulfil his big dream. Better to pretend- plan, to deny daily reality in the glow of an imaginary future and sanctified childhood memories worn meaningless by retelling. An anxious wife strives to hold on to her affection; there are two increasingly disaffected teenagers, an uneasy home atmosphere: ordinary failure and banal tragedy. Small wonder that Robert Bolt’s 1957 play was compared to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

 

 

But the comparison does it no favours: Jim Cherry is less self-aware than Willy Loman, and in a way more grimly tragic. Where Loman can reflect “I still feel kinda temporary about myself.. a man has got to add up to something”, Cherry suppresses his awful self-knowledge in drink and bluster, stretching his wife’s tolerance to the point where at one startling moment the neat split set – a sliver of garden alongside the suburban kitchen – sees them momentarily separated, each speaking. He is overacting, declaiming “O for a Muse of Fire!” and saying he has resigned to start an orchard in Somerset. She, outside the back door, is repeatedly praying for strength, just for long enough, for a mere moment of strength to leave him…

 

 

It is a wrenchingly sad slice of life, a portrait of the damage wrought by fantasy and bombast. Liam McKenna is Cherry (the part first taken by Ralph Richardson) , fuelled by a kitchen barrel of scrumpy ever more fortified by gin, poring over nurserymen’s catalogues and farm advertisements, chunkily eloquent in his memory and dream of an apple-orchard down West. The blossom, the harvest suppers of bread and cheese and bacon, the strong men, real men… To his modest, bumbling old colleague (beautifully evoked in appearances fore and aft by Benjamin Whitrow, who also direct) he brags about handing in his notice, but cries wolf once too often. At the heart of the play, in a restrainedly fine performance, Catherine Kanter is Isobel, 1950s everywife in a printed pinny, driven beyond endurance by the fantasy and pretences and discontent but in one final, dangerous throw willing to call his bluff and back his vaunted new life.

 

 

Whereon, of course, he shrinks back. During the gradual endgame it transpires that his daughter is afflicted by the same tendency to falsity, and his son , driven by the family atmosphere to get out at all costs, longs for his call-up. Into this mix comes the most hard-headed and hearted of catalysts, the daughter’s idolized friend Carol: Phoebe Sparrow wonderfully poisonous, young, calculating, amused, lethal. It’s another Finborough rediscovery, as relevant to the midlife dreamers among us still as to those of sixty years ago.

 

 

box office 0844 847 1652 to 20 dec

RATING  four 4 Meece Rating

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November 19, 2015 · 9:06 am

ROBIN HOOD Chipping Norton Theatre

OH YES IT IS!     CHIPPY , HOME OF PANTO, STRIKES AGAIN

It is, famously, the local panto for the Cameron family, though the paterfamilias PM himself might want to avoid swivelling heads and accusing stares when Robin, robbing the rich to give to the poor, chucks the last handful of chocolate coins out and sneakily mentions tax credits. The even better joke is when Denis the tax-gatherer opens the Sheriff of Nottingham’s filing cabinet to find , as the late Coalition’s treasurer did, a note saying There Is No Money left.

 
But never mind that: Ben Crocker’s latest is an absolutely cracking, proper pantomime, directed with gleeful inventiveness by Abigail Anderson in storybook sets (Russell Craig designs) and with fine songs ranging in style from nonny-nonny folk to music-hall. No stupid smut (well, one child-friendly poo-joke), no weary pop songs , no bought-in megastars doing their standard ‘turn’. Just wit, storytelling, enough participation to keep the young happy, and all the traditional elements – songsheet, water-fight, spotted bloomers, damn good female legs in tights – woven in without any exhausting overkill (“Behind you” occurs just once, neatly, as part of a door-joke).

 

 

There are four children onstage, and very good too; the villainous Sheriff (Andrew Piper) is all one could ask for, a failed Richard III with personal issues. And its pacy: before you’re through your first ice-cream, ten minutes have seen a song, a chorus of sarcastic pop-up puppet rabbits , Marian in shapely tights, a stave fight (girl-on-girl with Rosanna Lambe’s gender-changed Little Joan) ; plus all necessary back-story and the explosive entrance of Dame Connie Clatterbottom.

 

 

 
Ah, the Dame! Astonishingly, it seems that this is Andrew Pepper’s first outing as Dame, and he is a joy: of the rangy rather than tubby variety, which is handy when forced onto a giant swivelling archery target, but exuding warm flirtatious absurdity and effortless stage presence. He’s pure music-hall in his big numbers, and as schoolmistress saying “No-one needs a machete or a pump action shotgun in class” to the disguised villains he-she has fine authority. And in the magnificent bedtime strip sequence, some fifteen layers down to the bloomers, he must have brought tears of joy to costume designer Emily Stuart: few gentlemen can flick a pantaloon across the stage with more brio.

 

 

So yes,we three adults loved it, and so did every child in earshot (they were all in earshot,as well they should be. By the way, Crocker also respects the Robin Hood legends, down to Alan A’Dale’s lost love and the outlaws’ dismay at Robin’s cockiness in contesting for the silver arrow and landing himself in prison. Go for the big rackety starry spectaculars if you must; but this is a fine start to Christmas. And even better, it confines its nod to the season to one tuneless joke version of Jingle Bells, and spares us a premature Santa. Joyful .

 

box office 01608 642350 to 10th Jan
Sponsored by Kingham Hill School
rating five   5 Meece Rating

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November 17, 2015 · 10:53 pm

BADDIES THE MUSICAL Unicorn, SE1

DOWN WITH PAN AND CINDERELLA!

 
After the high-priced saccharine vapidity of ELF , it felt like time to check out something both classier, and more affordable. Always perilous for the lone critic is a primary-schools matinee, but I have forgiven this dedicated children’s theatre for the time I emerged with bubblegum in my hair from an enthusiastic blower in the row behind. I recommend the nice solo bench at the back by the door. Defensible space…

 
Anyway, it was well worth it. if only for the unusual spectacle of 250 young children enthusiastically booing a melodious and comely Peter Pan (and Cinderella) and rooting for the Big Bad Wolf and Cap’n Hook. Nancy Harris and Mark Teitler’s new musical opens with Red Riding Hood arriving chez Granny-wolf – Dean Nolan a splendid hairy-biker figure with a majestic beard and gut. Just as he is about to eat her, a swat team from the Bedtime Stories Authority arrests him, to the indignation of both (“It’s part of the story!” protests Red Riding Hood, entirely complicit.) In prison, on bleak bunks poor Wolfie finds the Ugly Sisters (Clare Sundin and Kelly Agbowu in garish urban bad-girl kit) . There’s a suave gangsta Hook in two-tone shoes, (Miles Yekkini) and the nerdy, gnomelike ginger Rumplestiltskin (DAvid McKay) who the others bully at first, for being good at mental arithmetic. “What did you think we were? snarls Hook at the audience “Care Bears?”. They all get their arias – the Ugly sisters beautifully bemoaning how they get judged on their looks, but then refusing pity in favour of feminist fierceness.

 
But the five baddies are united when it turns out that their real captors are a smooth-suited Peter Pan, selling his system for eternal youth (Christian Roe every inch a PR millionaire) and a wonderfully princessy Cinderella, KAthy Rose O”Brien as a sort of Zoella-ish selfie-queen in a ballgown, trilling her song “If only the uglies were pretty..” and chucking around sparkly cushions , pink teddies and air-freshener.

 
Turns out this pair, who even have a Powerpoint presentation, want to rebrand the baddies, turn Wolf into a rescue-dog and Hook into a cloakroom assistant, and promote role-model characters like the cheekily named “Fluffalo…a bestseller with a positive message loved by parents and teachers”.

 
It’s snappy, sassy, and knowing: the children all seemed to get the interwoven fairytale and Peter Pan references with no trouble. It lightly carries its themes of bullying, individuality, hypocrisy, the emptiness of “boys who are best at everything and girls everyone loves”, and the need for stories. “You need bad guys in a good story..without the sinner there’s no saint, without the darkness there’s no light”. There are some jolly songs, and director Purni Morell gives us sufficient coups de theatre to keep everyone happy – a flash-bang, an offstage roaring monster, a rope swing, a cracking good roughhouse fight and the final contest (high-speed mental arithmetic won by Rumpelstiltskin) roused a deafening , screaming roar of complicity. Splendid.
box office 020 7645 0560 to 24 Dec

rating  four   4 Meece Rating

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November 12, 2015 · 11:19 am

THE MODERATE SOPRANO Hampstead, NW3

OPERA’S THE THING!   YOUR LIFE IS BUT A SIDESHOW!  HURRAH! 
A play about the foundation of Glyndebourne Opera – “Snobs on the grass” as some cruel postwar journalist wrote? Tartan picnic rugs, Fortnums’ hampers, corporate networking? By David Hare?? Get away with you!

Yet this is a heart-soaring, joyful and sad and humane piece, and if it doesn’t follow Hampstead’s other recent triumphs and storm the West End, I’m a tartan picnic-rug. It was after Hare dramatized his his jaundiced memories of a constipated 1962 public-school in “South Downs” that the producer, Byam Shaw, suggested he take on the story of how John Christie, an eccentric wartime soldier and Eton science master, inherited the estate in the early ‘30s and decided to build an opera house and a festival. The “moderate soprano” of the title is his wife, the singer Audrey Mildmay, who he besieged with gifts and flowers until she married him: he was already fifty. Ironically she died before him, leaving him bereft. For the festival seasons he recruited Rudolf Bing, Fritz Busch and Carl Ebert: its a memory-play of the interaction of the five, of Christie’s explosive energy and his love story.
It is glorious. Simple in a way, discursive as characters speak their memories in between scenes. Sometimes it is very funny, at times profoundly sad. For what Hare makes of John Christie’s story is not “heritage theatre” but a hymn to art and its ambiguities, an elegy for the passing of life and a portrait of a man who is energetic, self-willed, choleric, impassioned. Sometimes Captain Mainwaring, sometimes almost Eric Morecambe, he is absurd but awe-inspiring, a “character’ but also a deep and needy personality. Roger Allam is perfection: chubbed-up, in a bald wig, here is the bluff reckless middle-aged soldier who one night in Bayreuth discovered “the sublime – until I heard that music I had no idea who I was”. Line upon line he delights: “Hate music-lovers, awful people, do nothing but complain – but I love music!”.

With his team assembled and the first season coming, he reacts with explosive horror to Bing and Busch telling him it can’t be Wagner – “you’ve built a jewel box, not an epic theatre” and shudders at the thought of Mozart, in the immortal line – “He may be great but is he any GOOD? Samey, jangly, it’s all servant-girls and awful giggling and big wigs”. As for his furious insistence that operagoers must pay heavily, wear boiled shirts and get on a train to deep Sussex on a working day, it is superb, and nobody could deliver it like Allam. These damn people must, he says, not just fiddle around with “ telephones and whatever they do in offices” then ‘take in a show’. They must accept “It’s their lives that are the sideshow! Opera’s the thing! And if it uses up their time and wipes out their savings so be it!”. And you know what – I was sort of with him there…
Nancy Carroll is a perfect foil as Audrey, sinking her identity and her art in his explosive will, loving him, her postwar decline tragic. Paul Jesson and Nick Sampson react wonderfully as Busch and Ebert, and George Taylor is a sinuous,sardonic Rudolf Bing. Who had to spend the war years working in Peter Jones, and only felt at home in the hair salon because its febrile atmosphere was most like opera – “I love hysteria…Nietzsche said, for art there must be frenzy”. The frenzy of a tubby, determined man with a yearning for sublimity receives, in this lovely play, the respect that it should.

Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com to 28 Nov

rating  five  5 Meece Rating

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November 11, 2015 · 1:10 pm

WASTE Lyttelton, SE1

POLITICS AND SCANDAL; IT WAS EVER THUS..
You’re an MP, a clever lawyer with cross-party popularity, newly invited into Cabinet to steer through a Bill to disestablish the Anglican Church and reform education. You’re passionate about this cause: defying the “barren minds and wills” of other MPs, arguing with vigour and humour. But you never quite fitted in to the high-Tory social circle at the heart of things. And just as you’re preparing for the big push, declaring that you are “In love!” with the Bill and the cause, in comes a nervy, distressed woman in a cloche hat with whom you tangled (very briefly, and not in love at all) in a previous moonlit scene. Announcement: “There’s a danger of my having a child. Your child”. She hasn’t been near her husband for a year.
Charles Edwards is magnificent as the MP Trebelle , expressing both a workaholic passion and a cool but decent core which makes him meet with i revulsion her insistence that she doesn’t want it. She demands, with rising hysteria, help towards abortion. He offers to help her go abroad and have it and be divorced. “You’d marry me?” “That is the usual thing” says Edwards glumly. She, however – and this is Olivia Williams on top ranting form – is resentful. “I can’t see why you don’t love me just a little!” she wails, though the reason is increasingly clear to the rest of us: because he’s a dry stick that way, and she is a pain in the neck. Something she proves by instantly switching off the emotion and getting gay and flirty when other men come into the room; not to mention her wail that it’s all “Beastly! No civilized woman wants children growing up around her to prove she’s getting old!”.
During the interval – for this is a political play, the female dilemma merely an inciting-incident – she dies of a botched abortion, and the long central scene sees a meeting of party grandees deciding whether or not to dump Trebelle, thus endangering the Bill, or whether they can square the estranged husband into not outing him as the adulterer at the inquest. (It’s Paul Hickey, sourly Irish, observing “She was a worthless woman, we are brothers in misfortune”).
It is riveting, director Roger Michell moving his cast with deft tone and body language to the degree that my companion (a seasoned political animal) gasped that it was horribly credible in any period of the Party. Gerrard McArthur’s aristocratic, chilly religiosity as Lord Charles hardly moves from the sofa, sitting in judgement on them all ; Louis Hilyer is northern, pragmatic and willing to dilute the legislation to get rid of the scandal; others dithering and hope. A wonderful and timeless political line is “In this sort of case, one talks a bit and then does The Usual Thing”. They bin Trebell.

It is, for him, the end: Edwards, movingly weary, expresses the despair. “I’ve never, so to speak, given myself away before. To be part of something…! Having lost myself in it, the loss of IT leaves me a dead man”.

Harley Granville Barker’s play was written in 1906, banned for being near the knuckle sexually and religiously, and revived and revised thirty years later. But over that gap of time, and the nine decades since, little changes in the cuthroat world of political intrigue. Only the cloche hats have gone. I took a while to warm to the play – the opening country-house scene is chillier and duller than it need be, partly due to Hildegarde Bechtler’s irritatingly minimalist, geometric sliding scenery (I suppose they were anxious not to Downto-nize it with too much Edwardiana, so fair enough).
But it gathers pace, and all the cast is strong: Emerald O”Hanrahan as the bluestocking Lucy and Sylvestra Le Touzel as Trebell’s sister are particularly striking. The end is grimly moving as the young secretary, Walter, angrily grieves the waste of Trebell’s talent. It’s Hubert Burton’s debut on the London stage, and he deserves an extra bow because on press night his important moment was delayed by a dead stop: a heart attack in the stalls meant a 25 minute wait for an ambulance. The last five minutes were played out to a reducing house with the medics and patient in situ. Respect to the family, who allowed it; and to Burton who achieved his moment with grace and sincerity.

box office 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk to 19 march
Rating four   4 Meece Rating

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November 8, 2015 · 2:58 pm

HARLEQUINADE / ALL ON HER OWN Garrick, SW1

A DOUBLE BILL: RATTIGAN AT PLAY AND IN GRIEF

There may be voices which jibe at Kenneth Branagh for being producer, deviser and co-director of a year-long season, finding starry casting like Dame Judi Dench and Michael Pennington and then giving himself the central role of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale.

As it happens, he may be the boss but he is superb in it (see below for five-mouse rave). And he also neatly undermines any murmurs of “who-does-he-think-he-is-bloody-Garrick-or-what?” by running it in rep with Terenace Rattigan’s gleeful parody of the theatre world in Harlequinade, himself playing the dedicated but dreadful Arthur Gosport: producer-actor-manager of a government-subsidized wartime initiative to take Shakespeare to a depressed Midlands town which doesn’t particularly want it. This gives him ample opportunity to portray vanity, directorial incompetence, and aching middle-aged insecurity over having to play Romeo opposite his younger wife (Miranda Raison, here spoofily actressy). Thus the entrepreneurial actormanager Branagh neatly takes the mickey out of those who take it out of him.

Harlequinade itself is a bit creaky, Rattigan enjoying the typical theatre-man’s sentimental self-mockery. It opens with a balcony scene rehearsal in which the female “darling”on the balcony asks the male ‘darling” below whether he’s going to keep in “that little jump” tonight? Huffily, the male darling says “I thought it helped the boyishness of the character”. As the wig does, until he pulls it off in exasperation to reveal the thinning pate. What is even less helpful is that he is back in Brackley, a rep stamping-ground of his youth, where the chirpy intruder Muriel turns out to be the result of a 17-year-old fling and the pram in the wings makes Romeo a grandfather. Aptly – given Branagh’s other opening production – he is auditioning Perditas for The Winter’s Tale when Muriel pounces on him with a cry of “Dad!” and all he can splutter is “Which text are you using?”
So there are some good jokes, and a gorgeously bossy Zoe Wanamaker as Dame Edna, the formidable aunt and grande-dame of the company with her devastating “notes”. But in this 100-minute double-bill evening which runs in rep alongside the big Winter’s Tale, the real find is the twenty-minute opener, ALL ON HER OWN, a dark Rattigan monologue by Zoe Wanamaker as a widow with a whisky decanter, addressing the husband who probably killed himself.

As she breaks into his voice in imagination and memory the widow strips her own pretentions bare. She reveals a life cultured, upmarket, but always a bit ashamed of her rich builder husband, impeccably polite to him but failing in love . She strips her pretensions bare, speaking for him at last in the inescapable haunting that is memory. “DId I kill you?”. Rattigan’s own lover was a suicide: grief and understanding blaze through this short, painfully arresting piece. It makes a curious bedfellow to Harlequinade, but worth seeing.

box office 0844 482 9673 to 21 Jan http://www.branaghtheatre.com

rating four, but only  because of the Wanamaker parts!
4 Meece Rating

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November 7, 2015 · 11:23 pm

THE WINTER’S TALE Garrick, SW1

IN WHICH FAITH IN BRANAGH AWAKES...

Kenneth Branagh’s Garrick year as actor-manager opens in unquestionable triumph. One of Shakespeare’s greatest, most redemptive plays is richly served without flaw or gimmick, traditional in this l 1889 theatre but fresh, clear, heartfelt.  The court of the jealous Leontes profits from being set not in antiquity but in a late Victorian – perhaps Tsarist – red-velvet palace in a Christmas season: under the tree a cosy opening vignette of the child Mamillius at old Paulina’s knee, begging “a sad tale’s best for winter”. His mother, prefiguring her statue moment, stands pensive aside, a column of white.
The perennial problem of Leontes’ sudden crazy suspicion of his wife and Polixenes – which can be a barrier to credulity – is softened as the family party begins with grainy old home-movies of the friends as youths, projected on a homely sheet. This, and one unmanly embrace, offer without simplistic emphasis the possibility that the jealousy is of both wife and friend. But as in life, its origin ceases to matter once self-deluding righteousness drives the sleepless half-crazy tyrant onwards, hurling terrible words at a bewildered, dignified Hermione.     His faintly Tsarist air also supports the superstitious reliance on the oracle (Hermione is the emperor of Russia’s daughter in the text, something I had never noticed; Rasputin did, after all, get a grip on that menage). The emotional hit of the first act (co-directed by Branagh and Rob Ashford) is shattering.
Judi Dench as the indignant, matriarchal Paulina is as you would expect matchless. But the sense of greatness, of timeless truthful wholeness which hangs around her in these great and generous parts, is shared this time by Branagh himself as Leontes. I have been in the past a Branagh-sceptic, but I take it back. This is an honestly great performance, restrained but vibrant with crazy emotion, the actor fully inhabiting a Leontes gripped mid-life by an emotion he cannot even understand, let alone justify. “I am a feather for each wind..” The bewildered dignity of Miranda Raison’s fine Hermione cannot reach him, nor the reasoning of Camillo and Michael Pennington’s sorrowful, appalled Antigonus. Branagh’s scenes with Dench crackle as vividly as the real brazier centre stage as she berates his “needless heavings”, thrusts the newborn Perdita into his arms and, when threatened with the fire herself, flings back “I care not!”. The emotional tornado pauses for its still centre during the solemn trial scene, as a calm, wounded Hermione mourns her newborn infant torn from her to murder, “innocent milk in innocent mouth”. Apollo’s vindication comes; as Mamillius’ death strikes Leontes, Branagh curls like a wounded dog, howling agony, drawing even Paulina to attempt some comfort . As the palace dissolves into a bare seafront old Antigonus sweetly cuddles the baby he must leave on the strand, and a coup de theatre of “pursued by a bear” echoes the home-movie moment we began with (indeed Christopher Oram’s designs serve every nuance and mood of the play with quiet precision).

Dench as Time speaks the sixteen-year gap; amid the fleeces come John Dalgleish’s lanky folksinging chancer Autolycus, the two shepherds (again perfectly judged, unclownish, decent) and the rustic, simple-hearted charm of Jessie Buckley’s Perdita. Polixenes’ irrational rage mirrors Leontes’; then back in the now pale, marble-grieving halls of Sicilia the family resolution is, as always , brilliantly given by Shakespeare to mere third-party witnesses – “Such a deal of wonders!” says Cleomenes happily. This is the late, mature playwright, aware that a classic neat romance-of-revelation moment must not dim the surreal beauty of the resurrection scene. As Dench’s steady voice injuncts: “It is required you do awake your faith”, we do. Heaven knows I have seen this play half a dozen times and read it as many, but I gasped, and tears came. For the lost ones – Antigonus, Mamillius – and for the fragility of new joys and the remission of old sins.

box office 0844 482 9673 http://www.branaghtheatre.com
rating Five    5 Meece Rating
It is, of course, sold out. But if you can’t arm-wrestle a ticket off somebody…there is a relay in cinemas worldwide on 26th November. It runs in rep with the double bill of HARLEQUINADE and ALL ON HER OWN: review of that follows tomorrow.

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November 7, 2015 · 8:11 am

LA SOIREE Spiegeltent, South Bank

ROLL UP, ROLL UP, ROLL OVER…

It’s back for Christmas: pure entertainment, faux-decadent but full of heart, skilful and cheerful and elegant and daft. In the great glittering tent by the Thames battering circus music softens us up to be astonished by miracles of grace and balance, to catch our breath at impossibilities and giggle at benign naughtinesses. Over eleven years the “new variety”, boldly burlesque grown-up circus has refined and perfected its formats, and collected artistes from across the world: aerialists and exhibitionists, jugglers and jokers, Weimar wannabes crooning darkly in preposterous feathers, acrobats in bondage gear. On any given night a selection of them hurtle and fly and preen and beguile and clown. I fall for it every time, one of the best , racketiest of nights out with never a minute wasted.
That lack of time-wasting is a prosaic thing to mention, but it matters: there is no ringmaster to drive you nuts with drawn-out pleasantries and unnecessary build-ups. Once it begins, smooth stage-management whirls it from act to act, balancing silent astonishments with sharp (and yes, some very adult) verbal jokes. Old hands will recognize seasoned Soirée performers. Clarke McFarlane in his studded leather biker outfit and bare tummy makes a couple of appearances as Mario Queen of the Circus, makes us sing We Are The Champions in tribute to the great Freddie, juggles and crowdsurfs and attempts a world record for the most people inside a hula-hoop. (Two. If he catches your eye to help him, don’t).

Captain Frodo the Norwegian contorionist does the thing with getting his body through two tennis-rackets: I have to cover my eyes intermittently in horror, but he is so verbally funnyand so likeable as he delivers an earnest commentary with one arm and leg through a racket and tangles himself in his microphone that his final extrication is cathartic. Australian Asher Treleaven with his “Sexy Diabolo For Ladies” and disgraceful Mills and Boon reading is a joy still. The English Gentlemen Denis Lock and Hamish Mc Cann, in bowlers and pinstripes, again do headstands and impossible balancing acts on one another while reading the Financial Times or puffing a pipe. Seen that and loved it several times, including the bit where they strip to union jack underpants and sock-suspenders; but Denis Lock now returns with another turn. It is a new, extraordinarily beautiful and scientifically fascinating bubble-blowing act. What? Bubble-blowing? for grownups? Yes. Astonishing.

Among these favourites are newcomers: Melanie Chy, androgynously ferocious doing hand-balancing on a smoking giant motorbike; Bret Pfister tough and tattooed swirling in a hoop overhead; a remarkable, sultry new aerialist General Yammel, who smokes a cigar while gyrating crazily on slings. The linking chanteuse this year is Miss Frisky (without her familiar cabaret oppo Mannish), doing the Weimary thing in an explosion of orange hair and gold lamé.
It couldn’t be done better. And for all the adults-only lines (well, I’d happily take a savvy mid-teen) the overarching spirit is of innocent, astonished joy.

http://www.la-soiree.com to 17 Jan   5 Meece Rating   give ’em the cheese!  Five.

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November 5, 2015 · 11:05 pm

ELF Dominion Theatre, W1

CURLY HAT AND STRIPY STOCKINGS TIME

Play critic-cliché bingo once they’re out! One point each for “Elf ’n Safety”, “National Elf” , kids with phones outside taking Elfies , pixie-lated publicity, gnome runs, and anyone saying “this’ll sleigh them”. The one about feeling good “from head to mistle-toe” is actually in the lyrics, so that doesn’t count.
But who am I to, er, rain-deer on its parade? The story is from the much-loved film with Will Ferrell, about an infant who stowed away in Santa’s sleigh as an orphan and is raised by elves before setting out to find his neglectful human father. It is determinedly good-hearted. The press night was an Alzheimer’s Society gala, the producers donating all the free press ticket prices to the charity. Ben Forster bounces enthusiastically around in an embarrassing green elf-suit with no sign of discomfort, and Kimberley Walsh of Girls Aloud deploys – in the one decent solo she is allowed – a dry wit and really beautiful, strong musical-theatre voice . For the benefit of Dads, she is first spotted in an elfin skating-skirt high up a stepladder in Macy’s (New York has long since stolen Christmas from old Chas Dickens’ London). And she accepts without snarling the possibly suggestive line from Buddy the Elf “I’d like to stick you on the top of my tree”. Hmmm.

If I was a starry-eyed seven-year-old, or if its ferocious Christmassiness wasn’t launched on Bonfire night to an almost totally adult audience, I might record more pleasure. The score and songs by Matthew Skier and Chad Beguelin are OK – Ms Walsh’s “Never fall in love with an Elf” being the best, and the reiterated “Christmas Song” the catchiest . The ensemble tap-breaks are professional, and there are two or three genuinely witty moments. The best involves the panic to pitch a children’s book and save the Dad’s publishing job; by happy serendipity the show opened the day after the cringiest Apprentice show yet when the teams had to devise a toddlers’ book in four hours and sell the ghastly result. Even they didn’t suggest “a family of asparagus children”.
But over and over again the word in my mind was “workmanlike”. It isn’t special, spectacular or magical enough to justify the record seat prices (from the high fifties (bargains 48.50 on one site)   to £ 160-plus, with no halves) . This production, by Bord Gais Dublin and the Theatre Royal Plymouth, is not a slick Broadway stunner. The story, with its moral of goodwill, family, and a Scroogeian grump learning “It’s never too late to grow” is simple even by child standards: children’s theatre these days is nuanced, strong-flavoured, thrillingly demanding. Yet it isn’t full-on panto either.

And to be honest, for most of its length – when Buddy the Elf is being no help in either Macy’s or his Dad’s office, playing with the shredder and throwing “snow” around like the intern from Hell – his “ lovable” naivete gives a worrying impression of bordering on serious mental retardation. He’s supposed to be thirty years old, and is expert with an iPad. Was there no wifi at the North Pole? One should not, perhaps, find oneself siding so exasperatedly with the nicely sour Joe McGann as the unwilling father…

.

Box Office: 0845 200 7982 to 2 Jan
: http://www.elfthemusical.co.uk / http://www.dominiontheatre.com

rating Two. You can add a third  if you’re under ten and get a bargain ticket.

2 meece rating

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November 5, 2015 · 12:48 pm

LOVE FOR LOVE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

FLOUNCES AND FLIRTS,  INSULTS AND INNUENDOES…A RESTORATION ROUT 
There’s a bustle of backstage larking before the curtain, cast dashing around in shirtsleeves, manoeuvring a hamper , getting stuck in ropes and tripping over a life-size model crocodile. So get in your seat early. Especially if you want a random hug from Mr Scandal (Robert Cavanah) or to be picked on to represent Queen Anne with a polystyrene crown from the gift shop plonked on your head (the Queen, it seems, saw Congreve’s play on her 32nd birthday, in 1697).
Director Selina Cadell notes joyfully in the programme that Restoration Comedy was always complicit: actors and audience alike letting it be known that it was all “play’ and the relationship was open: not until 1912 did the idea of the “fourth wall” get traction. So throughout this riotous, consistently entertaining evening characters make eye contact, confide, point, and require the front row to look after their jackets or hats. Not (be reassured) embarrassingly. There is even, briefly a tatty songsheet lowered from the gallery in the hope we will join a sailorly chorus.
I will not attempt to lay out the plot, how the spendthrift layabout Valentine wins his Angelica, whose ruse foils Sir Sampson Legend’s attempt to disinherit him, or why the straying wife of Foresight the duff astrologer is in cahoots with the equally loose-bloomered Mrs Frail to stop the favoured sailor son Ben marrying Miss Prue. It’ll all come clear in a firecracker onslaught of sharp lines, witticisms, flights of fancy and splendid insults. “Dirty Dowdy!’ “Stinking tar-barrel!” “Crocodile!” “FIsh – impudent tarpaulin!”. Not to mention double-entendres of magnificent clarity – one discussion about whether a woman went “to World’s End” takes us way beyond Chelsea. Enlightening that it was deemed suitable for Queen Anne, when you consider how strictly Royal Variety Performance artists are warned off innuendo today.
The joy of it, credit to both Congreve and Cadell, is that for the whole of the first half never five minutes passes without some new, distinct and preposterous character arriving. As costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt has opted for period silhouettes but “modern hair” rather than alienating periwigs, they are both appropriate and cartoonishly familiar today. We meet Valentine – Tom Turner as a languidly poudré rake lounging in his rooms in peacock blue and being berated about late payment by his valet (nobody in this play has any humble respect for anyone else, which is bracing and very Congreve). Soon Cavanah’s dark, sarcastic Scandal joins VAlentine, then – leaping over the chaise-longue in a Tintin quiff and a plump fluster of pink bows and orange tags – we have Jonathan Broadbent, who was so enchantingly touching in My Night With Reg. Soon there is the vain, tyrannical, affronted father, Nicholas le Prevost (an actor so accomplished that he can growl out Georgette Heyerish lines like “faith ’n troth she’s devilish handsome!” as if it came naturally). There’s the earnest fool Michael Thomas as Foresight with his astrolabe and stuffed croc; Hermione Gulliford upmarketly tarty as his wife, Zoe Waites even more so as Mrs Frail, and at last the seafaring Ben, very ahaaarr-Jim-lad, attempting vainly to woo the mummerzet -accented and pink-haired loutess, Miss Prue (Jenny Rainsford, gloriously funny).
In a riot of colour and choler, furbelows and flirtation, tricks and traducings, with a surreal Benny-Hill dash-through, two sweetly mournful songs and a rude shanty, it scrambles rumbustiously to its end. The Restoration had years of dreary Puritanism to get over. In the age of political correctness its spirit returns to comfort us.

box office 0844 800 1110 rsc.org.uk to 22 Jan
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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November 5, 2015 · 12:45 pm

ANITA AND ME Theatre Royal, Stratford East E15

MEERA SYAL’S MEENA…A MEMORY OF THE 70s, THOUGHTFUL FOR TODAY

Any show playing Slade and T. Rex standards before the curtain has me well softened up So does the wide, generous vision of Meera Syal, whose 1996 novel (set twenty years earlier) was a teenage-rite-of-passage story . Meena is kicking against her dignified Punjabi family heritage in a rundown slate-mining village in the Black Country. Tanika Gupta adapts it for the stage as a play with songs, understated and simply accompanied, by Ben and Max Ringham, It references glam-rock, morris-tunes and Indian rhythms, though the most an irresistible moment is when the schoolgirl yowls out Cum On Feel The Noize with her uncle’s enthusiastic tabla accompaniment and a chorus of supportively clapping family. Followed, alas, by the teenager’s enthusiastic cry that she loves the song so much she “wants to shag its arse off”. This, of course, being the most vigorous affirmation of affection the innocent moppet has learned from her rough-edged local heroine, Anita.

So there are some terrific moments, and in Bob Bailey’s lovely bricky street set Roxana Silbert directs a nostalgic portrait of the age of tie-dye, Jackie magazine, the coming of Comprehensives and motorways , dogs which still could be called “Nigger” and (let’s face it, since it happens halfway through) the hideous and ignorant youthful sport of “Paki-bashing”.
So far, so good. But it feels more like an observant novel still, series of sketched moments: small conflicts in family and community. Which is interesting, not least in artfully pointing up the irony of Asian immigrant families coming into rough, disaffected white areas and struggling to maintain in their children the dignity, moral standards and family piety of their tradition. The community’s hearts of gold with fags and pinnies are beautifully- notably the marvellous Janice Connolly as Mrs Worrall with her jam tarts and rugged kindness ; but Joseph Drake brilliantly evokes the boy Sam’s journey from an amiable doofus doing wheelies on a Chopper bike to a jobless, half-educated, angry bovver boy lashing out at the Punjabi planning official. Mandeep Dhillon as Meena is a delight, striding and scampering, her body language a lovely innocent contrast to the knowing, roughly sexualized and abused Anita (Jalleh Alizadeh). And as the parents, Ayesha Dharker and Ameet Chana are dignified and touching , especially in Dharker’s sudden expression of lonely, homesick despair at this hard life under an alien sky. Yasmin Wilde, too, is solidly noble as the grandmother, setting the history of colonialism and Partition into intimate family history. And that’s all good.

But as a play, a drama, it doesn’t catch fire until almost too late. All the strong events are in the second half, including a fine showy conversion of the set into a sinister canal-bank. To put it bluntly, not quite enough happens, and not so disastrously as to create a real, shaking conclusion. The plot needs a moment of recklessness to take it beyond a slice of good-hearted soap-opera. Everyone moves on: as it does in a novel, as it does in real life. Not quite theatre: maybe Gupta should have taken more liberties with the novel. But as a slice of 20th century life, it’s perfect.
box office 020 8534 0310 to 21 November

rating three 3 Meece Rating

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November 5, 2015 · 12:34 pm

LOVE FOR LOVE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

FRILLS AND FLIRTATIONS, TRICKS AND TRADUCINGS…
There’s a bustle of backstage larking before the curtain, cast dashing around in shirtsleeves, manoeuvring a hamper , getting stuck in ropes and tripping over a life-size model crocodile. So get in your seat early. Especially if you want a random hug from Mr Scandal (Robert Cavanah) or to be picked on to represent Queen Anne with a polystyrene crown from the gift shop plonked on your head (the Queen, it seems, saw Congreve’s play on her 32nd birthday, in 1697).

Director Selina Cadell notes joyfully in the programme that Restoration Comedy was always complicit: actors and audience alike letting it be known that it was all “play’ and the relationship was open: not until 1912 did the idea of the “fourth wall” get traction. So throughout this riotous, consistently entertaining evening characters make eye contact, confide, point, and require the front row to look after their jackets or hats. Not (be reassured) embarrassingly. There is even, briefly a tatty songsheet lowered from the gallery in the hope we will join a sailorly chorus.
I will not attempt to lay out the plot, how the spendthrift layabout Valentine wins his Angelica, whose ruse foils Sir Sampson Legend’s attempt to disinherit him, or why the straying wife of Foresight the duff astrologer is in cahoots with the equally loose-bloomered Mrs Frail to stop the favoured sailor son Ben marrying Miss Prue. It’ll all come clear in a firecracker onslaught of sharp lines, witticisms, flights of fancy and splendid insults. “Dirty Dowdy!’ “Stinking tar-barrel!” “Crocodile!” “FIsh – impudent tarpaulin!”. Not to mention double-entendres of magnificent clarity – one discussion about whether a woman went “to World’s End” takes us way beyond Chelsea. Enlightening that it was deemed suitable for Queen Anne, when you consider how strictly Royal Variety Performance artists are warned off innuendo today.
The joy of it, credit to both Congreve and Cadell, is that for the whole of the first half never five minutes passes without some new, distinct and preposterous character arriving. As costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt has opted for period silhouettes but “modern hair” rather than alienating periwigs, they are both appropriate and cartoonishly familiar today. We meet Valentine – Tom Turner as a languidly poudré rake lounging in his rooms in peacock blue and being berated about late payment by his valet (nobody in this play has any humble respect for anyone else, which is bracing and very Congreve). Soon Cavanah’s dark, sarcastic Scandal joins VAlentine, then – leaping over the chaise-longue in a Tintin quiff and a plump fluster of pink bows and orange tags – we have Jonathan Broadbent, who was so enchantingly touching in My Night With Reg. Soon there is the vain, tyrannical, affronted father, Nicholas le Prevost (an actor so accomplished that he can growl out Georgette Heyerish lines like “faith ’n troth she’s devilish handsome!” as if it came naturally). There’s the earnest fool Michael Thomas as Foresight with his astrolabe and stuffed croc; Hermione Gulliford upmarketly tarty as his wife, Zoe Waites even more so as Mrs Frail, and at last the seafaring Ben, very ahaaarr-Jim-lad, attempting vainly to woo the mummerzet -accented and pink-haired loutess, Miss Prue (Jenny Rainsford, gloriously funny).
In a riot of colour and choler, furbelows and flirtation, tricks and traducings, with a surreal Benny-Hill dash-through, two sweetly mournful songs and a rude shanty, it scrambles rumbustiously to its end. The Restoration had years of dreary Puritanism to get over. In the age of political correctness its spirit returns to comfort us.

box office 0844 800 1110 rsc.org.uk to 22 Jan
rating four

4 Meece Rating

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November 4, 2015 · 11:26 pm

ANITA AND ME Theatre Royal Stratford East, E15

CHOPPER BIKES AND CHANGE,  TEENS IN THE DAYS OF TIE-DYE…
Any show playing Slade and T. Rex standards before the curtain has me well softened up So does the wide, generous vision of Meera Syal, whose 1996 novel (set twenty years earlier) was a teenage-rite-of-passage story . Meena is kicking against her dignified Punjabi family heritage in a rundown slate-mining village in the Black Country. Tanika Gupta adapts it for the stage as a play with songs, understated and simply accompanied, by Ben and Max Ringham, It references glam-rock, morris-tunes and Indian rhythms, though the most an irresistible moment is when the schoolgirl yowls out Cum On Feel The Noize with her uncle’s enthusiastic tabla accompaniment and a chorus of supportively clapping family. Followed, alas, by the teenager’s enthusiastic cry that she loves the song so much she “wants to shag its arse off”. This, of course, being the most vigorous affirmation of affection the innocent moppet has learned from her rough-edged local heroine, Anita.

So there are some terrific moments, and in Bob Bailey’s lovely bricky street set Roxana Silbert directs a nostalgic portrait of the age of tie-dye, Jackie magazine, the coming of Comprehensives and motorways , dogs which still could be called “Nigger” and (let’s face it, since it happens halfway through) the hideous and ignorant youthful sport of “Paki-bashing”.
So far, so good. But it feels more like an observant novel still, series of sketched moments: small conflicts in family and community. Which is interesting, not least in artfully pointing up the irony of Asian immigrant families coming into rough, disaffected white areas and struggling to maintain in their children the dignity, moral standards and family piety of their tradition. The community’s hearts of gold with fags and pinnies are beautifully- notably the marvellous Janice Connolly as Mrs Worrall with her jam tarts and rugged kindness ; but Joseph Drake brilliantly evokes the boy Sam’s journey from an amiable doofus doing wheelies on a Chopper bike to a jobless, half-educated, angry bovver boy lashing out at the Punjabi planning official. Mandeep Dhillon as Meena is a delight, striding and scampering, her body language a lovely innocent contrast to the knowing, roughly sexualized and abused Anita (Jalleh Alizadeh). And as the parents, Ayesha Dharker and Ameet Chana are dignified and touching , especially in Dharker’s sudden expression of lonely, homesick despair at this hard life under an alien sky. Yasmin Wilde, too, is solidly noble as the grandmother, setting the history of colonialism and Partition into intimate family history. And that’s all good.

But as a play, a drama, it doesn’t catch fire until almost too late. All the strong events are in the second half, including a fine showy conversion of the set into a sinister canal-bank. To put it bluntly, not quite enough happens, and not so disastrously as to create a real, shaking conclusion. The plot needs a moment of recklessness to take it beyond a slice of good-hearted soap-opera. Everyone moves on: as it does in a novel, as it does in real life. Not quite theatre: maybe Gupta should have taken more liberties with the novel. But as a slice of 20th century life, it’s perfect.
box office 020 8534 0310 to 21 November

3 Meece Rating

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November 3, 2015 · 11:29 pm

AS YOU LIKE IT Olivier, SE1

A MAGICAL GLADE OF OFFICE FURNITURE…

Of all Shakespeare’s comedies, this is the one which most combines memorable lines – the seven ages of man, Rosalind’s quickfire epigrams about love – with a defiantly absurd plot and a rejection of every probability except that of young love. Indeed I should confess that the prolonged homoerotic practice-wooing between Orlando and a disguised Rosalind in britches has in many productions made me what to howl “Oh, tell him you’re a girl! Get on with it!” And that’s even without the lion-attack-rescue-reconciliation between Orlando and Oliver, – covered in one rushed speech – or the sudden resolution of the old feud as a messenger turns up in the last minute to announce that the wicked Duke has met a monk and changed his ways. It makes you suspect that Shakespeare, up against a deadline, suddenly realized he had got four girls in wedding-dresses and their grooms, plus a long-lost father and a depressed Jacques, all stuck in the middle of a forest with no money. Quick! Reform an offstage Duke!

Its central theme, though, is eternally appealing: that a stiff, unhappy, formal and arid world must be shaken up, its inhabitants thrown into a hostile forest so they can re-work their relationships. So director Polly Findlay opens it in a formal office, where bells govern everything and the only foliage is screensavers and stunted bonsai trees next to the shredders . It looks like a bit of a City trading-floor, not least when Joe Bannister’s blond, public-schooly Orlando has to wrestle, first with his domineering brother (Philip Arditti) and then more dangerously, with Leon Annor, enormous in Lycra and fright-mask, who has been tipped to kill him.
When Rosalind and Celia flee , rather than replace the office set by flying in some trees, designer Lizzie Clachan offers a scenic coup de theatre. Desks and chairs fly upwards, toppling and spilling to hang: monochrome, tangled and threatening as a winter forest. Some chairs still have cast members lurking aloft on them, making sinister woodland sounds. It looks like a freeze-framed explosion in Staples.

At first it felt a bit too clever, a desperate measure; but on the ground there is solidity, and the two fugitive girls carry it. Rosalie Craig is an utterly charming Rosalind, suddenly powerful and confident in her drag, and Patsy Ferran a mischievous physical foil as Celia: nimble and scornful and practical. The forest people too become foils and mirrors: there’s John Ramm as the exiled Duke clinging bravely to decency, Paul Chahidi an unusually troubled Jacques deep in questioning depression, and the shepherds. Among whom Siobhan McSweeney is a standout funny Audrey, and Ken Nwosu delivers the famous definitions of love with a poignant perfection.

So gradually the production drew me to its weird, angular, ultimately bright neon heart. The company singing, by Orlando Gough, is ravishing in it its eerie yearning harmonies. And the introduction of a flock of sheep played by the huge ensemble crawling around in Arran sweaters is a definite enhancement; especially as so many of them make the additional effort to jostle, try and mount each other, graze nose-down, and chew showily. One heroic ram fully consumes one of the hundreds of green Post-It notes on which Orlando writes his awful poems. Actors, gotta love ‘em!
box office 0207 452 3000 to 5 March
In cinemas on 25 Feb 2016
Rating four   4 Meece Rating

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October 29, 2015 · 10:18 pm

THE HAIRY APE Old Vic SE1

FROM THE FIRES BELOW,  O”NEILL’S  ACCUSING VOICE 
From the opening moments of Richard Jones’ stunning, nightmarish production of Eugene O’Neill’s early play we have both the shock of expressionist newness – it can still disconcert, a century on – and a powerful sense of period. Both are profoundly right. The ships’ stokers, black with smoke and filth, are figures frozen in the angular energy of 1920’s socialist realism, lurching in robotic concord as if hit by the ship’s roll in their yellow steel barred cage. They come to life to quarrel and brawl and sing and stamp, or listen to Irish Paddy (Steffan Rhodri) declaiming O’Neill’s passionate threnody for the real days of seafaring. Days when “there was clippers with tall masts touching the sky, the clean skins and clear eyes of the men, free men…work, but work under the sky with skill and daring in it..”. All the baffked anguish of industrialisation rolls through it.
Only Bertie Carvel’s Yank, alone and moody at the end or suddenly erupting in caged, stamping energy, is inwardly struggling to make sense of life. It is to be his journey and his doom, this proud aloneness: his story could not be more stark and simple. On the great deck above the spoiled young heiress of the Douglas Steel empire bickers with a stiff aunt , the face of her father the tycoon adorning the shining bulkhead. Young Mildred has persuaded the Engineer to let her see the stokehold and “how the other half live”. When they descend to the fires and men who keep the liner moving smoothly, she sees Yank looming diabolic and dark against the flames . “Oh, the filthy beast!” she cries, and faints in her pristine white frock.

Yank does not get over it. His pride is shattered. In dock, he roams Manhattan half-coherent with revenge . Nightmare, puppetlike masked figures of the wealthy swirl around him; he lashes out and ends in another cage, a prison cell. Carvel’s angry Bronx is sometimes only half-coherent in the dodgy Old Vic acoustic (it’s back in proscenium mode now) but it doesn’t matter. The anguished reiteration of words and themesgrows in power: steel becomes his preoccupation, the bright metal which brings weary captivity to some and wealth to others. Prison shouts echo from every corner of the theatre. An innocent radicalized, he finds the IWW, the Workers’ Union derogated by the newspapers as “a dagger to the heart of America”. But Yank’s enthusiasm for dynamite over leafleting has him thrown out as a suspected spy.

His weary dusk is spent slumped alone against the barley-sugar of the proscenium edge (an almost accidental poignancy, so rich does the Old Vic paintwork look against his shabbiness) . A great balloon moon whose face is the Douglas Steel logo hangs smug above; finally comes the zoo scene where he envies the gorilla because it does not have to think. It is not, like him, trapped in a reflective, feeling, remembering human brain within a world which ignores it and makes him a commodity. All he can do is force open the cage.
The gorilla itself, his merciful executioner , is remarkable. All the physical ensemble work is: expressionistic without pretension, deft, frightening. Stewart Laing designs, Aletta Collins choreographs, sound and light draw its ninety minutes tightly together. A time to remember.

box office 0844 8717628 to 21 Nov
rating five   5 Meece Rating

Principal sponsoring partner: Royal Bank of Canada

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October 28, 2015 · 11:11 pm

PIG FARM St James’ Theatre SW1

OINK! SWIPE! SNOG! STAB!

“Ohhh Tim, you beautiful filthy boy!” cries Tina the pig-farmer’s discontented wife, succumbing drunkenly to some pan-banging draining-board sex. Filthy he is indeed, though not in the sanitized Fifty-Shades manner: the 17-year-old “work-release” farmhand from the local penitentiary is head to foot in pig-slurry.
Soon her nightie is, too. In fact, at numerous points in Greg Kotis’ play all four characters are liberally besmeared with “faecal sludge” from the fifteen-thousand pigs on a grim rural unit which can’t quite cope. Tom, the husband (Dan Fredenburgh) is living on the edge, beleaguered by torrential rain and Federal government paperwork. Speaking as a former farmer’s wife, I can vouch for that realism. He devotes his evenings, though, to illicit sludge-dumping in the Potomac River while the thwarted Tina thinks he should be home making babies. Worse still, the Environmental Protection Agency inspector is coming tomorrow and requires an accurate audit of their pigs. There are too many for comfort, but as Tom repeatedly mourns, when America wants bacon, and pork prices keep dropping, numbers have to go up for a small, panicking farmer to survive.
Kotis last hit this stage with the unpromising but successful and West-End-transferred URINETOWN, a dystopian water-shortage dictatorship fantasy musical. Clearly he’s by no means through with excretory themes and sustainability worries. Or with violence: this story of country folk generously deploys a rolling-pin, a slaughtering-knife , a handgun, several offstage truck-crashes and an acoustically spectacular though invisible “pig run” when young Tim proves his manliness by crashing the West Pen open during the inspection and allowing Ole’ Bess the herd mother to lead thousands in a charge for freedom.
That this is black comedy rather than Chekhovian rural tragedy is signalled by the alliterative casting: Tom and Tina, Tim the farmhand, Teddy the EPA official preparing a report for DC, and offstage there’s neighbour Tony, Toby the feed-meal man, and Teddy’s colleagues Trevor, Tyler, Theo… well, you get the idea. This is, surprisingly, funny at the time. So is most of the violence, and the repetitive revivals of the two bloodstained corpses near the end is pure Python. You expect them to break out in Spamalot’s “Not Dead Yet” chorus.
Tom’s desperation and nostalgia for a simpler time in their life is both laughable and, at moments, immensely sad: Fredenburgh does it beautifully, and there is real depth of confusion and affection in Charlotte Parry’s Tina. Chuck in some nice Pinterish menace from Teddy (a brilliantly odd Stephen Tompkinson) and a remarkable turn from American Erik Odom as Tim, all adolescent longing and spurting violence. So the two hours, briskly directed by Katharine Farmer, are certainly watchable. As to the author’s political point about unmanageable, wasteful oversupply , disgusting industrial farming and resentment of Federal regulatory jobsworths, they are discernible, but not really central. Top marks for Carla Goodman’s credibly rundown kitchen set, though, and sound designer John Leonard’s spectacular thunder, porcine stampedes and pop radio.
box office 0844 264 2140 to 21 Nov

rating:   three   3 Meece Rating

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October 27, 2015 · 11:46 pm

HUSBANDS AND SONS NT Dorfman, SE1

THE PEOPLE OF THE PITS
Tender, fierce, intelligent and humane, this superb production reminds us that D.H.Lawrence was at his best a great interpreter of 20th century change. Years before the showy hysteria of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (heaven knows why the BBC chose the worst of his works to dramatize) he wrote plays about his Nottinghamshire pit village, vivid with understanding humanity, humble observation and pity. Here are themes of marriage and pride, trapped lives and rich communities, possessive fearful mothers and feckless endangered sons. Here is class and money and the yearning for art and the painful the rift between generations when education takes the young out of manual work. Here too, noted with generosity, is the increasing independence of women.
Three separate plays are superbly sewn together by Ben Power and presented in the round, village households lying before us schematic but detailed in another fine Bunny Christie design complete with fires and candlelight and washtubs and kitchen tables. The families’ lives weave through lanes and kitchens a pattern of light and shade. The oldest play, the 1909 “A Collier’s Friday Night” is more of a sketch, with Lloyd Hutchinson as an ageing curmudgeon supping tea from a saucer in his pit-dirt and berating his wife (Julia Ford). Her eye is on their son , home from college talking of Rimbaud but forgetting to take the bread out of the oven; at one point he interrupts the father’s snorting wash-down with the announcement “Fancy! Swinburne’s dead!”.
A still more possessive mother is up at the Gascoignes: Susan Brown magnificent as the contemptusous mother-in-law of prim Minnie (a finely tuned Louise Brealey) who is annoyed at the infantile helplessness of her handsome new husband Luther, not to mention the fact that he’s got the neighbour’s daughter up the duff. Finally, up the road is Anne-Marie Duff electric in the most troubled role as Lizzie Holroyd, victim of a drunken husband she cannot stop loving and hating.

With unobtrusive skill, Power and director Marianne Elliott weave it together, occasionally letting the families meet or refer to one another without diluting the individual stories (Hutchinson’s grumpy patriarch brings home the drunken Holroyd, who stays asleep on their outside lavatory during the other family’s latest row). The intercutting and counterpoint of emotional tides and themes is reminiscent , in a very good way, of the best soap opera direction (Excavation Street, perhaps) . But pure theatre are the moments when all the emotions gather silently against a scratchy plaintive record they all might hear, or a Lawrentian poem from lonely clever Ernest in the dusk.

Flashing rattling indications remind us of the mine that dominates their lives; the accents, thee’s and tha’s and nays and nivers, are pitch-perfect (my Mum was from thereabouts, and did it sometimes). A lost world rises before us, every voice in it ringing true with the sad, sweet music of humanity.
box office 0207 452 3000 to 10 Feb
co-production with The Royal Exchange Theatre

rating four

4 Meece Rating

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