October 27, 2015 · 10:32 pm

ROOSEVELVIS Royal Court, SW1

THE PRESIDENT OR THE POP STAR? CHOOSE YOUR ROLE MODEL, GIRL!

It’s a portmanteau of Theodore Roosevelt and Elvis Presley. And, one must sorrowfully surmise, was lit upon by The Team, a collaborative group, mainly for the sake of using that gamesome centaur of a title. Not too bad an idea, though, to have the spirits of two national heroes competing to hearten a shy, depressed citizen of today on a road trip. As if we were to portray a struggle between Churchill and John Lennon to offer life-coaching on the A 14 .

The heroine here is Ann (Libby King), meat-packing factory worker in South Dakota, who holds imaginary conversations with her alternative persona as Elvis, longs for lesbian love, and welcomes to her apartment the more adventurous ourdoorsy Brenda (Kristen Sieh) who she has met online and who is a bit Roosevelt. There’s an introduction in which they run us through a few details of their alter egos’ lives , in full drag including Brenda in sidewhiskers and bucksins. Then we find them on a middling-unsuccessful romantic campervan weekend to Mount Rushmore.

Brenda finally reproves Ann for being “unbrave”. In this sequence, and others, they spend a lot of time passive, watching bits of pre-created location film of their own activities on screens around the stage: theatre for the selfie generation. It does at least give them time to hop in and out of the costumes of their personae: Elvis’ is simple enough given Ann’s macho outfits and “dude underwear”, but Sieh has some sharp quick-changes into buckskins and sidewhiskers.
For most of the 95 minutes Ann is alone, going crosscountry to Graceland to show she is not unbrave; we gradually work out that the sidewhiskered Brenda now exists only in Ann’s head, ever at her side leaping around punching video-screen buffalo or delivering inspiring Roosevelt quotes. Conveniently, the real Elvis did love the President’s line about “great and generous emotion, high pride, stern belief, lofty enthusiasm”. Finally they fall out, Roosevelt calling Elvis “degenerate” and lazy, Elvis snarling “Rich kid!” and whining that he couldn’t have done any better with his life after coming from a family of “dirt farmers”. The message, unsubtly and repeatedly hammered home, is that there are two kinds of America, and that each of us as Whitman says “contains multitudes”.
Oh, and part of Ann’s problem is that she’s ashamed of being gay. The real Brenda, reappearing on the phone at Ann’s lowest moment, turns out to be a chilly cow anyway, telling her she’s “depressed” and that no, she never gave her much of a thought after that camping weekend. One finale inevitably references them as Thelma and Louise going over the Grand Canyon, the other has Ann glumly reaching Graceland.
The laborious whimsy wears thin, and there’s a a skill deficit. Ann’s voice and body language simply do not change enough between being herself and being Elvis, though the script needs her to do it moment to moment. Sieh as Roosevelt has created an accent so bafflingly odd (an idea of late-19c American Toff) that it grates into irrelevance. . She is, though, at least physically adept, spurting with energy and a good comic mover in the imaginary Roosevelt’s odd dance sequences. King, though more real, offers only a sweet one-note melancholy with underpowered Elvis moments. In the end, she has a speech of proper strength. But only the one.

box office 020 7565 5000 to 14 Nov
rating two   2 meece rating

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October 26, 2015 · 1:24 am

ROOSEVELVIS Royal Court, SW1

PRESIDENT OR POP KING?  WHO HOLDS THE SECRET OFLIFE?

It’s a portmanteau of Theodore Roosevelt and Elvis Presley. And, one must sorrowfully surmise, was lit upon by The Team, a collaborative group, mainly for the sake of using that gamesome centaur of a title. Not too bad an idea, though, to have the spirits of two national heroes competing to hearten a shy, depressed citizen of today on a road trip. As if we were to portray a struggle between Churchill and John Lennon to offer life-coaching on the A 14 .

ThE heroine here is Ann (Libby King),  a shy gay meat-packing factory worker in South Dakota, who holds imaginary conversations with her alternative persona as Elvis, longs for  love, and welcomes to her apartment the more adventurous ourdoorsy Brenda (Kristen Sieh) who she has met online and who is a bit Roosevelt. There’s an introduction in which they run us through a few details of their alter egos’ lives , in full drag including Brenda in sidewhiskers and bucksins. Then we find them on a middling-unsuccessful romantic campervan weekend to Mount Rushmore.

Brenda finally reproves Ann for being “unbrave”. In this sequence, and others, they spend a lot of time passive, watching bits of pre-created location film of their own activities on screens around the stage: theatre for the selfie generation. It does at least give them time to hop in and out of the costumes of their personae: Elvis’ is simple enough given Ann’s macho outfits and “dude underwear”, but Sieh has some sharp quick-changes into buckskins and sidewhiskers.
For most of the 95 minutes Ann is alone, going crosscountry to Graceland to show she is not unbrave; we gradually work out that the sidewhiskered Brenda now exists only in Ann’s head, ever at her side leaping around punching video-screen buffalo or delivering inspiring Roosevelt quotes. Conveniently, the real Elvis did love the President’s line about “great and generous emotion, high pride, stern belief, lofty enthusiasm”. Finally they fall out, Roosevelt calling Elvis “degenerate” and lazy, Elvis snarling “Rich kid!” and whining that he couldn’t have done any better with his life after coming from a family of “dirt farmers”. The message, unsubtly and repeatedly hammered home, is that there are two kinds of America, and that each of us as Whitman says “contains multitudes”.
Oh, and part of Ann’s problem is that she’s ashamed of being gay. The real Brenda, reappearing on the phone at Ann’s lowest moment, turns out to be a chilly cow anyway, telling her she’s “depressed” and that no, she never gave her much of a thought after that camping weekend. One finale inevitably references them as Thelma and Louise going over the Grand Canyon, the other has Ann glumly reaching Graceland.
The laborious whimsy wears thin, and there’s a a skill deficit. Ann’s voice and body language simply do not change enough between being herself and being Elvis, though the script needs her to do it moment to moment. Sieh as Roosevelt has created an accent so bafflingly odd (an idea of late-19c American Toff) that it grates into irrelevance. . She is, though, at least physically adept, spurting with energy and a good comic mover in the imaginary Roosevelt’s odd dance sequences. King, though more real, offers only a sweet one-note melancholy with underpowered Elvis moments. In the end, she has a speech of proper strength. But only the one.

box office 020 7565 5000 to 14 Nov
rating two

2 meece rating

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October 23, 2015 · 11:27 am

GASLIGHT Royal, Northampton

‘I MUST CLING TO MY HUSBAND!”  OH NO YOU MUSTN’T…  HE’S IN THE ATTIC…
James Dacre’s leadership of this twin theatre is certainly lively: a dark Oklahoma, King John in Magna Carta year, Arthur Miller’s forgotten The Hook (cheekily, since then Radio 4 has been claiming the “first” production). Add a powerful Brave New World, and now to ring the changes, a preposterously melodramatic , delightfully nasty neo-Victorian melodrama by Patrick Hamilton. Who is better known for bleak 30’s and 40’s novels like Hangover Square and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.

GASLIGHT itself is famous for the 1940 adn 1944 films, with Anton Walbrook and then Charles Boyer as the husband who convinces his fragile wife she is going mad, by hiding her things and fiddling with the gas pressure in a secret attic when he’s supposed to be out. It gave the psychiatric profession the term “gaslighting” for manipulative creating of self-doubt in another. The film crept so deep into the national psyche that a memorable pastiche in Round The Horne had Kenneth Williams in Armpit Theatre as the villain.
But this is the original play, realized with gleeful relish by director Lucy Bailey, and a quite brilliant set by William Dudley . It’s a gloomy drawing-room with uneasily slanted doors, intermittently transparent walls, and a ceiling which flares upwards at an angle to reveal horrid stairs and attics whenever necessary. The story is markedly different from the film: not least because the hapless Bella knows from the very start, that her husband is upstairs, and it’s him fiddling with the gas pressure. His emotional manipulation over her “madness” is more overt and harshly verbal; from the opening moments poor Bella (beautifully played straight and poignantly wounded by Tara Fitzgerald) is clearly a tormented victim of a Jonathan Firth who as Jack feels more like something out of Orton or Pinter in their nastier moods. It’s chillingly realistic, and very true to Hamilton’s novelistic vision in its uncompromising portrait of emotional bullying.
Rather less realistic is the arrival of a curiously stilted old police inspector (Paul Hunter) who reveals the husband’s brutal back-story and fiddles about forcing desk drawers: one could wonder by Bailey didn’t cut a bit of his repetitive and dated character-act wittering, and if it gets a transfer (which it 75% deserves) I hope she does.
For a time Bella nobly says “I must cling to my husband!” like a proper old-style missus, and refuses to co-operate; but once assured that he is not only a murderer but “has an interest in unemployed actresses” she goes right off the clinging idea. A very Patrick Hamilton woman: murder fine, adultery not so much. By the end of Act 1 the jocose old copper has informed her that she is married to a “tolerably dangerous” man; thereafter expect no modernistic volte-face to change that judgement.
Yet for all the clunkiness, and some slow passages, Bailey’s production has proper grip and power, rising to a final twisted revenge from Bella , superbly done by Fitzgerald, which had the matinee audience giggling with relief. And then a design moment which made us gulp. Hokum, yes: but Reader, I swallowed it…

BOX OFFICE 01604 624811 http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk to 31 Oct

RATING three  3 Meece Rating

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October 20, 2015 · 10:41 pm

DARK TOURISM Park Theatre, N4

CELEBRITY CULTURE DECODED – FURIOUSLY

I’m a bit late on the curve catching this, but it runs all week with two more matinees, so Roll up! Shudder as you savour the freakish world of celebrity PR agents, tup’n tell journalism, fake reality-shows, slut-shaming, and career dieting . Meet some of the most topically revolting of contemporary male characters: all but one equipped with seriously wrong beards, from the Mark Thompson Bristle to the Russell Brand Silkie. Applaud the author’s creation of four cracking female parts, alongside and agin these monsters.
Daniel Dingsdale, in his first and furiously eloquent full-length play, is a bit too discursive in the characters’ rants against (and for!) the cult of vapid fame, the cynical construction of narratives fed to media, and the general decline of culture, taste, kindness and modesty. But they’re very fine rants. He says in his notes that these people are heightened and bastardized amalgamations of reality, but it’s my world too, and some are credible verging on libellous…
It begins on air with two comedy DJs  – Milton a loghorreic druggy sex addict  smartarse with long hair (Huw Parmenter) , the other, Rob (Tom Maller)  a thuggy oaf. Decode that if you will. Parmenter and Maller are so accurate in tone that I actually started hating them (a few in the matinee audience booed the curtain call, which is a tribute). They riff an ooh-arent we-naughty revelation about Milton’s night with childrens TV presenter Becky, who as a result gets headlined BECKY BUMLOVE in the tabloids, is suspended and humiliated. Milton’s PR agent is Rick (Damien Lyne),  whose wolfish devotion to the dark arts is allowed, interestingly, to waver and develop into self-disgust as the disaster rolls on. His assistant Max, however, is pure, venomous manic evil, and the author plays the part himself with a sinister Brylcreemed hairstyle I devoutly hope is for stage-use only.
They set up a meeting in which, with a tabloid vixen at hand, Milton is to apologize and Becky forgive. It goes violently wrong (Dingsdale likes a showdown every ten minutes. – tiring but usually exciting) . Wronger still when some sex tapes emerge and the second act twists begin.

What I like is the author’s skill and intelligence in presenting four distinct types of young female fame, each falling foul of prurient misogyny.  Becky (a sweet Josie Dunn) is clean girl-next-door CBBC type, not looking for tabloid fame, but expected to be sexless: she loses her job and more.  Jenny is a serious actress, stalling in her career, fearing invisibility and using Rick as helpmeet: Carol is a fearful Fleet Street cynic who despises the other women and Gemma, a pout-perfect, brainlessly cunning X- for-Essex autotunie, is beautifully played, down to the last toothy smile and skip, by Tamaryn Payne: a born comedienne of whom we shall hear more.
Not a perfect play, it could do with a trim and less glee in its own eloquence, but I hope it finds bigger stages.  The author certainly will: not least because his willingness to work up narrative twists is refreshingly rare in a play so furious in its message.
box office 0207 870 6876 to 24 oct
rating three     3 Meece Rating

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October 18, 2015 · 5:53 pm

JANE WENHAM, THE WITCH OF WALKERN Touring

Touring Mouse wide

TOURING NEAR YOU;  RICH DARK OOZING EVIL AND FEMINIST DEFIANCE

A fierce bleak play, this. Set in 1712 but, taking the wider world as it is, not un-topical: hangings, tortures, religion turned into a sour power-trip. Here are superstitious dreads and demonization of anyone different, whether homosexual, eccentric or just female. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’ reimagining of one of the last witch-trials in England gives us a stimulatingly nasty picture of a village suffering from an oppressive, sly, sadistic hysteria, whipped up by bad sexual secrets and the neurotic, unhinged virginal zealotry of the vicar. The devil hangs over it, and not only in the imagination of hunched crones fantasising over a fire-pit about demonic carnality: rather like the book-group from hell which can’t move on from Fifty Shades of Grey.

It’s strong stuff, and Ria Parry’s stark direction serves it well (though some scenes go on a shade too long, and the opening could be clearer. We need to know what has just happened: the hanging of a “witch” whose young daughter Ann (a touching, troubling performance by Hannah Hutch) is grieving her, while the locals chunter prurient satisfaction and blame the dead woman for all the local evils, notably a wife’s repeated miscarriages.
Cut to a strong scene with an elderly Bishop (David Acton), an educated man who dismisses necromancy as “tricks of the light” and nonsense, versus the worryingly stiff young vicar (Tim Delap) who prates“thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. He has his eye on Jane Wenham, a reclusive elderly herbalist he thinks is next up for the witch-pricker and the gallows , because she has a pet cockerel which might be Satan. The Bishop wearily tries to dissuade him. But lest we canonize him too soon, it appears that he himself is taking advantage of Kemi Martha (Cat Simmons) a freed slave-woman who is his housekeeper and bedmate.
Meanwhile in the village the husband of the miscarrying woman is having a fling with the tavern-keeper, and poor lonely Ann has been giving herself unjoyfully to all comers in the barn. But she confides in the seemingly kindly Jane Wenham that her sexual desire is actually for women, and is furiously shooed away as “misshapen”. So when a child drowns, and the sly old demon-fantasisers (Judith Coke brilliantly sinister as Priddy) help the vicar to close the net round Jane, Ann vengefully joins the accusers. The final scenes with Amanda Bellamy as the tormented but defiant Wenham are fast, powerful and important.

It’s a rich dark mix : I can see why Lenkiewicz threw in the lesbianism, not to mention the vicar’s sudden burst of lust and the bishop’s ex-slave. It does paint a complete picture of sexually driven hysteria and exploitation, but these elements make it veer off-piste for a while. As for the references to child abuse and Blind Priddy’s robust description of the devil’s “kingo like a broom handle” in either a dream or a memory, it pulls no punches. As a result of which, I am sorry to say, one of its rural tour dates, the private Ipswich High School for Girls, was panickily cancelled on the pretext of bad language and “safeguarding”.
But you know what? If ever there was a show that GCSE and sixth-form girls needed to see – this being both the Twilight fiction generation and one bombarded with both online porn fantasy and news footage of Iranian hangings – here it is. Yes, you’d need decent thoughtful teachers to run serious discussions and analyses straight afterwards. But to ban it altogether feels worryingly early-60s. Even then, I hope and believe my convent school would (with a gulp) have let it through.

bookings and tour dates http://www.outofjoint.co.uk
rating four  4 Meece Rating

Co- production by Out of Joint, Watford Palace Theatre and Arcola, touring in association with Eastern Angles. I saw it at Woodbridge: next up, West Yorkshire Playhouse, 21-24 Oct, then Liverpool Everyman, Bristol Tobacco Factory, Salisbury, and Arcola from 5 Jan.

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October 15, 2015 · 11:40 am

A WOLF IN SNAKESKIN SHOES Tricycle, NW6

SINS OF A PREACHER-MAN 

Admit it, ladies. Within the most modestly-clothed and lipstickless of us pale white matrons, there lurks a sneaky wish to be – just for an hour or two – poured into a tight snakeskin dress, rechristened “Peaches”, and able to snarl “When God made me She broke the mould – put an earthquake in the sway of my hips, a hurricane in the curve of my stride and a tornado in the whip of my hair…Even when I’m a disaster, I’m a natural disaster,! This body is a gift and I will unwrap it as much as I see fit. I am a prize! Uh-huh!”. So thank you, Adjoa Andoh, for the brief fantasy. You did it for all of us.
And thanks to Sharon D.Clarke for the other female role model, the majestic pastor’s wife, first drumming up support in a rich gospel contralto for her venal fraudulent husband (“The preacher who can reach ya and teach ya..”) and then defying him. Oh yes, the women win all right in Marcus Gardley’s poetically eloquent, often peculiar, farcical-satirical echo of Moliere’s Tartuffe tale of a hypocritical cleric exploiting a bourgeois family whose head is dying and fears hell .
A problem is that this burst of manic female energy – and the full enslavement and rebellion of the family against Apostle Tardimus Toof – doesn’t happen until the far more interesting second act. There is some pleasure earlier on, not least because Toof is the magnificent Lucian Msamati – the RSC’s black Iago, no less. He does the villain proud in pointy shoes, hellfire sermons, weasel charm and correct terror of his majestic wife. He inveigles himself into the household : there’s Wil Johnson as the ailing Organdy, a gay son, the mistress Peaches, and a tribal-hip daughter, born Britney but self-styled “Africa Adewunme Wakajawaka X’tine. It means she who laughs like the hyena, bathes like the hippo, hunts like the lioness and walks like the dodo bird in the nighttime”. Good black-on-black mockery, though it doesn’t contribute much to the actual story.
The problem with that first act is that many such terrific lines and jokes are – despite the director being the normally savvy Indhu Rubasingham – half-buried under far too much shouting. And, once the Mexican maid joins in , under an overly intense outbreak of comedy accents at full volume. The seduction plot gets buried , as do the financial issues (which Moliere so cherished). Msamati gives his lines plenty of light and shade, but Wil Johnson needs to take the volume down six notches, as do several others in that section. I kept wanting to love the show for its exuberance, and just failing.

Until the second act. The duel and reconciliation of Peaches and the pastor’s wife is splendid, and there is an unmissable, satirically ferocious attempt by Toof to exorcise the son’s gayness with an exorcism banishing “ponytails and painted nails, muscle tees, and Elton John CDs. Except the LIon King. I dispatch angels” – he cries “ to uncross your legs, make you sit through Saving Private Ryan and break things for no apparent reason..”
See? I’m off again, quoting, because Gardley writes like a good angel. And the second act really is a treat. Not least because – no spoilers – there is not only a full-on farcical eavesdrop sequence, but a climax: a genuinely shocking, perilously cynical, ferociously political and dismaying Arturo Ui moment. Which nobody expected. And which works.
box office 0207 328 1000 to 14 November
rating three

3 Meece Rating

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October 12, 2015 · 10:50 pm

THE FIRST MAN Jermyn St Theatre, SW1

EUGENE O’NEILL,  EARLY AND IMPASSIONED…

Well, God bless the little Jermyn. Director and AD Antony Biggs, an unwearying ferret of lost drama, has dug up another barnstorming early 20c number: a UK premiere, no less, from lEugene O’Neill. The author, it seems, didn’t much rate it in 1922, and went on to success with more famous The Hairy Ape (about to run at the Old Vic). But on this smaller stage, with an impressive cast of 12 , the forgotten work flares into savage, passionate life.

Opening with a familial “unfortunate tea” in a Connecticut front room, it hurtles rapidly into scenes so emotionally violent, visceral and verbally shocking that you hang onto the arms of your seat. After a brief interval, a looming firelit tension punctuated by eerie wolf-howls of anguish fractures in turn into jagged fury, before a final funeral scene puts the lid on it with the hero repeatedly seeming to charge like a maddened bull at an unnerved group of relatives wincing in unison. Unsayably shocking things are said, enormous dependencies and betrayals hurled around as a smalltown earthquake rips up family decorum.

It may be this intensity, growing too fiercely and fast, which made O’Neill shove it back in the drawer after early outings. Or it may have been that Curtis’ worst remarks had too much echo in his own family life. But it’s a pity, because it has all the furious vigour of its decade: a postwar loosening of gender expectations and a hysterical pursuit of science. Against a clever impressionistic set of curtains daubed with Lascaux cave drawings Adam Jackson-Smith is Curtis, a Post-Darwinian anthropologist off to search the Gobi desert for the Missing Link between ape and man. His wife Martha, played with dignified, humorous authority by Charlotte Asprey, usually travels with him as “a chum, a comrade…more efficient than a whole staff of assistants and secretaries”.
After losing two small children years before, they have agreed to seek what he calls “a more difficult beautiful happiness” than mere family life, which is suspiciously convenient to his ambitions . But his friend Bigelow (Alan Turkington) is a widower with children, and Martha at 38 now longs for a baby. The scene where she tells Curtis she is pregnant – after the awful tea-party with his stifling family who hate her for being a “Westerner” – has him rivetingly losing all decent control and shouting “I cannot understand! I depend on you! Treachery! Ruining our life!” “YOUR life” she says reasonably, and he goes wilder still with “There are doctors….”. Asprey and Jackson-Smith strike violent sparks off one another in furious, incompatible mutual need: it’s electrifying.

Then we meet the family again (a very fine ensemble, with flares of salty character for every one of the eight) lurking by a dim fire hearing the keening howls of a proper Victorian-style obstetric horror-labour, brilliantly sound-designed by David Gregory to be not quite human. There’s even the looming presence of an old Aunt Elizabeth in black bombazine in the corner ( Lynette Edwards. and she gets her moment too).
The smalltown muttonheads have decided that Curtis’ weird attitude to the baby is not just because it sabotaged his work, but because it’s not his. He is unaware that they think this, and it feeds a fearful melodramatic showdown after the ultimate disaster. The gulf between Curtis’ enormous – and creditably believable – agonies and desire for a “fine free life” and their smalltown worries is something nobody feels more strongly than him: “Your rabbit-hearted emotions! bread and butter passions!” he shouts.

And it is to the credit of this vigorous production – and the beautifully directed panic of the family – that pig as he is, you rather side with Curtis. Though if there’s an actual hero, it is definitely Martha. A name , I’d suspect, artfully chosen to echo Martyr. Epic stuff. A nugget of theatre history in two sharp, unflagging hours.

Box office 0207 287 2875 to 31 October

RATING   FOUR   4 Meece Rating
rating four

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October 8, 2015 · 10:43 pm

MEASURE FOR MEASURE Young Vic SE1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FEELS THE NEED FOR A SCRUB

Sex is at this play’s core. But it’s not sexy in the slightest. It’s a means of leverage, abuse, it’s a crime, a threat. Each of the 50 or so plastic sex dolls strewn across the stage make you want to stew in hot bleach. You can taste the immorality of this Vienna.

So potent, the Duke withdraws and leaves his pious deputy in charge. In his ruthless clampdown – and via an acrobatic twist of logic – he attempts to rape a nun,   a young woman desperate to spare her brother from execution.

Like the best of Shakespeare, though, this is a feat achieved through fierce dialogue, and deft delivery. For the seasoned actors in this production, its disturbing sexuality and combative dialogue are its greatest asset. Not the ludicrous, childish, unoriginal and baffling production.  The sight of Isabella (the outstanding Romola Garai) r fending off of the maddening holy gropes of the puritanical Angelo (terrifyingly meek and quietly vicious Paul Ready) is a great gun-battle of Shakespearean acting. Every ludicrous train of perverted thought beautifully conveyed. Likewise Tom Edden (off of One Man Two Guvnor’s, here as Pompey) revives even the stalest of Jacobean gags and Zubin Varla (Duke Vincentio) nicely marries the camp and the dramatic (perhaps largely due to having a voice like Kenneth Williams doing a Larry Olivier impression?)

This play’s woeful undoing, however, is its director.  Joe Hill-Gibbins appears bored by the wicked story, the handful of thrilling performances and black humour. Just has he did in Edward II at the National.  Key moments of the play are delivered backstage, or just ever so slightly out of view. Our saving grace is a member of the cast with a camera hooked up to a baffling projection system.   For large tracts of the play, nothing happens on stage, and the entire auditorium is just watching a basic projection. A screaming, furious performance from Romola Garai is essentially skyped* to us from backstage for absolutely no good reason whatsoever. If you’ve never seen a camera or a video, this might tickle you nicely. Otherwise it proves to be an absolute shafting of the theatrical experience.

The staging is at its best when simple. Two actors, in dialogue, with nothing but the quiet stage. Brilliance is conjured. The flinging of sex dolls, flickering video streams and messy direction are nothing compared to the unobstructed power of the central performances.   It’s a dark and murky play – a success, despite the best intentions of its director.
*I’ve also, incidentally, seen better camerawork from a 4 year old.

4 mice (just)   4 Meece Rating

Until 14th November
Box Office 020 7922 2922

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October 7, 2015 · 11:50 pm

TEDDY FERRARA Donmar, WC1

QUEER ON CAMPUS,  THE 21c BLUES

Welcome to our college! Meet the students, America’s future. Or, as depicted in Christopher Shinn’s new play, a selection of the most sexually rampant, morally confused, smartphone-addicted and emotionally immature, so that as Matthew Marsh’s fed-up college President observes, “These kids are f—ing infants!”.
They also variously tend to suffer from a touching belief that the answer is tequila shots, random blow-jobs in the car park, opting for 20c literature because “the books are shorter so there’s more time to look at porn” and outbreaks of intense student politics by committee, campus journalism or loudhailer. Ah, college days! It’s Catcher in the Rye for Generation Porn.
But although Shinn’s characterization veers towards caricature at times, none of these poor kids deserves to be made more miserable than they naturally make themselves, and the inspiration of the play was serious: several suicides in US colleges, notably that of Tyler Clementi whose gay encounter in his college dorm was secretly filmed on a webcam and put online by his nasty git of a roommate.
Here, the victim of a parallel intrusion is Teddy Ferrara, played with inspired runty, weirdo geekiness by Ryan McParland. He spends a lot of time – before the real filmed encounter – assuaging his frustration by unzipping his flies and going for it on exhibitionist chatrooms. Meanwhile, ambitious Gabe (Luke Newberry) is running the LGBTQ group to |”create a community outside of partying”, and is touchingly in love with Drew ( a dark, intense Oliver Johnstone) who runs the news-sheet and is doing a splash claiming that last year’s suicide was secretly gay, so it’s not just a youthful tragedy but a political issue about the college being “deadly” to the diverse.
This is the belief of the ferocious lecturer Ellen (Pamela Nomvete, a sort of Diane Abbott on speed) and campaigners like transgender Jaq and disabled Jay. The campus, to them is rife with “heteronormative micro-aggressions”, which in English means that gay, lesbian, transgender or gender-fluid students – even when not actually bullied – are repeatedly upset by indications that they are in a minority. The body renames itself the Social Justice Committee because the word diversity is “too ocular”, and demands a “safe” syllabus free of anything which might upset anyone ever (some universities are getting to this point in Britain, so stop giggling). They want an extra set of gender-neutral lavatories throughout campus because transgender or variant students feel “unsafe in binary spaces”.

There’s a lot about that word “safe”: it adds to the general sense that decent, reasonable tolerance can shade into voluntary infantilism and victimhood. ln the funniest scene of an earnest evening, the College President tries to lead a meeting about it and digs himself helplessly into a hole. Marsh does it superbly: but while in the US the character was seen as satirical, the awful thing is that the middle-aged UK heart rather warms to the poor devil.
The plot is driven by emotion ,sexual energy and constant texting. Gabe is friendly with the big, straight, handsome Tim – Nathan Wiley, gleaming with dumbo-jock health. So Drew is jealous. He is desired by Nicky, his chief reporter (Kadiff Kirwan) who when the real lovers break up, chases Gabe, while Drew gets straight Tim to unbutton. There’s a demo in memory of Teddy, who dramatically bows out at the end of Act 1 (Dominic Cooke’s direction melds in Donmar-classy style with Hildegarde Bechtler’s bleak EveryCollege set).

The cast skilfully balance touching pained youthfulness and infuriating daftness, with Newberry in particular growing through the play. And the closing moments, with a disingenuous canonization of Teddy, throw a bracing gloss of cynicism over the whole farrago. But there are limits to how much time you can spend with self-absorbed nitwits, and Mr Cooke is wise to keep it half an hour brisker than it ran in Chicago.
box office 0844 871 7624 to 5 December
Supported by the John Browne Charitable Trust, I & C Sellars and Kathleen J Yoh, with Principal Sponsor Barclays.
Rating three    3 Meece Rating

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October 6, 2015 · 12:12 am

THE SMALLEST SHOW ON EARTH Mercury, Colchester & Touring

A FROLIC…

This is an artful wheeze. Take the story from the sunniest of films, a 1957 cheer-up British Lion starring Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford and Bernard Miles. Bolt on some classic Irving Berlin songs, and you’ve jukeboxed a stage musical. Director-writer Thom Sutherland has done this – fresh from a London success with Grand Hotel – for a cheerful touring show with a six-piece band. I saw it at the Mercury, which produces it, before it squares its shoulders and toots off round the country. A thin Monday house was hard to stir, but the frolicking energy of the cast and the sheer good-humoured Ealingness of the story got us going. Hard not to, with so much help from the Berlin tunes and lyrics.
The story sees a struggling screenwriter and his wife – Haydn Oakley and Laura Pitt-Pulford (so glorious lately in Seven Brides) – unexpectedly inheriting from disreputable Uncle Simon a fleapit cinema in Sloughborough (“the Venice of England, if Venice had fewer canals and more lino factories”). It has an ageing ticket-lady Mrs Fazackalee, her nerdy son Tom, and the drunken projectionist Percy. The blustering owner of the big rival cinema wants to buy it as a car park, together with his scheming wife Ethel (Ricky Butt, a born show-stealer). Their daughter Marlene rebels and joins the Bijou lot, who restore the cinema’s fortunes and honour its past as a music-hall by doing burlesque in the interval.

The scope for tap breaks and leaping ensemble choreography (by Lee Proud) is obvious, and done with ferocious verve from the very first scene in the Railway Arms, with Mrs F. on the piano and Uncle Simon drinking himself to death on a yard of ale while the rest of the cast leap on tables. There are explosions of energy all through, notably a fabulous cleaning-up scene (the set by David Woodhead is a gorgeous thing of barley-sugar-pillars, red velvet, portable townscapes and a neatly revolving staircase). A charming romantic tap shows off Tom and Marlene : Christina Bennington and Sam O”Rourke, the latter endearingly singing about stepping out in top hat and tails while actually wearing a duffle-coat with his woolly gloves on strings through the sleeves. And there’s much carolling of “Always” from the leads: Pitt-Pulford’s voice is pure honey.

As for the interval performances Matthew Crowe, having somewhat overdone the overemphasis as the dopey trainee solicitor, suddenly comes into his own as a full-on drag artiste in a bustle. And Bennington turns shy Marlene into a high-octane belter leading a spirited fan-dance with fans made, naturally, of celluloid film strips.

But as in the days of Rutherford and Miles it’s the oldies who walk off with it: Liza Goddard turns the ticket-seller into a middle-aged but game blonde mourning her boozy husband and doting on a pampered cat (“He can’t chase the rats, he’s allergic to animal hair”). Her “How deep is the Ocean” is genuinely affecting, properly cracked in character. And Brian Capron – completely unrecognizable as my all-time favourite Coronation Street villain – is a grand Percy Quill.
Regarding musical form, it can’t make the top table: Southerland and musical director Mark Aspinall use the old songs skilfully, with well-crafted dialogue breaks and attention to character, but in the first half songs tend to stop the action dead rather than move it on. The second half moves far better: and as the show moves on and grows, the first half will sharpen. And you can certainly go home whistling it. It’s Irving Berlin. You have to.
box office 01206 573948 to 10 Oct

then touring http://www.thesmallestshowonearth.co.uk/    Touring Mouse wide

rating three    3 Meece Rating

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October 2, 2015 · 11:57 am

EVENTIDE Arcola, E8

THE GREATNESS OF SMALL LIVES

We are in a pub garden in rural Hampshire, where landlord John is gathering logs for the fire (in high summer, “it’s part of what people come for”), and telling a joke about a ferret and a blow-job to cheer up Mark, a lanky, sad youth. Along comes Liz the bravely prattling church organist. They talk. A year later, they meet again. That’s all. But it is immense.
Sometimes a new playwright emerges bringing not only skill, but a determination to offer a perspective and preoccupation outside the mainstream of dramatic, and indeed national, discourse.  Barney Norris’ theme is unregarded lives in rural communities: villages hollowed out by alien money, agribusiness and a hypermobile world.   But his concern is neither agitprop nor nostalgia, simply an exploraion of how people inwardly navigate the rolling waves of life.
Norris first full play, Visitors, was a quietly, beautifully, tragic reflection on loss and memory, with an old farm couple at its heart. This time the three protagonists are on the face of it less vulnerable  as they  confront the universal problem of how life plods or races past you, unstoppable, unseizable except in fragments. It is also about the consolation of mere human interaction: chats in a drab pub garden with a semi-stranger.   But by pretending to no grandiosity Norris reaches out further and deeper – as Jez Butterworth did in the more swashbuckling JERUSALEM – into tradition, belief, identity, love, and the immense question of how anyone finds a place on a fast-turning uncaring globe. All this through jokey boozing John, young Mark the road-mender and odd-job labourer, and nervy Liz, who drives two hours to play the moribund church organ because it’s the only gig she can get.
The trio are variously likeable, and wholly believable (I find it hard to think of them as actors cven now, but they are James Doherty, Hasan Dixon and Ellie Piercy, perfect casting by director Alice Hamilton). They talk in the pub garden – first over a morning and evening, then a year later. At one point, two of them remember a verse from “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” and tears rise; but Norris turns the mood in seconds to a shock laugh and a crassness and breach. It is not without outside incident : it’s the landlord’s last day, he having sold to a chain after his wife left: the same morning sees the funeral of young Mark’s old schoolfriend, which he is missing because he needs the council work of repairing the war memorial she crashed into. “It’s for the centenary” he says; and skinny in his work boots, fresh from sleeping alongside motorways in the van he seems an modern heir of those WW1 recruits. In the second act Mark has sorted out his life, John returns just for a day, still lost, and Liz is giving up organ playing.

None of them are yokels: John’s conversation, when not ferret-based, is sharp, literate, poetic and aware, and Mark has a restless wish to know more of the world and “fill up his bookcase from down at the Sue Ryder”. Both have travelled: indeed a sidelong delight of the play is Norris’ beautiful debunking of the great modern god Travel. John went to Nepal but “there’s only so many hours a day you can spend being fascinated by how foreign everything is”. Mark – now humbly learning FIlipino words off his work colleagues – came home from India after only a week having given his money to beggars. He was repelled in a proper, decent spirit by the filthy poverty. “I just thought, you cunt – coming over here like it’s an adventure, when it’s these people’s lives..Disrespectful, to be there staring at everything’. Superb.

box office 0207 503 1646 to 17 OCT then tour: Bury St Edmunds, Oxford, Salisbury, Bristol.
http://www.upinarms. org.uk
rating five

5 Meece Rating

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October 1, 2015 · 11:53 pm

MEDEA, Almeida, N1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS ANCIENT TRUTH IN A GLORIOUSLY DARK DIVORCE

“I can unmake you the same way I made you. I write the story, remember?” Rachel Cusk’s brilliant vision of Euripides’ Medea for the Almeida transforms the barbarian witch into a modern-day writer: but, just as the ancient Medea’s spells had immortal force, so the new Medea’s power with words, particularly her fearless refusal to compromise on the truth, alienates and terrifies all those around her, and endows her with the ability to change her own destiny – at the terrible price of her sons’ lives. However, in Cusk’s profoundly contemporary version, Medea doesn’t actually shed blood: after all, “There are more ways of killing a child than just stabbing it to death like some wild animal.” She commits an equally unthinkable act: she abandons them. And sure enough, her children die, just as surely as if she had butchered them with her bare hands as Euripides decreed. From an elegantly restrained (Pinteresque) opening scene, Cusk sets and maintains an atmosphere of brutal tension which lashes out regularly into loud, snarling rows, placing the family on the psychological torture-rack of a messy divorce to reap a whirlwind harvest: gender battles, marriage myths, bitter recriminations about mid-life crises, all delineated with savage realism. Elizabeth Barrett Browning may have lovingly termed Euripides “the human”, but in Medea he shows us all the sides of being human we are ashamed to acknowledge, the play’s finger placed unerringly on our darkest secrets, nastiest failings, and most vulnerable weaknesses.

One of this Medea’s surprise strengths is how closely it can follow Euripides despite its modern setting, with many vital details (the cursed necklace, Glauce’s burning by poison, Aegeus’s childlessness and Medea’s clever bargain for safety in return for a cure, even her final vindication by the power of the sun) lovingly and cleverly transposed by Cusk, despite the introduction of an entire new character (a Brazilian cleaner, acting as a more sympathetic Chorus) and plenty of new ideas. Even Cusk’s text, which bristles and glowers with four-letter-words of all hues, will suddenly chime intimately with the original when you least expect it. Above all, Jason (a debonair Justin Salinger) is as suave, self-serving and loathsome as always; a man keen to have his way, and not interested in being made to feel bad about it. It says much for the failure of modern feminism that Cusk didn’t need to update Jason whatsoever to make his opinions, and his position, absolutely believable for a modern audience.

Kate Fleetwood is mesmerising as Medea, a taut, sinous pillar of vengeful contempt, turning her fury directly on the audience, as well as Jason: “It gives you a thrill to watch me suffer. The less I pretend, the more of a kick you get.” Our society piles just as much pressure on an abandoned wife to accept her husband’s decision as the ancient Greeks did; a Chorus of yummy mummies swap school-gate gossip and condemn: “How could she not have known?” A sudden switch from prose to rhyming couplets from a divine hermaphrodite Messenger strikes an odd note at first, but listen closely: the big finale is as horrifying, and disturbing, as ever.

~ CHARLOTTE VALORI

Rating: five 5 Meece Rating

Until 14 November at the Almeida Theatre, Islington, as part of their GREEKS season. Box office: 020 7359 4404

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October 1, 2015 · 11:19 pm

ROARING TRADE Park Theatre , N4

MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO SOUR 

The setting is excellent . Terrible flashing screens of numbers, alerts, currencies; sometimes becoming a glass window onto a London scene made of banknotes and FT headlines, or at one memorable moment a park where a £ 20 butterfly floats past. As you sit down there is an equally horrible barking, jabbering unease of voices. This is a bond trading room, evoked in design by Grant Hicks, Alex Marshall, Chris Drohan and Douglas O”Connell’s video.

And – as we all now know rather too well, from Capital City on ‘90s telly to Enron to The Power of Yes and William Nicholson’s Crash! – they’re pretty horrible. Aggressive, ambitious, neurotically bound up in their fantasy world of real money, crazy bonuses and cruel or sexual banter fuelling the dark human sacrifice demanded by high-tech capitalism.

So this play – first aired a few years ago and now directed by Alan Cohen – always risked being a “Meh, so what’s new?”. Even though Steve Thompson , who wrote Damages, researched it and its people with a kind of compassionate horror, and introduces enough up-to-date references (Syria, Volkswagen) to make it modern. But in the event it is gripping because of the quality and depth in the performances. Nick Moran is Donny the working-class sharp lad trader, unforgivably jeered at as “scullery boy” by Olly, known as “Spoon” for his silver-spoon posh-Cambridge background, though not until Donny has treated him pretty horribly for most of the play. The cockney confidence of the one and the entitled, nervy arrogance of the other are beautifully done. Lesley Harcourt is the tough glamorous Jess, who will use both her steel-trap mind and her top button to win clients and make millions; there is perhaps not quite enough to see beneath her surface glitter and nastiness, or not until the final minutes. Michael McKelly is interesting as the battered, discontented older trader PJ who is leaving to have a life, and alone in the trading-room tries to start conversations about the outside world – global warming, spreadable butter, Tony Hancock, anything but deals.
Family lives are used to underline the arid horribleness of their long working days. PJ has a wife (Melanie Gutteridge) who is furious at the idea of his leaving, being wedded to the lifestyle: he protests that they have had three new lounge suites since they moved to the 7-bed house and he’s never sat on any of them, too tired; “trouble with being flash – she gets used to the stash and you’re stuck”. Donny has a teenage son Sean, and their interaction is one of the most poignantly depressing bits of the play.
So you’re with them all, all the way, and indeed pretty depressed, and there is an unfolding dramatic plot moment in the last half-hour (it’s 1 hr 45 including interval, which is about right). But the only conclusion is that it’s an awful way to live, and that you’re stuffed even if you try to leave. But they’re real, such people, and out there looking after everyone’s money. It would have been good to have more sense of that.
box office 0207 870 6876 to 24 oct
rating three

3 Meece Rating

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October 1, 2015 · 5:40 pm

CRUSH Richmond Theatre

JOLLY HOCKEYSTICKS!  

“Put on your navy knicks, pick up your hockey sticks – and bully-up, bully-up..”  Jeepers. I had completely forgotten that ritual “bully” of stick-bashing at the start of a vicious hockey encounter. But a friend of my youth persuaded me to sneak in to this peculiar, and not unengaging, new musical on the last leg of its short tour.  And there was much to see:  the crazed hockeystick tap routine, the sapphic  love duet in the locker room, and a barnstorming finale when the demise of the unrepentant demon headmistress  caused my friend sagely to think of Don Giovanni. – ” I like it when the goodies win but the villain goes down defiant. And the bit with the ghost of the dead headmistress – it’s the Commendatore”.

Not quite operatic, though. Taking the musical style , dances and barmy plot together, Maureen Chadwick and Kath Gotts’ show – directed by Anna Linstrum – is best described a schoolgirl-story Salad Days for the same-sex love generation.  A traditionally feminist ‘50s boarding school has been taken over by an unaccountably (till the end) fascist-retro headmistress (a vigorously strident Rosemary Ashe) who demands well drilled wives and mothers . She opens with the best number of the lot: girls to her are “The future mothers of the future Sons of England…breeders of our leaders, strong and hearty, never arty”.   She also gets a magnificent line about the dignified charity pupil Daimler (Brianna Ogunbawa) – “named no doubt after the stolen car in which her unfit mother conceived her!”.
Good Miss Austin (Sara Crowe) in grey plats and brogues resists her; two mysterious interlopers , played by Kirsty Malpass and James Meunier, the only man, turn out to be the dei ex machina of the rebellion , all the way to a truly bonkers denouement with writs plucked from bosoms , mistaken identity, and Brenda the Sneak being reformed, and doing a cartwheel to prove it.
There’s some larky dance (choreography by Richard Roe) , and odd sharp lines (“Schools without rules breed savages and socialists!”).  But a less Ealing-comedy , more 21c aspect is that our heroine Susan (Stephanie Clift) is in love, beyond mere crush, with lisping Camilla, and heartbreakingly betrayed when her paramour goes straight. Via a stonkingly insane dream sequence in a an imaginary London lesbian night club, with Meunier reappearing as a baritone Marlene Dietrich, she finds another girl to love. In full-on modern, non-crush style love such as Malory Towers never (at least openly) permitted. There’s a point being made here.
box office 0844 871 7651 to Saturday
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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September 30, 2015 · 10:19 pm

SHOWSTOPPER! Apollo, W1

UNIMPROVABLE IMPROV…

You won’t see this show again, nor the other Showstoppers’ evenings I have loved in Edinburgh. If you weren’t there tonight you’ve missed a medley of Daily Mail headlines in the style of Fiddler on the Roof, a Mamma Mia finale, a Gypsy Kings’-style stamping love duet, a corgi chorus, Shakespeare rap, West Side Story rumble at the Cereal Cafe to a backing of “Snap Crackle and Pop”, and a moody Kurt Weill number. But don’t worry. Get down to the Apollo, shout a few suggestions at random, tweet some more dodgy suggestions in the interval, and watch your most feverish, late-night musical-theatre fantasies come true.
I adore the Showstoppers, because few sights are more enlivening than consummate, long-trained skill giving itself to the service of pure frivol. The runaway success of Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong proved that: do silliness well enough, and Britain will sit at your feet. This one may well follow it. The crowd-funders who have brought this musical improvisation company to its first West End run were right to believe in it: the tickets are cannily priced (it’s fine up in the circle, and under-25s get terrific half-price deals). As a way to spend a couple of hours with your mates just down the road from dreary old Thriller, it beats a lot of full-fledged musicals. Devised and perfected over eight years by Dylan Emery and Adam Meggido, with Duncan Walsh Atkins as musical guru and director, the group each night deploy seven out of the twelve players, men and women, and three of the five musicians in the tight company. They are all so well-accustomed to picking up off one another musically and verbally that a crazy, patchwork, but oddly satisfying musical results.
What happens is that the MC (Emery) on the side of the stage pretends to be cobbling up a pitch for a Cameron Mackintosh on the phone, and canvasses the audience for settings and titles (“The Daily Mail office” was the set this time, the title “The Lying King”). Other demands are randomly met: in this case the Cereal Cafe, the Queen’s corgis giving birth, and Jeremy Corbyn. The team take every theme up and run with it, occasionally freeze-framed by the MC taking an audience vote on the next development.
Sudden chorus lines appear, devising appropriate dances; two-player scenes flow naturally until one actor attempts to wrongfoot the other, who recovers magnificently; whole new musical genres are thrown to the musicians and created on the hoof by the singers. At one point on this particular night the MC demanded of us “some typical meaningless Cockney saying” and someone on the floor shouted “Up your bananas, Daddy!” . Seconds later, a riotous dancing Chas ’n Dave chorus was in full swing.

Always – each time I have seen it – the nonsense builds into huge, harmonic choruses which remind you why even quite lousy musicals jerk the heartstrings if you let them. Actually, you could acquire a full education in the styles and abilities of musical theatre by going every night . One is tempted. And this review, let me finally tell you, comes from someone who as a rule, really dislikes improv comedy. Must be the music that lifts it to something special.

box office 0844 4829671 to 29 November http://www.showstopperlondon.com
rating Five. The fifth is for sheer nerve.  They deserve the cheese for courage.   5 Meece Rating

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September 28, 2015 · 11:56 pm

TIPPING THE VELVET Lyric, Hammersmith

A SMILE, A SONG, AND SAPPHIC SOCIALISM
At last. The question tormenting many a fretful middle-aged man – what do lesbians actually DO? – is answered. Aerialism! When the giddy moment comes, in Laura Wade’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’ picaresque-erotic novel of Victorian lowlife, the participants are hoisted ten feet above the bed, still in their corsets, to swing acrobatically entangled. From silk slings – if romantically and innocently in love – or if involved in a more vicious encounter, from a chandelieresque iron frame above a cupboard-ful of strap-on leather dildos. Think Fifty Shades of Gay. However, if the encounter takes place in a worthily socialist community in Bethnal Green it is more basic and just involves a blanket over the head to facilitate tipping of the more homespun Corbynite velvet. So now you know, gents. Rest easy.
Sarah Waters’ novel made a sensation and a TV series for the good reason that it treated female same-sex love as having always been with us, absolutely natural albeit annoyingly disapproved of by the mainstream. It tells of Nancy the simple Whitstable oyster-girl, drawn into a music-hall career and downhill from there – transvestite rent-boy, Mayfair sex slave – until socialism saves her . It is not Waters’ best fiction (The Night Watch, The Little Stranger, The Paying Guest, infinitely better and more credible). But it is, as Wade and director Lyndsey Turner demonstrate, ideal for a rompy, pantomimic show (there’s even a songsheet for a massed ukelele version of These Boots Are Made for Walking. You slightly expect the trousered heroine to slap her thighs and cry “Twenty miles from London and still no sign of Dick!”.

Turner, under whose authority Mr Cumberbatch is still being and not being over the river at the Barbican, lets rip with all sorts of merriment. There are singing beef carcasses with xylophone ribs, a seaside-type cutout of clients receiving masturbatory attention through groin-level holes which are bells and whistles on which Nancy plays the National Anthem. And a nice cameo from Ru Hamilton as a be-tighted Soho renter called Sweet Alice.

The adaptation – starting with a lovely joke about the 1895 Lyric itself – takes the music-hall format of a tophatted MC – David Cardy – narrating young Nancy’s romantic intitiation, banging a gavel to speed up scenes to the interesting bit, and alternately relishing and deploring her activities. And if you suspect it is a leeeetle bit creepy to have a middle-aged man jovially supervising the first sexual encounters of a teenage girl, you’re not wrong. It is. Though we get a redemptive moment at the end where she takes the gavel off him, accepts the worthier of her lovers, and becomes “empowered” . But sometimes yes, creepy all right.

It romps along, with Sally Messham making a creditable debut as Nancy (though her singing voice is not yet firm enough to hold the songs for long) and Laura Rogers as her first love, the swaggering male-impersonator Kitty, a Burlington-Bertie in tails and topper. I say Burlington Bertie, but the play does not use – or pastiche – musichall songs, preferring a sort of early rock-n-roll approach, which usually (not always) works.

The psychology of Nancy’s decline into prostitution – boy-clad, tending to the gents in Soho Square – and her instant capitulation as kept sex slave to Madam Diana is wobbly, though her final conversion to the socialist-feminist cause is fairly convincing, with a perceptive sequence in which every serious question from her girlfriend causes her to grow a spotlight and rattle off a series of standup jokes. And anyway, in compensation for any flaky psychology we have sketches like Diana’s evil posh-tweedy-lesbian club, which is funny if a bit tiresome with its clitoris-fantasies, and a magnificent riff in which Nancy explains how to eat an oyster with such slimy, salty eroticism that the tweedy ladies collapse into chairs.

Well, you get the idea. It’s a big sprawly picaresque novel rendered into a pantomimic, polemic, ironic- erotic, hurrah-for-the-gay-girls night out, about half an hour too long. And the biggest laugh of the evening, given which week it is, is not about sex. It comes when the Bethnal Green Municipal Socialists panic that there aren’t enough sandwiches, and heroic Florence (Adelie Leoncie) cries “It’s a socialist rally! People will SHARE their sandwiches!”. Yeah, right.
box office 020 8741 6850 to 24 Oct http://www.lyric.co.uk
rating three    3 Meece Rating

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September 26, 2015 · 5:25 pm

NELL GWYNN Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

THE PROTESTANT WHORE RETURNS IN TRIUMPH
Charles II came to the throne (in a fabulous wig, surrounded by fabulous spaniels), with England in a mood to throw aside Puritanism and party. The theatres reopened, and for the first time that Restoration put real women on the stage, wearing as little as they could get away with. Charles had a series of mistresses, most famously the Cheapside orange-seller turned actress, saucy Nell Gwynn. Who deserves deathless memory, if only for the famous occasion when she was mistaken for the King’s (politically necessary) French mistress and barracked in Oxford; leaning out of the coach she cried “Good people, be civil, I am the Protestant whore!”.
The gag is used in Jessica Swale’s play, to good effect if out of context, and Nell’s is certainly a fine story to tell, Christopher Luscombe’s direction of it well suited to the rumbustious familiarity of the Globe. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is perfect in the role, larky and witty and credible as an Eastcheap lass whose straightforward cheek refreshed the King. He, as Swale also reminds us, saw his father beheaded and knew the fragility of monarchy as well as its pomp. Nell must have been a breath of sanity to him. She is spotted while heckling and wooed by Charles Hart, the leading actor at court (Jay Taylor); after singing a splendidly rude song, with gestures, as an audition she is brought on as an actress by him and Killigrew, to the entertaining disgust of Kynaston (a camply gorgeous Greg Haiste in fake boobs and skirts) who regards women’s roles as his private domain. Meanwhile Dryden scribbles nerdily away in the corner (Graham Butler in what I hope is another extreme wig) and various rival mistresses hiss at Nell.

It is rompingly entertaining, ferociously feminist (she thinks men should want a woman “with skin and heart and sense in her head!”) and she was right: she lasted right to the end, bore him sons and had them given titles, and clearly stayed dearer than any of the other women. In the first part the show is full of jokes: rather more knowingly Blackadderish at times than my own taste, but the audiences loved them all. Great cheers meet Charles II’s affirmation that “Playhouses are a valuable national asset!”, and soppy aaaahs greet the inclusion of a proper woofing King Charles Spaniel at his side.

It moves perhaps too swiftly towards the denouement: the King’s illness, Nell banned from his side, his dying words “let not poor Nelly starve!” , her illness and her brief return to her friends in the company (Lord, how sentimental is theatre about itself! and with good reason..). But it’s fun, it’s a squib, a light bright entertainment founded on a bracing truth.

It doesn’t match up to Swale’s last Globe production in this “Herstory” vein: Bluestockings was a five-star triumph, a thing of both tremendous laughs and profound seriousness telling the story of the 1896 struggle of Girton College, Cambridge to have its scholars allowed to graduate. That one ought to play again, in many theatres. This is a Globe lark, fun for a while but less nutritious. And OK, David Sturzaker is an amiable and handsome king, though I must confess to a secret conviction that by law, only Rupert Everett should ever play Charles II.

box office 020 7401 9919 to 17 October
rating three    3 Meece Rating

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September 25, 2015 · 11:08 am

HECUBA Swan, Stratford upon Avon

A KIND OF HORRIFIC GRACE..
We are having a spate of grisly classicana at the moment, brutal old tales of curses and murders and doom spinning down the unforgiving generations. A brace of stage Oresteias, a scorching Elektra, Bacchae everywhere you look. Here, though, is another take on the ancient horrors of the Trojan war.
Marina Carr, admirably uninterested in male heroics and subtly channelling present-day brutalities, centres her re-telling on Hecuba, wife of King Priam and queen of the ancient civilization ravaged by the Grecian invaders. Taking Euripides, Homer and other ancient variants, Carr delivers something unutterably bleak but strangely beautiful. Not least in the restraint of Erica Whyman’s direction and Soutra Gilmour’s design: no silly gross-out spectacle or property rubber limbs here. The story is told mostly in narration by the various characters, each recounting conversations, sometimes relating one another’s lines: a tactic which at first slightly alienated me, but whose poetic distancing grew more powerful by the minute, reminiscent of Synge and Yeats in Deirdre of the Sorrows.
But oh, the pity and horror and blunt stupidity of such war! We meet Hecuba on her dead husband’s throne, describing the torn bodies of her sons lying around her, Priam’s chopped-off head seeping on her knee, her baby grandson’s body flung among them, his head crushed. Her gentler daughter Polyxena weeps and the tougher less loved one, Cassandra who foresaw it all, sneers “Don’t you just love war. Sexy!”. Derbhle Crotty is a marvellous Hecuba, mature and enduring, proud. “Three thousand years of breeding in that pose” says the conquering Agamemnon, who strides in gleaming with barbaric warrior pride . The admiration is not mutual. “You came as guests, reeking of goat-shit and mackerel, saw our fields and palaces..”. The Greeks here are marauders, aggressors, imperialists, who know no rules of war. Outside women are being ravaged, old ones killed, babies thrown on pyres. “Different rules now” says Agamemnon “Everything is in my gift”.
Ray Fearon’s Agamemnon plays brilliantly against Hecuba. Here is a Spartan boy soldier who led troops at thirteen, never learned to read and write but sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia on the strand to get a fair wind. The brilliance of Carr’s characterization is her indication of the man’s intelligence, blunted by violence, and the vulnerability which Hecuba – still assured, though defeated and grieving – can raise in him. He cuts her own daughter’s throat for a fair wind to get his rabble of Grecian tribesmen home, knowing perfectly well that the superstition is “all shit” , and afterwards tends the hungry, ragged queen and takes her in his arms, needing her comfort not only physically but asking her how to run a country.
“Our laws” she says calmly “Were ten thousand years in the making”. That his army has destroyed them in mere hours is, Agamemnon perceives miserably, a less proud thing. In an extraordinary, arresting scene the child Polydorus, last son of Priam and knowing he is to die now, sits on his father’s throne. On press night it was Luca Saraceni-Gunner, a child of devastating dignity. His calm nobility leaves the immense Agamemnon muttering “I am humbled, reduced..”.
Hecuba is doomed, enslaved, defiled, bereaved, begging on her knees. But never reduced. Agamemnon speaks of her having “a kind of horrific grace”. The phrase  sums up the play. Can’t get it out of my head.
0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 17 October

rating four   4 Meece Rating

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September 24, 2015 · 5:55 pm

HENRY V Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

THE HOLLOW CROWN : A  CIRCLE COMPLETED 

This is the crown, the final flourish of Gregory Doran’s magnificently rendered history cycle. We have seen preening emotional Richard , troubled Henry IV declinging as his roistering son hits the whorehouses with Sir John Falstaff ; seen that Hal – Alex Hassall, who carries on the role here – fighting off Hotspur and at last attaining the “polished perturbation” of the crown. Poor Falstaff is gone now, babbling of green fields on his deathbed; his band of rogues join young Henry V in the battlefields of France.
It is a troublesome play in some ways, famous for the great Agincourt speeches and feeding (as a mischievous programme-note by Jeremy Paxman observes) a warlike patriotism, a legend in which England forever stands alone, outnumbered and gallant. Technically, it flits from place to place with a Chorus figure between scenes. It is often fiercely cut. But not here: in three hours of crystalline intelligence and thoughtful detail, Doran and his cast give us something marvellous, not macho but both mocking and understanding of the timeless terrible business of war. His Chorus is Oliver Ford Davies, grandfatherly modern in drooping cardigan, wandering through scenes which freeze into ghosthood as he tell us the story and enjoins us to imagine a dim heroic past for ourselves.

The production’s pace is judged to a hair, combining sharp comedy with a deep seriousness, turning from one to the other in half a breath sometimes. For instance as the bloodstained, exhausted young King hears that the battle is won and the day is ours, a thread of birdsong brings tears to his eyes as he sinks to his knees in prayer. And the Welsh braggart Fluellen (Joshua Richards) allows barely a second before starting to prattle about his countrymen’s valour and contribution, as Hal rolls his eyes tolerantly. Nonsense about leeks nudges alongside a great choral Te Deum; on the very battlefield, when we have just seen the young King steeling himself, alone, to “imitate the action of a tiger”, there is a meeting of officers in an absurdity of accents: a huge farouche Irish McMorris with a heavy brogue and Fluellen with his Kinnockian verbosity each staring nervously at the incomprehensible barks of the Scot Jamy (Simon Yadoo, take a bow).

To home in on such detail is not irrelevant: a great beauty of this production is Doran’s retention of many moments often cut, right from the start where the Archbishop discourses tediously on Salic law for five minutes to justify the English claim to France. Here, its sly usefulness is in allowing Hassell to show in his face how very new this kingly, political responsibility is to him, and how unsure of it he still is. “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” he asks, almost hopelessly; but his laddish pride tips over when the Dauphin sends him tennis-balls and pop-up mailed fist making a V-sign.

The story, through all the pathos, comedy, martial moments and heroic legend, is a coming-of-age one. At first I was concerned that Alex Hassell, so beguiling as Prince Hal, was less comfortable with the language and manner of kingly formality. But then, a new King would be, fresh from Falstaff’s party world: and as the war develops Hassell gives usa real and moving sense of a young man struggling to become a leader. A young man burdened, too, with the inherited remorse of his father’s usurpation of the crown from Richard: Doran gives us absolute acceptance of the religiosity. This Henry prays, and means it, and fears doing wrong. His scene in disguise among the soldiers makes your neck-hairs stand on end: a deep felt chilling silence ensues as he recognizes his responsiblity for the blood of common soldiers. The St Crispin’s day speech is stirring, authoritative rising to oratory, as ever; but more moving still is his moment of lonely prayer, like Nelson’s, to the God of Battles.

Details, grace-notes emerge every moment from a strong ensemble: Robert Gilbert as a foppish blow-dried Dauphin wickedly contrasts with the battered Hal; Antony Byrne’s oafish Pistol throws a surprise punch and is battered by a leek; odd understage uplights in Stephen Brimson Lewis’ bare beautiful set create subtle shifts of mood. And the merry political coda, the wooing of Katherine by a Hal grown young and unsure again, sees the women matching up to it: Jennifer Kirby playful and icy by turns as the princess, and Jane Lapotaire drily, grievingly, resignedly queenly. It’s the hardest of the history plays to do well. And this is done magnificently.
0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 16 nov (then to Barbican in Dec)

rating   FIVE 5 Meece Rating

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September 22, 2015 · 11:58 pm

DINNER WITH SADDAM Menier, SE1

THE WORST GUEST EVER…FARCE AND FEAR
It’s the least likely setting imaginable for a farce, even a black one. We are in Baghdad, in the Alawai family’s kitchen and dining-room on the 19th of March, 2003: the hours before the American Shock and Awe bombardment. But for a while, we might as well be in any domestic sitcom. The set (by Tim Shortall) is recognizably modern-suburban with just an Arab twist in the windows, which helps; the opening scene is almost Life with the Lyons, as the exasperated wife Samira (Shobu Kapoor) stumps in with the shopping after a frustrating search for basics, and berates her idle husband Ahmed (Sanjeev Bhaskar) who has done nothing about digging the well for when the water gets cut off. Student daughter Rana (Rebecca Grant, the straightest of the characters) quarrels with her father about his plan to marry her to her awful wealthy cousin Jammal. A geeky comedy plumber (Ilan Goodman) has sneaked in, who is actually Rana’s disguised real boyfriend.

There are some sharp lines and laughs; so far, so rom-com. But Anthony Horowitz, creator of Midsomer Murders, Foyle’s War and numerous novels, has thrown real political fury at his first stage play. Chancing upon the curious fact that the dictator Saddam Hussein had a faux-democratic habit of calling on ordinary families – albeit surrounded by heavily armed guards – he supposes that on this perilous night the dictator would have left the palace (of which the USAF missiles would have co-ordinates) to descend on the Alawais. The terrifying, eye-patched faintly camp security chief Colonel Farouk turns up (the splendid Ilan Goodman again, for good reasons which become clear). Farouk is a man reputed to have pulled out his own eye with a corkscrew for a bet, and announces that Saddam is on the way and the neighbours have duly been arrested, just in case. Some plot devices are neatly planted – a mis-labelled jar, two identical bags in the fridge, a too-tight suit – and these duly cause increasing mayhem. Bhaskar does a good Cleesian line in manic-panic, the lumpen fiancé Jammal the traffic policeman is given full comedy revoltingness by Nathan Amzi, and as the first act ends Saddam is among us, with a steel-lined trilby and two armed guards.

At which point Horowitz’ motive starts to pay off. Steven Berkoff, for it is he, is a truly terrifying Saddam: giving him glimpses of affable humanity and plaintive self-exculpation in between executions remembered – and in two cases ordered on the spot. Quite apart from the chaos sometimes going on in the next room, and a scatological interlude with Jamal’s tummy-trouble (this author has written a lot of teen fiction), the focus is on this terrifying giant baby, this killer buffoon. One long and startling riff from him must have given director Lindsay Posner a few hard moments, since it stops the farce action dead: but it does hammer home the points which Horowitz is fizzing with furious determination to make. That the West supported, praised and armed Saddam Hussein for decades; that Britain extended Iraq’s export credit a mere week after the Halabja massacre of Kurds; that Western sanctions killed more children than Hiroshima, depriving Iraq of necessary medicine, sanitation and nutrition. And, not least, that the American ending of the first Iraq war for fear of homecoming body-bags gave the monster dangerous confidence. “Their tears are their weakness” he says, bragging that his own casualties have no names or faces being just soldiers of Iraq. He cites with scorn the list of failed US overseas interventions ever since Vietnam.
All true – as are picaresque facts like Saddam’s early career as a bus conductor, and the fact that you could be thrown in jail for spilling coffee on his photograph. And as the farce resolves – the Alawais survive, pretty much – you cannot leave without sad sour reflection. Not least on Saddam’s line “In a country of so many sects and ethnicities it is essential everybody agrees on one thing. That they don’t want to be tortured”. It isn’t a classic farce, despite some fine laughs, and could do with pacing up a little before it transfers, which I bet it will. But goddammit, it’s a handy prelude to Chilcot, which alone earns it the fourth mouse. Wonder whether Sir John will report before the run ends? Or, indeed, book a ticket?

box office 0207 378 1713 to 14 November
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 22, 2015 · 1:47 am

MR FOOTE’S OTHER LEG Hampstead Theatre, N1

A FINE PLUM-PUDDING OF ACTS AND IDEAS

“Sex and the 18th century” said Brigid Brophy, quoted by the playwright Sam Kelly, “are the two most interesting things in the world”. The fiery, subversive free spirits of the time certainly kicked at religious, scientific and social barriers with glee: Georgians are never boring. And Kelly dramatizes and telescopes the career of one of the ripest: Samuel Foote. Actor, dramatist and theatre manager, whose “mimicry and audacious pleasantries” got him thrown out of Oxford , he found celebrity, clashed with censors and rivals, sparred with friends – Garrick, Peg Woffington, Prince George himself – had a leg amputated after being thrown by a royal horse, rallied, got a royal warrant as compensation, and used his wooden leg as a comedy prop, often while wearing a frock and bonnet. Oh, and he was tried for homosexual assault of a footman.

Kelly gives us this irresistible figure as a very modern character: a satirical celebrity who admits that he has “something wrong in my head, I never knew when a joke went too far” . A man living on the edge financially and professionally, never ceding to prudence or decorum, whose decline is both inevitable and wrenchingly sad. Who better to play it than the matchless, the twinkling, the deep-feeling, unassailably truthful, woundedly human , energetically rageous and intermittently dead camp Simon Russell Beale. What a treat.

The play kicks off with giddy comedy in a flash-forward , as Foote’s faithful servant the freed slave Frank (Micah Balfour) searches Dr Hunter’s anatomy store for his dead master’s old wooden leg, assisted by the old stage-manager Mrs Garner (Jenny Galloway, dropping tart lines with killer precision as she searches the specimen racks – “Cocks in bottles, best place for them”). It whips back twenty years, and on Tim Hatley’s fine backstage set we find our hero taking elocution lessons backstage under Charles Macklin, alongside a Brummie-accented David Garrick (Joseph Millson) and a still almost incomprehensibly Irish Peg Woffington (Dervla Kirwan). Foote himself , looking like a truculent Mr Toad in a periwig, has learnt the part of Titania. So we don’t stop laughing for the first ten minutes, even through a fatal onstage accident and a backstage pisspot intervention.
And the laughs go on, as Foote ,Garrick and Woffington start a rival theatre, running skits in the Haymarket until Garrick peels off to be more respectably Shakespearian. While Foote perversely decides that Othello could be played as a comedy, it leads to a scene unique in drama when two Othellos, blacked-up in identical tunics, brawl violently in the dressing-room where Woffington in her petticoats and the black Jamaican, Frank, try to separate them and the new King George III (Ian Kelly himself) appears in the doorway.

The loss of Foote’s leg, and his descent through deeper disinihibition and recklessness, darken the second half; sweetened by the ultimately touching reconciliation of the three friends in Woffington’s final illness (Kirwan is superb as the gallant, sexually free trouper). Above all there is Russell Beale’s gift for simultaneously conveying Foote’s personal despair , heroic flippancy and – beneath the latter – a genuine and important conviction that comedy, subversion, drag and satire are high moral forms. Raging against Garrick’s sacred-Shakespeare pomposity he cries “The theatre is a knocking-shop , always was..laughter means the audience is rubbing up against something they thought was right”.
Woven in with this is Dr Hunter (Forbes Masson) and his medical questing, alongside Benjamin Franklin to debate the mystery of consciousness in the brain with both chemical and electrical impulses, with a metaphor of thoughts hovering in

themselves in a communal zero-gravity suspension. It is all, as Frank joyfully says of London, “inebriating”.  Though there are moments in the second half when it needs a bit more soda in the tipple, as theatre, censorship, medicine, brain science, Abolitionism, American independence, the rotting effect of celebrity and the capturing of lighting with kites all jostle for attention, and Foote becomes a lost Lear in a huge feather bonnet crying “We do not know we have a mind until we begin to lose it”. It’s a rich plum-pudding , and maybe could have done with the omission of a nut or two. But wow.

Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 18, 2015 · 10:55 pm

HANGMEN Royal Court SW1

EXECUTION STREET…

Grotesque. Morbid. Hilarious. Dark, absurd, evocative.
Start with the last one. This is a period-conscious piece, even more than Martin McDonagh’s Irish-set works (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan, both recently and brilliantly staged). I affirm the atmosphere, because being twenty years older than Mr McDonagh I was a teenager in 1965, when Britain abolished the death penalty and closed down the condemned cells and execution sheds. No more would hangmen peer through spyholes to gauge the victim’s weight for a quick efficient drop: no more would cell doors swing open on the knell of 8 a.m. with doctor and Governor standing by.   We knew about these things from childhood, from adult whispers and black headlines – Hanratty, Allen and Evans… Hangings got into our nightmares and into comedy: remember the opening frames of Dennis Price in the condemned cell, in Kind Hearts and Coronets? Later, I interviewed Albert Pierrepoint, most famous of hangmen, when he wrote his memoirs and admitted his doubts about the trade.
In period-perfect black comedy, Mcdonagh evokes that dowdy postwar world , assisted by Anna Fleischle’s designs – bricky condemned-cell, bleak seafront cafe, and the cosily grim Oldham pub hangman Harry runs (very Rovers’ Return: think of it as Execution Street). Pierrepoint, of course, ran a pub himself. The half-prurient, half-righteous comments of the regulars acknowledge how the noose haunted us. As did the dread of miscarriages of justice, innocents hanged.
In the opening cell scene Harry – David Morrissey, stridingly and stroppily Lancashire with a John Cleese moustache – has arrived to execute one Hennessy, who fights and protests his innocence and offends him by snarling “They could’ve at least sent Pierrepoint!”. Two years later we are in the pub on the day hanging is abolished, with behind the counter Harry’s wife (Sally Rogers) and plump, shy, mopey teenage daughter Shirley (Bronwyn James, in an endearing début) . A stranger turns up, Mooney: Johnny Flynn, again pitch-perfect as a long-haired 1960’s southerner, with a flippant menace in his manner calculated to wind up Harry. Indeed many of his lines sound as if Pinter had collaborated with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. He may or may not be the real murderer in the Hennessy case: the first anniversary of the hanging, we learn, saw a similar death in Lowestoft and today we fear something else will happen. Maybe to Shirley.

McDonagh’s is gift for rising menace and jagged, violent moments punctured by lines which make us bark with shocked laughter. For obscenity, cruelty, vanity, and insult can be – and here are – hilarious. Like the line about murders of women in Lowestoft because there’s nothing else to do except clock golf, or the dismissive “He couldn’t rape mud”. Dear oh dear. But we laughed, a lot. So no spoilers as to what happens, or who dies and how nastily. Morrissey is excellent as a man whose macho professional pride in killing with “dignity” conflicts with his vanity and love of fame, then cracks into terrified rage. Reece Shearsmith is a marvellously creepy Syd , assistant hangman and part-time perve. McDonagh actually introduces Pierrepoint himself during the climax, as an immense pompous bully, a rival cock-of-the-deathwalk: which is a wholly imaginary characterization, since the real man was quiet, thoughtful, and small.

It’s splendidly done under Matthew Dunster’s direction. But unlike McDonagh’s greater works, I’m not sure what it’s for. As a satire on judicial murder and wrongful executions it’s a bit late; as a reflection on male professional rivalry in the grisliest of trades it is darkly funny. As a cliffhanger ending in violence, it’s effective. But above all, it catches a moment in history, and a period. Maybe that’s the point. And OK, maybe it’s time the new generation was told that the ’60s weren’t all Mary Quant and psychedelia.

box office 020 7565 5000 to 10 October
Rating three

3 Meece Rating

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September 18, 2015 · 2:43 pm

SO HERE WE ARE Hightide Festival, Aldeburgh

YOUTHFUL YEARNINGS A CONTAINER PORT CAN’T CONTAIN…

You grow up with your mates in a dead-end town, and you’re a solid gang – five a side footie team, in and out of each other’s houses since you were all six – but some of you start to grow away. From the same street and school some lads will be builders or roofers, like Pidge and Smudge and Frankie, but some will get on and out. Like Dan, who went to “uni” and is headed for a job in Hong Kong, in a suit.

Today they’re all in suits, mind, because they’ve come from Frankie’s funeral. Three are perched on a Southend dockyard container, bantering , farting, quarrelling like so many Likely Lads. Dan is on the ground, not joining in. Maybe he knows more about Frankie’s death than they do. Any minute the lost boy’s girlfriend Kirsty will turn up, to do a ceremonial loosing of black balloons in his memory.

Luke Norris’ 2013 Bruntwood prizewinner – on its way to the Royal Exchange in Manchester next week – is beautifully staged under the festival’s director Steven Atkinson, with the looming scruffy container delivering a fine coup de theatre halfway through its 90 minutes as we flash back to Frankie’s last day alive. We see him and learn more about what drove him to that “accident”. After the banteringly uneasy opening – often very funny – Norris leads us smartly through the pressures and doubtfulness of growing up as a young man whose education and chances are cut off, and whose yearning for an outer world will always be at the expense of the safety that lies in what he knows.

Daniel Kendrick is wonderful as Frankie: eager, doubtful, confusedly fascinated by the immigrant Latvian workmate only he pays attention to, and struggling emotionally with the need to escape more than Southend itself. His girlfriend Kirsty, Jade Anouka, is a fulfilled busy primary-school teacher and doesn’t see it; no more do the three team-mates, Mark Weinman the calmer of the them is engaged, an endearing Dorian Jerome SImpson is the pie-eating Smudge, nicely combining apparent dimness with a fiercer emotional intelligence than the rest; and there’s a rackety, cracking debut from Sam Melvin as the motormouth PIdge.
Each of them has in some way misunderstood Frankie, though they loved him. Dan (Ciaran Owens, broodingly present in his silence through the banter) knows better than anyone why it broke down. Comedy and sadness melt together. And as word-of-mouth is particularly interesting in these festival moments, I can report that members of the Aldeburgh audience, inhabiting quite another sort of East Anglian town, class, and outlook, spoke afterwards with real empathy, real sorrow for the world’s Frankies. Which is as it should be.

http://www.hightidefestival.org transferring to Royal Exchange, Manchester 24th.

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 17, 2015 · 12:33 pm

HARROGATE and BRENDA 2 plays at Hightide Festival, Aldeburgh

A WINNER AND A LOSER
Human beings sometimes – disastrously – get erotically fixated on one phase of their sexual history. In the case of Patrick (Nick Sidi) it is a teenage moment. He met and adored his wife when she was fourteen or fifteen; she is now a confident, busy, sharp-tongued doctor, but their daughter looks dangerously like that young love, and he can’t keep his mind off her. Not his hands, he’s done nothing (we think..). But he makes a prostitute dress in the daughter’s current school uniform, talk to him about GCSEs, her boyfriend Adam and schoolfriend Carly, and drink Bailey’s while promising not to tell her mother.
In the first act we find him conversing with that substitute, telling her off for wearing make-up, showing the letters she wrote when she was eight. There is a shrill tightness and controlling authority in his manner, which makes us uneasy; the girl’s teenage mannerisms are perfect, though, so it is perhaps slightly too late that we work out that this is not a real daughter. That creates a confusion in an innocent audience, because since she doesn’t know the flat well, I thought for a while that he was a divorcee access-Dad.
In the second act – out of school uniform, casual in tracky bottoms and cheekier towards him – we see her as the real daughter; school anecdotes are at first scornfully casual, later comes a revelation about the mother and a tormented account of a crisis in school. In the third act she’s the mother, striding in from work and being asked by Mr Creepy for a piece of role -play, of which which she abruptly and rather tardily realizes the significance.
The Hightide festival is known for sharp, risky new writing and has had some magnificent successes; Al Smith’s taut, troubling 70-minute play in the Pumphouse deserves (and has not yet got) a London transfer, though with a few adjustments I could absolutely see it in the National’s Temporary Theatre. The dialogue is brilliant, the father’s edginess and bossy control with the fake daughter, easier, tricky closeness with the real one are well judged, as is the riskiness of his colloquy with the impatient, doctorly professional wife in thie last section.
Richard Twyman directs , with some startling touches like the man’s sudden sense of electric shocks through the furniture (it’s set in blank whiteness). And the two actors are remarkable: particularly Sarah Ridgeway, who plays all three versions of the object of desire, convincingly both as teenager and mother. It is a stunning performance, and stays with me still. In the central section there is a searing breakdown moment when she admits her loss both of virginity and of her boyfriend (in Harrogate, hence the title) and more painfully the collapse of an over-teased male teacher by her and her friend. This sub-theme – of the power of teenage girls and their inability to understand its dangers – dovetails really interestingly with the father’s obsession.
Ridgeway, in proper teen style, is roaming round the stage eating Hula-Hops at this point, and in the show I saw she nearly choked. I am told later that it wasn’t planned, but at the time I honestly thought it was part of the distress, and rather brilliant. What a trouper. And I now suddenly remember how glorious she was as Eva in James Dacre’s The Accrington Pals, a few years back in Manchester. Right onto my favourites list, this lady.

Up the road, in a Church Hall (which makes it very site-specific) E.V.Crowe’s BRENDA showcases another good young actress, Alison O’Donnell, in another two hander alongside Jack Tarlton. But I can’t enthuse about the play, a gruelling business of long silences, moody wanderings around, and much fiddling with microphones and cables in the conceit that the pair are about to do some kind of public speech to their Scottish community about her difficulty finding a job.
The first fifteen minutes has the lights on us and them – or just her – roaming in gloom at the end; there’s a brief baffling bit of dialogue about someone having a “ball of consciousness”. Gradually we gather that the man wants Brenda to say her name and assert herself as an individual, but that she can’t because poverty and joblessness have deprived her of any sense of identity. “I am not a person”. It is fifty minutes in before we get this point. Which is a good and topical one; and O”Donnell , in her long wordless passages, body language and face, expresses a sadness and bafflement and passive suicidality which, in a better play, would serve the message well.
But the dearth of drama, the arrogant moody slowness of it, mainly made me think that it was not entirely a good thing when serious theatre audiences developed their present level of attentive, respectful reverence and an attitude of “Better not yawn or fidget, it might be the new Beckett”. It isn’t. A few walkouts and yawns would ginger up the makers of plays like this no end. And the psychological disintegration of the recession’s rejects is too important a theme to be made boring. But what do I know? This one does have a transfer booked, to the Yard Theatre in London.

http://www.hightide.org.uk
rating: HARROGATE three   3 Meece Rating
BRENDA two  2 meece rating

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September 16, 2015 · 11:55 am

USHERS Arts Theatre, WC2

SMALL BUDGET, BIG HEART, WELCOME UP WEST
I had been wanting for a while to catch up on this fringe squib about the lives of front-of-house theatre workers, and with devilish cunning Max Reynolds’ production, sharing the Arts with American Idiot, runs four matinees a week – tues, Weds, two on Friday and one on Saturday. Thus not only us theatre anoraks with too many booked-up nights, but actual ushers themselves can go.

And should. From Yianni Koutsakos’ and James Oban’s musical (book by James Rottger) I expected larks, and I got them. Not least from Alexandra Parkes in a stonking professional début as big Rosie the usherette-cum-stalker. She does a riotously raunchy, fabulously fearless number in a basque, about stalking Michael Ball, and crowns it with a very, very slow-motion performance of the splits.

I expected pastiche and joyful in-jokes and got them too: a fine Billy Elliott joke, some clever parody numbers, often half-hidden references, and plenty on the imaginary big man himself, Sir Andrew MacTosser, Most Powerful Man In Theatre. I relished the cracks about the ways of audiences: tourists, critics, tiger Mums and brats, stagies, husbands dragged along unwillingly, snogging lovers, and the awkward tardy bumbling pests who cavil at programme prices and insist that there is no spoon in their ice-cream when there is. Under the lid. I nodded at the central conceit of the villainous Theatre Manager Robin (a basso profundo Harry Stone, mugging like a more heavyset James Dreyfus, urging upselling and spend-per-head. It was nice that the show these downtrodden ushers are working on is “Oops I did it again – the Britney Spears Musical”, complete with tacky merchandise – “if it got any cheaper, Bill Kenwright would be touring it”. I like the set too, the back view of the kiosk.
All good fun. But I had not expected it to be so touching: a lightly taken, cheerfully poignant reflection on unappreciated lives and private dreams. The action takes place in the half-hour before the house opens, during the interval, and after the end of the invisible show, with occasional video-training screen moments from the evil Robin. Rosie, loves all leading men and hates actresses, new girl Lucy is fresh out of drama school and hoping for a break, handsome Stephen has toured as Joseph but yearns in a high tenor for character parts (“I want Phantom, not that random? Bloke who gets the girl in the end!”). Above all there is Gary (Ben Fenner) who has a chance to work in Austria but may have to leave his lover Ben behind. Poor Ben has suddenly realized that nobody wants to be an usher, nobody trains three years to sell ice-cream “always watching, never participating”. Gary’s aria about love and choice has one of the best couplets ever in a musical: “Once in a world of ice cream and joy / At a kiosk of wonders, a boy met a boy…”. Lovely.
And of course there’s a happy ending, a big reveal, and an OTT tap-dancing curtain call. Eighty minutes well spent, and a grin from the real ushers as you leave. Small budget, big heart, lovely show.

Box Office 020 7836 8463
http://www.artstheatrewestend.co.uk to 18 Oct
rating: four    4 Meece Rating

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September 15, 2015 · 10:49 pm

KINKY BOOTS Adelphi, WC1

THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR DANCING.  IF YOU DARE. 
Sequins, feathers, glitter, two and a half hours of hurtling from one noisy shining set-piece to another, this is more of a gig than a drama. If you’re fine with that – and why not – here’s your big night out. It’s less earnest than Made in Dagenham, less romantic than The Bodyguard, far less human than Once, or The Committments, or Memphis. But it is very, very Broadway: slick shiny, flicking the emotional buttons with economical briskness (being a Real Man, living up to your Dad, all that). Garlanded with Tonys, after Broadway and LA, Harvey Mitchell and Cyndi Lauper’s musical comes home with a British cast to the nation it’s about.
For the original movie – based loosely on some true events – is about a failing shoe factory in Northamptonshire saving itself by making specialist high-heeled footwear robust enough for the heftier drag queen. It was one of a slew of films – from The Full Monty and Brassed Off right through to the recent Pride (bound to end up as a musical, betcha) – whose theme is the late 20c decline of British industry, coupled with a rousing sense that hey, we’re warm-hearted people who love cabaret and gays so it doesn’t matter that we don’t make much any more.
Am I being cynical? Suppose so. But entertainment at this level is quite cynical itself. The story of Charlie (Killian Donnelly, as likeable and tuneful as ever) reluctantly taking on the factory and forging an unlikely partnership with Lola the drag queen is briskly narrated, big songs designed more as showstoppers than emotional plot-drivers. Likewise the collapse of his engagement to Nicola and his rapprochement with Lauren from the shopfloor . The homophobic horror of the conservative workforce, important in the film, is reduced to one thuggish dissident, Don, and resolved in another showpiece of a slo-mo boxing match between him and Lola. The glorious moment when George the veteran shoemaker overcomes his unease in the fascination of the technical demands of a stronger heel is pretty much thrown away between big belting X-factor-y numbers.
But hey, who cares? the showcase drag pieces are acrobatic, speactacular, breathtaking, glittery and funny (Jerry Mitchell directs and choreographs, asking feats of his stilettoed chorus-men way beyond what is probable, logical or wholly safe). David Rockwell ’s factory set is nicely adapted to the choreography, especially the moving conveyor-belt dance: a unique bit of staging if ever there was one. Donnelly is delightful as ever, deploying a wider emotional range than the script really deserves; Jamie Baughan is pleasingly gruff as homophobic Don, and as for Matt Henry as Lola, he’s a revelation: a spectacular cabaret artiste, queeny and showy but able – like Donnelly – to conjure up real feeling and a touching insecurity in between the big explosive numbers.

As for Amy Lennox as Lauren the factory girl who falls for the boss, her Northampton-accented lament, especially in The HIstory of Wrong Guys – is the funniest, freshest comic turn in a musical since Sheridan Smith burst on us in Legally Blonde. So though the sequins and unthreatening drag acts are pretty whoop-de-doo, and the two stars immaculate, for me it is Lennox – and the ensemble and the bonkers Gregg Barnes costumes – which overcame the cynicism and won the fourth star.
Box office 0844 412 4651
rating four    3 Meece RatingCostume design mouse resized (that last one is the customised costume-director mouse for Mr Barnes)

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September 14, 2015 · 10:35 pm

PHOTOGRAPH 51 Noel Coward Theatre, WC2

SCIENTISTS, SEXISM, THE SCR AND THE SECRET OF LIFE
Nicole Kidman, an Oscars star descending again on the West End, is the “story” here; so begin by saying that as the half-forgotten 1950’s Jewish scientist Rosalind Franklin she gives a quite wonderful performance. She’s restrained, fine-judged, tensely weary and luminous in stillness or crackling with energy as the prickly, driven, brilliant biophysicist whose work getting images of infinitesimally small molecules led directly to a blazingly important breakthrough: Crick and Watson’s discovery of the double-helix structure and functioning of DNA.

They and her colleague Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel prize in 1962; Dr Franklin herself died four years earlier, at only 37, her tumours possibly caused by exposure to X-rays in long days and nights in the lab. Kidman has said that this new play by Anna Ziegler attracted her because her own father was a biochemist, giving her a sense of scientific dedication. But any woman would burn a little with desire to record female pioneers in a time when, as at Kings College, even brilliant doctoral a woman wasn’t allowed in the senior common room. And would be – as here – automatically assumed to be an assistant not a prime mover, irritatingly addressed as “Miss” rather than “Doctor”, and dismissed as “a right old hag” when she asserts herself.

Ziegler’s play, told in short scenes and direct narrative by her and the posse of men around her, is a fiction based squarely on fact and memoirs. Under Christopher Oram’s toweringly macho, half-ruined postwar set of Somerset House looming over the bleak underground KCL lab, it gives Kidman some wonderful opportunities: sharp dry ripostes, sudden ferocities, and sour comedy as she fences with her lab partner (Stephen Campbell Moore oddly touching as the shy, defensively arrogant Maurice Wilkins). Her “I don’t want to be your friend” and scornful reference to his bad marriage when he clumsily attempts to win her over could alienate but oddly doesn’t: because by then we believe utterly in this woman’s focus. The work is everything, and the higher the mountain “the further I get to go”. Only in dealings with the amiable American PhD student Don Caspar (Patrick Kennedy), who shares her romantic joy in “shapes..endless repetition, the nature of the world” does she unbend. In a beautiful, sudden moment Ziegler gives her an imagined internal monologue, a yearning “to wake up without feeling the weight of the day pressing down, to fall asleep more easily..to be kissed, to learn how to be ok being with other people…to be a child again”.

There were moments when I worried that it would become a history-of-science lecture, and in its exposition of bickerings , rivalries and technicalities would curl up its own back end like a failed helix itself. But Will Attenborough’s crazy-haired arrogant young Watson and Edward Bennett’s sardonic Crick are an energizing double act, their blokey tesing relationship with Wilkins a painful contrast with the isolation of the clever “Rosy” who can’t talk things over in the SCR bars with them. And in the last third of its 90 minutes (Michael Grandage’s direction always spare, elegant) it lifts off, the metaphor of the double spiral which without touching feeds itself into life is replicated in the interaction of the pairs of humans.
That is moving, as is the ‘failure’ of the isolated Rosalind to see the extraordinary truth revealed in Photograph 51. Her photograph: the one that broke the intellectual dam and swirled the men to global fame. You leave reflecting on a neat irony: for in opposition to the cliché about emotional women and rational men, it was excited scribbling intuition which gave Watson the road to the answer, and meticulous insistence on irrefutable evidence which made the woman delay…

box office 0844 482 5130 http://www.noelcowardtheatre.co.uk to 21 Nov
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 12, 2015 · 7:59 pm

FUTURE CONDITIONAL Old Vic, SE1

GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES (genuine 21st century school leaver..)  ENJOYS THE MENTAL MUMS

3 Meece Rating RATING  THREE
With the news we’ve been having this week, a play about education policy may seem a little lightweight. For most of the first half it was. But the play pulls that neat Love Actually trick. Tedious for the most part, yet satisfying in the end. Little sense, little structure, little point, but plenty of character and warming comedy. Its arguments are highly worn, but it has wheeled out engaging and intriguing characters to tell them to us again.

Education is the primary concern of the play, although curiously there are no children. Instead the Tamsin Oglesby’s play gets lost in the fringes, separate side shows. We see only one character, who is an actual child, being educated. Nikki Patel, who, I am surprised to hear, makes her professional stage debut, gives a mightily strong and funny warmth to Alia, a young Pakistani girl breaking through to Oxbridge against the odds. A part that could be trite is witty and eventually moving.

The rest is extremely well played, peppered with top gags but largely directionless and inconsequential.

Three sections. Teacher, mums, education policy wonks.

The first, Rob Brydon’s bit, is fine. But he barely appears. Most of his scenes, despite being set in a bustling classroom full of rowdy, cheeky and undoubtedly (we’ll never know) witty school children, is played solo. Just him. Talking to student-sized gaps in the air. The little he is given echoes around the lonely stage, lacking dynamism in spite of the reasonable performance. Too late into the 2 hours he’s given dialogue, and it finally comes alive.

A diverse range of mental mum is fully on show. A playground plagued by desperate attempts to get the best school place for their kids. Most scream, one drinks, the other pretends to divorce her husband to move him out into a better catchment area. In this, Lucy Briggs-Owen, the stand-out star, gives a jolly masterclass as the frantic, posh, Scottish mum driven to obsession. Her performance , as usual, is detailed, hilarious and completely recognisable (sorry mum).

The final bunch – a gaggle of policy wonks, is the dullest. As it cuts between its three parts, with Alia peppered across a couple, I felt my shoulders droop and my eyes drift as I recognised their flipboard being wheeled on. The dialogue, save for a few jokes at the chubbier one’s expense, is entirely made up of cutouts from newspaper leaders, prit-sticked together into a make-your-own argument collage.

I would have thought Matthew Warchus’ first play as head honcho would have had more bite. It is a good comedy, with sharp, colourful design. But perhaps we needed something shocking. Not something which is on the one hand this and on the other hand that. Not something we nod along to and moments later forget.

3 Mice

Until 3rd October

Box Office: 0844 871 7628

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September 9, 2015 · 10:58 am

BRAVE NEW WORLD Royal & Derngate, Northampton

VISIONS FROM 1931 OF A TEST TUBE FUTURE…
Hot on the heels of Headlong’s obliquely brilliant treatment of 1984 comes a rival dystopia: Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, eighteen years before Orwell and before the second war: the comparison is fascinating. Orwell saw ordinary people, recognizable but crushed by brutality and surveillance, thoughtcrime punished and history denied by violence. Its science is basic – telescreens, shredded newsprint and photos. Huxley – whose brother Julian was an evolutionary scientist and eugenicist – in envisioning his hyper-controlled society saw the future’s horrors as technological, humanity itself turned into a man-made biological hierarchy from Alpha to Delta. Embryos and infants are conditioned to their destined planned occupations, the freely available “soma” drug, controlled consumerist leisure and universal promiscuity keeps everyone happy and prevents the subversiveness innate in family, intimacy and poetry.
Dawn King’s adaptation, under James Dacre’s stark, tight direction, sticks thrillingly close to Huxley and demonstrates enough recognizable 21c phenomena to bring on nervous laughs (not least, early on, at the Hatchery’s director explaining that the trickiest embryos to condition are Betas, middle managers: because you have to make them efficient but not ambitious to be Alphas). We have IVF now, and a prospect of genetically engineered foetuses; we are moving towards considering Huxley’s brisk “end-of-life facilitators”, and also have a cadre of high-consuming and promiscuous alpha-betas. Some of the skycopter-riding workers on their way to electromagnetic golf or the “Westminster Abbey cabaret” are indistinguishable from modern city traders at play. The scornful writer Helmholtz, bored with writing prolefeed “dramedys” and feelie-movies would be quite at home with the modern screen. We have throwaway clothes, too, and high-consumption leisure: World Controller Mond is female in this adaptation, a scornfully masterful Sophie Ward, and explains that they brought in countryside-aversion conditioning because country walks don’t encourage the buying of enough expensive equipment.
There is a lot of explanation, as in Huxley’s novel, which could have torpedoed it as drama but doesn’t because it remains so creepily fascinating a vision. Skilful robotic ensemble moments upstage hint at the toiling, happily drugged Deltas and the use of sexuality as a bonding, tranquillizing group experience. The story itself concerns Bernard Marx – an Alpha who is chippy because he had some Epsilon blood by mistake (Gruffudd Glyn is perfect, just that bit smaller and geekier than fellow-Alphas like James Howard or David Brunett). He takes Lenina, the pretty Beta, to a “Savage reservation” where unaltered humans live wild tribal lives as a control group.

They bring home John (William Postlethwaite) a noble savage whose mother (this being a dirty word in the test-tube society) was from the manufactured world but got lost and lived on, grey and raddled, in the reserve. John has found an old volume of Shakespeare, and lives by quotations: Huxley, unlike Orwell with his proles, had to telescope the idea of a primitive noble savage with that literary and poetic sensitivity, so he could attack both aspects of the main society – its philistinism and its science. Abigail McKern has great fun as the mother, disgusted with her exile into a primitive world without soma and disposable clothes and where babies come out of the “poor quality storage” of the womb.
But Lenina, unsatisfied by the multiple partners of convention, wants Savage John. Her frank (very modern) advances send him into a frenzy, Hamlet-cum-Romeo, ranting of the rank sweat of an unseamed bed and vowing that she shall not melt his honour into lust. So the second half is darker, more urgent, tragic.
And for all the necessary exposition, it works; Dacre knows how to keep things sharp and tight, and Huxley’s vision still carries the same scorching unease, the same powerful demand for “the right to be unhappy”, to love and yearn and dream and fail .

box office 01604 624811 to 26 sept
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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September 8, 2015 · 11:20 pm

HERO’S WELCOME Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough

79 NOT OUT –  AYCKBOURN, AT IT AGAIN 
Suns decline, new stars rise. This is Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s 79th play – not among his best, but when did genius ever run level? But it is also, under the author’s direction, the moment of a really lovely professional debut for Terenia Edwards, the youngest cast member and an innocently luminous presence. She plays “Madrababacascabuna”, the young wife of indeterminate nationality brought home by the bemedalled Murray (Richard Stacey). He is fresh out of khaki in some equally indeterminate war zone, having braved snipers and rescued children from a burning hospital. Returning to a civic welcome in his Yorkshire hometown after 17 years, he dreams of reopening the derelict family hotel (his Dad drank most of it near the end).

But his reception is not universally warm. Even grumpier and more vile to his wife than usual is the posh, lecherous Brad, Murray’s old schoolfriend and rival (a nice villainous turn by Stephen Billington, looking uncannily like a young Simon Williams) . Frozen-faced with rage is the Mayor Alice, who he left pregnant at the altar when he fled. Now, as Council chief and property-developer, she wants only to pull down the hotel for apartments and high-end retail. There are, of course, two versions of what actually happened between Alice, Brad and Murray all those years ago.
So it’s a play about lies, and bitter memory, and smalltown jockeying for advantage, and the pitfalls of marrying-up or marrying-down, and the idea of a hero. And the ingredients don’t really meld together as well as they should. Plenty of nice Ayckbournian middle-class awkwardnesses, like the moment when joshing about the tricky ring-road makes Alice snap that “hours in committee” were devoted to getting it right; and there’s a touching performance by Emma Manton as Brad’s wife, brightly reconciled (until the crisis) to a contemptuous and imprisoning marriage in a semi-stately home. (“A prison where you can at least decorate your own cell”).

Most of the comedy – tinged with a ruefully dark explanation – comes rom the glorious Russell Dixon as Derek, the cheery downmarket mayoral consort, the husband Alice settled for; he infests the whole house with a vast train-set (we see the kitchen bit, and hear the rest hooting and rattling offstage from lounge to bedroom). Derek is an innocent who means well and lets cats out of bags; for Brad he is the necessary loser, just as Murray is the unwelcome winner (they shoot clays together, and yes, Sir Alan obeys the first rule of theatre – that if you have a gun lying around in Act 1, it had better go off in Act 3.)
But the greatest pleasure is Terenia Edwards as “Baba”, at first barely speaking English, but growing in vocabulary and confidence to become the strongest and most decent of them all: “goodness writes white” they say, and actors often dislike attempting it; but she makes the most of the innocent’s perception (“Murray, why they all hate you?”) and of the eccentric appositeness of her vocabulary acquisition (“Me-na-cing… o-mi-nous…pre-da-tory” when with Brad, but then “Endure. Con-flict. Hosti-lities. Action!”).
There are more problems than is comfortable. I don’t quite believe in a sudden woman-to-woman rapprochement between Alice and Baba; nor am I sure why Alice collapses, or of what illness. The ending is – for two protagonists at least – a gentle and soft landing, though offstage lies death, arrest, and a deeply unwelcome refinement of the train-set. Still, I was never bored.
Box office 01723 370541 to 3 october
rating : three
rating three    3 Meece Rating

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September 5, 2015 · 6:14 pm

JEEVES AND WOOSTER IN PERFECT NONSENSE on tour!

Touring Mouse wide LOAD UP THE TWO-SEATER, JEEVES, WE’RE ON TOUR

It always seems unfair when particular delights, best-comedy Olivier winners like this, are reserved for the West End, even if they do run a whole year and do bargain ticket offers. On the other hand a touring cast can find itself unfairly considered – well, a bit second-rate, after starry names took turns up West. But the Goodale brothers’ fabulous treatment of P.G.Wodehouse, in which Bertie attempts to put on a play about the eventful cow-creamer weekend at Totleigh, more than survives its transfer to the open road . From Crewe to Colchester,and Aylesbury to Inverness you have a treat in store.
The play itself is gorgeous – my London review here gives the general idea – http://tinyurl.com/oxse654 – but in some ways, tweaked a bit and performed with a ferocious brio which endures all the way to a jitterbugging curtain-class and whoops from the audience, this felt even jollier. The friend I took actually got pains from laughing too much.

Having talked to the new cast – Joseph Chance as Jeeves, Matthew Carter as Wooster and co-author Robert Goodale as Seppings – being just up the road I sneaked in to the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds on its second night out. A bit unfairly, as reviewers aren’t yet invited, but I can report that it is a riot. Sean Foley’s original direction is now taken over by David Goodale – brother of Robert and co-creator of the play – and Alice Power’s set and costumes are even more gloriously, vaudevillishly ingenious and silly than before. Joseph Chance, new to the company, is sternly impassive as Jeeves but hurls himself alarmingly (sometimes simultaneously) into roles as diverse as Gussie, Stiffy Byng, Madeline, and Sir Watkyn Bassett, and Matthew Carter is the most gormlessly endearing of Berties.

But I have to say that the greatest glee of the night comes from the hurtling performance Robert Goodale himself, as Seppings the decrepit butler of Aunt Dahlia’s household, roped in by Jeeves to fill in the other parts. He plays his employer, the pleasingly gung-ho and intermittently violent Aunt Dahlia, plus Constable Oates and the 9ft tall Roderick Spode (on a dangerously rolling rig with Dahlia’s skirt showing underneath ). And also takes on a number of props and special effects, including a loudly applauded turn as a level crossing on Bertie’s painstakingly staged drive to Totleigh.

They’re having a riot, these chaps, and so were we. And yes, the surprise bicycle, savage terrier and rubber duck bath scene are still there. Gruntled? You bet.

ON TOUR http://www.jeevesandwoosterplay.com/2015-tour-part-1/

RATING   four 4 Meece Rating

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September 2, 2015 · 10:56 pm

FLARE PATH Richmond Theatre and touring

In 1941 young Terence Rattigan was creatively blocked, gloomy after an early success then a relative failure. He joined the wartime RAF as a tail-gunner in a Wellington bomber, and in a crippled plane, on a dangerous landing, snatched a torn draft from his notebook. The play, fresh from his own experience of comradeship, duty and fear touched audiences deeply: one fellow-airman said there was “shock, that he had seen so deeply into us”. Their world after all was new in the history of wartime: aircrews in rural England would stroll the lanes by day and meet their wives and girlfriends – in pubs like the one where the play is set – and that night fly missions over Germany amid flak and flames. Soldiers in the field can retreat into a supportive military world: these boys, often still in their teens, lived half their lives in an idyllic England, knowing they might lose it forever in a few hours time.

 

 

 
The play fell out of use for decades, in the postwar queasiness about the civilian cost of bombings over Hitler’s Germany. But Trevor Nunn’s West End revival in the Rattigan centenary reminded us what a terrific play it is: perfectly constructed, emotionally intense, suspenseful, a model of courteous clarity in its vignette of a single night with one set of aircrew and civilians. That clarity is important, and old-fashioned in its skill: my companion, not having grown up like me with air-minded brothers, knew nothing of RAF routines and bantering culture, but understood it all. It is good that this Original Theatre Company production is going to tour, and bring back that unforgotten interlude of duty, debt, skill and stoicism.
Justin Audibert directs what is in the main a strong cast, notably Alastair Whatley as the puppyish, larky pilot Teddy Graham, morale-boosting joker of the base: his emotional collapse in the dawn is truthful, sharp and shocking. His glamorous wife Pat – on the verge of running off with a more glamorous old flame from the movie business – is played also with particular fine judgement by Olivia Hallinan, conveying with proper Rattiganesque pain the conflict between her romantic passion and the gentler, maternal and dutiful feelings that Teddy awakes in her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile the night and morning of the older, more battered, angrier Polish airman and his ditzy, decent barmaid wife Doris (Siobhan O’Kelly, caricaturish at first but getting far, far better as it goes on) is moving. Those who know the play will find, once again , the letter scene and redemptive final twist just as they should be. Though the Pole, I think, is not given quite all Rattigan’s unsparing lines about his desire to flatten all Germans.

 

 

 

 

But the play’s the thing, a memory and a message from a real past, and this company do it decent credit in taking it on the road again. It has rom-com sweetness, but the lethal reality of the times sharpens it: Rattigan took care to debunk romanticism. As the Wing-Commander “Gloria” Swanson says “I hate that patriotic bilge in the newspapers, but we do owe these boys…”. Seventy years on, we still do, and it is good to see an honest rendering like this.

 

 
box office 0844 871 7651 to Saturday touring     nationwide to November

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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September 1, 2015 · 11:52 pm

PEOPLE PLACES AND THINGS NT Dorfman, SE1

PRIORY PEOPLE…

Acting is a useful metaphor (one man in his life plays many parts, etc), and in this portrait of addiction, therapy and recovery author Duncan Macmillan squarely – and a bit riskily – makes his central character, an alcoholic and drug addict, an actress whose problem includes not being sure who she really is. We first see her skidding off-piste as Nina in a production of The Seagull. Ushered incoherent off the stage, in Bunny Christie’s uncompromising white-tiled tunnel of a transverse set she finds herself at the reception desk of a rehab institution, shouting “Cunt!” down the phone at her mother.
In arrogant exchanges with a doctor (Barbara Marten) Emma says that she just wants a quick fix, a “tune-up” and a certificate that she no longer presents a risk to employers. She vents petulant, shuddering boozed-up benzodiazepine rage when told that it will take weeks if not months, and that she will have to join group therapy and follow an AA “twelve-step” programme, accepting both responsibility and weakness, calling on “a higher power”, . and making amends.
She derides the idea of higher power, spouting jumbled defiance of the therapist she considers her intellectual inferior, citing Derrida and Foucault and generally being vile. Her room rises spookily from the floor: director Jeremy Herrin in Headlong tradition pulls no punches in visually and aurally involving us in maelstrom of hallucination and withdrawal. But our heroine won’t co-operate with group therapy, and the risk of making her a self-absorbed actress – rather than someone from an unglamorous life, who also might get addicted – lies in the possibility that away from the earnest Dorfman audience, her thespian posing and showy scraps of Streetcar and Fukuyama might drain all sympathy.

It nearly did even for me, and I revere actors and understand the reality of addiction. Denise Gough gives a storming and courageous performance, a draining and career-making turn; but Macmillan’s unflinching evocation of a person chemically hollowed out into a deluded, self-obsessed, lying, treacherous, greedy ball of rage is so strong that you hover between pity and revulsion. Still wincing from compassion-fatigue after Stef Smith’s “Swallow’- where the self-harming heroine blames her behaviour on everything from 9/11 to Auschwitz – I lost empathy when this Emma cited global miseries and distant war zones yowling “Self-medication is the only way to survive in a world that is broken”. Even though she claims her brother’s death as excuse, it later transpires that she was so well away even before it that she didn’t get to the funeral.
On the other hand, Emma’seloquence is such that once or twice you switch sides and wonder whether the author’s target is actually the pious , “boredom and shame and fucking orange squash” culture of the rehab industry (it’s never explained who pays, by the way). Marten, doubling as the doctor and group leader, has exactly the kind of fuzzy grey hairdo which makes normal people fear therapists; and the sharply played ensemble group, once launched into antiphonal fragments of glum back-story, hover between pitiable and plain depressing.

But take heart. The second act, in which after a fresh crisis Emma capitulates, is far more engaging. And there is a harsh, truthful and rather brilliant twist at the end when we are reminded that the slightly cultish role-playing and warm mutual support of group meetings is not necessarily a realistic preparation for confronting the family your addiction spent years destroying. Overcoming addiction is indeed something to celebrate and praise: but not everyone has to join in straight away.
box office 0207 452 3000 to 4 Nov

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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August 31, 2015 · 9:54 pm

MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS Theatre Royal, Bath

GETTING ‘EM OFF FOR VICTORY
Never in the field of TR Bath’s excellent endeavours has so much flesh been displayed with such nerve to so many. Some were, in the interval queue for the Ladies, a bit gobsmacked. “Didn’t expect them to go all the way, dear!”. But it was happy surprise. This is a newborn musical incarnation of the true story made famous in the film with Judi Dench: how a doughty widow bought the Windmill Theatre to put on “Revuedeville” , with the legendary Vivian Van Damme as her manager, and decided to improve its failing fortunes by persuading the showgirls to get naked. She used her formidable respectability to persuade the Lord Chamberlain that it was going to be art not stripping, because once naked the girls wouldn’t move, but represent classical paintings under filmy light (“subtle lighting and a conscientious hairdresser” on the pubes).
So there had to be nudity. The first, longer and more frivolous act, taking us from the mid-30s to the war years, offers plenty, including a few male backstage backsides when the girls taunt manager and staff to go first. That first act ends with a particularly courageous and surprisingly moving moment as Emma Williams as Maureen, tea-girl turned star, breaks the rule and steps forward starkers as the bombs fall to finish the defiant anti-Hitler number “He’s got another think coming” after the male singer falters.
It is the warmest and most engaging of shows, the book deftly managed by director Terry Johnson to take in the comedy,the bleakness and the camaraderie as a leg-show turned into a kind of mission. Sharp dialogue helps dilute any tendency to the saccharine: when van Damm says “We must fortify London in a way that sandbags cannot” Mrs Henderson snaps “Mr Churchill will be so glad you’re on his side”. The lyrics are by Don Black, always a safe pair of rhymes (the moment Mrs H. sings to her gloomy Jewish partner that she is “Au fait with Oy Vay” this connoisseur sits back contented.)
There is great fun in the vaudeville auditions, even greater in Graham Hoadly as the Lord Chamberlain, very Gilbert-and-Sullivan beneath the Victoria Memorial. And some of the songs (composed by George Fenton and Simon Chamberlain) are properly notable: plaintive or roistering but always neat, sharp and pushing the emotional line of the piece forward as they should. Mrs Henderson herself is the peerless Tracie Bennett: lately a memorable Judy Garland but here deploying a sharp, acid wit, convincingly aged as a patron saint for all women determined to get a bit of fun out of their latter years . “I can be anything I want – except young”. That’s an song which could last.
She is beautifully counterpointed by Ian Bartholomew as Van Damm, who has the difficult transition to make from cynical impresario to shock and depression at the invasion of his native Holland. But the balance of sweet-sour sentiment is always kept neatly: when up on the roof, firewatching in the Blitz, our heroine is told “You’ll catch your death” she replies “Oh, I think Death’s busy enough elsewhere”. Nice. This one’ll live on.

box office 01225 448844 / theatreroyal.org.uk to 5 September
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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August 28, 2015 · 8:15 am

OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD Olivier, SE1

DRAMA AS REDEMPTION 
From the first moments Nadia Fall’s production sets brutal, bullying humanity against a hot, strange, majestic Australian dawn. A lone aborigine watches, silent on a great dark bare plain , as the land heaves beneath him and becomes the deck of a prison-ship of half-starved, flogged inmates and resentful red-coated marines. Up comes the light, and we and the prisoners blink, half-afraid, as Peter McKintosh’s great red-and-gold diorama blazes at us.
I fell in love a few years ago with Timberlake Wertenbaker’s marvellous, passionate play (based on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, about a real event of 1788 when a colony of deported British prisoners put on a play – George Farquar’s arch comedy The Recruiting Officer, under the direction of a theatre-loving lieutenant of Marines. That was Alistair Whatley’s shorter, less richly cast version at the Rose, with some deft cast-doubling (ten players, 23 onstage here). Love all over again, last night. The only thing I missed – as Gary Wood’s nimble, mysterious Aborigine speaks only once – was the plaintive questioning line on his first seeing the ship and its brutalized inmates “Is it a dream that has lost its way?” .

Which question encapsulates the whole theme: that a highly evolved, theatrically cultured 18c society still deported thousands for trifling thefts, some pitifully old or young, often girls sold in childhood.
Wertenbaker makes the creation of the Farqhar comedy a symbol of the possibility that well-ordered language and imagination can free and transform the most brutalized. ‘Theatre is an expression of civilization” is a fancy of the idealistic governor: Cyril Nri, nicely combining thoughtful liberalism with an arms-length detachment from the chaotic directorial and personal struggles of the ambitious, lonely Lieut. Ralph (Jason Hughes). At one point, insisting on the casting of the terrifyingly farouche Liz (Jodie McNee, spikily ginger, her whole body always seething with anger) he says that they must “make an example” of her. “By hanging?” asks Ralph, since there has been a lot of this for thefts of food since they arrived. “No. By redemption” says Nri.

Cerys Matthews’ music, drawing on folk, blues and aboriginal instruments, frames the action with yearning emotional power; the nobility of the text strikes with additional power when set, tightly, against fragments of harsh back-story and the horrible brutalities and humiliations meted out by the contemptuous Major Ross (Peter Forbes). But there is saving comedy in the rehearsals and the ensemble of prisoners is tremendous: notably AshleyMcGuire a memorable stroppy Devon wench as Dabby, and Matthew Cottle beautifully judged as Wisehammer, branded a criminal for his Jewishness. Small beautiful moments reaffirm the redemptive theme: the savage Liz suddenly quieting when the Lieutenant apologizes for interrupting her; the huge angry Arscott (Jonathan Dryden Taylor) clinging to his part because of the liberation it brings “I’m not myself, I don’t hate, I’m Kite and I’m in Shrewsbury”.

Prison arts, prison theatre, are forever under attack even today by panicking Home Secretaries. The timelessness of this play’s insistence on the value of “refined literate language,well balanced lines expressing sentiments they are not used to” is striking. From the pioneering days of the London Shakespeare Workout in Brixton and Pentonville to Inside Out and Clean Break today, the truth and the need for that go on.
box office 020 7452 3000 to 17 Oct
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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August 21, 2015 · 10:13 am

FOR SERVICES RENDERED Minerva, Chichester

THE BARBED SHADOW OF AN OLD WAR

I’m late on the curve with this one – but it runs into September and for me, In n these WW1 anniversary years, fascinatedly collecting plays which reflect – better than any prosier or more historical media – the sense and effects of that long tragedy. Last year’s crop I wrote about here for the Telegraph – an account which may remind some regular theatregoers of how good it’s been . Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/11314343/Theatre-can-make-the-dead-walk-before-you.html .

 

 

 

 

 
It is the 1930’s plays, as well as earlier ones, which make unsparing points about the hard backwash of even a victorious war; and few are more devastating than Somerset Maugham’s portrait of a family – fourteen years after the armistice – apparently back to pre-war life in a tennis-party world, but scarred both literally and socially. The Ardsleys – Simon Chandler as a prim businessman and Stella Gonet as his wife – have four children. Sydney (Joseph Kloska) is a blinded naval offcer with a DSO and nothing to live for. Of his sisters , Eva lost her man int the war and devotes herself to her blind brother, Lois is still young and has little chance – as was the case for many women – of ever finding a husband or lover. Ethel rashly married a handsome officer who, back in civilian life , reverts to being a boorish, alcoholic tenant-farmer (“The king made me a gentleman but I don’t always want to be, I like a laugh”). Visiting them is the afflluent, twice-married boulevardier Wilfred (Anthony Calf, very suave) who has his eye on seducing Lois; and most poignantly, going quietly bankrupt is Nick Fletcher as Collie, for whom twenty heroic and bemedalled years in the Navy were a poor preparation for business life. “I may have to get a job driving a motorbus” he half-jokes: this a man who commanded a destroyer.

 

 

 

 

 
Fatheaded stupidities, selfish and desperately selfless behaviour, wilful blindness, heroic stiff-upper lips, suppressed passions and bitterness (chiefly from Sydney, whose blind presence is a constant reminder of reality) create a hum of unease and tension. To modern sensibilities, some problems seem crazy: why can’t the girls get jobs, why shouldn’t a woman help a man out financially, why should Eva sacrifice herself for a brother who is so rude to her, and indeed why can’t he play some part at least in the father’s business rather than stay at home all day being told he is useless? But you buy into it, as the the sense of period is strongly evoked and maintained in Howard Davies’ production (the Minerva’s intimate wraparound shape it really helps, we’re there; and William Dudley’s clever, bitter design has a rural backdrop beyond the window with haycocks and the shadow of old barbed wire).

 

 

 

 

 
And in these days of complaints about few good roles for women, note that Maugham has (admittedly in a cast of 11) five absolutely cracking female parts. Justine Mitchell’s Eva is superb- notably in the scene where she begs the over-honourable Collie to accept her help and her love , wrenching herself from convention to heroically humiliating frankness. Gonet’s Charlotte, watchful, maternal,resigned, deals brilliantly with the matriarch’s extraordinary response to a shattering revelation and then a scandalous one; Jo Herbert’s resigned Ethel and Yolanda Kettle’s bright, seductive, scared Lois are perfect; and Matilda Ziegler’s Gwen, aggrieved wife of wolfish Wilfred, gets her storming moment in the second act.

 

 

 

 

 

 
So at last, a shivering snort of laughter meets black irony as the blinkered father says “It’s very nice to be surrounded by one’s family”, impervious to the fact that – this need not be a spoiler – one is blind, one has gone embarrassingly mad, another is about to trigger a major scandal, one is dying, one alcoholic, and another mired in quiet desperation. “We have our health” he fatuously says. It’s a cruel characterization of middle-class obtuseness, even by Maugham’s standards : but Chandler does it beautifully.
box office 01243 781312 to 5 Sept
rating four      4 Meece Rating

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August 17, 2015 · 5:48 pm

WHEN BLAIR HAD BUSH AND BUNGA Pleasance One, Edinburgh

IN WHICH I AM EASILY AMUSED BY QUITE OLD JOKES. AND CLIVE MANTLE.

We are all urged by manically cheerful Bajan waitresses to sing “`We’re all going on a Summer Holiday” before the show. It’s winter 2001, Tony Blair’s in his second-term pre-Iraq heaven enjoying a freebie by Sir Cliff Richard’s guitar-shaped Barbados pool with Cherie, Carole, Carole’s boyfriend, and a sour-faced Alistair Campbell. Cherie has farmed out the kids to Sandy Lane courtesy of Michael Winner, and invited her fellow-Catholic rich mate Silvio Berlusconi. Tony and Alistair want them out of the way because of a top secret guest: POTUS himself, George W.Bush, whose helicopter may darken the sky any minute…
Had to see this: if you want the complete theatrecat-friendly sampler-set of Edfringe theatre you need at least one big starry one, a couple of tiny hopeful ones nobody much else will bother with, some edgy Traverse stuff and one like this: politically scurrilous, real-name, sue-me-if-you-dare stuff. Its a first play by the TV director Patrick Ryecart, and though woefully dated provides some good laughs. Despising the popinjay Blair will never entirely date, will it?

And Christopher Staines is a perfect Blair: the light-tenor voice , the hairline , the theatrical gestures and intermittent flicks of panic behind the eyes. He has borrowed Cliff’s guitar to sing ,rather badly, a number called Kosovo Dreams because Carole Caplin’s Aussie boyfriend (Douglas Hansell in tight budgie-smugglers) is encouraging him to write a musical about himself . His story would “fit like a bum in a bucket!”. Alistair is taking calls from Max Clifford about Robin Cook’s mistress (dated? archaeological!). Carole is blessing stones for some kumbaya-trocious tantric ritual with Cherie. Who is scoring free stuff at the Sandy Lane boutique.
Tony’s ghastly entourage of blingy shallow greed has been lampooned before, and I did despair for a while. But what heats it up into proper farce is a surreal nightmare involving Berlusconi and Bush – surrealism which, should the victims protest, be a defence: it was all a dream, m’lud, brought on by heatstroke and Red Stripe beer. For Silvio turns up in leopardprint trunks, beaming through facelift bandages, and Cherie makes him ring Pope Ratzinger (“I appointed heem! Is Nazi but long ago!”). She gets Tony converted – in German, by speakerphone – while Silvio blows kisses and Cherie crows “Now we can get the kids into the Oratory!”.

There’s an apparent corpse under a towel, and Silvio doing Benny-Hill chases upstage, but the real star is Clive Mantle as George W.Bush. It’s a wonderful , fully realized comic turn , making the most of Ryecart’s best bits of writing – an airy dismissiveness of Yo-Blair, malapropisms, bland ignorances, diversions about Mitt Romney and the Morons and some apple-pie-picket-fence people in Wisconsin who told him for sure that that Saddam zapped the twin towers as revenge on his Daddy, who used to play cro-kay with Maggie , remember, she knocked his balls over the place, where was I? Who is this Al Kida, never heard of him, we’ll just go in, blam blam, who cares about this Coffee Kebab guy and the United Nothin’…”
His looming dominance over an ever weedier Blair reaches the point that when Bush says “Tony, you gotta deal with my dick” while fumbling (for his phone) in his shorts, the PM very nearly agrees to…but phew, he means Dick Cheney.  Crude but enjoyable. So I forgave it its datedness. And the local Bajans – especially David Webber as a Poirot-loving cop – are very good fun.
http://www.edfringe.com to 31 August
rating three     3 Meece Rating

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August 16, 2015 · 5:37 pm

THE MAN CALLED MONKHOUSE Assembly Hall, Edinburgh

THE MAN WITH THE TAN 
When Simon Cartwright came onstage, what with the bright orange tan and smooth hair and that nervy little mannerism of smiling at the punchline, I briefly panicked. Because this show , written by Alex Lowe, is directed by Bob Golding who himself performed as Eric Morecambe, I must have been half-consciously expecting to feel warm affection. I clean forgot that I never took to Bob Monkhouse. Of whom Cartwright is, voice and all, a horribly believable doppelganger.

But that’s the point of this unnervingly interesting 50-minute show, drawn from the comedian’s autobiography and using a few clips of the real man in interviews. It catches the period, especially the 80’s: the shiny-floor TV shows and smiley quips, long before Merton and Dee and the deadpan satire and surrealism of modern standup. Monkhouse always felt like a throwback, even then, though he had triumphed in the 60s at the Palladium, the Man with a Thousand Gags. But even then he was awkward: a southern middle class bloke lacking the warm working-class solidarity of Morecambe or Ken Dodd. Cartwright catches the nervy determination, the scribbling down of every idea and the crippling insecurity born both of his chilly relationship with his mother (she wore black to his wedding) and of cruel tabloid exposure. Migraines, stomach, the pallid vilitigo which meant the sunlamp hours and fake-tan, and always a fear of losing it. And of losing touch with mankind in general – “Ive learnt to pretend to feel…”
Lowe sets this session in the comedian’s study at one moment in 1975: two of his precious joke-books have been stolen and the police are on the phone, and he is preparing a funeral speech for his old collaborator Denis Goodwin. He roams about, talks to himself, thinks of his friend (quoting C.S.Lewis on friendship from The Four Loves, indeed.). He breaks into prepared routines, remembers his prolific affairs, his disabled son and the calumnies in the Sunday Mirror which made him cry. He mentions assorted showbiz figures including Larry Adler, who threatened to kill him. (“He said to me, I should read his book on how to tell Jewish jokes. I said, you should read mine in how to stick a harmonica up your arse”. And he does a quick turn as Dabber Davis the veteran agent, which thrilled me since I too have briefly worked for him. He shudders at an old Lynn Barbour interview, which like all thin-skinned comedians he has kept a copy of . It begins “You’ve got to like him, he wants you too so much…it’s like having margarine rubbed in your hair”.
The dramatic turn comes with a shocking moment when the police sergeant on the phone has not turned out to be an adoring, unquestioning fan. The cop’s casual remark about preferring a different cheesy TV show hurls Monkhouse into a surreal torment as a TV gameshow screen seems to flash up “words associated with Bob Monkhouse” and he sees SMARMY – OLEAGINOUS – INFIDELITY – INSINCERITY. He collapses, knowing that many of us thought exactly that. Which is where I came in….Oh dear.
So yes, there are the Monkhouse jokes. But we get inside the man who grafted to write them, too. Fair enough.
http://www.edfringe.com to 31 August

rating four   4 Meece Rating

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August 15, 2015 · 1:06 pm

THE FRIDA KAHLO OF PENGE WEST C Nova, Edinburgh

A VICIOUS AND GLEEFUL PLEASURE…
There is a particular kind of modern feminist who fixates on the Mexican painter and free-loving socialist and her endless self-portraits: two other plays in this very Fringe have superscriptions from Kahlo sayings, like “I was born a painter and born a bitch”. But Zoe, a quiet, cerebral, apologetic publishing assistant scared of life, explains Kahlo as “Interesting, if you like that kind of thing and don’t mind being a bit annoyed…like being hit with a sledgehammer of schoolgirl solipsism” . Her cuckoo flatmate, Ruth, is an unsuccessful actress, gripped by the idea of stuffing the patriarchy by doing a one-woman show. Once she disentangles Frida Kahlo in her mind from Frida from Abba, she sees her story – lame, boho genius, fiery lover – as a dream subject. “She shagged that Lenny Trotsky! When she wasn’t painting she was shagging, and when she wasn’t shagging she was limping! Take away the ‘ting’ and you have “pain!”. AND she was a cripple, and hornier than a dwarf on a stag night!”

In this achingly funny, now well-honed and successful comedy by Chris Larner, Kahlophilia is only one of the targets skewered, in sharp lines and wonderful body-language, by the two players, Olivia Scott-Taylor as the eternal mouse in awkward blouse and pleated skirt, and Cecily Nash as the appalling Ruth: toxically self-confident with chaps (“red lipstick, show him your tits, mean are eaaaaasy!”) and raging endlessly at the weaknesses of theatre. Oh, we do love in-jokes, and these are good ones. She turns people away from the RSC Box Office where she works disadvising them from a 500-year-old Croatian epic revival described in the Indy as visceral. “£20 seats you can’t see, £ 70 you see too much and pay later in booze and therapy…Angry people walking up and down shouting. And where are the WOMEN?”.
It’s wicked, contemptuous, striking with rattlesnake accuracy at ambition and pretension in theatre (“I will do the bus crash in dance”). But is also painfully accurate about the way one young woman persecutes another. And there’s a rom-com plot running under it, predictable but enjoyable.
They even give us some of the finished show – “My womb is a paintbrush” , including a remarkable turn as Trotsky by Scott-Taylor. It world-premieres (one always says that, even if it’s going to be a derriere after two nights) in a pub theatre so new that the compere announces no talking at the bar downstairs in the interval, because the regulars are watching the Chelsea match. Given the play’s wild success at the Rosemary Branch in London, there’s a nice ingratitude about that.
So it’s a gleeful thing, and should sell out, and launch Nash and Scott-Taylor as rising stars on their Edinburgh debut. As to the writing, in sharpness of script it knocks spots of most flatmate (and flattened)  TV comedies of recent years.

http://www.edfringe.com to 30 August

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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August 14, 2015 · 1:18 pm

THE CHRISTIANS Traverse, Edinburgh

A TAINTED HALLELUJAH

Hail a bracingly, triumphantly, intelligently unfashionable play, and Christopher Haydon of the Gate Theatre for directing and premiering it here. Lucas Hnath’s subject is religion: true believers, theologically agonized, submitting personal happiness and relationships to a deeper philosophical argument. Not in the 17th century, not in militant jihadism, but right now in modern America.

We are in one of those immense Pentecostalist churches, where a choir of 25 in purple cassocks sways to a boppy gospel opener, happy-faced, urging us to catch our soul on fire. It’s a community, a certainty, a shared life. Having grown from a storefront assembly to a vast thousands-strong church, they have just paid off the building debt.But Pastor Paul (William Gaminara) is a charismatic, commanding figure with a new message. Agonized by a colleague’s bland assurance that everyone who doesn’t accept Jesus goes to hell (even, notably, a heroic Muslim lad who gave his life to save his sister) he asked God for guidance and was told that there is no Hell. No Satan: it is the wickedness in humanity which must be challenged, with love and a promise of salvation. He says that the judgmental assumptions of his church only draws them apart from the love of their sinful neighbours.
To a sophisticate in religion, no problem: the concept of the virtuous pagan, and of damnation as a willed, determined self-separation from God, is common enough (read C.S.Lewis’ The Great Divorce). But to this simple-hearted faithful congregation it is dynamite, just as even thinner theological arguments ripped apart Europe five centuries ago. The associate Pastor (Stefan Adegbola) challenges the heresy and walks out; others follow. The rebel’s “You are not my brother” shatters like a falling icicle on the cheerful bright-lit podium where the protagonists debate on microphones. Out of church, an Elder casts doubt on the pastor’s wisdom in allowing the schism, not least for financial reasons; but he stands firm, rejecting the church’s old culture of “contempt” for non-members.
Is he a saint in his impracticality? Or is he something else? A congregant rises to ‘testify’ with a painfully personal speech. She is Lucy Ellinson, who astonished in the Gate’s GROUNDED: once again this remarkable actor demonstrates her ability to stand still and yet emit electrical pulses of emotion and meaning so violent that the world tilts around her. Sister Jenny is just a poor single mother, living on food stamps but still paying her tithes, needing her church community but agonized with sincerity over this frightening new concept that “even Hitler”, even a child murderer, might be saved from hell.

She has another accusation too, still more damning. A confrontation with his wife shakes the pastor even more, with her flung accusation that “you’re saying that absolute tolerance involves intolerance of the intolerant‘. Breezy modern atheists may scratch their heads at religious absurdity. I have no idea where the author himself stands. But the sincerity and intelligence of the production opens a window into a world too often mocked, too little understood.

http://www.edfringe.com to 30 August
rating four     4 Meece Rating

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August 13, 2015 · 8:22 am

OF MICE AND MEN Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh

It breaks your heart, an epic tragedy in miniature: two men, a couple of sacks and a crate, but their plight and their dreams rise before us in pathetic grandeur. Drilling into the heart of the famous John Steinbeck novella, Nigel Miles-Thomas’ simple staging fully evokes its bleak compassion and harsh unsparing humanity. The story of the itinerant farmworkers, clever thwarted George and big, dumb Lennie, is conjured up, a fleck of individual love and pain in the Dustbowl America in the ‘30s. It’s as strong and rough-edged as a Woodie Guthrie song.
Miles-Thomas himself, who adapts and directs, plays the huge, looming,battered Lennie: an amiable Frankenstein-monster of a man, with the intellect of a small child and the strength of a giant. Alongside him Michael Roy Andrew is a small, neat brisk figure: bright impatient, George, who has looked after him and travelled alongside him after his aunt Clara dies, comforting and pacifying the over and over again like a patient parent with the dream of one day them getting their own farm. Every time he is made to re-tell it, the picture rises more solid, more beautiful. The promise is that Lennie can help out and “tend the rabbits”, because of his childlike fixation with petting anything soft and furry.
But not understanding his own huge strength, he kills every mouse he handles, and his tendency to panic has had them thrown out of one farm for clutching a woman’s soft dress and not knowing how to let go. “God, you’re a lot o’trouble!” says the exasperated George, but resignedly. “You cain’t get rid of him cos he ain’t mean”. Lennie, dependent and willing, just fears the punishment of not being allowed to tend the rabbits on the imaginary future farm.
If you know the book you know what happens, and how the great soft dangerous man’s sweet proclivity will bring them to disaster. But what grips in this spare, perfectly judged production is the honest evocation of the characters and their relationship. Alarmed, appalled, we watch Lennie’s half-sly, half-confused grin and moments of panic, his clutching of a newborn puppy whose fate you wincingly apprehend long before he can (“why’d ya go get killed? I never bounced you hard, you ain’t so little as mice, I didn’t know you get killed so easy”.) Michael Roy Andrew’s George, carer and almost parent, perfectly evokes the daily fear and awareness of Lennie’s innocent dangerousness – “It ain’t bad people that raises hell, it’s dumb ones”. Other characters, the few needed, are sparingly evoked: a fight, a death, narrated in brief physicality. Nothing gets in the way of our contemplation of the central relationship, and the immensity of small tragedies. It shakes you, as it should

http://www.edfringe.com    to 31 August

rating  four4 Meece Rating

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August 12, 2015 · 9:28 am

THE TITANIC ORCHESTRA Pleasance One, Edinburgh

DARK COMEDY FROM A FRACTURED EUROPE. BUT WHERE’S THE BEAR?
Only in Edinburgh’s August are you likely to find an immense, patient queue snaking round the block for half an hour, unable to get to the bar, in order to see a Bulgarian playwright channelling Beckett, Pinter and Kafka in intense, wrist-slitting Mittel-European gloom about the human condition. Even if it does star John Hannah as a time-travelling, undead Harry Houdini, have the catnip word “Titanic” in the title, and be improbably acclaimed as “a madcap comedy of illusion”.
But Hristo Boytchev is a much renowned Bulgarian playwright and political satirist, and attention must be paid to this UK premiere. So what we have here is a group of tramps at a derelict railway station, living on rubbish that trains throw out as they go past, and dreaming of escape along the rails which link and envelop the world from which they are social exiles. Meto (Jonathan Rhodes) tries to organize them, as a theatrical director yelling “I can’t work in these conditions!”. Louko (Stuart Crowther) is solidly sullen, Finnish Heidi Niemi, the only woman, is depressed . Doko (played by Ivan Barnev from Sofia) is a heartfelt if rather overdone imbecile, mourning for his one love, a bear called Katya . She died, probably as the others unkindly say because he sold the last of her food for vodka. They all booze a lot, whenever someone throws a half-finished bottle from the train.
But what is this? Out of a crate emerges the dapper tail-coated figure of John Hannah, who is no sooner murdered for his yellow patent shoes than he returns to life and starts creating illusions, because he is Harry Houdini. Who, being Hungarian-American, presumably returns to this dour 21c Europe to sort it out. He magics up the illusion that Doko’s bear is alive, selling tickets and driving the train (no, we don’t see the bear, dammit). He conjures up more beer. and gets drunk. He explains that all life is an illusion because men need “bread and circuses, all the world’s a stage’.

In the one moment of the 80-odd minutes which is really emotionally engaging, the group sing the European anthem from Beethoven’s 9th and pick up old buckets and rubbish which become violins, to play through disaster like the orchestra of the title. To hammer the point home and flatten the nailhead, Houdini declares that “The whole world is the Titanic and we’re along for the ride. The only escape is through illusion…the seventh dimension of the world is inside you..dream of a world beyond that we carry within us”. When he does magic up a train, it all gets grimmer until Doko adds the further moral that we are each alone, the whole world being just “the dream of a sleepwalker”.
Hannah gives it all he’s got, which is a lot; Russell Bolam directs with some wit, Anthony Lamble and Giles Thomas set it physically with excellent sound and light illusions of passing trains. Mark Bell, one of our best LeCoq-trained physical experts, gets them all falling over a lot. But it feels derivative of too many similar strands, its absurdism tires, and it hammers home its messages too sententiously. If you love such plays, it’s for you. the gloomy Niemi says it all: “Harry, you be weird. We all like to get pissed, but you taking it too far”.
http://www.edfringe.com to 30 Aug

rating  three   3 Meece Rating

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August 12, 2015 · 8:10 am

THE MAIDS The Space at Surgeon’s Hall, Edinburgh

GENET GENIUS? Hmmmm

From time to time, the seeker for cultural enlightenment must deliberately book in to the works of some author he or she can’t see the point of. For some its Beckett, for others Sarah Kane, for many the excitement faded (forty years ago actually) for the knottier French existentialists.  For me it’s Jean Genet , ragamuffin darling of the 1960s intellectual left and subversive prophet of the “beauty of evil”. So, in a spirit of hopeful generosity, I staggered off the Caledonian Sleeper for my first Fringe outing to see what All Bare theatre made of this, described once as “a poisoned pearl”, and revived a few years ago in New York with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, no less. It’s that sort of play: the kind actors challenge themselves with for intellectual credibility.
Genet took inspiration from a 1940s case where two maidservants brutally murdered and mutilated their employers. His black-stockinged maids – who clearly don’t have much housework to get on with – spend 75 gruelling minutes in role-play, switching names (one is Claire and one is Solange) and they each take random turns at impersonating the employer, who also briefly appears.
In eloquently contemptuous speeches – Martin Crimp translates -they play and taunt, one forcing the other to crouch spitting and polishing her patent shoes and then despising her very spittle. Sometimes Claire, or possibly Solange, gets overwrought about the rise and fall of the mistresses “ivory” breasts. Often they boast of being capable of murder. Bizarre statements of stoned poetic import are made –  that the image in the mirror has a ‘stench’ , that objects accuse them. Neither seems fond of the other , or sounds much like a real woman, and both hate and revere the mistress. She despises them. Its socialist-capitaIst resentment of the servant relationship: none of your Downton Abbey stuff.

Crowdfunded, played with dedication by the three young cast, it is a waste: one of those determinedly academic exercises which never quite gets within striking distance of any truth or pleasure.   Even as a curiosity of theatre history it is pretty dated: its appeal (Think Blanchett and Huppert) is faile social indignation and candy for the male gaze – French maids outfits, breasts, say no more . Si no, I still don’t get the point. But I did try. Honest.
to 22 aug. http://www.edfringe.com.
Rating: two  2 meece rating

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August 11, 2015 · 12:29 pm

SWALLOW Traverse, Edinburgh

ENJOY BEING A GIRL? UM, NOT REALLY…
Stef Smith’s new play – after her acclaimed debut with ROADKILL – is  skilfully written, elegantly performed, and curiously annoying.  It is a portmanteau compendium of young urban 21c female angst and self-harm .   There are three mainly soliloquizing, often antiphonal, occasionally interacting characters and a lighted panel which is sometimes a door. Director Orla O’Loughlin correctly describes it as “fragmentary, poetic, tonally diverse” and Smith herself cheerfully says that all of us wrestle with the “the chaos of deep dark hard things, behave badly, drink too much, sleep too little, punch walls”.

The risk she takes (and sometimes does temporarily evade) is that watching strangers have 85-minute nervous breakdowns, however beautifully scripted, can pall. The most determinedly loopy of the three, and mercifully the funniest, is Emily Wachter as Anna.   She has spent over a year shut in her top flat in her pants, starving herself to the point of death, making bird-feeders out of tampons and granola. She is now destroying mirrors , clothing and furniture (“God bless hammers!”) before moving on to rip up the floorboards. She actually is quite entertaining, her demented gung-ho busyness about her flat not unlike a dark version of the character Miranda Hart plays.   Or perhaps Bridget Jones gone tonto.

Wachter is  as usual, superb. But as it darkens into a somewhat tiresome intensity, Smith gives Anna one long self-absorbed riff about her guilt for everything from 9/11 to Auschwitz, whereon my compassion-fatigue went nuclear, provoking a reprehensible urge to slap the spoilt tilde kid for grandstanding on real misery. The author does at least feed in a line to indicate that someone is paying the rent for her solipsistic suicidal lifestyle, though the landlord is going to put in a stiff bill one day for those floorboards.

Downstairs – we learn – is where Rebecca lives (Anita Vettesse). Her husband has left her, provoking her to cut her own face open with broken glass, shout “Fuck off!” at the doctors treating it, and smash the telly (more hammer work, though the set is starkly bare and we must imagine it) . She gets repeatedly drunk, though in a passing moment of realism we learn that she does have a job, as “a paralegal”, which may explain why conveyancing always takes so long these days.
The third, most sympathetic and fully rounded character, is Samantha (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) who works in a care home and wants to change sex and live as Sam. Her/his gender dysphoria is the most convincing of the three problems; a disguised brief fling with Rebecca is properly affecting. So, in another interaction, is Rebecca’s attempt to find out through the letterbox what is wrong with her invisible neighbour . That it has taken her over a year to wonder about the crashing and smashing is, I suppose, part of the urban-alienation theme.

Anyway, Smith does allow us a redemptive ending,  thanks to the kind of visitation which only happens in this kind of play:   a possibly imaginary injured pelican who can fly through closed windows. Oh, and it snows, and something else sentimental happens in the ceiling too.

2 meece rating
http://www.edfringe.com to 30th August
rating two

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August 10, 2015 · 6:15 pm

ADA Bedlam, Edinburgh

THE COMPUTER COUNTESS 

It’s a topical, Tim-Hunt-tastic moment to celebrate one of the forgotten women of science, and the Edinburgh University Theatre companyhave hit on a cracking good story. Ada Lovelace (her married name, she was a Countess) was Lord Byron’s daughter, his only legitimate child, by the clever and mathematically gifted Anne Milbanke. Who, understandably, left him, what with the sibling-incest and the philandering. She raised Ada to be a femme serieuse: the child’s daring imagination may have come from the absent Dad, and she fought her mother over the idea of “poetical science”, but her hard gift for mathematics led her to collaborate with Charles Babbage, first father of computing. He was working on his huge clattering cog and wheel “Engine” (nicely evoked here in huge noisy projections) and dreamed of a still bigger Analytical Engine .

Ada brought her skill to his work, but also that poetical imagination about its possibilities: she is credited with creating the first algorithm, and with pushing the idea that in the future, computers might be able to work with things beyond mere numerical calculation.   He called her “ a fairy who cast a magical spell over the most abstract of sciences’. She said “My intellect will keep me alive!”. What Lady Lovelace would make of the age of Instagram yoga selfies and click-porn doesn’t bear thinking of.

But it was a hell of a life, cut short at 36, and there is gold in her writings, from childhood dreams of flight to a fiery correspondence with Babbage (“I cannot stand another person to meddle in my sentences!” – yep Ada, I know the feeling.)  He and she apparently started a horserading syndicate late on, victims of the common delusion that there is a System, and lost money at it. In this production’s rareish moments of clarity – either biographical or computer science lecturettes – it becomes fascinating. The six- strong student group, however, unfortunately opt for a sour, pretentiously ‘devised’, black-clad, mimetic- symbolic interpertation, full of showy lifts and fallings to the ground. It is a theatrical idiom which only works at the very top of its game. Not here, alas. The show claims itself to take the form of an algorithm, but …no. . So while I am immensely grateful to have learned of the lady, and have looked her up like mad ever since, the show barely gets off the starting block.  But what a cerebrally adventurous story, what a feminist pioneer yarn! I was going to say, bring on a Frayn or Stoppard to do a less drama-schooly version; but hey, the old boys have done their time. Give the story to James Graham. Or Lucy Prebble. Use more of the contemporary letters. Shine a light on Ada the Algorithm lady, not on outworn theories of theatrical form. http://www.edfringe.com to 30 aug rating two    2 meece rating

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August 10, 2015 · 9:41 am

AN OAK TREE Traverse, Edinburgh

GRIEF, ILLUSION, PLAY…
You can’t label this extraordinary two-hander by Tim Crouch as “experimental” theatre, even though it uses a different – wholly unprepared – second actor every time, involves secret audio and audible muttere briefings and a handing over of scripts by the author-performer to his colleague; even though it drops in and out of levels of reality including moments when Crouch asks solicitously whether the second actor is OK, and that it plays recklessly with time, probability, meaning, the concept of hypnosis, and the philosophical idea that all of us perform our lives perilously unscripted.
But it’s not experimental any more, given that Crouch has been doing it for ten years with multiple awards. Whatever it proved, the piece continues to prove it to seat-edge audiences far wider than the cognoscenti who rejoice in novelty and metatheatre. So stand by: this is the moment to bring along a friend whose wariness of tricksy modern theatre usually makes him or her swerve to the bar for an hour, pleading headaches.
This imagined friend will be converted, though shaken. Crouch has humour, sincerity, belief and gentle humanity, and his topic is grief. He plays (when he is not being the writer-director leading the other actor) a scuzzy showbiz hypnotist who, three months before, was driving a car in the dusk and killed a girl of twelve on her way to a music lesson. He is stuck in trauma, blocked, hesitant, losing his grip on his act and his life. The other actor (in the show I saw, Aoife Duffin, young and slight and female) plays the middle-aged father of that child, himself stuck in grief, who improbably volunteers from a pub audience to go onstage.
And that’s it. The rest is their interaction, both during the show before the hypnotist realizes who the father is, and after it when the supposed pub audience have left, shocked. Beyond that, description will not help or enlighten you: just say it is one of the strongest, strangest, truest evocations of grief I have ever seen. The grief that traps, that deludes, that leads you in circles, fuels desperate magical thinking and can estrange one mourning parent from the other and rip families apart. There is guilt, too: a guilt transferred helplessly between the driver and the father, united in the narrowing trap of a fact neither can get past. It is the grief, brilliantly written, which can become a kind of synaesthesia so that words from a policeman fall “like concrete blocks in black” and lodge under your ribs, and in which your lost child seems to lurk in every space and crack in every object in the house and the world.
It is shocking, grippingly moving in moments but momentarily funny: it is held together by the sincerity of Crouch and the acceptance ,and unease, of the other actor. When, near the shining end, the creator drops out of character and turns conversationally to his colleague he asks “Don’t you think it’s a bit contrived?” . We laugh. It is that cathartic moment of theatre when, having been shaken into a community of pain, we breathe and realize that it was all in play.
Take that sceptical friend, do. But probably not if his or her own grief is recent. It’s strong stuff.

http://www.edfringe.com to 16 August

rating five      5 Meece Rating

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August 9, 2015 · 6:01 pm

JURASSIC PARK Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh

DINOSAUR-TING OUT FAMILY LIFE..

A school backpack suddenly yawns like the jaws if a Tyrannosaurus Rex, devouring an actor’s head. A toy helicopter overflies three herding brontosauri. Human velociraptors hop and hiss: a sudden umbrella is the menacing crest of a Spinosaur. And as an unseen patient lies heaving laboured breaths, a ukelele and xylophone lament gently murmurs “Bye bye ceratops, dont cry cry ceratops, i will try, triceratops to get byee…” And at that moment, a show of whimsy and masterly, LeCoq-trained mimetic physical daftness slides into something with real heart.  Eccentric, oblique, but  real.
Superbolt Theatre – Maria Askew, Frode Gjerlow and Simon Maeder – play a Dorset family of three – Dad Terry, geeky son Noah and splendidly stroppy teenage Jade. They are preparing, in a community centre in Lyme Regis on the Jurassic coast, to show us an old VHS of the first Spielberg film in memory of their late Mum, who was a palaeontologist, and after separating from Terry has died. This leaves him an incompetent fulltime custodial Dad who buys time with takeout curries and the toy helicopter.  The teenagers flash back at times to their childhood and the confusion of that early separation, but – someone having lost the video cassette – Noah draws the others in to re-enacting highlights of  the film, right down to the trembling glass of water and the electric fence.
It is adept –  the sight of Maeder playing both parts as a velociraptor chasing himself is remarkable – and amiable in tone, as when the three storm the auditorium trying, confusedly, to explain chaos theory to individual audience members in a babbling hurry. And, of course, it has good physical jokes as when the men appear as DNA strings, or one becomes Richard Attenborough in seconds, courtesy of a glob of shaving foam.
But its chief appeal is in simple heart: a slanting portrait of a family in the confusion of grief, holding itself together with a takeaway curry and the consoling memory of a film they used to watch together, raptly obsessive. That strikes a chord, in a sweet and funny hour.
http://www.edfringe.com to 30 Aug
rating three     3 Meece Rating

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August 8, 2015 · 10:49 pm

TINA C: HERSTORY Underbelly Potterow Topside , Edinburgh

THE RHINESTONE COWGIRL RIDES AGAIN
I first saw this cabaret-theatre character here in 2002, drawn by curiosity because the theme was “Tina C’s Twin Towers Tribute”. Under a year on, it could have been the car-crash acme of Fringe tastelessness. I stayed to admire.  The occasional metamorphosis of writer-performer Christopher Green into a glitzy Nashville diva is up there with Dame Edna for calculated, needle-sharp humour and party-time rapport with an audience. Born on the gay-cabaret scene and honed in many a pub, marquee, inflatable cow and festival, it even flowers intermittently on Radio 4 – no mean feat for cross-dressed satire in a rhinestone miniskirt, and proof that Tina doesn’t depend only on her (not inconsiderable) physical glamour .

It’s sharp, that’s the thing. The swipe at American showbiz grandstanding after 9/11 was if not exactly harmless, pretty well deserved.   The idea was that this steely, self obsessed C& W star woke from anaesthetic after cosmetic surgery to find everyone emotional, distressingly learning that for once, everything wasn’t about her.  So while every other country star was lucratively emoting patriotism and revenge, she was helpless in hospital with a face like a baboon’s bum.
Over a decade since I have kept up with Tina’s shows: the lifestyle guru insulting the audience with elegant patronage, the claims of entertaining troops in Eye-rack, her explanation of the banking crisis, her Presidential candidacy. Like Edna’s the legend grew: “First I was a girl, then a woman, then a brand, and now – (chokes with emotion) I’m an ideology”. In this show, disguised as a book launch event with songs (“Does Margaret Atwood do that? Does Jane Austen?”) the story told, with several new songs and lines and some beloved old ones. The spoof country lyrics grow ever more delicately filthy ” It aint easy being easy” and ” No dick is as hard as my life” – as he skewers the glitzy feminism, blingy lifestyle, early years poverty tales bulging into marble-and-onyx consumerism , and the soupy religiosity (“Make it pretty for Jesus!). And, of course, the country pain,: Tina explains that the deal between beautiful famous people and us oiks is that you must pretend to suffer.

To parody so well you have to be half in love with the genre and its people, and Green is: the music itself (he plays guitar well and keyboards superbly) disgracefully carries you away. Tina’s “I am America, my body is this land” is both rude and strangely inspiring, and there’s an awful stir in her Iraq war anthem (“Shock and Awe! Sexier than internnational law! I am America, hear me roar”) . Even in the inaptly arid lecture-room environment to which Underbelly have daftly moved her, the whole audience succumbed to Tina’s iron control, and not only did a brief line-dance but sang along to her hyper-Republican campaign song Tick My Box (she makes Sarah Palin sound mild).
Green has other strings of work – Ida Barr, a coming book on stage hypnosis, theatre events – but it seems that Tina is not yet being pushed over the Reichenbach Falls with her cowgirl silk fringes flying behind her. She may not be an ideology, but she’s still an event. Hell Yeah!
http://www.edfringe.com to 17 August

rating:  four 4 Meece Rating

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August 8, 2015 · 1:42 pm

IMPOSSIBLE Pleasance QueenDome, Edinburgh

HOLMES AND HOKUM, FRIENDSHIP AND GRIEF
Good to start the Fringe-blitz with a winner . (Not that it was the first one that hit me as I lurched off the Caledonian Sleeper, but more of that later). I would rather rejoice in a fabulous return to form by writers Tom Salinsky and Robert Khan, whose COALITION I loved, but whose KINGMAKER last year, a Boris-fable, didn’t quite ring the bell.
This one abandons modern politics to dive back into the 1920s, with such thematic sharpness, entertaining brio and artfully strong production values – all neatly contained within an hour – that it gets my first Edinburgh-Five. Hurrah. From the moment when we all settled down to a backdrop of archive film – magic-tricks, muttonchop whiskers, old Sherlock Holmes clips of Basil Rathbone – the mood was set; in the opening scene a séance promised a pleasing ghostly Edinburgh creepiness, which is then neatly subverted by the actual story, which is not without seriousness.

It draws on the real friendship of the American Harry Houdini, great magician and escapologist, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Houdini, realized by Alan Cox with gorgeous energetic suavity, is a showman to his fingertips, seen doing one of his own fake seances with his wife Bess (Milly Thomas), talking of “beyond the morbid veil” etc. But Houdini knew it was hokum, and that there was nothing supernatural in his magic tricks and escapes either: only graft, practice and skill. But he hugely admired Conan Doyle for the rationality of his Sherlock stories; and when the great man comes backstage – Phill Jupitus gloriously auld-Scottish and orotundly admiring – they become friends.

But Doyle, who has lost a son, believes in spiritualism, frequents mediums including his own wife (Deborah Frances-White) , and lectures about it . He also of course was taken in by the “Cottingley Fairies”, also dramatized here a couple of years back.
Houdini is horrified, stops doing his fake seances onstage, and artfully exposes one of his friend’s pet mediums , beginning a mission to expose others as mere conjurers like himself. But Doyle is muttonheadedly convinced of communication with the netherworld, even believing that Houdini himself has a secret supernatural gift and dematerializes in his water-tank performance. The friendship starts to crumble. A deeper question slants through, relevant to eccentrically religious people and sceptics today: is it right, asks Bess Houdini, to try and disabuse someone of a comforting belief? Should grief outrank rationality? In a painful scene Doyle sets up a seance for Houdini to talk to his late mother, and the showman angrily debunks it; opening the other question of the morality of faking conversations with people’s dead relatives at all.

It’s neat, sharp, brief, entertaining and full of well imagined lines, especially as Houdini gets aggravated by Doyle’s stubbornness (“And half of his Holmes stories he cribbed from Edgar Allan Poe!”). A shocking (real) event changes the mood, no spoilers for those who haven’t read about Houdini’s life. It opens the way for Khan and Salinsky to create a really spooky shock ending. A temptation which, praise them to the skies, they utterly reject. They end on a very, very good joke. I’d love to see this play grow longer, and live on.

to 31 August   http://www.edfringe.com

rating  five  5 Meece Rating

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August 7, 2015 · 3:16 pm

LETTER TO LARRY Jermyn Street Theatre , SW1

A LOST LADY RETURNS, SAD AND BEGUILING

Theatre loves to eat its own history, and fair enough: if you want intensity, volatile emotion, hope and heartbreak and impossible yet irresistible characters, there are few richer diets. Especially looking back at the age of star-cursed star marriages and a pre-permissive intensity of scandal. Only lately Southwark gave us ORSON’S SHADOW, with Adrian Lukis as Laurence Olivier, taking up with his third-wife-to-be Joan Plowright during an ill-fated collaboration with Orson Welles. In that play Vivien Leigh (Gina Bellman) was mentally disintegrating gradually, but in the background to the clash of Titans.

Now that divorce moment of 1960 is examined from another angle, and this time it is the full Vivien: the remarkable Susie Lindeman sits, roams, clambers, collapses, emotes and flirts, alone onstage for 75 minutes in Donald MacDonald’s play fresh from Paris. It chimes with a BFI season and exhibition at the V&A, marking fifty years since her final performances; and in its own right does much to remind us that there was more to poor Vivien than being Scarlett O’Hara and a discarded Lady Olivier.

Lindeman is physically perfect in the role: birdlike, fragile, a wayward waif, eagerly intense in profile. Her voice is deceptively wispy until it hardens into sudden determination, her studied actressy flirtatiousness suddenly falling away as the rages and despairs of her bipolar mental instability take hold. Her plaint that the ‘condition’ has condemned her to a life of apologizing for behaviour she can barely remember is unbearably touching. “Suddenly I seem to be standing outside myself and I can’t get back in”.
The title indicates that the monologue, in direct speech or recreated flashbacks over twenty years, is addressed to her lost husband, during the divorce and his remarriage to Plowright. At first , and in flashes thereafter, it is the kind of imaginary conversation anyone jilted in love can recognize: appealing, pleading, insulting, claiming. But as she remembers, she carries us back into their key moments: courtship (when both were married to other people), her convent childhood, a beauty’s steely conviction that she could always get what she wanted – “but then of course, you have to keep it..”. She remembers the misery of her ECT treatments, her miscarriages, the affair with Peter Finch, how Olivier’s look of love turned over years to intolerable pity. She flashes out the suddenly steely realization after Gone with the Wind that ‘I was better on film than you!”.
Every gesture and line is immaculate, thought-through, elegant and telling, and it becomes mesmerizing. Cal McCrystal directs – away from his normal comedy beat, but taking pains to keep it moving and surprising, not least with some brilliantly simple but effective video projections by Mic Gruchy : sea-waves, clouds, Notley Abbey’s ancient windows , and Sardi’s where the nervous Olivier agreed to meet her, his new woman at his side to guard him. It transports you to a lost time, and a lost individual’s rare, sad, starry career.
Box office 0207 287 2875 to 22 august
rating four     4 Meece Rating

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