May 13, 2015 · 10:10 am

WOLF’S CHILD Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk

A WILD AND WOLFISH WALK IN THE WOODS

Last time I went a Norfolk and Norwich Festival outdoor event, I had to spend the night suspended in a nylon flower-petal up a tree and get hugged by tree-kissing Belgians called “Starlight” and “Hummus”. The time before, it was Artichoke’s elegant Alice in Wonderland adventure-dinner-concert. So you never know. This time, they have recruited WildWorks, famous for the Port Talbot “Passion” with Michael Sheen, and set it in the deep woodland surrounding the 17c Felbrigg Hall.

So here we are, stumbling through chilly darkening woods, mocked by ragged giant crows for being human (“Queer little walkie-talkie-two-leggies! Driving dead machines! Craaaahh!). After gathering us round a smouldering fire and a ritual of “summoning the bones” they hustle us to and fro, 250 of us in groups led by crows with ragged umbrellas called Sorrow, Funeral, Birth, Mirth, Bone, etc. The dark harsh birds, often from up trees as we progress, need to tell us a story: a mythic tale of Rowan (superbly played by Kyla Goodey) raised in an authoritarian orphanage. Shamed, she runs away in the woods and gives birth among wolves. We follow her into the darkness, coming to scene by scene as the dusk falls, until like her we change sides and learn to look at human beings through the wary, judging eyes of beasts.

It’s a beguiling idea, and Bill Mitchell’s team (professionals and community together) approach it with a fierce theatrical dedication which – in the end – pays off to memorable effect. Vocal harmonies by Victoria Abbott accompany us: a Crow choir reappears at each scene with primitive raw sound, while the orphan “Maids”, neatly Edwardian in white dresses and corseted back-braces, ceaselessly chant the rules of constricting civilization under the authoritarian, white-haired “Mother” (given chill authority by Sue Hill).

There is some puppetry, notably wolf-skeletons pawing and leaping; there are flaming torches underneath the trees, but it is the human-animal players and tensions which create real silences, so you hear the breath of those around you and even the gits put away their smartphones. Even the fact that the ushering Crows (my boss was Mirth) repeatedly cry “Keep to the path!” for obvious elf ’n safety reasons gets incorporated into the sense of folk-tale danger.

Some scenes are unforgettable: a tiny golden child born among grey-clad wolves (the physicality is excellent) romps with them like family dogs until cruelly “rescued”. At this point we are called “back to civilization!” by the crows, to watch the infant grow up. I cynically thought “Yep, good call, Mr Mitchell, get the punters out of the stumbly tree-root darkness onto the nice manicured National Trust grass before the light goes”. Shame on me! WildWorks are not timorous about us. Minutes later it’s “quick, quick, into the woods!” and a ten minute scuttle up hill and down in the darkness, following the escaping child towards intensely dramatic final tableaux in a cathedral of tall trees lit by torchlight (and a single star above, that night).

By which point none of us has the slightest idea where we are or how far from the Hall, and we are entirely on the side of the wolves. The last vision, as they mournfully howl their loss, is of the child walking down a long, long dim avenue alone, empowered by her dual nature, free.

By then I was with it all the way. It took time – maybe the first of the two hours – but was well worth it. And the weather forecast is reasonably good. But wear something sensible. Wolves and crows always do.
box office 0)1603 766400 to 23 May. Details: nnfestival.org.uk
rating four  4 Meece Rating

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May 12, 2015 · 10:14 pm

THE FATHER Tricycle, NW6

THE DARKNESS OF DEMENTIA 

Devastating. No other word for it. Without sentimentality, in Christopher Hampton’s powerfully simple translation, the French playwright Florian Zeller leads us into the unknowable, all-too threatening realm of dementia. In a mere 90 minutes James Macdonald’s production shatters your peace and challenges your humanity as violently as a good Lear. For we are not only observers but partakers of mental chaos: the retired engineer André is the victim without pretension or Pinteresque brutalities Zeller simply demonstrates how it might be to live from minute to minute unsure. Not being certain of your closest family, of where you are, when it is, what is happening, why the furniture seems not to be there, why people are treating you strangely…

It happens in one room – so we think, or he does, though it isn’t – and jerks in short scenes separated by dead blackouts and a dazzling flashing frame (Miriam Buether’s design, simple but disorienting). Bright virtuoso piano at first mocks with its precision the confusion of André’s mind: but speeds, stops, jangles, mingles with unidentifable sounds in the blackouts.
Kenneth Cranham, in a performance whose humanity, power and control should in justice win many awards, is André: Claire Skinner his daughter Anne. We see her husband Pierre, Laura the carer, another woman, another man; but they are not always the same person. Even to us. The “who are you? Why are you here?” is at first generally clear : we are in a naturalistic world where Claire (deploying a fragile, thwarted, worried competence) confronts her father’s absentmindeness, short-temper and confused paranoia about his carer. Cranham creates an André who had, sometimes still has, wit and charm and bluff sense: able to turn the tables with a reproving “Why are you talking to me as if I was retarded?” or to explain to the carer “My daughter has a tendency to repeat herself , it’s an age thing”.

So we laugh. But when he stands baffled in pyjamas, searches obsessively for his watch or is confronted – as are we – by a different face claiming to be his daughter, unease grows. Worse, an unidentified man (Jim Sturgeon, truly upsetting in his confident shaven roughness) sometimes replaces the son-in-law and taunts him repeatedly “How much longer do you intend to hang around getting on everyone’s tits? Ruining your daughter’s life?”. He is slapped. We do not know whether this really happens or is in his head, because by now we are in there too, and hardly breathing.

As every familiar piece of furniture vanishes and the room becomes a care home, André is a child again, not knowing his name, but afraid, wanting to be fetched home, comforted by a strange nurse. “I’m losing all my leaves…branches..in the wind”. It is one of those performances you believe too much, too painfully, so that even the curtain-call doesn’t help you regain control. But it is brilliant, and necessary,. Honour to the Tricycle for bringing it up from the Theatre Royal Bath.

box office 020 7328 1000 to 13 june
rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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May 11, 2015 · 10:38 pm

HAY FEVER Duke of York’s Theatre, SW1

THE BLISS OF JUDITH BLISS:  FELICITY INDEED

Whenever I see this beloved play again I wish it was my first time. It should be seen in youth – when the dread of embarrassing parents getting emotional is at its height ; and again in middle-age, to empathize with Judith Bliss’ envy of the fresher generation.

For Hay Fever breathes a spirit of mischievous mockery, invincible youthful cynicism. This is the 1924 Noel Coward knocking off a deathless play in three days, playing with the idea of his own ideal tribe – charming, theatrically showoff bohemians – tormenting and confusing staid weekend guests with deliberately created dramas. Young Sorel and Simon (Alice Orr-Ewing and Edward Franklin) have each invited older admirers – she a stiff diplomat Richard, he the fortyish“self-conscious vampire” Myra (Sara Stewart). Their grumpy novelist father David (Simon Shepherd) has invited a flapper to “study the type” (Celeste Dodwell panics beautifully). But at the centre of the action is Judith Bliss: a diva who should never have retired from the stage and needs to live through scenes from the iffy melodramas of her heyday. Her admirer is a pop-eyed callow youth (Edward Killingback) As each family member contributes to Judith’s game, the visitors are in turns ignored, embarrassed, seductively flattered, manipulated, compromised, and driven to flight.

Lindsay Posner’s production for Theatre Royal Bath is set in period (the Howard Davies one a few years ago up the road gave the family more modern bohemian style, a messy studio-barn-conversion). Here Peter McKintosh’s s set is traditional, which permits an especially magical moment for Felicity Kendal in the second act finale, draped backwards over the banister in stage agony. Her Judith Bliss is a delight, even sharper and funnier than last year in Bath. It has sometimes been played as a Junoesque tragedy-queen, but is even funner as Kendal’s superannuated, shingled flapper, a menace who y has been overacting for years and now hurls herself opportunistically into any role the moment offers – vamp, matchmaker, self-sacrificing old mother, betrayed wife, repentant adulteress. Yet all the while she never quite drops the beady eye and sharp asides of a practised control-freak.

Every move Kendal makes is perfect, a masterclass in subtly acting the part of someone acting hammily. There’s a mimsy flailing of flirtatious fists when she asks the lunk Sandy about his boxing, a downward glance at “dreams trodden in the dust” and a cry of “I am growing old, and I must face it” coupled with a reassuring glance in a hand-mirror. Her seduction of the poor diplomat (Michael Simkins) is quite perfect, as is his gradual dissolution from senatorial dignity to clumsy flirtation and utter horror at Kendal’s fake emotional overkill. His demeanour the next morning , as the four visitors flee, has all the ratlike scuttling dissolution of a Cabinet Minister caught in a strip-club.
Coward intended only entertainment; but frankly, if from time to time in life you do get trapped in someone else’s “featherbed of false emotions”, phrases from the play are useful . I have, personally, used Sorel’s irritable “You are being Beautiful and Sad!” and David’s “Don’t be statuesque!” . It’s good to have it back onstage again.

box office 0844 8717623/ http://www.atgtickets.com to ! Aug

rating four    4 Meece Rating

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May 11, 2015 · 9:51 am

THE AUDIENCE Apollo, WC1

IN WHICH THE QUEEN REGENERATES AS KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS

A playwright’s work is never done. Not if politics are involved: Peter Morgan relates that once it became clear that David Cameron was back, he slept two hours and got up to rewrite the PM’s scene with HM Queen for that night. Seems that they were so surprised that Samantha had been “packing vans” already. Excellent.
I went on election night itself, to see how after a couple of years it felt to reprise Morgan’s imagining of the weekly audiences: twelve Prime Ministers over sixty years. I had loved it in its Helen Mirren incarnation: despite the humour and the respect there is little caricature or satire, nor too sentimental a royalism. I wrote “funny, truthful, good-hearted, spiky, full of surprises”.

That still holds. Cast changes are effective: David Calder as Churchill gives just the right elderly bombast in his exchanges with the young Elizabeth, and Sylvestra Le Touzel is a more convincing Thatcher, mastering the eye-flash and tripping gait. Nicholas Woodeson as Wilson returns, in Morgan’s best scenes as he and the Queen find joshing common ground . Stephen Daldry’s direction is fluid, filmic, making the most of the moments when Elizabeth talks briefly with her rebellious child self, warning her of a world of heavy reverence where “No one will ever call you by your name. Or look you in the eye”.
There are tweaks to the play: Tony Blair now makes a brief appearance, which helps to underline Morgan’s tart verbal paralleling of Eden’s Suez invasion and Blair’s Iraq venture (that “is it legal?” echoing down the decades). I am less enamoured of the zhoozhing-up of ceremonial with the Coronation moment, and two huge Life Guards stamping up and down during the interval, but the Americans nearby adored it, which I suspect is the reason. For me it clashed with the intimacy of the play’s tone.

And the new Queen? For Mirren has regenerated, Dr-Who style, as Kristin Scott Thomas. And yes, it feels different. Mirren has a warmer wit; her evocation of the Queen’s wry awareness of her powerless pomp, dutiful personality and deep religious faith convinced entirely. Scott Thomas is harder-edged, chillier. Morgan seems to have removed from the script the moment I found most touching in the Mirren version, when she is asked about the Duke’s health and suddenly almost chokes, speaking about the heart device“keeping him alive”. That’s gone; but it wouldn’t have worked as well with Scott Thomas. She can do huge crazy emotions (as in Electra) but not that delicate modest suggestion of suppressed depths. She is, on the other hand, perfect at delivering a sudden waspish “Are you wearing make-up?” to a Cameron fresh from the TV studio. And if you haven’t seen it before, do go. The play’s the thing.

Box Office 0844 482 9671 to 25 July                 theaudienceplay.com
rating four    4 Meece Rating

Box Office 0844 482 9671 to 25 July                 theaudienceplay.com
rating four

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May 7, 2015 · 9:46 am

MATCHBOX THEATRE Hampstead, NW3

STRIKE A LIGHT! FIZZLING OR FAILING, FRAYN IS FUN

This two-hour entertainment consists of squibs and sketches, five-finger exercises and amused imaginings by Michael Frayn. Who never really meant to make a book of them, he says, let alone stage them. Do not expect COPENHAGEN or DEMOCRACY; or even NOISES OFF or DONKEY”S YEARS. But it comes from the master’s hand, all the same: and from Frayn’s mental matchbox even brief flares, flashes and fizzles light up the world for a moment.
A sense of happy frivolity pervades the theatre, not least because Hamish McColl and designer Polly Sullivan reconfigure it as a giant, circular matchbox, a blank arena with a neat rising trap in the middle; the show opens with a spoofy request to “keep your mobile phones on, your call is important to us” (Hampstead audiences are brainy enough to know it is a joke) and an earnestly pretentious disquisition on the nature of in-the-round theatre.

Indeed the best of the 24 sketches , with a sharp six-strong cast, involve knowing theatrical mockery. There’s a marvellous TV news moment outside the National Theatre as the anchor questions the breathlessly hopeful reporter about what’s going on inside. “They’re still in there, and still talking…” he says hopefully, predicting “a joint communiqué” from Hamlet and the King and downplaying a reported fracas involving Queen Gertrude and a stabbing (denied). We return from the real interval to find a pompous memorial service led by the theatre’s “spiritual consultant” , head cocked patronizingly, telling us to Give Thanks for the late Interval, celebrate rather than mourn it, and hear tributes from tearful or grateful voices popping up across the auditorium remembering how great and life-changing dear Interval was. Another meta-theatre moment has a brutal interrogator and cowed subject all too aware that they are following a hackneyed formula. And best of all, there’s a hushed David-Attenborough commentary on those mysterious, rarely seen creatures of darkness, the stagehands, scuttling busily around, fearing the return of the light as the more aggressive actors reclaim their territory.

So everyone loved the in-jokes, and why not? Other sketches follow a Fraynian theme of miscommunication and marital exasperation. A grey stone couple on an Arundel tomb are woken by the youth disco-evensong in the crypt and do some 600-year bickering; a pair in a restaurant eavesdrop and are infuriated by the stupidity of fellow-diners; a woman enrages the council by wittering on the phone (great visual curly-flex gag), Lovers attempt a Brief Encounter farewell at an airport, interrupted by increasingly contemptuous flight announcements.
A few squibs misfire; sometimes Frayn’s gentleness feels a touch too soft for our harsh satirical age, and the final sketch about theatre funding feels a bit contrived. But there are enough bright flashes of genius to make it very well worth the ticket. I am still grinning about some of them.

Box office 020 7722 9301  www.hampsteadtheatre.com to 6 June
rating three     3 Meece Rating

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May 6, 2015 · 10:34 pm

THE VOTE Donmar, WC1

AND NOW THE REAL ELECTION…AT LAST…
Election day, Tony Benn used to say, is the only time we are all equal. One citizen, one secret vote. And despite the short-sighted, corrupting Blair extension of postal and proxy votes to the merely lazy or self-important, most votes are still cast with a stubby pencil in a schoolroom or community hall. Here, for fourteen hours, (they get a special working-time-directive dispensation) polling clerks from the Council supervise a meticulous regime of privacy, integrity and, supposedly, dignity.
Before our eyes in drift the voters: daffy or drunk, frivolous or earnest, first-time kids, proud new-fledged citizens from the ends of the earth, the senile and the pompous, the committed or vague. Some you can hardly trust to hold a pencil, others are brisk and sure; lovers giggle, spouses snar, but they’re all equal. James Graham, author of THIS HOUSE and COALITION, set out to express the ordinary moment of voting, in which this preposterous, overblown lying campaign must end. Comic without cynicism, it is unexpectedly touching.

This Donmar undertaking is, as its director Josie Rourke explains at previews, “a weird television-theatre experiment thing”. Its official opening will actually be its last night – election night, Thursday 7th, when it goes out live on More4 TV. The audience arrives half an hour early to queue in the fake polling station and vote for fictional characters: good to see Ian McKellen, Nicholas Hytner, John Carey , Yevgeny Levedev and a host of notables meekly obeying. It runs precisely from 8.30 to 10pm, shadowing that weary last 90 minutes before polling stations close, boxes are whisked off to the constituency count and exit-polls announced. It has an improbable cast of 44, nearly a quarter being bankable stars (Judi Dench and Finty Williams, Mark Gatiss , Catherine Tate , Tim West ..!) It is set in a supposed London marginal, in a nicely evoked primary-school hall, with the council staff forced to sit on the vaulting-horse because nobody turned up to open it at eight as the law requires and unlock the chairs, so Kirsty the poll-clerk (Tate) took an axe to the door .) .

I won’t spoil it with detail – though the Russian lesbians with a selfie-stick and the shrieking teenagers shouting “Siri – who do I vote for?” are memorable, as are the pinstriped upper-middle bickerers, and Judi Dench’s cameo as a domineering mother of her (real!) daughter Finty Williams. Nor will I reveal the daft plotline which emerges concerning malpractice, Haribos, and increasing desperation. You really have to watch it. If only for the joy of seeing Mark Gatiss as a polling officer gradually overcome by events.

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But for all the jokes – and they are many – for me it breathed a kind of awe. From the first moment when big Llewella Gideon crashes to the ground and demands that Timothy West (another great cameo) turns her voting-slip upside down without looking at it, the principle of individual privacy is stressed. As, for all the disasters and pomposities, is the idea of dutiful civic respect for rules: there is a grassroots glory in their petty, old-fashioned carefulness. “It has to mean something!” says Gatiss desperately, as ten o’clock nears in mounting disorder. Farcical it may be, but Graham catches something of the immensity of democracy which must descend to small simple places and embrace the dim and grand alike; petty protocol guards fragile freedom, and stubby pencils may put an end to power.
By the way, for those who believe all theatre to be rife with bilious bias, note young Mr Graham’s subtlety. There’s a poignant moment as the no-hope Tory candidate – young, black, of Nigerian parentage – chokes up with emotion at the sight of the ballot paper “I’m actually – a bit – seeing my name there…my parents would…”. Clever, and honest.

Rating four . The Vote is broadcast live from The Donmar Warehouse on More4 at 8.25pm, Thursday 7 May or available on demand on All 4 from Friday 8 May http://www.channel4.com

4 Meece Rating

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May 5, 2015 · 10:48 pm

NOISES OFF Mercury, Colchester

LORD, WHAT FOOLS THESE MORTALS BE…

“Doors! Sardines! Getting them on, getting them off. Getting the doors open. And shut. That’s farce. That’s theatre. That’s life!” Ah, how bitterly true: how accurate a metaphor for life is the tale of a hapless theatre company, attempting the most technical of exercises in the company of fallible colleagues. Like John Morton’s 2012 and WIA on television, by showing us the detail of one human enterprise going wrong it illustrates all the errors and temperaments which beset human endeavours. And makes you howl with gleeful recognition; being removed just far enough from reality (it’s a play about a play and full of theatre jokes..) it allows us the cruellest of delights.
I hope Daniel Buckroyd’s Mercury production tours. Not just because it’s a good one but because the last national Noises Off tour (a recast version of Lindsay Posner’s starry Old Vic one) was four years ago, and there must be people who have never seen Michael Frayn’s masterpiece of farce: a reflection which grieves me greatly. At a moment when The Play That Goes Wrong (a humbler but worthy successor) has won an Olivier, it is grand to see it back.
For newcomers, a recap: the first act shows the final rehearsal of an awful farce called Nothing On (full, gloriously pretentious spoof programme provided); the two-tier set revolves (brilliantly here, do get back early from the interval to watch) so that the second act shows it from backstage. The play progresses out of view and the entrances and exits see rising fury and violence among the cast; the third act finds it on the last night of its tour, out front again, going terminally wrong. By which time we know the script, and the characters, all too well. Dotty, playing the comic sardine-loving charlady is getting on and has put her savings in the show; an unwise fling with the divinely dim leading man leads to furious rivalry with the morose, divorcing nervous wreck Freddie; Belinda mumsily tries to smooth things over, the bimbo Brooke keeps losing her contact lenses, and “Selsdon Mowbray” (great old theatre name), is an alcoholic wanderer. Nor does it help that the director, a frustrated Eng.Lit graduate reduced to touring farce, is sleeping with both Brooke and poor put-upon Poppy the stage manager.
I saw a late matinee preview, and they were already spot on, move for move, tumble for tumble (Louis Tamone does terrifying work on the stairs). Having seen it several times I was at first doubtful about the director – Hywel Simons playing it low-key, rather than theatrically shouty and camp as some do – but I warmed to him, and his downplaying makes identification with his frustration easier. Louise Jameson is quite wonderful as Dotty, and David Shelley gives Freddie a fine exasperating pathos. But they’re all good, and the timing bang-on, as it needs to be in this tricky farce. I wondered whether the joy would be as piercing as in the starry West End one. But actually, it was. And the whoops of glee – and surprise – around showed how well (unlike poor Selsdon) it has aged. It does what we need in this harsh election season, as required by the thwarted director’s cry “I didn’t come to the theatre to listen to problems. I want to be taken out of myself. And preferably not put back!”

box office 01206 573948 to 16 May
rating Four   4 Meece Rating

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April 29, 2015 · 11:07 pm

EVERYMAN Olivier, SE1

THIS VERY NIGHT SHALL THY SOUL BE REQUIRED OF THEE…

God is sweeping the big blank stage. We won’t know for a minute or two that Kate Duchene IS God, given she’s a weary grey-haired cleaner in a tabard. But in Carol Ann Duffy’s modern take on a medieval morality play, interpreted by Rufus Norris, that’s who God is: incarnate among us, char-ing for the orgiastic, coke-fuelled birthday bash of “Ev”: Chiwetel Ejiofor. Knowing all things (cleaners, like God, tend to) she predicts that she’ll be sweeping up condoms and worse by morning – “Don’t ask”.
At the party, crazedly choreographed by Javier de Frutos, we see that she’s right. Everyman is a high-living, bonus-fuelled party animal, surrounded by sycophantic friends bellowing “Happy fucking birthday!” (Duffy wins the palm as the sweariest poet-laureate yet). But, following tradition, Death comes for him. He falls off the balcony on his 40th, draped in police incident tape in a moment of staging which feels suspiciously designed to remind us of Norris’ London Road. Death, a drily funny Dermot Crowley, dons a white forensic suit and rubber gloves (no scythe in 2015) and warns Ev to render God an account of his life. So, as in the old plays, Everyman vainly seeks advocacy from his friends (“We’re well out of our comfort zone here, this is mental”), from the family he has neglected, including a gloriously grumpy Sharon D Clarke, and from the good deeds he never did.
Despite the stardom of Ejiofor and the always interesting Duffy as writer, it felt a risk for Norris to set out his stall as new Artistic Director with a 100-minute religious masque: given that the number of believers eager to take offence is now matched by equally offendable atheists. But with wit, panache, showmanship and the occasional earnestness of the verse offset with sly comic timing, he pulls off something both spectacular and serious. Hytner, remember, put Jerry Springer The Opera in his first season: more scatological, but with the same Judaeo-Christian theme of death and judgement. A nice symmetry.

And moments to remember. Ejiofor is its powerful core, swaggering, hungover, arrogant or terrified, learning humility before our eyes. Duchene, reappearing in his darkest hour as a fellow-tramp but still God, has a wisely underplayed strength. Tremendous projection expresses the global news and disasters which Ev has ignored; the ensemble in various guises moves kaleidoscopically and there is a wonderful mash-up score (William Lyons, with Paul Arditti’s sound) from disco to lament to the harsh choral beauty of The Lyke-Wake Dirge (“This ae nicht… fire and fleet and candle-licht, and Christ receive thy sawle!”).

That is sung by the ensemble startlingly disguised as 8ft-high walking rubbish tips; a huge wind-machine blows fake money and paper rubbish across the stalls as Ev laments in a plastic wasteland “I thought the world was mine to spend, a coin in space…”. Cue penance, apology, terror. But the final moments, when he learns to give thanks for the failing body and the world it shared, are strongest. Death’s rolling incident-tent (more police tape) sweeps aside his physical functions – personated by the ensemble, medieval style – leaving Ev alone. “I think I have a soul like this planet has a moon, my own soft light when there is only endless night. Let it go free of Time…In all humility, let it go free of me..”

Death is furious at this gentle resignation, and threatens the audience. “who’s next?” We laugh. Nervously. But not nervous for the new NT regime, not now. Offbeat but traditional, theatrical but heartfelt, it’s a triumphant night. There are £15 tickets, so get queueing.
box office 0207 452 3000

Sponsor, Travelex. In Cinemas 16 July via NT Live
Rating four    4 Meece Rating

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April 29, 2015 · 12:59 am

WAY UPSTREAM Chichester Festival Theatre

SHIP OF FOOLS GOES AGAINST THE FLOW…

This is the play which flooded the Lyttelton stage and the National Theatre electrics in 1982. Of all Alan Ayckbourn’s massive oeuvre it is one of the rarest : not surprising given they tech demands. . Nadia Fall’s involves turning the Chichester stage into a segment of river with 65,000 litres of water, deep enough for several cast members to fall or dive into, surrounded by real towering trees and vegetation . On it floats a tubby 21ft cabin-cruiser which can be fired up, moved, moored, wobble underfoot and jerk its passengers around. Credit to designer Ben Stones, to Tim Mitchell’s lighting – sunrises, blackouts and odd semi-strobe interludes – and Fergus O”Hare’s sound with a storm scene, chirping crickets and some weird, tense passages of score. And technical co-ordinator Sam Garner-Gibbons deserves a palm for sheer nerve.

But goodness, it’s an odd piece, as if Ayckbourn in mid-career set out to give us one play and finding himself tangled in a sudden anger abruptly bolted on a different one halfway. With considerable success in the first act he gives us thoughtful observational comedy mining his characteristic vision of marital disillusion, temperamental absurdity and benign moral puzzlement at what fools we mortals be. Keith – Peter Forbes – has persuaded his indecisive business partner Alistair (Jason Hughes) to share a hire boat upstream to Armageddon Bridge. His wife June, a marvellously brassy and discontented Sarah Parish, can’t stand him. The other wife Emma (Jill Halfpenny) is sweeter, but disappointed in Alistair’s floppy temperament.
Keith fancies himself as skipper, but is both incompetent and unable to take his mind off his ailing factory, summoning his secretary (Nicola Sloane) to the riverbank; a botched mooring sequence is so technically and comically perfect that it got a round of applause, as the hapless PA in a neat lemon-yellow business suit is dragged skidding on the muddy grass amid confused shrieks and wrong instructions. When Alistair runs the boat aground they are rescued by an alpha-male in ripped denim: Jason Durr as Vince, who Poldarkily gets his shirt off. June immediately cheers up no end, and Keith is manipulated into subservience.

So far, so sitcom. And we all loved it (well, Chichester knows about boats and their delusional effect on chaps). One colleague complains it is dated, because now they would have mobile phones rather than make a secretary gallop along the bank: how little he knows of rural Vodafone-deserts, it could still happen.

But it isn’t dating that’s its problem. The name Armageddon hints that the second half turns darker, stranger, odder. Vince’s controlling behaviour, which starts with a funny if Orwellian ploy of claiming new names for parts of the boat – gaffters, weevildecks, piggles – becomes a fascist reign of terror alleviated by sadistic drunken orgies and the unnecessary arrival of an equally manipulative sexpot, Fleur. The bullying becomes very Lord of the Flies, and starts to stretch credulity. When a fake river feels more real than the behaviour on it, theatre has a problem.

So the final development never took me with it beyond the (certainly glorious) moment when June does a drunken cabaretnumber in black suspenders. By the time we get to the marooning, near-drowning and potentially fatal fight, not to mention the point when two of them may possibly be in heaven, I had lost it. Even if it is, as some say, a political allegory of Britain turning to the right or a reference to the medieval Ship of Fools. But until the last quarter it was entertaining all the way, the cast superb whether wet or dry, and the staging remarkable.

box office 01243 781312 cft.org.uk to 16 May

rating three   3 Meece Rating

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April 27, 2015 · 10:35 pm

AMERICAN BUFFALO Wyndhams, WC2

MEN UP A DEAD END…
The marvellous junk-shop set by Paul Wills comes into its own most gratifyingly when Damian Lewis finally loses control and trashes it. For most of the play it simply evokes the rubbishy oppression of heavyset, patient Don Dubrow’s “Resale Shop”, up some mean street in 1975 where gambling men and smalltime crooks gather for half-baked plots and guarded man-banter. John Goodman, NYC stage and screen veteran, is Don: longsuffering, paternal, the most potentially sane of the three, doing up his saggy cardigan on the wrong buttons at moments of stress but finally, both literally and figuratively, getting it right.
Tom Sturridge is Bob, a protegé of vague function, a shaven-headed starveling teenager with a menacing naîveté and dangerous pathos, looking to Don as probably the nearest thing to a father, though resisting offers of breakfast. Last to arrive onstage, to a little frisson of here-comes-our-star, is Teach: Damian Lewis, back on the London stage after a decade . Not the Homeland Damian, and certainly not Henry VIII: lanky and manic here in a plum-coloured suit, with drooping ginger moustache and sideburns and a permanent state of twitchy offendedness (at first by the unseen Ruth and Gracie, who seem in some mumbled way to have disrespected him).

There’s an exiguous plot in which the elder two plan to steal back a rare coin – the American Buffalo – from a buyer who may have bought it too cheap; yet the real action, as usual in David Mamet’s furious dialogue, is beneath the surface. They plan and spar and disagree, and Teach vents indignantly bravura, wordily eloquent self-justifying rants like a grown-up version of Just William. The most profound of his sayings is probably “Do not fuck with me, I am not other people”. Or maybe “According to me is what it is when it is me who is speaking”. The most alarming moment in the play is not his brief violence with a sink-plunger, but a fearsome five minutes when he waves a gun around, and you’re far from certain he has the wit to put the safety-catch on.

There is the deliberately slight coin plot. But if you just watch them – and these are stellar performances – and tune to the subtext, what they are really saying translates variously as “Do you trust me? More than other guys? Are you my friend? Am I a man? Do you respect me? Will you let me down?” In an extraordinary moment Teach blusters “I am not your wife!”. It’s the least homoerotic of duets, though. Director Daniel Evans writes in the programme that the buffalo motif is important – these animals being aggressive, endangered and prone to leaving their mothers at a young age to roam around with other males. He suggests that the new wave of feminism weighs heavy on them, as well as their failure in the American business dream (as in Miller’s Death of a Salesman). Not sure about the feminism : it can’t all be our fault. Though at times I rather longed to see Ruth and Gracie come in and sort them out.
The first half is slowish, the energy rising after the interval; re the play’s fault than the players’ or directors, and probably an American audience would tune in sooner than me. But in the end, though I am not as a rule a fanatically keen Mamettian , the pathos and truth of these lost boys’ plight became moving, and memorable.

box office 0844 482 5120   http://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk to 27 June

rating four   4 Meece Rating

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April 26, 2015 · 6:16 pm

BOMBER’S MOON Trafalgar Studio 2, SE1

FROM BOMBER CREW TO ZIMMER DAYS: A TRIBUTE FAIRLY PAID

As the aged heroes of World War II slip gradually away, the urge to bear witness feels ever stronger. In Rattigan’s recently revived FLARE PATH (another production touring this autumn by the way) we were reminded of the surreal life of the young bomber crews, under fire over Germany at night and drinking in a quiet country pub near the base by lunchtime. Now screenwriter William Ivory draws on the memories of his late father – who died in 2008 – to give us a heartfelt, unsentimental evocation of an aged man, once a rear-gunner in war and now washed up, beached, trapped in a failing body in a warden-sheltered flat.

One tributes he pays is to demonstrate how funny, how deadpan, how salty such old men can be. James Bolam always brings a marvellous honest solidity to his acting, and drop-dead timing: he is wholly convincing both as an octogenarian grump who can barely get upright on his zimmer frame, and in flashback as the bright-eyed youth. Sometimes, movingly, he crouches holding that frame as he once held the machine-gun mounts. He catches the cheerful black-humoured obscenity of servicemen’s talk, and takes you momentarily into old long-suppressed fears.

The set is simple – by Laura McEwen – the bedsit kitchenette, chair and screened commode of planet eldercare; but the window in the door can become a full moon, the bomber’s moon, and the ceiling fan crossing the lights overhead suddenly evokes a plane in clouds as the soundscape (by Damian Coldwell) rises to a jet-engine roar mingled with urgent voices from long ago.

The story is just a few weeks’ interaction between old Jimmy and his new carer David – Steve John Shepherd. Jimmy is no soft touch: not unkind but sceptically cantankerous, irritated about “the big lesbian, Moira from Mobility” who keeps giving him wholemeal bread, and infuriated when the geeky, nervous Shepherd comes at him with God-bothering chat about religion and formulaic social-worker phrases. Jimmy’s mind is all there – even if his hand trembles, he recites his multiple medications with the rat-tat professional accuracy of the technical gunner he once was., when the only medication was the routine issue of amphetamines to keep men flying. And his mind is still haunted, with weary tolerance, by the last traumatic flight when his comrades died shot down over Nuremberg and he survived by a fluke and was captured in the snow.
There is gripping sincerity throughout , though it is only in the second half that we get a clearer view of the life-crisis which made David take this work, and which may yet destroy him as surely as it did some wartime comrades who capitulated to the great fear. There was a moment near the end when I feared Ivory might be going to get out of it a bit too pat, either religiously or otherwise. But he pulls it off, with the old man’s witness to the past moving towards healing for the troubled young man in the present. There’s fidelity to that World War 2 spirit, in it at the end, to that Rattigan restraint. And a small coup-de-theatre which I should have seen coming and didn’t. So the matinee audience rose to its feet, for an honest performance but as much for its grandparents , and the pity and gallantry of seventy years ago.

BOX OFFICE 0844 871 7632 to 23 May http://www.atgtickets.com From £ 15

RATING:  FOUR  4 Meece Rating

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April 24, 2015 · 10:49 pm

WHAT THE BUTLER SAW Emporium, Brighton

GUEST REVIEWER CHRIS PALING SEES AN ORTON OEUVRE IN ITS TRUE HOME..

Joe Orton would have liked The Emporium. This deconsecrated Methodist church has been a theatre and café for a couple of years now. It was at the vanguard of the regeneration of an unloved part of the city. Gary Blair and James Weisz work hard at keeping it afloat with sharp and well targeted programming. Beckett, Pinter, Sondheim and Orton have all been staged here – modern classics aimed squarely at the central Brighton demi-monde. The venue is fashionably scruffy; the food, beer and coffee are good.

Joe Orton and his partner Kenneth Halliwell went house-hunting close to The Emporium; their last trip together was an outing to Brighton ten days before Halliwell bludgeoned him to death with a hammer. Orton was working on the first draft of ‘What the Butler Saw’ at the time. In his diaries he relates breaking free from Halliwell one gloomy, damp Brighton night. In a borrowed mac he visits a Gents’ lavatory beside a church where he meets a tall aristocrat and a dwarf “skulking in the corner.”

His plays are hard to get right. Play him too broad and comedic and the lines fall flat. Characters must remain unaware of their absurdities leaving work for the audience to do. Kearns’ cast are note perfect.Once the ear tunes in to the epigrams there’s plenty to enjoy – one of the biggest laughs of the night went to orgasm-faking Mrs Prentice announcing to her husband, “My uterine contractions have been bogus for some time.”
Director and designer Patrick Kearns has assembled a powerful company. Brian Capron (beloved in his murderous role as one of Gail Platt’s husbands on Coronation Street) effortlessly takes the lead as the priapic shrink, Dr Prentice, Jenny Funnell plays his highly strung wife with a nice harmonic of hysteria. Special mention to the superb performance of Michael Kirk as the senior psychiatrist: his strutting around and Herbert Lom mid-distance stares give real weight to the character.
The action takes place in the consulting room of a psychiatric hospital. The drama ignites when Dr Prentice is caught in flagrante by his wife. To escape her wrath he declares his victim insane, cue a couple of hours of characters in various states of undress, distress and consciousness dashing in and out of the four side doors of the stage. Farce relies on the audience buying in to the unfolding logic of the circumstances and it’s a measure of the success of this production that the audience were hooked in from the start. The first act, before the pace becomes too frenetic, is more successful than the second but this is a fault of the play and a reminder that it was still a work in progress when Orton was murdered. A farce it may be, but in tackling issues of insanity one can’t help feeling that he was mining the material of his own life and the unravelling mental condition of Halliwell. He never saw his play performed. He’d have relished this Brighton production.

box office tickets@emporiumbrighton.com to 9 May
rating: four    4 Meece Rating

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April 24, 2015 · 12:54 am

LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE Lyttelton, SE1

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION AND ITS END
What do you do after a revolution? Tyrant toppled, lives sacrificed, people feeling entitled to reward, reformers aflame with rapidly diversifying ideas. Meanwhile things have to be organized, the starving fed, heroes re-examined, laws set up. We watch the factions and fanaticisms  of the Arab Spring and forget that it happened here once: our democracy was not born all at once , or easily.

Caryl Churchill’s play about the aftermath of the English Civil War draws on the pamphlets and movements of 1646 to 1660,   on Cromwell’s Parliament-men, on the factions of Ranters and Levellers, and the Diggers who moved onto St Georges hill and simply began digging it up because “True Freedom lies where a man finds his nourishment, and that is in the earth” .

Everything was shaken, even more than in the Reformation years. The idea of Divine Law was overturned by the defeat of King Charles I and his imprisonment; in the Putney debates of 1647 impassioned intellectual and religious questions were raised, resonant today in the age of Occupy protests and anti-globalization rallies. How can all men be equal if some have more property? Must all have the right to choose their representative, or only some? Is a person bound to obey laws he or she doesn’t morally approve of? “If a foreigner dwell here, shall he be content to be subjected to the Law?”. Meanwhile, out among the rabble and rant of dissent in the fields, wild-eyed starvelings declared that nothing was barred, not thieving or sexual freedom, because everything was new.
When Churchill’s knotty, impressionistic, tough-going play was last produced in London it was with a cast of six, switching roles. This one – launching Rufus Norris’ leadership of the NT and directed by Lyndsey Turner – has a cast of 19 plus a community ensemble of forty more. Es Devlin’s set is a vast table , at first loaded with meats and exotic fruits and surrounded by grandees, later a bare board around which white-collared Puritans sit scratching at documents. At one point the Diggers actually take it up plank by plank to start digging. Finally a ragged starving  remainder argues around a brazier, wondering why the Second Coming of Christ did not, after all , usher in the new Jerusalem as per plan.

The look of it is fine, the populace being clad in a nicely vague rural-timeless-modern manner by Soutra Gilmour . It does create a sense of eavesdropping on the far past. The moments of song are stirring and there are undoubtedly some excellent performances:  a headlong barmy Joshua James, an impressive Trystan Gravelle, Alan Williams as Gerald Winstanley and as a fine striking drunk, and Ashley McGuire immensely touching and restrained as a vagrant woman, Margaret Brotherton. And I have a pretty high tolerance, not universally shared, for 17c political prose: got a real frisson when Sargon Yelda as the Leveller Colonel Rainborough rises at the Putney debates with that great affirmation that “the poorest he that is in England has a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly Sir, I think it clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government..”
Tremendous. And you can see why Rufus Norris decided to programme it, his first show, in election season. But for all the fine execution and the unquestioned if oddball genius of Caryl Churchill, as a play it fails to ascend the heights. Too wordily dense, too much in love with the verbatim, and frankly a touch arrogant in its unwillingness to explain itself courteously to audiences short on homework. The birth of modern Parliamentary democracy deserved a more democratic approach.

box office 0207 452 3000 to 22 June
Sponsor: Travelex Rating: three

3 Meece Rating

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April 23, 2015 · 1:06 am

CLARION Arcola, E8

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE. WITH TONGS. 

The Clarion is a newspaper which hates immigrants. And liberals, especially those on the hated rival Sentinel, a barely-disguised Guardian. Britain, it says, is going to the dogs: betraying Nelson and Churchill and Mary Whitehouse and the Methodists. And the Romans, who were clearly acceptable immigrants, since the editor wears a shining centurion’s helmet at weekends. He hates multiculturalism, bisexuals, Glastonbury, lattes , sundried tomatoes, the Met Office (“They’ve an agenda. I don’t know what but it’s there. Incubating”). Oh, and Elvis, whose music caused “sixty years of culturally sanctioned underaged rutting and the fucking polytechnics. None of which happened when everyone went to lunchtime recitals of Vaughan Williams”.

This is morning conference under editor Morris Honeyspoon, played by Greg Hicks with a craggy, vulturous, leathery aggression which makes Malcolm Tucker look like St Bernadette. His Clarion is “an issue-led newspaper”, and if you think you can work out which one – or a mixture of which two – you really would be safer keeping quiet about it. Not that the barks and eddies of laughter in the Arcola, the yelling of Honeyspoon, and the soundscape of apocalyptic howling wind round the Shards and Gherkins of London make for much quiet.

Mark Jagasia’s first play – he’s an ex-tabloid hack – delivers under Mehmet Ergen’s direction an unnervingly enjoyable evening. If you have ever worked for a newsroom “run like a North Korean death camp” or as a reader been exasperated by the British press, there is both joy in the caricature, and an undertow of seriousness if you care to admit it. In the early moments I feared it would not progress beyond a wicked sketch, but plot develops nicely: an incriminating document, a comradeship and a betrayal, a bomb, a death and two sharp twists at the end.
Partnering Hicks is the glorious Clare Higgins as Verity, a veteran foreign correspondent. Once “a ferocious little kitty with the morals of Caligula”, she clawed her way up to OBE fame, hit the buffers and the bottle, and now supports a dying husband by fiddling her expenses and enduring complicity with Honeyspoon’s toxic headlines : “Immigrants barbecue llamas at petting zoo…Paedophiles in burqas stalk our kids…UK swamped by foreign gays”. Having been in Rwanda, she says, “I know what people are capable of when they’re fed lies”; but once sold, a soul is expensive to buy back. Higgins is superb: dry, scornful, half-reluctantly decent, defeated by life, a limping ragged integrity draping her battle-hardened carapace.

Hicks himself gives even the irresistibly appalling Honeyspoon a vulnerable streak of pathos, since he is under the cosh from the proprietor, a “Cypriot dwarf” who owns a chain of topless burger-bars, and his money man Clive, a god-bothering pinstripe (Peter Bourke, sliming for England). Honeyspoon is at least a proper newsman, whereas the proprietor wants headlines about a starlet’s lost dog, last seen in a frilly skirt on Hampstead Heath . “Wandering round a homosexual wilderness surrounded by Keynsians!” cries the editor “England in 2015, a bulldog in a tutu owned by a whore!”. Only the possibility of pinning the dognapping on Romanians cheers up this Farageian Canute. That, and the financial difficulties of the liberal press…
It’s a howl of an England struggling without grace for identity, and a newsprint industry in decline. Supporting characters in the newsroom are beautifully sketched: the hopeless news editor yearning to get home to Braintree for Curry Club, the pretentious young novelist earning a despised crust as “Immigration Editor”, the lunatic astrologer welcoming the end of days. And Laura Smithers puts in a fabulous London debut as the intern: a masterclass in, yeah, like, infuriating youthful entitlement and vacuous ambition. “She’ll be the next editor” breathed a nearby real journalist. Oh dear.
Box Office: 020 7503 1646 | http://www.arcolatheatre.com
to 16 May
rating : four

4 Meece Rating

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April 21, 2015 · 11:24 pm

AH, WILDERNESS! Young Vic, SE1

THE SANDS OF TIME YIELD UP THEIR DREAMS
This is Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy: the moment when from his vortex of family addiction, illness, loneliness, romantic seaward longings and deep human empathy came a spurt of hope. It is set in the same East Coast seaside house as his fogbound, bitter autobiographical A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The title is from Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou, beside me singing in the Wilderness–Ah, Wilderness were Paradise enow!” Teenage Richard, aflame with calf-love and rebellion, has the poem by heart. It weaves through the play, together with the lush, lily-scented despairing eroticism of Swinburne and Wilde, references to Ibsen and the daring literary fin-de-siecle spirits of the author’s youth (remember the father’s disgust in the later, harsher play: “Baudelaire, Whitman Poe, Wilde, whoremongers and degenerates!”
For we are in O’Neill’s youth, idealized a decade later in 1933, yearning back to the passion of banned books, a new century’s revolt against the parental rigidities. Wonderfully cunning of the Young Vic and director Natalie Abrahami to have ‘60s Bob Dylan tracks playing as we settle: another age when youth was hopeful and despairing, embracing love and disillusion and rebellion and times a-changing.

Observed by a wandering, curiously ghostlike figure who steps into remembered characters and then watches intently, unseen in the margins , this is a portrait of the family O’Neill should have had. One in which adolescent angst and anger could clash against a partially dysfunctional household and run wild in brief dissipation, but be contained and accepted in final mellow moonlit moments by solid united parents. Martin Marquez and Janie Dee give them that solidity: he a local newspaper proprietor rooted and respected, if testy; she typically strong as Essie, who knows her duty to object to “corrupting” books and behaviour, but is perfectly aware of convention’s unimportance next to keeping the family together.

Sometimes brother Arthur – Ashley Zhangahza – sits at a battered piano and sings the gentle melancholy parlour-songs of a century past, underlining that sense of a safe if stale old world before all this new poetry stirred it up. Not that family life is smooth: Dominic Rowan is Uncle Sid, an amiable (and very funny) habitual drunkard who was once to marry aunt Lily (Susannah Wise) until she demurred at his incurable behaviour. There is real subtle pain here, though delight in the scene, nicely indicated as pretty routine, where Sid demolishes the family dinner.

But young Richard is the focal point, and George Mackay is marvellous: flouncingly adolescent, self-righteously wounded when his chastely hesitant girlfriend Muriel is persuaded to chuck him. He goes on to a low bar, where his first-time drunkenness and squirmingly embarrassed encounter with a predatory tart are quite beautiful in execution. He poses as sophisticated, tries to play cool when Muriel reappears, hurls himself flat on his face in a sea-pool to express thwarted embarrassed adoration. He is glorious.

But what keeps me haunted hours later is Abrahami’s drifting, gentle direction within a wonderful set by Dick Bird. Fresh from its annihilation under the gravel of Happy Days, the Young Vic stage is now under tons of finer sand: sculpted dunes and breakwaters beneath faded seaside clapboard, sands of time in which characters will suddenly burrow to haul out books, a table, a sea-pool reflecting the moon. Memories are as drifting and reshaped as a windblown beach. Charles Balfour’s lighting gives it a Hopper-like beauty of sharp-lit silhouette and shadow, a remembered dream. I can’t get it out of my head.
box office  www.youngvic.org / 020 7922 2922 to 23 May
rating four     4 Meece Rating

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April 21, 2015 · 12:16 am

LOVE’S SACRIFICE Swan, Stratford upon Avon

THREE OF THEM IN THAT MARRIAGE…
You get plenty of cautionary tales in John Ford’s little-remembered 1633 play. For one thing, if you get three women pregnant at once with promises of marriage and then variously insult their appearance, age and morals they will take a nasty vengeance.  In front of a Cardinal, in masks, and with an anachronistic but weirdly brilliant use of 21st century ultrasound technology under their bodices.
Nor is it wise for a young courtier to spurn the Duke’s widowed sister, be she never so shrewish a cougar, claim a vow of celibacy and then get close to her beautiful young sister-in-law. No good will come of this. Especially if the spurned widow teams up with D’Avolos, a smooth, mutteringly poisonous Jonathan McGuinness. Such death-dealing intrigues are the lifeblood of vigorous, bloodthirsty 17c drama. But this play is curiously more thoughtful, and less randomly bloody, than Ford’s incestuous, murderous “Tis Pity She’s A Whore” (lately revived at the Wanamaker, (review, http://tinyurl.com/p9zenc9 ).
Indeed Love’s Sacrifice is traditionally written off as a bit of a dog’s breakfast, with its sub-plots which only confusingly mirror the main action: T.S.Eliot said it had “all the faults of which Ford was capable”. And yet, and yet…it turns out in Matthew Dunster’s admirable and physically spirited production to be far more interesting than that: ambiguous and questioning and psychologically intense.
The triple-seduction-pregnancy sideshow is briskly treated – Andy Apollo in his RSC debut season playing Ferentes like a caddish Elvis, smoothing his quiff and hauling the women around like giggling potato-sacks. Another random branch of the tale involves Matthew Kelly as a ridiculous old man with a huge white wig, yellow stockings (very Malvolio) and an endearing servant gorgeously evoked by Colin Ryan. He introduces an exiled Lord disguised as a Fool and previously rejected by the noble (yet illicitly pregnant) widow . And so on. Fear not, though: the trademark RSC clarity keeps things as credible as is decent.

In the first hour Dunster gives it the full romp-and-rampage treatment, as hypnotic religious chant shatters into high anguished impassioned fiddle shrieks and the court scamper and lark among cathedral arches and across a high wrought-iron balcony. But that contrast, sacred and profane emotions and problematical vows clashing into disaster, deepens fascinatingly as it develops. Success depends strongly on central performances, and here we are richly served. Jamie Thomas King is the decent, conflicted Fernando; Matthew Needham as the Duke carries it brilliantly from a larky, jokesome and rather endearing alpha-male laddishness to real anguish, confusion, remorse and violence. Catrin Stewart, lately so fine in The Jew of Malta, is a delicate perfection as the lovelorn wife who confesses her adoration to Fernando but vows not to go beyond a kiss for the sake of chaste wedlock.
In the second half there are some quite remarkable scenes between these three victims of “lawless love” and impossible temptation: moments as powerful as Othello, not least in a long, intense confrontation between the heartbroken confused Duke and his wife, in which Stewart delivers crazy, taunting, extraordinarily modern sentiments of defiance: thrilling. Anna Fleischle’s design, with curious iron pillars within which hellfire seems to flicker through cracks, and Alexander Balanescu’s extraordinary score, create a genuinely unsettling atmosphere and serve both the ferocity and the dark comedy of the tale perfectly.
So long-lost concepts of chastity and honour spring back to life, nearly four centuries on, and shake us. As much, indeed, as one particularly shocking moment near the end which wrenched a sharp, unison gasp across the house. It involves white funeral wreaths. Say no more.

4 Meece Rating
box office http://www.rsc.org 0844 800 1110 to 24 june
rating : four

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April 18, 2015 · 10:40 am

A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD Jermyn St Theatre, SW1

FIFTY GRADES OF A?  ( EDUCATIONAL SADISM TODAY)
During the first half, parents of teenagers will cringingly hope that Jonathan Lewis’ play is fanciful: a comically exaggerated libel on a generation. Especially a generation of boys. Horrible, most of them they are: rackety, full of shouty toxic “banter” , contempt and their own dicks. In particular AJ Lewis as Zachir the Albanian Muslim is a courageously unsympathetic portrayal, as is Jack Bass as Aldous, the irritating prankster who has papered the entire room with identical gurning pictures of Nicholas Cage because it’s a room they will be “caged” in for Isolation between close-packed A level papers (a resort caused by timetable clashes, to prevent cheating).

The other boys, despite obvious nervy vulnerability in a couple of them, play along with the tone. Ugh: these are not the lively, affectionate, vulnerable children we know at home! The four girls are more civilized, contemptuous of the boys’ nonsense; but one is hunched in a corner with a misery not related to A levels, others selfie- and self-addicted, and a late arrival Twink (Elsa Perryman Owens) downright terrifying in her smudged aggression.

However, it is not really fanciful at all: Lewis workshopped the play with his son’s generation, and the eleven young cast are fresh out of school, non-professional. And my daughter, a co-ed close to their generation, reckoned the portrayal of group behaviour was bang on: to the point that I actually apologized to her in the interval for sending her to school and putting her through any such system of exams at all.

For that is the point of Lewis’ trilogy – which this opens – entitled “EDUCATION EDUCATION EDUCATION” . It is a howl of protest about the dehumanizing, grade-obsessed, teach-to-the-test world of exams. As the play continues, the kids themselves alternate between clear-sighted cynicism and desperate buying-in to the A-star, Oxbridge dream . Entertainingly, there are brief freezes when each speaks the groomed, disingenuous language of the UCAS personal-statement “…and thats why I have a passion to study xxxx”. It helps, too, that the exam they are in the middle of is Politics.

What emerges – notably through the more eventful second act – is that they are, effectively, abused by the system and their high-flying school. This eventfulness is driven by the other thing parents will hope to God is fanciful – the fact that the school has messed up its arrangements, and the eleven are left unsupervised in the defaced music-room with no teacher even to remove their phones to prevent cheating. Hence the Lord-of-the-Flies atmosphere. Though when the teacher does arrive – Joe Layton a study in angry haplessness – and certain secrets emerge, things do not get better or quieter. Though often they are pretty funny.
And, in the end, touching. For these 18 year olds are not monstrous, just bent out of shape by what Lewis calls “the maniacal devotion to testing and prescriptive teaching, in which exams are not just a diagnostic part of learning but the sine qua non of an education based on conformity and compliance”.

The next two plays will have a different, less riotous tone as the same issue is expanded; first through the eyes of parents, then of teachers. As Lewis says, he has not pat answer: “I am simply sharing my despair at a system which seems so often to turn children with wonderful imaginations and joyous self confidence into depressed teenagers with appallingly low self esteem and a terrible sense of failure and hopelessness.” This one is sometimes hard going – the first half could be trimmed – but with Lewis’ skilled writing and pacing resolves into something valuable, angry, and (God help us) darkly entertaining.
box office 020 7287 2875 to 9 May
rating three    3 Meece Rating

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April 17, 2015 · 11:38 pm

CARMEN DISRUPTION Almeida N1

WILL GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES TORE-ADORE IT?   READ ON
The best way to describe this play is as a sideshow. There is a performance of Bizet’s opera Carmen somewhere, and playing out around it are these connected lives. Think 2004’s Crash mixed with Shakespeare in Love. A mix of portraits, but with a master text to play with.
The Almeida, the West End’s cupboard cousin, has been stripped bare by designer Lizzie Clachan. Bare brick, exposed lights and no flats for the actors, yet delicate licks of red paint, gold detailing and ornamental lighting for the audience. We’re led to our seats through backstage – perhaps labouring a little too heavily the point that we’re peeling beneath the opera – past a dead, bleeding, but still breathing Bull.

I have no idea what happens in Carmen – I don’t know a thing about opera. You say ‘thrilling performance at Covent Garden’, I think man with a unicycle and flaming batons outside Boots the chemist. But thankfully this tension seemed to be in play. Michael Longhurst’s production – spare but madly theatrical – satisfyingly excavates the pop culture from the opera. In the ENO season-ticket holders, you could almost hear the Sauvignon curdling. Yes opera is about sex and death. But surely not in such a raw state as this.

In a way I’ve never thought possible, the lack of any real story, quite nicely made way for these character sketches. A business man, a rent boy, a disturbed singer, a troubled teen, a lost mother at first seem like the standard roll-call. But Jack Farthing – a latter-day Carmen as a witty Essex rent boy – and John Light – Escamillio of the square mile with sharp suits and semi-automatic delivery – were enrapturing. Carmen’s high power ejaculation about which it “is only fair to warn people” and Escamillio’s frantic defines of following people had us hooked. Their stories, perhaps linking in meaningful ways for the black ties in the crowd, were for the rest of us just masterfully told single stories.

However, these moments could be hit and miss. Katie West – as Micaëla, for the informed – had an absent unrequited love to battle with, into which she threw herself but which failed to move. And I never fully bought into Sharon Small – as ‘The Singer’.

A haunting chorus, with snippets from the opera, were for me were the only links. And eventually lost souls stumbling on the ‘chocolate box opera house’ Carmen, the curious lifestyles of opera singers, personal technology and ‘Europe’ were the playwright’s inspirations. I’m not sure all these were hit, but his skill in producing entirely entertaining and mostly crisp lives was an entertaining watch. Even if the Bizet did go straight down the bidet.
Box Office: 020 7359 4404  to 23 May

raing:  four   4 Meece Rating
Rating: four

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April 16, 2015 · 10:08 am

MRS ROOSEVELT FLIES TO LONDON King’s Head , N1

ADMIRABLE ELEANOR 

An old woman, cadaverous under harsh light, wakes fretful, remembering a war and shuddering at the Cuba missile crisis : it is 1962. We know that it will resolve, but it strikingly reminds us how that threat felt to the generation which endured World War 2. As the old woman springs up and sheds twenty years (good lighting moment!) we share Eleanor Roosevelt’s memories of 1942.
What memories they are too: even my generation is too little aware of the lady’s gallantry, gaiety and liberal passion; how admirable for Alison Skilbeck’s tightly researched, elegant monologue as the “world’s first lady” to come back to a young King’s Head audience. Especially in this VE-day anniversary year (and just as another Presidential wife, Hillary Clinton, declares her shot for the top job).

Eleanor, of course, never went that far, though after the death of her cousin-husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945 she remained a force, instrumental in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But her intelligence, nerve and above all sheer driving goodwill had played no small role in that war, and in the emergence of the American liberal spirit. Orphaned in childhood, raised without much love, she found a husband who for all his qualities (and despite being crippled with polio ) was not above marital betrayals, needing, as she ruefully observed, always a woman at hand to admire him. She was more a harness-mate, a prodder and goader and inspirer. For her own emotional fulfilment there were the warm women friends.
But in 1942, at no small risk she flew over and toured blitzed Britain, with the stated intention of encouraging the women’s war effort but in effect offering wider cheer and encouragement. Not least – as an early cheerleader for racial justice – to the African-American servicemen in Liverpool, about whom she cheekily informed a Southern senator the white girls “do not look at with terror” . Franklin was not pleased about that note, or her sneered reputation as the “Negroes’ Friend”; he needed the Southern vote, and the Ku Klux Klan quite explicitly threatened the rebellious Eleanor.

There are light moments, as the Queen (our Queen Mother) apologizes for the freezing cold of Buckingham Palace with the windows blown out, and for the economy tide=ring painted round the baths; as she sits next to Churchill and finds him rather hard going, or notices how exhausted the reporters seem to be by her fierce itinerary of night-shift workers and whistlestop city tours. She sees Rattigan’s Flare Path, experiences rather too many brussels sprouts, Moments of memory enlighten us about her life and beginnings; Lucy Skilbeck (spookily, no relation) directs a spirited 75-minute evocation both of the woman and the nation she travelled through. Sometimes Skilbeck moves to a suitably retro microphone to deliver some of the speeches of the time; sometimes quotes from Eleanor’s real letters home.

It is a bit Edinburgh-fringey, and absolutely deserves to be done with more expense and a little expansion: projections, photographs, bits of film maybe, audio from the time. But I wouldn’t change the performer, nor the spirit. And am intensely glad to have seen and admired both the show and the late Mrs R.
box office http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com to 9 May

rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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April 16, 2015 · 12:24 am

GYPSY Savoy Theatre, SW1

IT DON’T GET BETTER THAN THIS…
Is there any odder opening line to a big musical number than “Have an egg-roll, Mr Goldstone”? Is there any dryer account of the emotional tangle of mothers and daughters, showbiz and ambition than this Laurents / Styne / Sondheim show? Will Jonathan Church’s Chichester never give over turning out productions so fabulous that they transfer and bring London to its feet? Is three standing ovations even enough? And is there any actress more heroically accomplished, more vividly alive, more formidable in song , speech and silence, more superhuman yet more likeable than Imelda Staunton?

Questions, questions. Jonathan Kent’s production thrilled Chichester last year. It is, if anything, even more kaleidoscopically irresistible set in the Savoy’s weary gilt-and -velvet. Posh enough, yet retaining a tang of the ‘30s vaudeville houses through which Mama Rose pushes her troupe across Depression America, hectoring towards stardom the favoured daughter June and dogsbody Louise. From the moment Staunton storms up the aisle brandishing a lapdog and shoving other children away from blocking Baby June’s squeal ’n splits routine, we are there. Anthony Ward’s sets, swift-moving and unfussy, take us to squalid digs, looming backstage barrenness and luscious limelight. Stephen Mear’s choreography wittily evokes all levels of aptitude: baby June’s robotic precision and eyes-n-teeth smile, Louise’s willing awkwardness, the boy dancers’ romping amateurism morphing into their accomplished, balletic or tapping adult selves. Character blooms in every step of the jaunty desperate family dance when Mama’s strategy has stranded them broke in Texas with the “Toreadorable” troupe; there’s the glorious cow, and at last the three strippers. Especially Louise Gold’s Amazonian centurion, grumpily demonstrating how to bump it with a trumpet.

The joy of Gypsy is that, set in the dying throes of vaudeville, it can twist in a moment from some gorgeously entertaining absurdity or repartee to a bleakness of poverty, delusion and betrayal. All the cast give the serious emotion full weight: there are silences as memorable as the big numbers. There’s Rose’s utter stillness as she reads the letter from the defecting June, then Louise and Herbie frozen in turn as she rallies and turns the beam of her lethal attention on the remaining daughter. Lara Pulver returns as a fine-drawn Louise, touchingly quiet and tomboyish until her wild final blossoming – elegantly spanning four costumes and risingly glamorous locations – as Gypsy Rose Lee. Peter Davison is Herbie, giving the lightly written part real dignity and heft.
For all the glee, and our mass inability to resist leaping to our feet at the end of the two biggest Mama Rose numbers, it is not a show you leave without sober reflection. My daughter, fresh from reading Jung, quoted him – “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically…on children than the unlived life of the parent” . Its rueful insights are perennial; Rose’s determination to keep control rather than marry is pure feminism (“After three husbands it takes an awful lotta butter to get you back in the frying pan”). And her ultimate she-Lear rage, Staunton unforgettably vulnerable as she stands alone against blackness and shakes her booty in furious flirtation and storming at fate mirrors with sharp awkwardness an even more modern phenomenon. Women still wince at middle-age and missed chances, envy daughters, claw towards their own limelight. Even – as tiny Staunton looks up at the statuesque Pulver and appropriates her sable stole – deludedly purr how handy it is that they can wear the same clothes. Ouch.
box office http://www.atgtickets.com to 18 July

rating   five  (of course. Again. Including a triumphant Imeldamouse. 4 Meece RatingMeece with mask tiny compressed

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April 15, 2015 · 7:04 am

THE TWITS Royal Court SW1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES TAKES HIS INNER CHILD FOR A HAPPY SPIN…

As Mrs.Twit wisely points out – children are horrible. Too many “family shows” forget that. Instead of sweetness, children want darkness. They’ll allow a happy ending but they expect plenty of misery, menace and thrills in the run-up. Just like, would you believe it, adults. Roald Dahl built a career on this intelligent approach.

This mischievous, glorious production is more an extrapolation than an adaptation by Enda Walsh. The characters are there, their sadistic motivation intact, but in between the familiar beginning and contractually obliged happily-ever-after is sandwiched a totally unexpected, but warmly welcomed invented middle.

Years ago Mr and Mrs Twit tricked a group of fairground folk out of of their livelihood. A dog was shot, a boy’s hope’s ruined and a tattooed fortune teller duped. Bored with their caged monkeys and looking for wicked entertainment, the Twits entice them back with the promise of reconciliation and the return of their fairground. Instead they are kept fin limbo for months; teased with performing monkeys, they are practically abused by a filthy Barbara Woodhouse (Mrs Twit,) and a rustic Santa Claus with a whiff of Yewtree (Mr Twit).

Monica Dolan and Jason Watkins are near perfection as the giddily evil pair: camp, slightly perverted and beautifully drawn, a real masterclass of comedic acting which instead of splashing in the surface froth, delves right to the depths of meaty, funny parts.
The accompanying cast are all excellent. But Aimée-Ffion Edwards as the daughter monkey – who is the highlight of the monkey family’s mini plays – took what might have been functional, and made it hearty and funny.

John Tiffany has directed not just a brilliant show for children – I heard genuine laughs and panicked drama-tears from the junior crowd – but also a solid play for adults. Every laugh from the script is successfully carried to us, with heaps besides. Skits from the monkey family, Mr and Mrs.Twit penchant for fancy dress and songs are all brought together with the kind of music and lighting cues you expect from a mammoth musical. This is a shipshape show.
The set, beautifully designed by Chloe Lamford, is a large blinking hamster wheel, a round face out a which a long tongue of a stage folds out. It is wooden, scuffed and dirty, but covered in bright circus lights. And it wasn’t a lazy set. It moved, twirled, rose and opened; all the genius whizzes to hold any child’s imagination.
This was darker than the book I loved as a child, and all the more satisfying for it. Children laughed with the adults, leading each other at different points. If it wasn’t jokes about ridiculous accents (Leeds, Wales), it was the murder of Rudolph. A certain hit, with West End transfer written in spit, shit and glue all over it. Hurrah!
Until 31st May
Box Office: 020 7565 5000

rating: five   5 Meece Rating

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April 13, 2015 · 12:31 am

OLIVIERS NIGHT……. royal opera house

The list of winners is now widespread, but for theatrecat tolerators and friends, some review notes on how it was to be in the actual ROH seeing it happen:

– definitely the best production by SOLT so far: snapoily timed, Lenny Henry friendly, low key, every performance interlude directly related to a proper show, not pop offshoots.

– how they fit five whole musical casts into the ROH dressing-rooms is a mystery. But they do.

– there is a real beauty in the way the Steadicam TV guys skilfulky prowl the stage, red lights like pilot-launches circling a ship by night

– only two of the awards felt wrong to this critic. Which may mean I am disgracefully mainstream in my tastes. Though a few un-nominated ones make me sad.

– it is very perilous to tweet , Shenton style, as it goes along. I described Angela Lansbury as ‘bear supporting actress” not Best Supporting. The image remains hard to banish. Esp with that teddybearish hairdo.

– the ovation for her was a joy to join in

– the noisiest claque were from BEAUTIFUL, in the circle

– closely followed by the joyful mob from Sunny Afternoon. Three Oliviers! Go Hampstead!

– the moral that subsidized theatre enriches the ecosystem and makes the West End a powerhouse was proved over and over and over again…Almeida, Donmar, Y Vic, Hampstead, NT…

– dame Judi revealed that Kevin Spacey i troduced her to caramel macchiato and omce arrived at her door with a ping pong table on his head. This made us all very hapoy

– Sylvie Guillem claims retirement from dance may tuen her i to ‘a fat bumblebee with skinny legs’. I doubt it.

– Ivo van Hove deserved both his awards and is the coolest Belgian since Poirot, and then some

– i love how many winners thank their producers for trusting them.

– thrilling that the subversive spit n sawdust new-variety origins of La Soiree have brought them to the “legit” status of an Olivier, just as some years ago Green & Martinez got one for c’est Barbican. This is healthy.

– and finally – that moment when Kevin Spacey told us he loves the Old Vic more than anything and then took off his jacket and SANG Bridge over Troubled Water with the largest choir I have ever seen…well…

(Chokes, sobs, can write no more)

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April 11, 2015 · 10:41 am

CROUCH TOUCH PAUSE ENGAGE Watford Palace & touring

A RUGBY REDEMPTION

“I’ve known since you were seventeen” says Gareth Thomas’ exasperated team-mate. “When you said you wanted me to be your best man, why do you think we spent a whole afternoon walking up and down Treorchy High Street eating chips and fucking curry sauce? I was giving you time to reconsider…”
Hand on heart, I didn’t particularly expect to enjoy this National Theatre Wales play (with Out of Joint ) about the coming-out of the tremendous Welsh rugby captain, international and 100-cap star athlete Gareth Thomas. Rugby terrifies me, I am lukewarm about verbatim theatre (which this mostly is), and read some pretty h-hum English reviews when its tour began in Wales. And, after one particularly gruelling Edinburgh Fringe, I issued a personal fatwa against plays about young men discovering their sexuality: enough, already!

But Robin Soans’ piece is different. Thomas’ self-doubt and deceit was particularly painful, alpha-male team sport being a toxically tough world for gay men (remember poor Justin Fashanu, who died, and Robbie Rogers who felt he should retire rather than play on as gay.) It is also different because private anguish and shame at twenty years of lies and fear is interwoven with his hometown’s travails. Bridgend, whose beating heart was in hard manual work, family, community and rugby, was badly knocked about by the decline of the mines (there’s a verbose explanation from that now-affluent Brussels fatcat, Neil Kinnock). It also suffered a strange, heartbreaking series of teenage suicides
So we have Thomas’ story and his parents’ and teammates’ remarks on being told: we get extraordinary facts like the way the Sun had chapter-and-verse proof of gay sauna visits and the rest in 2001, the day of an International, but for some mysterious reason – compassion? – never ran it even after Wales went down 44-15 to England and they could have crowed as homophobically as they liked. Six months later, still trying to “melt away his gayness”, Thomas disastrously married a childhood sweetheart; their scenes together are agonizing.
But alongside his tale run the problems of two ordinary teenage girls, Meryl whose angry jobless father brutalizes her mother and kills himself; and her friend, Darcey. Who suffers from schizophrenic delusions and whose near-suicide coincides with that of the rugby star.
Under deft direction from Max Stafford-Clark, each of the six players at times speaks Gareth Thomas’ words , then with clarity reverts to their own persona (or one of several, including a nervous reporter ). Rhys ap William is particularly fine as the player, and Lauren Roberts’ Darcey is irresistible: she plays it big, slobbish, lairy, manically grinning and heartbreakingly at sea in her terrifying mental world.
It was a quietish matinee I caught, but the intensity, deep goodwill and the stark honesty of the piece made it feel greater than the sum of its parts. The aftermath of coming-out is particularly striking in its refusal to embrace the feelgood sentimentality of films like PRIDE. Thomas admits that the shame of having lied for so long lingered on, that some on the terraces still shout hateful epithets, that the new “out” career involves nonsesne like panto in Wrexham, giving his name to scented candles and enduring a coming-out party run by London PRs with no proper food fit for rugby friends.
But it’s out, it’s open, and it never truly mattered. The honesty itself buoys him up, and the other characters find their equilibrium too, sing a verse of Bread of Heaven (with the proper “Jehovah” not the mimsy C of E “Redeemer” word). In a final scene they train with him and we cheer the curtain-call scrum. Loved it. Still too scared to watch the Six Nations, though.
Box Office: http://www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk to 11 April
then touring England till 20 June (reaches Arcola London 20 May)\   Touring Mouse wide
Rating four 4 Meece Rating

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April 9, 2015 · 11:50 pm

AFTER ELECTRA Tricycle, NW6

A BOHO CLYTEMNESTRA

No sooner do we get over Kristin Scott Thomas going murderously nuts as the original Electra at the Old Vic, than along comes April de Angelis with a sly, hilarious, biting and ultimately moving modern take on that primally perilous mother-daughter bond. Her wit (lately deployed in FANNY HILL at Bristol) now returns to the fertile middle-class territory we relished in JUMPY. This Theatre Royal Plymouth production certainly ought to follow it into the West End.

It begins with a classic what-if social situation: frumpy middle-aged Haydn, a grief counsellor with little cheer about her, visits her artist mother Virgie in a beautifully realized ramshackle Essex railway-carriage cottage (Malcolm Rippeth’s design). She is promptly informed that the glamorously boho 84-year-old plans to cap the party by drowning herself. “Not looking forward to the decrepit bit” breezes Mum. This, after all, is a 60’s free spirit, lately spotted at 76 in a nude peace protest, married to her art. Other visitors arrive for the terminal salad lunch: Tom the weary old RSC actor : “playing a variety of beards now, you never remember the names” carps his thwarted novelist wife Sonia. Kate Fahy and Neil McCaul give excellent glare as the poisonous couple. Then there’s Virgie’s sister Shirley, an overconfidently brisk OFSTED peer (“I was a headmistress, I”m used to controlling situations I know very little about”). And there is the alcoholic son Orrin, thrown out by his wife.
So with snorts of laughter and gasps of shock, off we go: and it’s more than a treat, de Angelis pacing her laughs neatly as surprises (Sam West directs, and I bet he enjoyed it). Marty Cruikshank is swashbucklingly enviable as Virgie, Rachel Bell a sharply smooth sister, so credible as a life peer that I almost looked her up in Hansard.
Veronica Roberts as the troubled daughter gives just enough hint of the real seriousness of the family situation and back-story, which are revealed in the second half, on the far side of Virgie’s stroke and her cantankerous near-recovery. There’s a Colchester cab driver too, a lovely gangling cameo from Michael Begley (“I picked a bloke up at Braintree once, thought he was Buddha. He wasn’t”). And finally, briefly, an art student, who matters.

The play continues to provide violent laughs, often at the expense of Tom the actor, a constant joy; but moves into darker territory with the unfolding of the question it really wants to ask: not about suicide or even really about female ageing – though there are some treasurable remarks on that subject, not least Sonia’s panicky conviction that Zumba and “West African drumming” will keep her young. Rather, it resolves itself into the starker question of whether a mother who is also an artist has a right to place her gift and her message higher than her duty towards her children.

For Virgie is a kind of Clytemnestra, though the husband she discarded was not actually killed and Haydn’s revenge is wreaked on her canvases, not her body. But what remains of this immensely enjoyable play is even more powerfully a joyful reminder of how sharp, how funny, diverse and stroppy older women can be. And how rebellious. I could quote it all night, but be satisfied with Virgie’s solution to the budget deficit: care-home denizens, she says, ought to be sent to war:

“Free travel to exotic places, no heating bills, stepping on a landmine, quicker than cancer. 80 years, shot by insurgents at Kabul while winching her mate’s wheelchair out of quicksand. Saves the NHS loads, no wasted life, no bereft mothers, no wobbly kiddie-writing saying Daddy we miss you – our kids have grown up and hate our guts. It’s a solution”….
My late Mum would have loved that. A lot.

box office 0207 328 1000 to 2 May http://www.tricycle.co.uk
rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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April 9, 2015 · 10:16 am

THE ABSENCE OF WAR Oxford Playhouse & touring

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS: HOW IT WAS, AND HOW IT WASN’T
David Hare’s 1994 play reimagining the 1992 election – elegantly staged by Headlong and director Jeremy Herrin – has toured since February, doughty as a battlebus , energized and angsty as the doomed Labour campaign. On election night it’s in Bath, a brave place to affirm in swooping rhetoric that the Labour party is “the only practical instrument that exists in this country for changing people’s lives for the good”.

So I caught it on the wing, and a fine night out it is. It was inspired by the situation of Neil Kinnock, who dragged the party’s left into a “pact with respectability” to try and end the long run of Tory triumphs. Hare writes a hilariously huffy programme note about how the Labour front-bench hated it because the hero George was not a red-headed Welshman with a wife called Glenys. Silly of them, since George (marvellously played by Reece Dinsdale) is six times more personally beguiling than Kinnock ever was: thoughtful, jokey, never eating anything at diplomatic banquets so as to save room for his own recipe scrambled eggs with chilli peppers. He’s a rounded autodidact rooted in old wisdoms, a theatre-buff who explodes in fury at wasting a Hamlet ticket because the crafty Tory leader calls a snap election (“The bastard’s going down the Mall!”). He’s wonderful. Vote Dinsdale!
But, as in history, they don’t. Hare is exploring the perennial problem of an idealistic, leftist Labour party finding it difficult to persuade a suspicious electorate that it is fit to govern. Historically, the play marks the divide between that kind of Labour (to which we seem to be returning under Ed Miliband) and the New-Lab, Blairy, relaxed-about-the-filthy-rich variety which did win five years later. George has surrounded himself with a clique of unelected policy-engineers and spinners – Cyril Nri splendid as Oliver, James Harkness a wincey Scot who eats croissants worrying that it betrays his Paisley roots: and a brisk Charlotte Lucas as Lindsay, the PR adviser.
This clique may improve his chances – so they think, as they crunch through polls about whether he is “thoughtful..downbeat..solitary..boring…” etc and beg him to say “fairness” not “equality” , to bang on about the NHS a lot, and never to mention the economy because that “reminds people he’ll be in charge of their money” . Yet at the same time this image micromanagement is imprisoning him, killing his passion and personality. So are the “whingeing backbenchers” the doughty old post-war idealist Vera (Helen Ryan, very funny in her brief fierce asides) and a treacherous shadow chancellor silkily played by Gyuri Sarossy. George flunks a nasty TV interview, punches Oliver, and faces election day with sad, steely dignity. There’s even a big rally – like the one which torpedoed Kinnock – with music of which someone immortally says “I didn’t know Hitler composed..”

So plenty of modern echoes from the distant far side of the Blair-Brown era, and plenty to reflect on, whichever is your party. Hare also skewers exactly (whether he intended to or not) the contempt rife on the political left for actual voters, who simply don’t understand what’s good for them.
One little dishonesty I could have done without: the cameo Tory PM is portrayed as an arrogant, entitled pinstriped Oxbridgey toff. Students outside the theatre were chortling about that. So I had to tell them with aged maternal sternness that actually, the Tory leader who beat Kinnock was a man who grew up with impoverished variety-artiste parents in two rooms in Brixton, and left school with three O levels, did more on his own as a clerk, and worked his way up.: John Major. So there!

0186 530 5305 http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com to 11th
then touring to 8th May – Cambridge, Kingston, Bath
rating; four 4 Meece Rating

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April 8, 2015 · 6:43 am

CYRANO DE BERGERAC Royal, Northampton

RHETORICAL ROMANCE…
Ah, Cyrano! Fighter, scholar, poet, maverick: ever since Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, set in an imagined musketeer-y 17c, he has been an archetype of reckless generosity. Last of the courtly-love serenaders, patron of all unrequited lovers who nobly plead their rival’s cause. No wonder stars from Jacobi to Kevin Kline have been delighted to slap on the rubber conk and do him honour.

Loving Roxane, but cursed with that immense red nose, Cyrano writes divine love-letters for the “comely but dumb” Christian , thus convincing her that her lover has a great soul. Cyrano brokers the marriage, and struggles with his feelings when (somewhat unconvincingly) she declares that the letters are so great she would love Christian for his soul even if he was ugly. He comforts her long widowhood, only to reveal accidentally in his lengthy, delirious, sword-waving death scene that the great soul was him all the time.
The play has become a musical and several versions. but this is the most famous: Anthony Burgess’ translation is partly in verse like the French alexandrine original and, unfortunately for us, is faithful to its extreme Gallic ornamental verbosity. The first hour of the 105-minute first half , despite the side-plot about Ragueneau the provisions man and the envious grandee Ligniere, provides nothing exciting except the ensemble of Gascon cadets in white fencing-gear shouting a lot. The word ‘gruelling’ should not occur to one in a theatre: if director Lorne Campbell irreverently took the Burgess by the horns and did some brisk telescoping, it might not do so.
It is set – play-within-a-play – not as per original in a hotel, but for some reason in a gymnasium where the ensemble put bits of costume over their white fencing-kit to express each part. I can’t say that the gym added anything: if you’re not going naturalistic, black curtains would do as well in such an excessively verbal and often static play. Comedy and feeling both improve, though , as Nigel Barrett’s Cyrano takes Chris Jared’s Christian in hand and dictates every swooning line for him to speak under Roxane’s balcony, saying her name swings like a brazen bell, etc. Christian wins his kiss and betrothal while the big distorted man sits grieving nobly in the shadow. At which point I must say that Barrett is absolutely tremendous in this title role: declamatory and dry by turns, physically commanding, every inch the warrior. No complaints there.
But despite the point well made in the programme about Burgess’ empathy with flawed, gallant extreme mavericks, there is something curiously out of tune about the play: more so than Shakespeare or Sophocles. The courtly-love trope, the idea of convincing a woman of your ‘genius’ by larding on intemperate praise, feels almost insulting even when filtered through French 19c cynical asides. Roxane’s eager demand that Christian’s stumbled “I love you” should be “embroidered with golden tapestries” is downright irritating.
Cyrano’s generosity – as evoked by Barrett – is moving, and the concept of the “panache” betokening his pure soul is well carried. We believe his “I am a tree, not high, not beautiful, but free”. Roxane is chirpily strong-willed and turns up on the very battlefield to join her lover; Cath Whitefield plays her very beguilingly in black tights, and achieves genuine dignity in the final fifteen-years-on scenes in the convent with sick impoverished old Cyrano. But a question kept rising in my head: “Do we need this play, in this style, here and now?” Not convinced.

box office BOX OFFICE 01604 624811 http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk to 25 April
A joint production with Northern Stage; runs in Newcastle from 29 April

rating three 3 Meece Rating

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April 3, 2015 · 3:56 pm

DEAD SHEEP Park Theatre N4

THE GENTLEMANLY ASSASSIN RIDES AGAIN. AND HOWE…

Klaxon alert! Outrage merchants , boots on, scramble! In an election season here are theatre types in North London doing a play about Tories! Written by a BBC reporter! With PM Thatcher played in drag by chap from Spitting Image!

No, panic over, at ease, chaps. Jonathan Maitland is not spitting left-wing venom or, indeed, bashing the late Margaret more than is mild and reasonable. His lively, closely researched account of Sir Geoffrey Howe’s long-suffering loyalty and final explosive demolition of her 25 years ago is in the tradition of James Graham’s determined, fascinated humanisation of politicians in the NT’s This House and the TV play Coalition. And while director Ian Talbot makes the most of playful brief impersonations of some of the more richly impersonateable characters of the 80s – notably Alan Clark – Howe himself emerges well. Here is a principled if unspectacular hero who gave up loyalty only after a struggle, and Ian Gow as a decent man struggling to hold together the pair’s fragile relationship after Howe’s cruel demotion.
As for the casting of Steve Nallon as Thatcher, it is unexpectedly effective: not least because with the sculpted perm, ultra-careful outfits and gimlet eye there always was something faintly drag-queeny about the Iron Lady. It creates a useful sharp contrast with the other woman in the story: Elspeth Howe, wife of Sir Geoffrey and chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Broadcasting Standards Council . Jill Baker, with casual hairdo and cheerful flat-shoed bluestocking liberalism makes a wonderful contrast to the menacing burnished-blonde clip-clop of her husband’s Nemesis . The PM patronizes her , calls her “dear” and evinces clear contempt for feminism (we are overshadowed by that vast Cabinet picture of her all-male retinue). At one point she purrs “I didn’t win two elections and a war by being nice to people”, to which Elspeth retorts ‘Imagine what you might have achieved if you had been…”
Maitland flashes backwards and forwards from the pinch-point in 1989 to earlier days – when Chancellor Howe rescued the new leader from a potential party revolt, and to the triumphant conference of 1983 when she demanded the opposition be “routed!”. As the years go by the sidelining and undermining of Howe is apparent: James Wilby gives our hero the hesitant credible decency of a clever thoughtful man steamrollered by a ruthless politician. Never pathetic or bumbling, he gives precise sad weight to lines like “ “I am not Heseltine, I can’t prowl the wilderness like a hungry lion” . Domcstic scenes with Elspeth are genuinely touching, Howe sweetly sporting a picture sweater of his beloved Chevening.

Around them four other actors nimbly, entertainingly narrate and take diverse roles: Graham Seed is a strong Gow, John Wark a mischievously lisping Brian Walden, and Tim Wallers a blustering Bernard Ingham and a gloriously camp, offensive Alan Clark, bringing whoops of delight from those with 25-year political memories. The PMQ moment and the denouement, the big cricket-metaphor speech, create a proper House of Commons atmosphere.
Plenty of nice touches: Howe visibly reddening as he heads for the backbenches after twenty-five years in office, grandees scoffing at John Major – “He doesn’t even go abroad for his holidays” , and a nice swipe when the PM is asked about arts subsidy and replies that they should support themselves “Trouble is, art is not about profit as much as about a statement. Usually a socialist statement”.
One point, more in sorrow than in anger: Lady Thatcher was ever a fastidious dresser, and someone in Wardrobe has really got to run an iron over that terrible houndstooth suit on Nallon. Or bin it for something smooth and blue. The hair is great, so is the walk and the glare and the voice. But he doesn’t half need an Ironing Lady.

Oh yes, one note.  Sir Stephen Wall, from Howe’s original staff  – played by John Wark – saw it on press night and said “Terrific. … a brilliant job at being true to the character of the main protagonists …characterisation of MT was spot on: gimlet-eyed and terrifying but also with a kind and vulnerable side” .
box office 0207 870 6876 to 9 May http://www.parktheatre.co.uk
rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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April 2, 2015 · 9:40 am

DEATH OF A SALESMAN Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

GREATER THAN GREEK:  ATTENTION MUST BE PAID

The greatest plays keep their truth but strike you differently every time. I saw Arthur Miller’s masterpiece at twenty, then ten years ago was electrified by Brian Dennehy’s Willy Loman in London. Now comes a different emotional hit in Gregory Doran’s RSC production, with Antony Sher as the failing, suicidal hero.
Different, not because any one production is more faithful, but merely because of one’s own attrition, life and loss as decades tick by. “Everyone cries at the end” said a confident voice in the tea-bar beforehand. But for some of us the most wrenching, releasing moments are earlier, and we are finally just glad Willy is out of the terrible race. Ah, the beauty of theatre: quiet private revelations in a public space.
Still, when he says “I still feel kinda temporary about myself”, who – at any age – does not shiver a brief “yes..”? Thoreau’s spoke of “’lives of quiet desperation…men who go to the grave with the song still in them.” The strength of Sher’s performance is that for all his grouchy hopelessness and enslavement to the big-man myth, when he plants his carrot-seeds, exults in his DIY or sees the moon between the looming towers we hear the faint flutelike song within him.

Set in 1949 Brooklyn, it is famously a condemnation of the business ethic of the time, the dream of a big desk in a big office for a big man. Yet it buzzes with topicality: we too are a culture where everyone must sell to live, “riding on a smile and a shoeshine”. Loman ‘off-salary’ is effectively on a zero-hours contract. His troubled son Biff took a wrong turn when he flunked one exam, didn’t get to university and has never settled to a job. Everyone’s mortgaged, and children fail to launch: “Ya finally own it and there’s no-one to live in it”. Topical all the way.
But Miller sweeps wider, more grandly through the human endgame. Willy protests “I am well liked..” but alone with his wife Linda admits “People don’t seem to take to me..I’m fat and very foolish to look at”. Tubby and square, grainy and growling, Sher takes the early scenes slow and querulous, almost singsong, rising to intemperate Lear-like wrath and bouncing back to optimistic fatherhood during the flashbacks to earlier times with his boys – especially Biff the sports hero (Alex Hassell, changing age brilliantly). Stephen Brimson Lewis’ set is ingenious: lighting turns the towering new blocks transparent in memory or brings the pitiless rackety New York streets and offices forward. The ghostly figure of Uncle Ben (Guy Paul) wanders white-suited under an eerie light talking of Loman’s missed chances.

At the heart of it Harriet Walter is Linda, loving a small man who “can be just as exhausted as a great one” and to whom, in that immense central speech, she affirms “attention must be paid”. There are layers of effort and fear and love in every folding of her arms, every, heroic, desperate encouragement of Biff’s hopeless business plans. Anything to cheer Willy enough to live. His business unravelling is painful to watch: Tobias Beer gives us the restless young boss sacking him while playing with his new wire-recorder(more topicality – today it’d be an iWatch). Joshua Richards is heavily, solidly decent as the only friend, from whom Loman can hardly help.

The tragedy is greater than Greek, simply because he is no king, never was. “A man has got to add up to something” he cries. But with a roar of engines and sad thread of flutes (another wonderful Paul Englishby score) he is gone.

box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 2 May
Sponsored by Interbrand

rating  five    5 Meece Rating

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March 31, 2015 · 6:01 pm

OUR AMERICAN COUSIN Finborough, SW10

A SNORTER? OR  A SMOKED POSSUM?
It was in 1865, on the stage line “You sockdolagizing old mantrap!” that John Wilkes Booth took advantage of a guaranteed laugh to shoot dead President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s theatre, Washington DC.  At moments in the first half of Tom Taylor’s 1858 play (the first revival in London for a century) one did slightly yearn for a pistol-shot. But not too often, and mainly during some of the painful puns, malapropisms and prolonged jokes about sneezing from the silly-ass character Lord Dundreary . Yes, he has Dundreary whiskers: this is the actual character in the actual play which gave those exaggerated sideburns their name. And yes, the overlong jokes were put in by the original actor because his part was too short. Don’t blame playwrights for everything.
Timothy Allsop does his gallant best with this now deeply unpromising comic creation, but is stuck with the sort of jokes which last amused Punch readers well before World War I (Taylor as well as being a West End hit merchant, edited that magazine). And as the dangblastit, hornswoggling, bison-baiting, Grandma’s-slapjacks yee-ha American who horns in on the British toffs and solves their problems, Solomon Mousley is almost enragingly cheeky-charming.
Fine: the Finborough audience likes a bit of living history, and director Lydia Parker clearly made a brave decision not to rescue this hoary lump of Victoriana  by cutting ferociously and playing it double-speed. Rather we learn how it used to be: especially how mutual amusement and suspicion flowed between US and UK in popular culture, before Henry James began laboriously explaining us to one another in the 1880s and, British grandees took to livening up the gene pool by marrying Boston heiresses.

The result finally becomes oddly fascinating in retro charm: a cast of 13 in a stately home deploy a thicket of asides and back-stories, a drunk scene, a couple of songs, a superbly pompous comic butler (Julian Moore-Cook), time-wasting crosstalk and annoying riddles, a missing document, a changed-at-birth story which seems to go away, a problematic will, love at first sight, a scheming mother, a spirited proto-feminist heroine (Kelly Burke) weary of being excluded from the business incompetence of her dim squire Dad. There’s an Irish alcoholic who comes good, and even an adorable milkmaid (Olivia Onyehara).

They all give it admirable wellie, though the one I really fell for is Hannah Britland as the scheming mother’s “delicate” daughter being sold to the tedious old captain: she secretly wants to give up the fashionable invalid role and scoff a plateful of “corned beef and pickles!”. Britland looks uncannily like a young Rebecca Front and has much of that great comedienne’s dry brilliance. Watch this space, she’ll go far. Daniel York is nicely evil as the former charity-boy steward who like a good middle-class schemer has got a mortgage on the estate. And Erika Gundesen, a pale beauty at the piano, plays before, during and after the show original galops and waltzes unearthed from the British Library, with very considerable musical wit.

3 Meece Rating

box office 0844 847 1652 ; Sun-Mon-Tue to 14 April, with matinees.
rating three

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March 27, 2015 · 10:33 am

THE JEW OF MALTA Swan, Stratford upon Avon

THE BOUQUET! IT WAS POISONED!
We are supposed to be thinking about the history of European antisemitism, tracking back to the 16th century when Christopher Marlowe wrote this play ,and the 15th, where he set it. And it’s all here – the ‘blood libel’, the accusations of physical dirtiness combined with greedy wealth, the spitting contempt and – not least – the undercurrent of awareness (Marlowe was no fool) that the thing which most annoyed Christians was that Jews were so damn clever, and that the fear of them was fuelled in a vicious circle by guilt at the violence meted out to them. We all fear the people we maltreat.

Thus our anti-hero Barabas – after the governor of Malta seizes all his property to pay off invading Turks – vows vengeance and runs rings round the ruling élite. He uses his daughter as bait to make suitors kill each other, then when she gets angry and converts he poisons her entire convent with rice-porridge, thus enabling the deathlessly plonking line “All the nuns are dead. Let’s bury them”. Moving on, he murders one friar and frames the other, and poisons his blackmailing servant, a courtesan and a pimp by disguising himself as a pantalooned “French musician” banging incompetently on a lute and giving them a poisoned (albeit fascinatingly slow-acting) posy of flowers to smell. Oh, and he fakes his death, admits the invading Turks through a sewer, gets made governor but burns all their soldiers to death. Which, accidentally, enables the Christian governor to turn the tables and drop him through his own secret trapdoor.

A clever Jew, see? And, as performed by Jasper Britton under the gamesome direction of Justin Audibert (a riproaring RSC directorial debut), disgracefully likeable in a confiding, Richard-III way. When he brags “”I walk abroad a-nights and kill sick people groaning under walls; sometimes I go about and poison wells…” we get a strong sense Barabas is parodying the prejudice he meets, and probably couldn’t be bothered to do any of it. And anything which could be uncomfortable about this cheerily brutal evening – pitched somewhere between farce and mumming-play – is that Christopher Marlowe is disgusted with the Christians too. They’re stupid, cruel, lecherous and as keen on money as anyone. The two friars are greedy, venal and competitive and deserve their fate. Only Abigail, used as a pawn by her father and converting when she grieves her dead lover, is at all decent (Catrin Stewart gives her great dignity and the only depth of feeling in the play). As she expires with “I died a Christian” the friar can only gropingly regret that she died a virgin too.
Audibert is not afraid of incidental comedy : even the bearers removing a corpse do “stone paper scissors” to decide who takes the messy end, and the poisoned nuns, to a background of yearning plainsong, actually foam at the mouth. Lanre Malaolu’s Ithamore , bought in the slave-market by Barabas’, escapes his early degradation to be caperingly wild and deliciously depraved. And there’s even a line prefiguring a centuries-later satire on human behaviour when Barabas says “I am my own best friend”.

Yessir! Marlowe got there before CHICAGO…
box office http://www.rsc.org 0844 800 1110 to 8 sept
RATING four     4 Meece Rating

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March 26, 2015 · 11:19 pm

THREE LIONS St James Theatre SW1

THREE MEN IN A (PROBABLY RIGGED) VOTE…

In 2010, three men came to a Zurich hotel to present (to a scandal-ridden FIFA) Britain’s case for hosting the 2018 World Cup. David Cameron the chirpy new PM was backed by two icons from different strata of British society: David Beckham and Prince William. William Gaminara, alone among playwrights (very slow, TV commissioners..!) saw that this was a gift. In 2013 I loved the result in Edinburgh; now it’s back, in from a pre-London tour (I caught it in Ipswich) just as FIFA stumbles through the fallout of its next bad decision, Qatar.

From my recce in Ipswich I can report that it is still a blissful farce: sly, sharp, its impersonations just the right side of caricature. A sycophantic Indian hotelier pops in and out of the bedroom where the men deliberate; offstage Boris is in the hotel bar and becomes involved in a reported trouser incident. Each of the men repeatedly has his leash jerked as he fields phone calls from home: Beckham being told to hang his clothes up and blag a seat at the coming Royal Wedding, William fending off Kate’s fear that if invited Posh might sing, and Cameron at one point offstage in the hotel bathroom fending off Nick Clegg while the Prince and the footballer earnestly discuss haircare.

The beauty of Gaminara’s approach is that none of them is cast as villain or gratuitously mocked in tedious leftie news-quiz style. This is more P.G.Wodehouse than The Thick Of It, as he plays not unaffectionately with the interaction of three very different Englishmen united in a quixotic, patriotic attempt which we know will fail. Cameron (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) and Beckham (Séan Browne) are not close lookalikes, but rapidly become credible. The PM is jerkily, selfconsciously masterful as he was in his early days in the job, matily trying to get his kids a playdate with Beckham’s (he is caught secretly practising keepy-uppy before the others arrive). Beckham exudes friendly decency and slow-thinking literalness. Tom Davey however is uncannily like Prince William, with beautiful deep rounded royal vowels: his earnest well-bred goodwill leavened with schoolboy practical jokes (the best capped with “it was Dads idea, I promised I’d give it a go” when he pretends to think the meeting is about cricket, and enjoys the polite panic of the others)..

In the first half relationships ebb and flow, sometimes the two Etonians bonding in reminiscence and pedantry, sometimes William and Beckham affronted by the PM’s arrogance. As they return from ‘pre-meetings’ with FIFA grandees each has his weakness revealed, not least a lovable British incompetence at bribery. Ashok the butler does, at times, become a little tedious with his learned verbosity and rather dated Empire-loyalist caricature, but it transpires there’s a reason for that.   The second act becomes nicely farcical, as Cameron imposes the old Tony Blair / Enoch Powell trick of making them all fill their bladders to add urgency to their big presentation. Which, without crudeness, leads up to the classic trouser moments.

So once again I enjoyed it no end. And there’s a joke I didn’t remember from Edinburgh. The daffy intern gushes that Boris Johnson is “cute”. To which the PM replies “Cute is not the word I”d have chosen. Almost, but not quite…”

Yes, think about it. The Ipswich matinee audience got it immediately, the dirty beasts…

box office http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk to 2 May

rating four 4 Meece Rating

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March 24, 2015 · 11:05 pm

RULES FOR LIVING NT Dorfman, SE1

SITCOM DOESN’T QUITE STAND UP

First the good news. If there is an award for best-choreographed food-fight, it’s just been won (take a bow, fight director Kate Waters).  Stephen Mangan leaps on tables with the agility (and the hairdo) of Erroll Flynn, Miles Jupp looks terrific with gravy on his head, John Rogan delivers from a largely wordless wheelchair role some of the best reaction faces this year. Maggie Service has all the fearless absurdity which marks the rising generation of female stand-ups, and Deborah Findlay is, as ever, heroic in suggesting layers of painful character with little to work on.
But that’s it. Out of ten the cast score 8, the play about 3. Sam Holcroft’s blackish comedy of a dysfunctional family Christmas never makes the jump into reality, even with Marianne Elliott as director and a kitchen-diner set so huge and smart that it makes David Cameron’s look poky. The theme is built on an idea behind Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, that people set themselves unachievable “rules” which make them unhappy. Offstage until the end is Emma, 14-year-old suffering from fatigue syndrome and what her fussed, unhappy mother Sheena (Claudie Blakley) calls “negative core beliefs”. She is deemed too poorly to come down to the family meal.
Her father Adam – failed cricketer turned junior solicitor – despises psychobabble and won’t go to couples counselling (Sheena is currently unhappy for the footling reason that he didn’t book a hotel for their anniversary). Brother Matthew is a more successful lawyer, who fancies Sheena but has brought a horribly extrovert actress girlfriend (Service on galumphing form). Mother Edith is under stress, attempting to do a perfect Christmas as her husband Francis is wheeled home with a post-operative stroke. Matthew is trying to diet, Sheena to stop drinking, Adam to give up smoking. None succeed.

Mangan and Jupp almost become credible characters, but Holcroft gives the women no subtleties at all to work on; indeed there’s a formulaic, cardboard case-history quality in all the characterisation. This is not helped by the gimmick of a lighted scoreboard overhead, detailing the “rules” for each character. Once or twice this is funny – Matthew always has to sit down in order to lie, and Carrie can’t stop dancing around telling jokes until someone laughs. But it woefully prevents the actors developing any fluid honest realism.

Just as well one doesn’t care much for any of the characters, because before the big row kicks off (over a complex card game, a clunky metaphor) the second act opens with an uneasily sadistic scene, modishly “dark”, as the younger generation confront the speechless wheelchair father and revert to childhood rivalries. If the best laugh for fifteen minutes is a stroke victim shouting “Fuck off” and groping a breast, you’re in trouble.

Indeed the trouble with the whole play is that until the final food fight it’s not as funny as it needs to be. You can see the jokes coming a mile away, and the one about a clumsy showoff visitor breaking an ornament and being tearfully told “It was my father’s” deserves a geriatric wheelchair of its own.
box office 020 7452 3000 to 8 July
Dorfman Partner – Neptune Investment Management
rating three3 Meece Rating

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March 20, 2015 · 12:03 am

BUYER AND CELLAR Menier, SE1

SUBTERRANEAN STREISAND: SILLY AND SUBLIME
It’s a heady cocktail, the Hollywood Heartbreaker: tartness and syrup,  firewater and froth ,l served in the campest crystal with diamond sparklers.  Heady delusion meets hard dollars, and schmaltzy folksiness erects steel gates against the overpressing adoration of the faithful.  Rarely has this L.A. la-la land been skewered with such loving laughter as in Jonathan Tolins’ one-man play, a fantasy about Barbra Streisand.

That is, about her basement. He read, in her extraordinary vanity coffee table book “My passion for Design”, that as an avid hoarder of costumes, toys, antiques and curios the megastar actually built, in her Malibu basement, a row of old fashioned folksy stores .  He began to wonder how it would be if she employed a floorwalker to play shops with her, down there under the pink (flattering) light whenever she cared to wander down the spiral staircase.
Hence this 100 minute virtuoso piece, hedged carefully around with insistence that – with “a person so famous, talented and litigous” it is definitely all made up. Although apparently acquaintances of the real Streisand have cautiously admitted a certain truthfulness in the characterisation. Who knows? There are strong gates, and she is an actress born…Anyway, its too good a fantasy to spoil, and comes to the glorious Menier (directed by Stephen Brackett) garlanded with off-Broadway awards.

The performer is Michael Urie – known from Ugly Betty – as Alex, an actor sacked from Disneyland (“Mouseschwitz”as embittered ex-employees refer to it ). who takes the weird subterranean job. Urie is ,from the opening moments, an elfin delight: entrancingly entertaining word by word,  and controlledly camp. That control enables him to drop in and out another character, his boyfriend Barry who is thirty degrees queenier and has a typically schizophrenic and terrifyingly well-informed love-hate relationship with the Streisand legend .
Urie also gives us the cynical no-nonsense PA, and Barbra herself . She visits her deranged mini mall, playing improv shopping games with Alex: at this point it gets so funny you can hardly breathe. When he pretends to haggle there is “an almost erotic pleasure in denying this woman something she wants”. Then she begins to seem to show friendship: if it is ever friendship when the deal is so one-sided. Once , she demands that he stay on all evening in case she wants frozen yoghurt from her street’s candy store. Poor as a church-mouse, Alex mentions overtime and the diva cries : “It’s always about dollars and cents..why can’t people CARE as much as I care?” . Ouch.
The trajectory takes the story beyond mere sketch: Alex’s involvement torpedoes his real life by degrees, and ends in a lovely bit of disillusion.  And froth-light as it is, the play gently, affectionately teases out serious themes. It’s about fame, fortune and unbridled acquisition: the terrible glamour of the famous boss who seems for a moment to care, and the gap between rueful strugglers at the base of the showbiz pyramid and lonely deluded billionaires at the top, clinging with absurd pride to the hard-luck legend of their youth. It is about aspiration and perfectionism and the way, as Alex admits, that we are all “struggling to create our own perfect little world” and watching the stars’ lives for “the comfort of the totally impossible”.
But I would hate you to think it’s in any way a sober evening. Never stopped grinning all the way through…
box office 0207 378 1713 to 2 May
rating: four4 Meece Rating

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March 18, 2015 · 11:14 pm

PLAYING FOR TIME Crucible, Sheffield

A GRAVE GRANDEUR, AN UNFORGOTTEN HORROR

Hard to overstate the impact, the sense of event, commemoration and bleak grandeur in this extraordinary evening. There is, in this 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, obvious solemnity in staging Arthur Miller’s “memory play” from the testament of Fania Fénélon. The Parisian chanteuse survived by forced membership of a rag-bag orchestra recruited for the entertainment of the SS officers and, horribly, to march fellow-victims to the gas chambers and pander to Dr Mengele’s experiments on music and insanity.

But add to that a central performance as Fania from Sian Phillips: eighty-one now, a war-baby with early memories of being taken outside at night to watch Swansea burning. We use some words too lightly in the arts, but Phillips’ wholly committed gently controlled performance is a marvel of fearlessness, sorrow and sincerity. It is one of those rare memorable nights when you come to believe you are not watching acting at all, but remembered experience: a necessary ritual.

It is a huge cast: fourteen women and three men, amplified with extras from Sheffield People’s Theatre. So shaven-headed women in rags are herded and surged around the big open theatre, edges of violence being glimpsed – as they were by the appalled, conflicted Fenelon – around a central area where for much of the play the hungry, fearful musicians struggle with ill-assorted instruments under the nervy, disciplinarian Alma Rosé. She was Gustav Mahler’s niece: the Jewess virtuosa violinist who with Fenelon’s orchestrating skills and grainy, Weimar cabaret voice somehow held them together.

Richard Beecham’s direction is supported by extraordinary lighting and design by Richard Howell and Ti Green, creating a darkness visible, a grey despair around the vivid individuals . It is further served by unobtrusively sinister sound design by Melanie Wilson – whistles, thuds, shouts, guard dogs barking, at last the distant artillery . And even more by the musical direction and some lyrics by Sam Kenyon, creating shattering moments. Here are the Commandant and Dr Mengele sitting splay-legged with imperial power, sentimental over the desperate gentleness of the scratch orchestra playing von Suppé, and saying approvingly “it strengthens us for this difficult work of ours” – that is, murdering twelve thousand a day.
At another moment, after playing marches as the prisoners head for the ovens and the smoke rises, Fania must sing Madam Butterfly’s hopeful song about “a thread of smoke rising on the horizon” from the ship bringing back her lover. Congratulated by the Commandant, she bravely denies her stage persona with “My name is not Fenelon. I am Fanny Goldstein”. A terrible silence.
But nothing is milked, nothing is sentimental, and Miller allows rein to the tensions between Jew and Gentile, Pole and French, the Zionist and the racially indifferent, the despairing and the defiant. Nor does he flinch from the brutalities that brutalized people pass on: the Polish women guards shoutingly bully the “Jew shit”. Marianne asks early on: “Why are they doing this? What do they get from it?” Unanswerable.

Sian Phillips is the powerful centre, but around her other performances rise too. Melanie Heslop is Marianne, moving from naive fear to greedy dissolution, whoring herself to the very executioner on the day her friend’s beaten body is left hanging dead in the rain until dark. Amanda Hadingue is stiffly Austrian as Alma, Kate Lynn-Evans is Mandel the officer whose half-humanity becomes, to Fenelon, the “problem”. A problem horribly reflected in her own honest conflict about using her art in collaboration, struggling to hold something back yet survive to testify .
And always the Beethoven and Puccini, the cabaret songs and accordion, remind us that this was Europe, this was recent. That savagery is not something alien and far away, for humanity can go downhill very fast and very far, without losing the superficial trappings of efficiency and aesthetic culture. As Fania says, “The aim is to remember. Everything”.

Box Office 0114 249 6000 http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk to 4 April
Rating five5 Meece Rating

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March 18, 2015 · 11:33 am

REBECCA – a study in Jealousy Richmond Theatre & touring

MANDERLEY AGAIN,  AND VERY WELCOME TOO 

“Last night, I dreamed I went to Manderley again…” The famous opening is spoken from the sea-bed: a dim otherworld where a jointed lifeless body descends from far above, crushed beneath a wrecked boat. Which – as a vast chandelier descends in turn – becomes sometimes a table, sometimes floor, beneath the leprous plaster and high broken banisters of a grand ruined house above. So the set itself is the ghost of Manderley and of the rockbound Cornish bay where the first wife Rebecca met her end. Within this frame, between a dark past and a smouldering end, the story will play out. Fishermen intone the first shanty “Go down, you blood red roses”. Brilliant.
Kneehigh, and Emma Rice’s direction elsewhere, are generally original, quirky, larky, musical, a touch camp, prone to outbreaks of puppetry, but focused on storytelling and above all theatrically atmospheric. This touring production, I am happy to say, is their finest since Brief Encounter . It’s a glorious evening: both faithful to the spirit and shape of Daphne du Maurier’s chronicle of second-wife paranoia and Bluebeard dread, and mischievously subversive of it.

Perhaps the Cornish setting inspired the Truro company even more than usual. In folkish Kneehigh tradition it is interwoven with shanties (and that lovely Wilburn brothers ballad Give Them The Roses Now, sung by Frith the butler to cheer up poor Mrs de Winter after the ball débacle). Cast members casually pick up instruments – bass, banjo, fiddle, accordion – and deftly create interiors with props, often singing in hair-raising harmony. There are tweaks: Rice has made Maxim de Winter’s sister Bea and her husband a pair of rip-roaring, huntin-shootin’-shaggin’-drinkin’ County party-animals, at one point executing a spirited sand-dance routine in Arabic costumes and leading a vo-de-o-do outbreak as an Act 2 opener. Lizzie Winkler and Andy Williams give it their all, to general glee, Winkler seeming to channel a hypermanic Edwina Currie in her prime.

The footman Robert (Katy Owen) becomes an elfin, broadly Welsh lad, tearing cheekily around and, in opening scenes, startlingly discussing his mother’s menopause symptoms over the phone to the lodge-keeper (“bit of a dryness in ‘er tuppence”). She’s very funny too. Danvers – Emily Raymond – is perhaps not quite as terrifying as one would hope, possibly due to modern sympathies towards her plainly lesbian passion: but having her entrances heralded by a flapping puppet cormorant is grand. So is the puppet dog, especially when he greets the terrified new bride with a nose up the crotch.

Not that she is terrified by the end. Imogen Sage is a real find, as tremulous and cotton-frocked and virginal as you could wish, but hardening and sexing-up convincingly when she discovers the truth. It’s a genuinely striking transition. So, in its way, is the decline of Maxim – glorious Tristan Sturrock, who was the original lover in Brief Encounter. He has just the casual, haughty, scornful affability and moody hawkish demeanour of a romantic hero in the 1930’s mould. As they say, you would, wouldn’t you? Even though you’d definitely regret it in the end.

His bride doesn’t: even in the genuinely dark,shivery moment when the corpse is raised and laid to rest amid shifting suspicions. The school parties around us shuddered with pleasure. So did I.
Box office 0844 871 7651 to 21 March

then TOURING    Touring Mouse widenationwide to 19 Sept – Kneehigh tour dates on http://tinyurl.com/lqvo5jo

Rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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March 17, 2015 · 10:48 am

THE HEART OF THINGS Jermyn St Theatre SW1

POST COALITION TRISTIS…
The best line in this rather overstuffed play comes from Keith Parry as Bob, a magnificently slow-thinking lummox. In the corner of a scruffy Norfolk kitchen Bob is the blinking, half-aware witness of an emotional scene in which a drunk, despairing middle-aged English teacher relates a failed proposal, underage sexual blackmail, personal confusion, schoolyard violence and a crashed career . The teacher’s sister and nephew stand transfixed with horror, and in a brief silence bearded Bob surfaces in his corner with: “Ah. All goes on down London, don’ it? Fancy a bit o’toast?”. It’s a beautiful bit of bathos, an unkind reminder of what certain impatient GPs put on patients’ notes – NFN. Normal for Norfolk….

Which is, of course, unfair. But such flippant thoughts do tend to surface during in Giles Cole’s play. His last one here, The Art of Concealment , was an excellent and well-researched biographical imagining of Terence Rattigan (same director, Knight Mantell). But maybe the freedom of pure fiction was a bit too heady this time. For in its two-hours space, and in the trajectory of Peter the teacher (Nick Waring) over his sister Ros’ birthday celebrations, Cole hurls in questions of sexual identity, paternal post-traumatic guilt and contempt (Ralph Watson is a splendidly curmudgeonly old bastard father in a wheelchair), plus potential incest, thwarted ambition, self-publishing, rape, and the question of whether dim Bob will ever finish his model ship after twenty years (it’s a truly terrible prop: the mast is all wrong). Oh, and there’s an advance condemnation of Michael Gove’s education reforms, because the action is set in 2010, during the discussions which formed the present Coalition, and Peter has brought along a fierce Tory PR lady called Jacqui, who he now wants to marry because he’s tired of being gay. But he is really, deep down, longing for his big sister. Frankly, if Peter is on Facebook he’ll need something more comprehensive to post up than “It’s Complicated”.
This overstuffing is a pity; and so is the character of Jacqui, played with a rather retro, overarticulated 1930’s brittleness by Amy Rockson and never allowed to develop into anything beyond a clumsy plot device. On the other hand there are some wonderful performances, especially from Patience Tomlinson as Ros, the countrified sister whose life has been a trap between curmudgeonly father and dim pointless Bob, by whom she has a nice son William . Tomlinson conveys without fuss multiple layers of sadness and warmth and hurt and daily decency, and your heart goes out to her. Ollo Clark too, as William, nicely evokes a generation – one I know well – of citified educated youth emerging, laughing slightly shamefacedly, from dull rural homes and returning with a gentle patronizing kindness. As for Waring as Peter, he does everything possible with his melodramatic unhappiness, confusion, and back-story. But the cast are streets better, and more authentically credible, than the material. It’s always dangerous for a playwright to quote four lines of WH Auden in a scene: reminds you that the rest of the lines are not nearly so good. Except that one of Bob’s. That I treasure.

box office 0207 287 2875 to 4 April

rating three  3 Meece Rating

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March 16, 2015 · 12:01 pm

DIFFERENT BUTTONS Avenue, Ipswich

MEMORIES OF A MADHOUSE

Hard on the heels of her admirable PROGRESS, Joanna Carrick of Red Rose Chain revives (in this elegant new studio theatre) an earlier piece devised as site-specific three years ago for the closing of the old Victorian asylum in Ipswich: St Clements. The sound design, indeed, by Laura Norman, has used recordings made inside that haunting space, in corridors and abandoned wards: the stories threaded through small scenes and monologues reflect reality. And, of course, the history of the great Victorian change, approaching the ‘lunatic paupers of the borough” in a way more humane than the old imprisoning madhouses . Though still, to our modern eye, wincingly difficult to watch.
In a bare but convincing space – old radios, old magazines, hospital chairs – the five cast switch roles . Tom McCarron is sometimes a foul-mouthed inmate but often a doctor, or a Victorian journalist giving his account of the place’s foundation; Herbert Brett and Daniel Abbott as other male inmates, the former rantingly aggressive, the latter curled, terrified, foetal and trembling; Rachael McCormick as an older, longterm female inmate, working as a maid, put in by her father as an uncontrollable “moral imbecile” in 1924. There is – when one has just walked to the Avenue across it – a particular jolt when she remembers being brought across the stone bridge by the station on the day it was opened, amid free and happy crowds: it reminds you of the resonance of this kind of powerfully local theatre.

But at its centre is Lucy Telleck as a modern young woman, seemingly hard-faced , resentful and unhappy, waiting for her appointment and haunted by these ghosts of earlier time. Carrick makes good dramatic use both of contemporary writings on madness, with old obsessions like measuring people’s heads (“Cranium – narrow”) and also of the sad tickbox forms modern depressives are asked to fill in “I am feeling useful / Hopeful / confident – Most of the time / some of the time/ none of the time…” etc: Telleck develops into a powerful emotional presence, both in her modern defiant indignation and in the moments when she regresses into an overwhelmed Victorian mother interned against her will.
The piece does provoke thought: about changing ideas, and the perennial struggle of the “sane “to help or contain “mad”. It pulls no punches about irrationality, persecution mania, violence, the difficulty of comforting the unreachable, and the simple frustration of dealing with the silent, trembling youths played by Abbott (another strong presence). Dramatically, sound and light are strong, and it is a short piece, ninety minutes including interval.

But it is not easy to watch: sometimes you feel like a rubbernecking onlooker in an older Bedlam, and correspondingly uncomfortable. Which, of course, is a tribute to the actors. The interwoven stories do become clearer as time goes on and there is another real emotional jolt at the end when the ghosts bid farewell to the troubled, modern Ruth: “Live without fear, no need for endless grieving.”

Box office http://www.redrosechain.com to 28 march
RATING three 3 Meece Rating

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March 14, 2015 · 10:14 pm

THE CUTTING OF THE CLOTH Southwark Playhouse, SE1

A BESPOKE PREMIERE, TRIBUTE TO A TRADE

1953, a tailors’ basement workshop under Dover Street. Five people work eighty hours a week or longer. Out front, unseen, the smooth cutters and measurers greet bespoke clients; down here the “makers” work. In a set of breathtaking immediacy tools, clutter, and casual expertise come alive. Old Spijak the Pole works cross-legged on his bench as his forefathers did, sewing by hand and despising Eric – faster, earning more – for his sewing machine. Each maker has a “kipper”, a female assistant for cuffs and lowlier “ kipper-work”; Spijak’s is his daughter Sydie, Eric’s is Iris. Maurice, Spijak’s tyrannized new apprentice, spends his lunch-hour in the bare washroom writing a play…

For Michael Hastings – who died only in 2011 – was such a teenage apprentice to his father’s trade, though he became a distinguished Royal Court playwright (famous or TOM AND VIV). This slice-of-life play, never before performed, emerges from that youth. But Two’s Company and director Tricia Thorns love forgotten, truthful testimonies of the past, notably with workplace themes: LONDON WALL brought a 1931 law office alive, WHAT THE WOMEN DID gave us WW1 munitions-girls.

So it seems a period piece, larded with snatches of ‘50s pop and references to clients like Macmillan, Charles Clore and the impresario Henry Sherek, who was so large that at one point Sydie and Maurice stand side-by-side as Eric drapes the basted (tacked) jacket over both. But it bites because then, it was social realism: a portrait of a transitional moment. Spijak , powerfully played in an (at first) improbable accent by Andy de la Tour, is devoted to hand-stitching, persecuting his apprentice (James el-Sharawy) for not sitting cross-legged enough, being left-handed and insufficiently Jewish. His craft has, through disappointments we gradually glimpse, become his obsessive sole pride.

Eric (Paul Rider) is light-footed and brisk (all the cast are uncannily convincing as lifelong craftsmen, trained up by a modern bespoke tailor). He gets his joys rather in the unseen toffs he dresses: at one point, glorilusly, puts on Harold Macmillan’s new jacket and demonstrates how he allowed for the sloping shoulders of the Housing Minister , and how it would work when he was on the grouse-moor, with proudly double-lined pockets to put dead birds in. He dreams of Ascot and the Mirabelle and (with a Hancock echo) is never happier than with a Racing Gazette and “the old Puccini knocking the lid off me gramophone”. The two “kippers” are Alexis Caley as the quietly sceptical Sydie – Spijak’s daughter, taken from school at 14 to replace a mother dead from overwork – and Abigail Thaw, a marvellous drop-dead comedienne as Iris who feeds the pigeons and dreams of the seaside. And, it turns out, of Eric.

At first the wealth of detail – facings, inlays, gorges – and the noisy altercations threaten to lag or mystify; but it becomes absorbing, they become your own workmates in the L-shaped intimate room. Brown parcels of work thud down, chucked from the front office, goose-irons and blocks and half-jackets are nimbly manipulated so that the never-still movement of continuing work beneath every line and silence is masterful. We see regrets and griefs, the decline of Spijak, the progress of Maurice from victim to acolyte and beyond. A theme – unexpected in Hastings’ Angry-Young-Man, Osborne-and-Wesker generation – is how sweated labour in a time of change can be perpetuated by the exploited craftsmen’s own deep pride in expertise, and condemn those who could have escaped or embraced new technology to crippling lives. Spijaks’ father “died on a bench in Warsaw, happy doing what he could do best”.

Neither a sentimental threnody for dying craft or a shout of socialist rage , it is idiosyncratic, human, funny, sad. Near the end switchbacks of comedy surround a private tragedy and twist back to a lesser one. Thorns’ direction and the cast handle this brilliantly.

Box Office 020 7407 0234     http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk    to 4 APril

RATING   four  4 Meece Rating

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March 12, 2015 · 11:01 am

RADIANT VERMIN, Soho Theatre W1

GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI IS CHARMED TWICE OVER

Miss Dee arrives. She’s from the newly-created DSRCDH: “Department for Social Regeneration through the Creation of Dream Homes.” She makes Ollie and Jill an offer which is surely too good to be true: Miss Dee explains it’s a government project inspired by the Amazon jungle plant, “The Shimmering Glimmering Tree”, which looks drab until you polish one berry, at which point, all the berries begin to shine until “the whole tree sparkled like treasure.” To have a free house, all the Swifts have to do is do it up: Jill has excellent taste, Miss Dee notes, and Ollie is a dab hand at DIY.

The dream home in question is a shell: it needs rewiring, has no hot water, and is in a deserted suburban development mainly inhabited by wandering tramps. But Jill and Ollie, with a baby on the way, take the chance. They do renovate the property, to their own astonishment, in a macabre and surreal method in which Ridley’s dark humour begins to wax lyrical. And, sure enough, Gilead Close begins to sparkle as predicted, with aspirational neighbours moving in to take advantage of the property boom, culminating in a shiny new shopping centre round the corner, offering “The Never Enough Shopping Experience: because enough is never enough.”

Radiant Vermin has two strengths. One is its macabre twist, which I won’t spoil for you: but just watch Ridley’s twist grow, strengthen and become ever more prominent, with the characters’ actions becoming ever more hysterical and desperate. While maintaining a tone of cheerful surrealism, Ridley slides in questions about religious hypocrisy, our attitude to the homeless, consumerist greed and neighbourly one-upmanship. You are swept up into the joke: but afterwards, walking away through the streets of Soho with beggars on every side, I felt a kind of horror at the hilarity which only applies to the very best of black humour. You almost can’t believe you laughed at it, but you did.

The second strength is the sheer talent on stage, directed by David Mercatali. Sean Michael Verey begins Ollie as a quiet, ordinary bloke, but steadily builds him into an extraordinarily brilliant character performance, including two hilarious one-man fight scenes, in which he fights his invisible assailant while commentating on and explaining each punch in real time, causing the audience to collapse with laughter. The speed of Ridley’s writing, and Verey’s natural comic instincts, seem made for each other. Gemma Whelan is wonderful as his socially-upward wife Jill, a nice girl who likes to get her own way, cheerfully sacrificing her morals until guilt begins to eat away at her. The play builds to an insane crescendo in the fabulous “Party from hell” scene, which has Whelan and Verey playing no fewer than eight different characters, all with scrupulously distinctive accents, body language and gestures, in bewilderingly rapid exchanges, reducing the audience to helpless, uproarious laughter. Amanda Daniels is bewitching and unsettling as Miss Dee, the devilish Fairy Godmother figure, and heartbreaking as the shattered vagrant Kay.

– Charlotte Valori

Box office: http://sohotheatre.com/whats-on/radiant-vermin/, 020 7478 0100, until 12 April

Rating: five 5 Meece Rating

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March 6, 2015 · 10:21 pm

ANTIGONE Barbican, WC2

ANCIENT GRIEF, A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

There are some trademarks here: shaven heads, bare feet, bleak staging, immense and timeless dooms and subtle, insistent soundscape. Ivo van Hove, the Belgian director from Toneelgroep Amsterdam, stunned us lately with Arthur Miller’s A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, and there is a family resemblance to that “perverse purity” in this Sophoclean tragedy , with Juliette Binoche at its heart striding stark with grief .

It is that quality which van Hove’s production most expresses: the grief of Oedipus’ orphaned daughter, desperate for her dead warring brothers and defiantly burying Polyneikes, the reflected sorrow of her sister, Ismene, at her headlong rush towards death; the grief too of King Kreon, blinded by stubborn realpolitic – “the sacrilege that I called public policy” when his own son and wife sink beneath the same dust. The production is spare, slow-paced, mesmerizing, almost incantatory with Anne Carson’s text and Daniel Freitag’s echoing insistent score: Binoche moves with beautiful, unsettling sorrow: at one point her ritual tending and burying of the brother’s dead body is beyond moving.

Yet it is a difficult tone to sustain for a hundred minutes, especially in the Barbican theatre, a space which somehow always manages to feel both cavernous and claustrophobic. Van Hove’s great View from the Bridge was born in the breathing, warm, organic, almost makeshift atmosphere of the Young Vic: the starkness there was a contrast, not so overpowering. And some may find this re-telling slow, underpowered, perhaps less engaging than Polly Findlay’s recent, more detailed production of Sophocles’ tragedy at the Olivier.

For me, though, it struck home: the way the grief crackled through it, the unemphatic message of the courtiers being in modern business-dress, the casual vernacular chorus acting as advisers and as quietly horrorstruck onlookers, the gentle angry power of Binoche. And, not least, Patrick O’Kane’s strong Kreon and a wonderful Queen Eurydike from Kathryn Pogson. There is a moment when suddenly the dead Antigone strolls to the stage’s edge and delivers lines belonging to the messenger, her accent suddenly a little French for the first time: “Citizens…” she calls us, and the moment feels thrillingly direct. A message from the deep long past, a dead hand reaching out in warning and resignation. “Fortunate, unfortunate..no seer can see what’s ahead”.

box office: barbican.org.uk to 28 March
Then touring Europe; BBC filming it for BBC4 later in the year
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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March 6, 2015 · 10:50 am

THE ARMOUR Langham Hotel, W1

ONE HOTEL, 150 YEARS, THREE PLAYS

Plays in hotel rooms are in vogue: there’s a voyeuristic intimacy and a pleasing sense of dislocation about them. And a grand hotel – the Langham was Europe’s first – is theatre in itself, a marbled set with a large cast. A couple of years ago the Carinthia down by the river offered Mimi Poskitt’s immersive, rather brilliant experience in which every (lone) viewer became a new staff member, hustled about and falling into decades-long time-warps from kitchens to rooftop as the guests’ stories interwove. This is a different approach: less immersive and personal, in which each group of fifteen or so remains an audience not a participator, and moves through three hotel rooms in three eras, tracking moments in its presumed history.

This company, Defibrillator, had a success with Tennessee Williams’ HOTEL PLAYS here, and now the hotel’s Writer in Residence Ben Ellis presents three short two-handed playlets – basement, third floor and seventh floor, directed by James Hillier. The matter of moving us around is untheatrically done (would have been good to have a solemn flunkey with an atmospheric script, perhaps) but the plays are sharply written and – by the end – thoughtful.

At first we are in the basement nightclub, where Hannah Spearritt is a spoilt, self-destructive pop legend tinkling at a keyboard, waiting for the helicopter to take her to the o2 and refusing to go, despite her exasperated manager’s pleas. The clue which links it to the last of the three plays is a historic coat she has stolen from a glass case, and which finally gives her courage. It is the least engaging of the three; but then, 21c arena pop meltdowns are wearily familiar as a theme.

The next play, set in 1973, chimes with my own Langham memories: it was a BBC building in the ‘70s, when its grand-hotel days seemed to be over. I trained there as a studio manager on aged Bakelite desks and loudspeakers the size of wardrobes; as a Today producer we were sometimes – like the continuity announcers – allocated a few hours there overnight, in spartan scruffy rooms with lugubrious lavatories down the corridor. Ellis has had fun trying to reproduce this in room 353 (probably to the present, ultra-glitzy management’s mild horror) where we find Ryvita soundproofing, an old microphone and some polystyrene cups. An American couple are waiting to be interviewed about his docklands containerization plans: we gradually learn that he is a Vietnam veteran, furious at the world, wanting to “rip out the rotten teeth” of the old world with its small cosy lives and found “a new nation coming – the Republic of Capital”. Which has, of course, come to pass. The actual BBC people are represented only by keeping these two waiting while they work out their angsty relationship. This one does catch fire.

Then up to the seventh floor: and Emperor Napoleon III, in exile in 1871 (he did indeed stay here) . He is lit only by candlelight as his Eugenie, in flowing nightdress (a splendid Finty Williams, all loving wifely exasperation), tries to coax him out of his suicidal, end-of-empire gloom. This one is genuinely spooky, full of sadness and an old man’s yearning for the great world of expansion and innovation which is crumbling . There’s a nice digression into the invention of margarine, which indeed Napoleon III did foster, with a prize for anyone creating a butter-substitute). This was the best of the three. So the 90-minute evening is – metaphorically as well as literally – a journey upwards… And then down to the bar again with a 15% food and drink discount for audiences. Because it’s the Langham’s 150th birthday….

  

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box office seetickets.com to 4 April
RATING three 3 Meece Rating

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March 4, 2015 · 11:03 pm

GAME Almeida, N1

GAMES WE NEARLY PLAY

It’s the Almeida, Jim, but not as we know it. Hunched on benches in four uneasily intimate soundproofed zones padded with camouflage-print, summoned by a robotic voice and issued with headphones, we watch screens . Then blinds lift and we peer into a real flat where a young couple are exclaiming over the induction hob, the hot tub, the longed-for private space.

Except that it isn’t. The screens show in grainy monochrome a crowded observation space in the flat\s walls, where a Warden admits punters and issues rifles . In detailed CCTV we too see the flat from various angles, always with each sniper’s crosshairs. The residents have got the flat in exchange for being shot repeatedly with tranquillizer darts as they go about daily life. As the horrible boss (Daniel Cerquiera) says to the warden in charge (played with skilful low-key decency by Kevin Harvey) “they’re adults, they’re no’ stupid, they knew what this was”.

And we on our benches, darting our eyes from screen to reality, are complicit. Hard to know whether it is worse to find yourself watching the lovemaking (for it is love, for the young couple, even if just barea-rse ludicrous sex to the voyeurs) or spying on domestic life: hoovering, eating, coming home from another failed job interview…

You can’t fault Mike Bartlett for diversity: fresh from his caricaturish King Charles III he’s back at the Almeida with this hour-long, intense and angrily dystopian show whose themes – picked up artfully in the programme collage – are many. The desperation of young couples for homes and work, the Big Brother culture, pornified sex, TV’s rubberneck interest in poverty, violent screen games, the tendency of showbiz to go a bit further every year, the and the way the ghastly Hollywood glamour of the sniper is irresistible to a soft-living discontented society. Too much? Not really. This deft, brief, unnerving show brings them all together in a “Game” which – at least in the moment – feels real and imminent.

Jodie McNee and Mike Noble play the workless couple, trying for a decent life and a baby. The first time we see them shot we are not yet aware that they will recover. Horribly, the wearying repetition of their collapses continues until it begins to bore the punters and they want more: the extra frisson of shooting their seven-year-old child. He at first is scared, then withdrawn, ironically immersing himself in a violent video game and hiding in cardboard boxes, alienated and ruined. The boss on the screen, his business model fading under pressure of imitators, snarls that it would be better to “make them actually suffer – if this was Holland we could do euthanasia!”.

As the young pair suffer the humiliating price of a home, we see and hear the punters above. The strength of the piece is that it is not cheap agitprop – posh rich people shooting the homeless poor. It’s modern everyman; lads tittering as they aim at the naked girl in the bath, a shrieky hen-party, a bickering middle-aged well-spoken couple, and best (well, worst) of all, a primary schoolteacher relishing the chance to shoot little Liam. So we’re all complicit: even if we don’t yet shoot at the vulnerable, we stare at them through the one-way mirror of the telly and the tabloids. And it corrupts. The last moments of the Warden make that clear, as does the child’s blank-eyed obedience. Nothing physically gruesome: just morally. It’s shock treatment, but Bartlett’s j’accuse says necessary things.

box office 0207 359 4404 to 4 April Partner: Aspen
rating: four
4 Meece Rating

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March 1, 2015 · 1:33 pm

MY MOTHER SAYS I NEVER SHOULD Chipping Norton Theatre

MOTHERHOOD, SECRETS AND LIES

Neatly in time for International Women’s Day and the celebratory WOW-ings on the South Bank, John Terry has had Chipping Norton’s gorgeous galleried interior temporarily reconfigured in the round for a 30th anniversary revival of Charlotte Keatley’s modern classic. Tracking four generations of 20c women from the 1930’s to the late 1980’s, it’s a lovely intimate staging: birdsong and washing-lines and moody piano, and deft unfussy costume-changes as the four actresses dodge around the decades, backwards and forwards. And, occasionally, step out of time to become their child selves – as if they were contemporaries, little girls playing in a ‘waste ground’.

A device which, for a good while, I couldn’t quite bond with: it felt too self-consciously theatrical, and the actual narrative is so strong that at times the brief interruptions can irritate. But looking back, the device has its reasons; not least because the little girls are not sugar and spice but realistically crude and credible, well into mutual blackmail, play-violent fantasies and amateur witchcraft. Maybe it’s a necessary grit to keep the tale from soapiness.

Sue McCormick is a splendid, majestic big Doris as the grandmother, in brisk middle-age as a wartime mother and formidably amiable when in later years she reflects on as ixty-year marriage in which “we never liked each other much” and on the way that “When you’re old and you’re rude they think you’re losing their mind. They never know it’s anger!”. Zara Ramm is her daughter Margaret, growing up proudly postwar to expect to work, but finding only secretarial obedience and compromise. Her own daughter Jackie (Jessica Guise) is a sixties kid demanding more and getting it, but still unable to handle single motherhood and reluctantly handing over her baby to Margaret, with the hateful convention of the day which made her a pretend “big sister”.

Both are delicate, touching, subtle performances, treating the difference of age and era adeptly. The hardest job perhaps goes to Charlotte Croft as Rosie, because we see her only between the ages of ten and sixteen, largely bratty and eventually unforgiving of her real mother. Despite the older women’s vast obvious affection she has a hard time being likeable. But it’s a lively performance, and maybe the obnoxiousness is necessary for credibility. Anyway, altogether this absorbing evening captures perfectly many things most women will recognize; the half-needy, half-resentful maternal bond, the preciousness of objects and ideas handed down, the bafflement of each generation at the next one’s freedoms. And the moment of the rabbit-decorated baby dress is electric: a dangerous secret hovering behind a domestic banality. Wonderfully played.

box office 01609 642350 to 11 March
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 26, 2015 · 12:23 am

MAN AND SUPERMAN Lyttelton, SE1

BRAVADO, BRIGANDS, FABIANS, LIFE-FORCES…..

It is a truth universally acknowledged that George Bernard Shaw was a bit of a windbag. At no point did the words “Less is more”, or “Show don’t tell” impinge on his exuberant, contrarian torrents of prose, famously difficult for actors to learn and deliver at a speed necessary to get everyone home before dawn. Of his joyfully verbose oeuvre no play beats the sheer size of this five-act marathon, even though sometimes it is played without the prolonged dream-sequence. In which the main protagonist, during a restless night on a bare mountain with brigands, turns into Don Juan in hell and argues with Lucifer about everything, including the life-force which drives men towards enslavement by women and the mystery of unique self-aware consciousness in the human animal (yes indeed: GBS was fretting about The Hard Problem a full century before Tom Stoppard’s adventure in neuroscience, running in the Dorfman next door).

Fortunately, it is also true that the National Theatre has the capability to throw at this huge, sprawling, talky-talk play everything it needs to make a night of it. Not only the peerless and apparently indefatigable Ralph Fiennes as Tanner, the revolutionary anarchist intellectual perma-talker and reluctant guardian of Ann (a sparky, spiky Indira Varna) who is determined to marry him. We also get a nice Desert Island Discs joke to start with, and a glorious design by Christopher Oram, with library, carriage-yard, functioning car, craggy mountain and Spanish bower garden all framed in misty panes, behind which play vague cloudy symbols of whatever it’s all about at any particular moment. They also make a nicely blank scene in Hell for the Don-Juan interlude, though in preview it is rumoured that Satan’s cocktail-shaker table came up through the trapdoor with a bit of a crash. No probs on press night.

Director Simon Godwin also cannily gives us modern dress and a few verbal updates, and accords free, not to say licentious, comic rein to Tim McMullan as the depressed lovesick mountain brigand chief and a hyper-cool Satan in skinny jeans. McMullan is hilarious in both roles, making the most of Shaw’s ferocious playfulness to the point when – as he reminisces in a heavy Spanish accent about being a Jewish waiter at the Savoy and tearfully reads out his poetry – you start to reflect that Monty Python’s Flying Circus was not really doing anything that hadn’t been done in 1905.

Not that we’re supposed to be reflecting on any such thing, but on the multiple philosophical-biological-mystical-socialist points which Shaw is machine-gunning us with via the astonishing Fiennes, with dashes of Nietzsche, streaks of idealism, gobbets of cynicism, grumpy political paradox and some bafflingly upside-down feminism laced with memories of Much Ado as our Beatrice and Benedick finally – after three and a half rattling hours – fall into one another’s arms, cursing.

There you are. Brilliantly done, keeping us entertained against (frankly) considerable odds. Fiennes is a marvel. So is McMullan, and Nicholas le Prevost as Ramsden . I leave you though, in this election season, with a nice line from Lucifer. “Englishmen will never be slaves. They are free to do everything that the Government and Public Opinion allow them to”.

From a somewhat rowdy post-football 2339 train towards Manningtree, good night.

Box Office 020 7452 3000 in rep to 17 May . Pretty sold out BUT –
NT LIVE in cinemas nationwide on 14 May http://www.ntlive.com


Rating Four 4 Meece Rating

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February 24, 2015 · 10:43 pm

KILL ME NOW Park Theatre

GRIMLY COMIC, NOBLY TOUGH

For a young actor to play a severely disabled, facially twisted, speech-impaired young man in an electric wheelchair cannot – in this week of Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar – fail to evoke comparisons. Here, close up for a hundred emotionally and physically gruelling minutes, Oliver Gomm delivers the performance of his life. In movement, face, and urgent distorted voice he is – I mean this as high praise – every bit as unsettling as the real thing. Which means that he evokes in us “normal” onlookers, unless we are practised carers, an authentic degree of pity, unease, and awkwardness. Until (again as in real life) we grow to know and like the determined inhabitant of that body. We see him first naked, lifted from his bath slippery and jerking and swearing, an angry teenager newly sexual and despairing at his lot. By the end Joey is the wisest of them all: no angel indeed but shiningly human.

In Canadian Brad Fraser’s tough, unnerving play Gomm is Joey, who is looked after by his widowed father Jake , once a writer, with assistance from his aunt Twyla (Charlotte Harwood), the younger sister Jake raised after their mother died. Greg Wise, back onstage after a long gap, puts heart and anger and warm furious truth into the role: he makes it clear that Jake has come to think himself irreplaceable, too lovingly controlling and immersed: “I have a severely disabled son; I have no self”.

Interaction between the father and son is wrenchingly real, both in affection and anger. Not least as Jake (who is carrying on a relief affair every Tuesday with married Robyn) has to assuage the boy’s desperate erections. An easier relationship is of Joey with a schoolmate Rowdy, a cheeky, sexually adventurous “retarded” victim of foetal alcohol syndrome. He is entertainingly and authentically played by Jack McMullen, at first as an irresponsible nuisance obsessed with online porn, gradually emerging into decency as he becomes useful to the household “smelling of piss and despair”. He has to be useful because – Fraser really piles it on here – Jake himself has a fall and is succumbs to a spinal neurological condition which rapidly reduces him to a state only slightly less crippled than his son. Thus Greg Wise, like Gomm, has to perform a physically intense and agonizing change of shape and movement.

Do I make it sound unremittingly hellish? Not at all. Just over an hour in I did wonder whether the author – and director Braham Murray – were going to run into the sand, but despite a slight sag as more sexual issues are played out, they never do. Partly because Brad Fraser gives Joey sudden fabulous one-liners, which Gomm gloriously shouts, reducing the surrounding audience to uncontrollable laughter. He is every angry teenager and emerging bright young man, an essence concentrated by his entrapment in a jerking body which can’t even masturbate. The irrepressible and kindly Rowdy fixes him up, and strikes up an even more “inappropriate” arrangement with Aunt Twyla. (“Mildly retarded and well hung. Few can resist” he says smugly, causing another explosion of shocked mirth).

It is brilliantly shocking, yet deeply kind: lurching through the worst vicissitudes of unlucky lives towards a tragic but redemptive ending. For retarded or not, Rowdy’s right: you gotta fight, because nobody else will. Though I did reflect that if the play was British, its humanity would be diluted with political ranting against benefit cuts. Oddly, the fact that it isn’t makes you all the more inclined to rant against them yourself. Such people deserve everything.

box office 0207 8706876 to 29 March
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 24, 2015 · 9:29 am

OKLAHOMA! Royal and Derngate, Northampton and TOURING

KI YIP I YAY

It’s back. Again. But worth the buggy-ride: brightly directed by Rachel Kavanaugh and choreographed by Drew McOnie with athleticism, wit and inventiveness: ballet, ragtime and brawling naturalism (no tap this time) makes that element so striking that some of the London dance critics would do well to stir out of town and have a look.
The casting is a delight. The first few sung words are from offstage – Oh what a beautiful morning! – and when he appears against the sunrise gap in Francis O’Connor’s barn set, Ashley Day sure is the purdiest chap ever to wear leather chaps. Sings like a lark, insouciant and relaxed, as Laurey, (Charlotte Wakefield), stumps around in a fierce divided-skirt, her pure high soprano adding innocence to her tomboy mien. And we’re away.

The septuagenarian Rodgers and Hammerstein blockbuster itself is almost too familiar for comfort. In any revival, the first act must navigate round the perilous fact that every single tune – they come so thick and fast that there is barely time for a few sentences between numbers – is achingly familiar from Radio 2’s more vintage moments, not to mention lift muzak and call-waiting . So the moment Laurie and Curley swing into “People will say we’re in love” your attention threatens to wander, however good they are. A period of aw-shucks good natured Old West hokum is of course necessary, and Belinda Lang’s robust, sharp-edged Aunt Ellen is a joy to watch, efficiently tubbing and mangling an entire household wash in scene one. Lucy May Barker’s Ado Annie shakes it up nicely too with her I Cain’t say no: here’s a deeply engaging comedienne, who even vouchsafes us a flash of her robust pioneer panties beneath the froth of gingham petticoat.

But the teasing merriment of the first fifty minutes is needed to make the contrast with this show’s – always oddly unexpected – darkening as Curly beards the lonely hired man Jud in his hovel lined with dirty pictures and teases him that he should hang himself to get any sympathy.

I have seen this scene done with ironic lightness, which the lyrics certainly permit (“laid to rest, his hands upon his chest, his fingernails have never been so clean” etc). But Kavanaugh allows its full perplexing nastiness, and Nic Greenshields as Jud Fry is a remarkable presence; immense next to the elfin Ashley Day, stooping, black-bearded and threatening (among his last few parts I see are Big Jule, Big Davy, Big Mac and The Beast. Casting directors look up nervously, sigh with relief and tick the Big Bastard box). But he is more than a hunk: Greenshields anchors the conflict of the plot. His immense baritone is reverberating and dark, his despairing solo of murderous loneliness and desire chills, threat and pathos mingling unnervingly. As for the dream ballet in which Laurey’s unspoken fears of rape are wordlessly enacted, McOnie and Kavanaugh move the mood startlingly from athletic, ingenious cowboy fun with cylindrical straw-bales to an explicit terror of depravity and violated innocence. Charlotte Wakefield throws herself into this with real power.

In fact, for all the hokey, it is tougher than the last West End version. But the wit keeps it rattling irresistibly along with a fringe on top, never slackening pace. Ki-yip-i-yay, Oklahoma, OK! And much as I love the West End, as seat prices there go stratospheric it is good that classic musicals with top production values, big casts and solid live bands (note also Sheffield’s fabulous Anything Goes) are richocheting gaily round the regions to be seen by anyone who can raise as little as £ 16.

BOX OFFICE 01604 624811 http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk to Saturday 28 Feb
then TOURING to 8 August, Wolverhampton next!
rating four 4 Meece Rating

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February 24, 2015 · 9:11 am

CLOSER DONMAR WC2


NEW-GENERATION GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES UNIMPRESSED BY MARBER REVIVAL

There were a lot of jokes about strippers’ arseholes. 

Almost entirely for the joy of saying ‘strippers’ arseholes’. Was that funny in 1997? Half the audience seemed to remember why. But, like so much of this play, 2015 eyes were left dry and weary.  Who speaks to people on chat rooms anymore, who finds a Newton’s cradle novel and full of metaphor? Patrick Marber’s play does. It is absorbed, dated and unaware, throwing out some nice threads but only stitching a few together in the final scene. 

Four people, connected by a mix of the most contrived and fun circumstances (car accident and chat room misunderstanding, photo shoot and photo exhibition) end up shagging in almost every combination. Ill-feelings ensue and partners are swapped, worried over and returned with no delay.  A prude would take against this play for the smut, but frankly in this day and age any reasonable citizen would, purely for the unoriginality. At points it was just the exorcising of Marber’s wankmares… Rufus Sewell’s character launching into a debate with a stripper about the morals of strip clubs whilst she writhes around on a bed in front of him, twenties-a-plenties stuffed in her garter. 

And? We’ve done that. Who cares? We’ve landed on the moon, we’re past CDs, we know stripclubs aren’t as interesting as 1997 thought they were. But despite this, and the roll-of-the-dice way each scene threw up a change of heart for one of the characters’ lovelife, it did have laughs. Aside from old men wheezing at “c***s” and “whores”, there were flashes of quips which eased along quite an indulgent plot. 

Nancy Carroll, essentially the most adult (age-wise) of the foursome, offered a more considered character, nicely rounding Anna off as almost believable. This despite Rufus Sewell’s childish gurns, the talented Oliver Chris’ constant exasperations and the bland Rachel Redford’s best efforts. There was no point of connection with these people, they were ludicrous. 

In direction (by David Leveaux) the play was slick, with nicely punctuated scenes. The set assisted this, but did little more; a bare brick, crisply lit grey space with wheely furniture and a strip block of light which teased its way across the stage whenever it could.

  The play worked as a series of conversations, but unoriginal ones barely linked. Glib ponderings on time, writing (oh god, writing) and love were trotted out one by one, but few stuck around for a proper grilling.  The biggest, heartiest, wheeziest laugh of the night, went to someone hurling the insult “you – writer!”. Case closed.  

Box Office: 0844 871 7624 TO 4 APRIL
Supported by The Ruddock Foundation for the Arts and Barclays.
Rating: two 2 meece rating

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February 22, 2015 · 9:16 pm

FARINELLI AND THE KING Sam Wanamaker playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe

MONARCHY, MADNESS, MUSIC

Philip of Spain, grandson of Louise XIV and captive of 18c monarchic rigidity, is lying on his bed , fishing in a goldfish-bowl and announcing that it is all a dream. When his anxious queen Isabella (Melody Grove, moving both in affection and despair) coaxes him, he petulantly addresses the goldfish and throws the water at her candle shouting “Fire!”. Wilful eccentricity: petulant, childish denial. This is not the manically humble derangement of the last stage mad-king, Alan Bennett’s George III. For Philip, as the singer Farinelli later says “His madness was a kind of sorrow”.

To be credible, even lovable while portraying self-destructive depression shading to violence you need a special actor. Clare van Kampen has – for this her first play – the very special Mark Rylance. His strange openness and mournful mischief are familiar as Thomas Cromwell on TV, but onstage he is an even stranger marvel: hardly acting, rather seeming to endure some profound, cost-bearing inner event in each performance and not minding that we watch. He seems half-clown half-angel, those comic slanted eyebrows over a face oversensitive, visionary, quivering with the griefs of eternity and the music of the spheres.

Well, it gets you writing like that. Sorry. This extraordinary, heart-shivering two-hour adventure in the little Jacobean playhouse combines three of the most powerful emotional triggers in theatre: candlelight, Rylance, and Handel arias sung by Iestyn Davies. It is the trues story of King Philip’s depression, and how the only thing which made him almost sane was the voice of the great castrato singer, who in the manner of the day was brutally unmanned at ten years old to retain a “birdlike, unimaginable” high voice (here Davies’ unearthly flutelike counter-tenor).

We hear the same arias Philip would have known, and Van Kampen’s script and John Dove’s direction place them with the care of a master-jeweller setting fine stones. Each ones feels both necessary and astonishing, as it did to Philip himself. Sam Crane plays Farinelli; Davies appears alongside, in identical clothes, to sing. That could be distracting: but in evvect the subtle body language between the two men conveys another emotional message of the play – that great artists sometimes feel in awe of their own talent, afraid that like a magical pet it might desert them. In the final moment, in the singer’s old age, his avatar is not dressed like him, but in the bright brocade of his youth. Leaving, the tenor leaves puts a pitying, loving hand on the reclusive old man’s shoulder.

Beyond the intensely redemptive moments of song, it is a play painfully perceptive about depression : Philip’s initial “I lack for what I need. There is no song here” makes Isabella go to Vienna to recruit the singer. As he becomes more himself, he bossily decamps with wife and Farinelli to a forest to harmonize with the stars, the “ music of the spheres” . And when Farinelli tries to escape this captivity, he turns on his wife with shocking brutality and deploys a combination of threat and sulk and needy paranoia utterly authentic for anyone dealing with a half-cured serious depressive. “I don’t love you” he snarls at Farinelli “I just need you to sing”.

Have I conveyed the fact that it is often funny? Maybe not. But the courtier (Edward Peel ) frustrated by the King’s ineffectiveness, and the singer’s agent (Colin Hurley) have great moments . And van Kampen – like April de Angelis in FANNY HILL at Bristol last week – has a sly knack of keeping it credible yet throwing in moments of modern slang to prevent any sense of wearying 18c pastiche.

box office 020 7902 1400 to 7 march
rating five
5 Meece Rating

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February 20, 2015 · 9:37 am

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FANNY HILL Bristol Old Vic

FIFTY SHADES OF FANNY

A crane, giant crates. Foggy docklands, two hundred years ago. Foppishly approving Britain’s mercantile culture, Voltaire coos “You are so moderne!” Up pops Caroline Quentin, a Fanny Hill past her best and on her uppers, offering to scratch his itch. The Frenchman flees. She grumbles that customers are getting fussy (“You don’t need teeth to -“). Thus we are launched into April de Angelis’ unexpected version of John Cleland’s 1748 fictional memoir of “A Woman Of Pleasure”, directed with elegant mischievous glee by Michael Oakley.

What does a modern woman and innovative theatre want with this notorious 18c porn? The ultimate male fantasy of a tart besotted with her “amorous adventures”?  In an age of even more vicious commodification of women’s bodies, what can it give us? Absolute f——ing delight, thats what. Here’s a nonpareil of subtle feminism, a humane revisionism of pornified sexual politics. It is so rich in womanly scornfulness that at times I feared for the men at the matinee, surrounded by female hilarity.  Certainly the most raunchy depiction of a rampant phallus is given to a female forearm with a stocking on it, filched from the cowering bare leg of the nearest bloke.
     

De Angelis’ structure has old Fanny accosted by Spark, a Cleland figure (Mawgan Gyles) , who reckons there’s money in a book. But Fanny can remember little beyond “a blur of bedpans and blokes buttoning up”. So she recruits two younger tarts, the cynical Louisa (Phoebe Thomas ) and the demure little Swallow (a fabulous breakthrough by young Gwyneth Keyworth) . They act out her fantasy story, assisted by the mercilessly bulled Mr Dingle (Nick Barber), who is hanging round the docks after losing his money in shipping. Barber, who plays a series of clients, deserves a prize for willing abasement: the urgent absurdity of male desire has rarely been so pitilessly evoked.

So as Quentin scribbles, directs and plays various Madams, Swallow romanticizes and Louisa wearily cooperates. It is very, very funny at times: the author gleefully expands on Cleland’s terrible euphemisms for body parts – the “Sweet seat of exquisite sensation” having “sparks of desire tossed onto its kindling” as it accepts the “beloved guest, the love-truncheon, the Essential Specific” . There are assorted absurd alliterations of erotic execution (dammit, it’s catching). For as Fanny herself says exapseratedly of her ‘mincing metaphors” , repetition is inevitable. “Words like joys, ardour, ecstasies, flatten like an old mattress”.

Any fear that the play would do the same is unfounded. Hilarious as it is  to see Quentin deploying matter-of-fact matronliness as she ducks and dives round the edges of acceptability and makes the guys wriggle, the play is threaded through with solid sadness, thanks to Rosalind Steele’s onstage fiddle and pipe and the cast’s breaks into broadsheet ballads. And in the second act, after a remarkably choreographed marching-chanting-heaving orgy, the exploitative male ‘author’ reappears to meet the darker eroticism of Quentin going at him with a rope and stick and real anger. And when both her girl-puppets refuse to cooperate in the fantasy of the happy hooker , up come the real unmentionables. Rural starvation driving girls to city streets, pox, infanticide, hangings. And what seemed a retro romp delivers, sharply, the most topical of messages to our own trafficking, twerking, phone-porn century. Women are not toys for sale.

box office 0117 987 7877 bristololdvic.org.uk to 7 March
rating: four 4 Meece Rating

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February 18, 2015 · 4:47 pm

BRITAIN’S BEST RECRUITING SERGEANT Unicorn, SE1

MERRIMENT , MUSIC HALL, AND WAR

A while ago I wrote – see http://tinyurl.com/q53tp5p – about how well and honestly fringe and mainstream theatre had evoked the popular first world war experience, without mawkishness or grandeur. Now children’s theatre has a go, and I had a slight qualm about the subject. For Vesta Tilley, male-impersonating star of the music hall, was indeed a powerful recruiter of cannon-fodder in the early gung-ho days of 1914 and 15. You could take the King’s shilling in the very stalls. How honest could they be about what happened to those lads? And about how that artiste might have felt?

It works better than expected. A fragment of Iraq-war bulletin at the start – almost unheard amid the jangling piano tunes – reminds us that modern 8-year-olds (t recommended lower age) hear the news: wars and rumours of war are part of their awareness. Many came to see the poppies at the Tower. They have been made to know. But they also are at home with the idea of a determined child star (Tilley was four when she went on the halls, and drove her own career with fierce intention). And role models are hardly alien to them, twerking away to Rihanna. So this story, unfolding in straightforward language by Joy Wilkinson and directed by Lee Lyford, held for an hour a half-term matinee (some younger than 8). The children were visibly rapt; and only as distressed as any theatregoer must be, when the tale darkens.

Emily Wachter plays the child Tilley, one of twelve, a bossy tomboy diva emulating her father (Tom Espiner) with his raucous songs and “tramp’ persona, and deciding at the age of nine that it would be a better act if she dressed as a boy. Her first response to the war, later on, is interestingly done: “I can’t take the mickey out of young men now!” . So is the ambiguity of her part-idealistic, largely opportunisitc realization that marching around with a Lee-Enfield as a hero will not only please the War Office (short of soldiers) but keep her a star.

The four cast are nimble and versatile. `Mia Soteriu plays Vesta’s older self, sometimes narrating and at the very end telling how the story ended: in retirement, charity work, and a lifelong unease about the part she played. ‘It’s not my fault!” says young Vesta. And a technical coup de theatre at the end had the children gasping. It’s a simple piece, but it does as much in an hour as many longer ones.

box office 0207 645 0560 http://www.unicorntheatre.com to 15 March

Rating: three 3 Meece Rating

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