June 11, 2015 · 9:18 am

THE RED LION NT Dorfman, SE1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES SAYS “BACK OF THE NET, MARBER!”

“This isn’t a church, it’s a ‘business!” What a sentiment for a theatre crowd to hear – or indeed anyone with an art, talent or craft within fifty paces of a cash register.
Back after nearly a decade in the dark, the writer Patrick Marber has mustered a slick three-hander. I am someone who actively takes against football. It’s a bloated beast which long trained its eye on the dosh, and has legions of devotees to do the explaining and the covering up for it. This play movingly demonstrates the dedication, and the devastation. All-consuming fandom and those riding it for every penny.

This is a desperate group of lonely men, just wanting to belong. Kidd (Daniel Mays) is the manager of a low-level but quietly well-performing team. He sees himself on the rise. “I’ll kick a puppy” if it will get him his way. Yates (Peter Wright), a former player – old, beaten and washed up – is washing kits.  His devotion for the club runs upsettingly deep. Stirring passions in the latter, and dollar signs in the former, is Jordan (Calvin Demba), a young player with skills too good to be true.

Above all this is a crisp piece of work: a freshly sanded, neatly varnished piece of craft. The set is nicely detailed, the lighting is warm and rose tinted . Director Ian Rickson has marshalled a punchy and funny winner.
With the crushing wit and bouncily intelligent dialogue of Marber in his mouth Daniel Mays scores yet another triumph. As Kidd he masters a confluence of sheer panic and fuck ’em nonchalance , cocky swagger and depressed paranoia. As the play moves, you feel the terrifying precipice this desperate man stands on as deals collapse and plans fail.
Peter Wright is peacefully simple but quietly brilliant at the other end of the spectrum. Where Mays’ character gives us a running rage, Wright is given only one outrage. The rest is calm tragic loyalty, Mays is struggling on the first rung of the ladder out of the club, Wright clinging on stoically as it sinks.
Their hopes and overdrafts are on Demba, as Jordan. Despite only 2 previous theatre credits he holds his own, painting confusion, principle, and the crushing weight of all their hopes.

Marber’s dialogue has a toe-tapping, thigh-slapping, lyrical majesty; the plot, slow at first, is crushingly tragic. Football – “It’s the Wild West out here”.
Box Office: 020 7452 3000 to 30 Sept
rating: five     5 Meece Rating

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June 9, 2015 · 11:03 pm

THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD Brunel Tunnel Shaft, SE16

FROCK-COATS AND FLOODS, TUNNELS AND THE THAMES 
In the week that Crossrail tunnellers broke through beneath London, a city and river now criss-crossed with subterranean thoroughfares, how better to celebrate than to creep through a low, narrow bricky shaft , and climb fifty feet below Shoreditch into an echoing Victorian vault?
Especially if down there you find the year 1827, union jack bunting, candlelight warming leprous bricky walls, two pacing men in frock-coats lighting cigars and worrying, and a voice intoning Thomas Hood’s mocking ode to Marc Brunel, father of Isambard:
“How prospers now thy mighty undertaking, to join by a hollow way the Bankside friends of Rotherhithe, and Wapping?” asks the poet, aware of the recent floods which stopped work. “ Poking, groping, making an archway underneath the Dabs and Gudgeons…to walk under steamboats…”
It’s the ultimate site-specific theatre: for we are sitting in Brunel’s Thames Tunnel Shaft, which began the world’s first ever carriageway tunnel beneath a navigable river. It was sorely needed, the Thames being chock-full of busy shipping under sail; another bridge would have interfered badly with that, and ferry crossings were slow and disruptive on the tideway. So Marc Brunel, French-born refugee from the Revolution, began the project and his son Isambard, who became far greater, came to work as resident engineer.

Before us is young Isambard aged 21, already dreaming of the great bridges and railways and ships he will one day create alone, but dutiful in his painstaking supervision of the clay, the piles, the tunnel-shield and the labouring men, often sleeping below ground. With him his irascible mentor-father : lame, curmudgeonly and short-tempered, veteran of a debtor’s prison (his engineering brilliance not matched by business acumen) and resenting the young man’s confidence. Their tunnel is halfway, 549 feet and a recent flood repaired, but the backers and bankers are nervous, rival engineers“circling like sharks. So tonight there is to be a banquet underground to persuade them to keep on.
Nick Harrison’s play, directed by Martin Parr, is little more than an hour, and broken by an interval; slight enough but magnified by its setting, and the sense of wonder and gratitude which the name Brunel (especially the younger) brings to those of us who travel nightly through Paddington and often to the deep west. Drama is provided by their interaction, and atmosphere by the setting and sound – a distant band, cheering, rumbling (Yvonne Gilbert’s sound design). The two performers are strongly drawn: Peter Harding gives the father an arrogant curmudgeonly foul-mouthed impatience, and the very likeable Ben Eagle makes young Isambard a grave, dutiful, sturdily handsome youth with the edge of youthful unease that first apprehends a revered father’s flaws, and nerves himself to defiance. References surface to his over-studious childhood and the terror of his parents’ three-month imprisonment when he was fifteen; at one point the pair actually grapple physically in their mutual frustration at one another and the flood-ridden, imperilled task before them.

By the second half, there is a kind of reconciliation as the pair work through the seating-plan for the underground banquet: it could be any modern fundraiser, as they calculate where most advantageously to seat the “Iron Duke” of Wellington, who backed them all the way. And at last – though we may know that a year later another flood stops it again and injures the young man – there is hope again. And the brass quartet descend from the scaffolding ladders overhead and play. And speaking as a sucker for engineers, pioneers, Victorians and hope, I have to say that once you give me a tuba reflecting candlelight and blasting out the opening bars of Judas Maccabeus ten feet away from me in an ancient brick tunnel-shaft, I’m generally pretty happy.
8 – 14 June 7.30pm plus 3pm matinees on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday    3 Meece Rating
Tickets: £20
http://www.wegottickets.com/eighthwonderoftheworld

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June 9, 2015 · 8:56 am

BETA TESTING Udderbelly at the South BAnk SE1

THROW IT UP, KEEP IT MOVING,  THAT’S LIFE…

With August looming over the horizon, there comes a time when the critic needs to harden up, sit on some prickly astroturf leaning on a dustbin, eating a falafal wrap and staring up forebodingly at an enormous upturned purple inflatable cow. Just to remember that it’ll soon be time to brace up for the Fringe. Luckily, London has its own Udderbelly season now, with every kind of oddity and adventure and showoff and physical-theatre explosion. So down I went to see the Circus Geeks explain the nature and psychology of juggling.
And so they do. This hour-long session is an oddity, even amid the circus-variety-standup Udderbelly world, because Matt Pang, Aaron Sparks and Jon Udry are accomplished jugglers – of clubs, balls, hoops, chairs, diabolos, top hats, anything life throws at them – but rather than merely dazzling and demonstrating, they want to discuss. And deconstruct. And admit what it’s like when you drop one. A vox pop (bits of sound are fed in, and bits of video, breathtaking, on the screen) says among other things that it is a metaphor for life, and less kindly that “only other jugglers” are really interested: the cruel paradox being that the better a juggler is, the longer he or she can go on, the more likely the audience are to get a bit bored….theatricality demands danger and conflict, and a really sucessful performer makes this art look smooth and easy. Bummer, as the lads would say.

It’s an entertaining hour, and has taught me something of the lexicon of the trade: I now know the difference between oldschool, newschool, Russian, Mexican (very fast) and French (interpretative mimetic lecoq-y stuff). I know how to breathe the word “Gatto!” after a great child prodigy when something is superb. So there you are. Can face the Fringe programme now. Been in my first purple cow. Summer’s begun…

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk to 21 June

rating There’s really no point. Read the above and you’ll see if you fancy it. I did.

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June 6, 2015 · 8:52 am

ORESTEIA Almeida N1

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES TACKLES THE ROUGHAGE

The Oresteia is probably one of those stories you don’t know. Until you start watching it again. Only then, piecing together fragments, does it slowly resurface. It’s a muddle of murders. Each one justifying the next, avenging the last.
This is a sleek stage – all glass screens, marble floor and the full sweep of the bricky back wall exposed. But the play is drawn thin. Action is bunched and the pondering spaced out, as if we cannot be trusted with too much entertainment. The reworking by Robert Icke leaves tremendous voids in the interest. Spectacular murders – limbs flailing, blood oozing and lights, walls and eyes flashing – are a sick joy to watch. God Only Knows skips and pulses from the speakers, Luke Thompson’s brilliant Orestes screams and Clytemnestra marches slowly, knife in hand. Brilliant. \
But 6 minutes, tops.  The run-up is dull dialogue and simple flourishes, which pay off late late in the evening, but just confuse and bore at the time. Angus Wright has been slowly bled of any charisma as Agamemnon. His voice is like an audiobook and he moves like a pile of ironing. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. As the spark for all these subsequent crimes he sets the ball rolling at a mighty slow pace.
Lia Williams’ Clytemnestra is much more accomplished, squeezing him out of every scene. She even throws herself fully into a strange TV interview and dreary victory speech – two indulgent moments by Icke. Their only addition was to justify a camera on stage, so the actors’ faces could be seen 4ft behind them but bigger. Stop it, Icke.
As we see more of Jessica Brown Findlay (Electra) or Luke Thompson (Orestes) – the true stars of this play – they mop up all the charisma Angus leaked, and soak up the most passionate scenes. You’re with them and you barely notice the others. Lia Williams, even in the throes of her most emotional scenes, enunciates perfectly. Where she was too crisp, they were nicely rough.
The gems make it hard to hate the rest. It seems unfortunate, but this play only mobilised any merit when there was a knife in hand or an eye brimming with tears. The endless chatter, darting from the meaning of justice and the meaning of words (yes….words!) to the exclamation “why do we do things” does the rest a terrible injustice. In the end some bite comes back but above all it is the masterful set-pieces and the brief chilling, thrilling asides which take hold.  There are treats along the way – but only if you stomach a hefty amount of roughage.

Box Office: 020 7359 4404  to 18th July

Rating:  three    3 Meece Rating

3 Mice
Box Office: 020 7359 4404
Until 18th July

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June 4, 2015 · 12:24 am

STOP! The Play Trafalgar 2, SW1

BANKSY,  SEX,  AND STAGE DIRECTIONS 
In a tatty rehearsal-room, the title reflects the director’s frequent cry, stopping for new stage directions or rewrites from the unseen playwright, “Hildred McCann”. I admit I am a sucker for plays about plays: some are works of genius like Frayn’s NOISES OFF, some physically adept larks like THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG. But on the whole they parody traditional, creaky, Mousetrappy drama: it was time somebody took the mick out of grandiosely ‘edgy’ modern work, and I was glad to see David Spicer having a go.
The first act shows a cast of five, under Ben Starr as an unjustifiably self-confident director, struggling with Hildred’s constant revisions; the shorter second act puts the result on stage. During this process it morphs from an earnest drama about a teacher who wants to be an artist (“How was your day, teaching at that school you teach at?” enquires the wife.) The anxious SM reads out overwritten stage directions involving a fountain, spiral staircase and pet monkey. But rewrite by rewrite the lead becomes a silent cipher, and has to be pacified by directorial flattery about how silence “makes him a stronger presence”. Stage directions alarm the ingenue with instructions to be “pinkly naked”, throwing off clothes like “the peelings of her sexual fruit”. A lesbian subplot causes her to shriek at her script “Holy shit! I’m not doing that!”.
An entirely new character, a millionaire American rapper, is introduced; in the background the veteran Wilfred forgets his lines, demonstrates that he can still orate most of Murder In The Cathedral, and reminisces about doing a Stoppard in Reading in 1982 and not understanding a word. Eventually it becomes a pan-sexual psychodrama about Banksy and the metaphor of “a man with a spray can painting a picture of a man with a spray can painting a picture” . The director in a beret becomes a narrative chorus (“I am Art”) and the male leads resist directions to kiss.

Promising, then, and certainly the first half is stuffed with good jokes, not least about flowery stage-directions (“they laugh like cut glass baubles tinkling on a mountain stream… as soft as an elf on butter…art strikes like a cobra in a babygro” etc). The author writes a lot for stand-ups, and it shows, sometimes in a good way. Adam Riches is fun as the miffed leading man and Hatty Preston as the ingenue; there is a spirited turn by Tosin Cole as the rapper, conveying the mystification of a straight black actor forced into a streetwise stereotype while the others try not to be racist while questioning what the hell he is there for. Like Riches, Cole walks out at one point and has to be lured back: it did the show’s pre-publicity no harm that Peter Bowles really did quit at the start of rehearsals, to be replaced by James Woolley.
Who, it turns out, walks away with all the best laughs. White-haired and amiably vague, Woolley rises above the standuppy jokes to give real heart and humour to the part of Wilfred, who no longer remembers lines but is a fund of long experience (“I stripped off once in Leatherhead, in Equus. I was only an usher, mind, but it got me noticed”).
So far, so good. But there are problems for director John Schwab to tackle before this romp finds its way. The first half is all on one note – shouting – with no calms to give it bite and contrast; we could also do with a line of explanation as to why the hell Hildred gets away with all these rewrites. The second part, the Banksy play itself, is too broadly nuts to hit its target properly. Which is a shame, because the target deserves it: as anyone who has survived a few experimental fringe festivals can tell you.
box office 0844 871 7632 http://www.atgtickets.com to 27 June
rating three (just)    3 Meece Rating

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June 1, 2015 · 11:07 pm

THE ELEPHANT MAN Theatre Royal, Haymarket SW1

BROADWAY VICTORIANA DOESN’T QUITE GET THERE
It was David Lynch’s 1980 film – monochrome, moody, with an unforgettable performance by John Hurt – which brought to modern awareness the story of Joseph, known as John, Merrick: a monstrously deformed young man rescued from a freak-show by Dr Frederick Treves of the London hospital in 1884. The film, drawing on Treves’ memoirs and medical photographs of the day, used horrifying prostheses within which Hurt created the gentle, romantic, intelligent bible-reading character of Merrick. Lynch’s achievement, unveiling the terrible head only late on, was to make us more repelled by the rubbernecking cruelty of the crowds than by the deformity.
But this is the 1970’s play by Bernard Pomerance. Scott Ellis’ production is transplanted whole from a Broadway success, set with bare artistry on hospital floorboards and matchboarding, and done without prostheses. Bradley Cooper is first seen as himself: fit, buff, six-packed: as Alessandro Nivola’s Treves displays archive photographs and reads the medical report – “immense head…sacklike flesh..repulsive cauliflower growths, fungus, stench” etc, Cooper distorts himself limb by limb: his movement discipline throughout is faultless, even managing to look as if his head, like Merrick’s, is too heavy. He remains crooked for the rest of the play.
As a device that is effective enough. ; the sly showman taking money before a fairground screen stresses the humiliation, and in hospital – different screens, in a neat parallel – the reactions of the first outsiders (shrieking “Oh my God in heaven!” or “Indecent” in improbable accents) help too.
Treves recruits an actress, Mrs Kendall (finely and sensitively, if somewhat slowly, played by Patricia Clarkson) since she is trained to hide her feelings. She visits Merrick, and by the end of the interval he is a social lion, visited by Royalty and aristocracy and plied with silver-backed hairbrushes which he clearly cannot use. His physical condition declines to death while Treves, for reasons only sketchily achieved in the clunking script, has a verbose and tedious nervous breakdown.
I wanted very much to like it: a fascinating story, a Hollywood A-lister and Broadway cast, programmes a tenner, stalls tickets up to £ 100 `(cheaper upstairs and just as good a view btw): event theatre, this, and a palpable sincerity in Cooper’s pride in bringing Merrick’s memory back to London.
But it’s not a good play. Sketchy, plodding, and repetitively determined to drive home its point – that he is being whored to the social set as much as to the fairground punters, and that all the characters who praise him just want reassurance of their own goodness-within-metaphoricall-deformity. In two hours including interval, it still dragged. The only credible relationship is between Merrick and Mrs Kendall, notably when he wistfully says he has never seen a lady naked (only pox-ridden fairground doxies) so with a nimbleness barely credible in the age of corsets she shows him her breasts. That is actually touching.

I can’t not mention the awful speech problem: struggling with Pomerance’s cod-1880s phrases most of the cast sound like beta-minus graduates of a crash Berlitz course in Let’s Speak Victorian. They talk slowly, in worryingly improbable accents with unaccountable flat pauses. Cooper himself has to keep up a strong speech impediment, and does it (like the physical work) with admirably sensitive skill and modesty. But for some reason he is given, despite a workhouse upbringing, a posh and orotund English accent. So he does, at times, sound like a rather drunk 1950’s Etonian. Conviction wavers, more than he deserves.

box office 020 7930 8800 to 8 August
rating three (and the third is for Cooper alone)      3 Meece Rating

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May 29, 2015 · 2:38 pm

PETER PAN Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park W1

AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE

We’re in a World War I field hospital with iron beds and the corrugated-iron, battered detritus of trench warfare below. But young men will always leap and lark like the boys they were not long before. The opening moments , as a graceful Mrs Darling sings a lullaby blended with “Keep the Home Fires burning’ , see a blurring of the distinction between the nursery world Wendy, Peter and John and a ward of bandaged, shocked young men in khaki having a story read by a nurse to calm them.

Timothy Sheader’s imagining, part romp and part elegy for a lost generation, is not a conventional Peter Pan. Fair enough: the Llewellyn boys whose childhood inspired J.M. Barrie all saw action in the 1914/18 war: Edwardian children who played battles met real ones, and the eldest Llewellyn died near Ypres. Barrie’s novel – which came seven years after the sweet fantastical play – is full of darkness and loss. The theme of boys needing a mother’s comfort winds throughout: it gives an added edge to Barrie’s Lost Boys’ dredging up dim memories of lost family life as they play house with Wendy. Michael’s “Mother, I’m glad of you” is followed, as in the book, by the words “They were the last words she was to hear from him for a long time”. That, with the WW1 theme, pulls you up short.
So I did worry for a while that Sheader had pitched the production awkwardly, the historical frame too dark and puzzling for children and the larkiness too childish for adults. But its charm, energy and sincerity win the day. A bright child from eight up, especially if they vaguely know the story and are told about the war centenary, will be fine with it; as to adults, my daughter aged thirty grew up with boys, as I did, and identified straight away with the makeshift games. In Jon BAusor’s design the beds become walls and doors and an island, the khaki soldier ensemble are waves in the lagoon or puppeteers manipulating sinisiter gas-mask mermaids with a horrid suggestion of skeleton, and a nurse darts around with an Aldis-lamp-and-junk Tinkerbell. There is also, naturally, stepladder-and-corrugated iron crocodile, and an even better version of its jaws (no set-spoilers from me) to swallow Hook. Who is David Birrell, half Kaiser-Bill officer, half schoolyard bully.

And there’s flying. Oh yes. Peter Pan, at the centre of it all, is more than wonderful. He is Hiran Abeysekera, raggedly macho, gang-leader and rebellious child at once. He flies under the great gantries on lines whose visibility, oddly, makes his flight all the more miraculous – acrobatic, graceful, wild, joyful. The Darling children fly a little too: Kae Alexander’s thoughtful, gentle Wendy and her brothers comically clumsy as they hurtle off the beds. The players, all adult, create their childishness without strain or cuteness: Thomas Pickles’ Slightly is particularly funny and touching. The pirates have marvellously ramshackle dressing-up box outfits, from Viking and Knight to Saracen and D’Artagnan looks ,put together by Jon Morrell with gleeful loopiness. Beverly Rudd’s bespectacled Smee is particularly taking.

And as the game ends, deeper dusk falls under the trees, and the nurses are back in the field hospital folding the blankets towelcome peacetime, we know that Hook is gone, with his love of “the obliteration of youth – something grand in that!” . And though not all the boys come home, Barrie’s odd, plaintive tale ends as ever with the injunction that “The window must always be kept open” in case lost boys return. Gulp.
box office 0844 826 4242 to 15 June
rating four    4 Meece Rating

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May 27, 2015 · 10:58 pm

TEMPLE Donmar, WC1

ALL FIVE MICE REJOICE (CHURCH MICE, CLEARLY)  FOR A MODERN HISTORY-PLAY

Above the table cluttered with  last-night’s paper cups, high windows show St Paul’s dome; the distant chanting is not of choristers but demonstrators, and the black-clad Dean looking out in weary despair is invaded by a dishevelled supply PA with her backpack hanging open – late because of a rail replacement bus. Thus within the first minute Howard Davies’ superb production establishes a clash: orderly ecclesiastical tradition meets the angry muddle of modernity.
Steve Waters’ play recreates an insoluble dilemma, imagining the final deliberations in 2011 when St Paul’s reopened after a fortnight’s closure. Would the Dean and Chapter co-operate with the City Corporation in injuncting against – and forcibly evicting – the Occupy protest camp? Ironically, that inchoate anti-capitalist demonstration was never meant to be there: it was the police who kettled it into Cathedral territory, thus providing Occupy with hot TV pictures and the Cathedral with a massive financial loss, a painful question of conscience, and countless sanctimonious remarks about moneylenders-in-the-temple. To make it harder the Canon Chancellor, Giles Fraser, showily resigned at the idea of the Church seeming to condone violence.
The Dean, already under fire for closing a building which stayed open all through the Blitz, had to rule. For ninety theatrically gripping minutes we watch this lonely man beset from without and within, and played by the greatest actor of the day. For Simon Russell Beale gives him intensity, pain, fragility, fire and twinkles of unexpected wit : it’s a flawless, thrilling performance. Waters’ writing weaves absurdity, sincerity, personality and history into a piece sorrowfully perceptive , thought-provoking and necessary. And dares include some very, very good laughs.

For one after another, forces besiege the Dean as he tries to write his reopening sermon. The resigning Canon Chancellor, Paul Higgins all jeans and anorak and enfant-terrible vanity, prates of how “invigorating” and ‘joyous’ the protest camp is. The Dean’s confused horror at his colleague’s self-aggrandizing Twitter habit all through the agonizing day is cruelly demonstrated, their final reconciliation oddly touching. From the other direction comes a snakelike Corporation lawyer (Shereen Martin) urging brisk injuctions against the “scruffy, illiterate, unsightly” plebs.
Nor is our hero helped one whit by the Bishop of London, wickedly given orotund patriarchal life by Malcolm Sinclair. He refers to the occupation as “a gift” and urges some sort of washy PR campaign to please the vaguely distressed unseen figure of “Rowan”. But as the Dean observes with brief waspishness (Russell Beale managing always to convey the conflict of a man who wishes he wasn’t so provoked to sharpness) the Bishop of London is on easy street. “Without portfolio. No dragging a building around for him. No, he springs up here, there, a royal wedding, glamorous speaking assignment, at liberty to be endlessly visible”. Sinclair’s attempt at a reassuring man-hug of the stolid, appalled Dean is a comic moment to treasure. Though not, I suspect, if you are the Rt Revd. Richard Chartres.

Rebecca Humphries is beguilingly natural as Lizzie the PA (never sat her history degree, but did a thesis on “Witchcraft through the lens of Queer Theory”). She is pivotal both in argument and emotion, reappearing at every juncture. And so it goes: faeces and racket and earnest idealism and disorderliness outside, inside the Virger (a stiffly splendid Anna Calder-Marshall) talking of lacquering candelabras. And all the time, that impossibility of a right decision. For as the Dean says, St Paul’s has been there 1400 years and never asked to be the parish-church to Mammon’s towers. But since it is, it must keep the worship going and the roof on, try to be holy, somehow. The ending is graceful and profound: sad, human, gentle, honest.
box office 0844 871 7624 to 25 July
Rating: five    5 Meece Rating
Sponsors: Barclays / C & S Sherling

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May 26, 2015 · 11:42 pm

THE BEAUX’ STRATAGEM Olivier, SE1

SONGS, SCUFFLES, VILLAINS AND VIRTUE IN 1707

Towering staircases and sliding panels transform the big stage from tavern to genteel house, with a pleasingly inexplicable intermittent folk-band lurking on the top landing. Here for two and a half frenzied hours Simon Godwin zingily interprets George Farquar’s Restoration comedy with a cast of 21, not one part a dud. It is farce bordering on panto, edged with songs, enlivened with scuffles, glorified with random absurdities and containing a hard nugget of feminist polemic. You get scheming London beaux chasing rich wives ,confused by equally artful Midlands villains, a churlish drunk, a daft and deadpan comedy butler (O, Pearce Quigley, what a joy you are!). There are spirited womenfolk, a bossy matriarchal herbalist, highwaymen robbers, a magnificent rumpus of a fight conducted partly in stunning 18c ladies’ underwear, a lost earldom, an amorous French officer bursting into Piaffesque song, a French priest exposed as an Irish spy,  lies and redemptions and a Deus-ex-machina in a periwig . And – here’s the polemic – the conclusion, so daring in 1707, that sometimes divorce is the only thing for it.
For it is not quite your routine Restoration romp ,in which a Lady Teazle must return repentant to her husband. Susannah Fielding is Mrs Sullen, fourteen months married to a man who ignores and despises her, and values only her fortune. He comes to bed drunk, all cold feet and snoring, but she longs for his love and schemes uselessly to make him jealous by flirting with the Frenchman. With difficulty she resists the more congenial advances of the rascally beau Archer (Geoffrey Streatfeild, holding a delicate balance between opportunism and growing decency). Her cry to the audience after the interval gets applause; “In England – A country whose women are its glory – must women be enslaved?”. Fielding perfectly evokes an intelligent woman in an age without rights, her misery curdling occasionally into cynicism “London is the place for managing a husband…wheedle your booby up to Town!”. At her side, the single Dorinda (Pippa Bennett-Warner) is equally spirited but not yet trapped, though Samuel Barnett’s pretty, fake Lord Aimwell is moving in on her.
The delight of Godwin’s production is that it gives proper weight to the nastiness of a bad marriage while letting rip with splendid nonsense . It revels in faints and fake fits, cries of “Unlace your stays! Unbosom yourself!”, Ealing-comedy burglars, cross-wooings, double-entendres, some rich Brummie accents and wiggling wench-work, and sudden interpolations like Barbara Kirby as a dotty old countrywoman seeking herbal advice from batty Lady Bountiful – Jane Booker in unforgettable lateral-sprouting hair. But even at its most Benny-Hill moments the core problem remains: as Mrs Sullen sadly says to her spouse “Have we not been a perpetual offence to each other?”. Thus Dorinda’s happy marital conclusion must be matched by an equally happy divorce for her friend. So when they all dance farewell (including the tied-up highwaymen, jerking and squabbling) there is a real sense of release both comic and moral. And it’s a Travelex: all yours for fifteen quid if you’re quick.
Box Office 020 7452 3000 to September Sponsor: Travelex
http://www.ntlive.com: broadcast live to 550 UK cinemas on 3 Sept

rating;  four   4 Meece Rating

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May 26, 2015 · 12:19 am

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

DARK, STARK AND DANGEROUS:  A MERCHANT FOR TODAY

What an odd, stark, angry, intelligent Merchant this is! Wholly unlike the last RSC production, Rupert Goold’s spectacular Merchant-of-Vegas gameshow. Polly Findlay sets it modern dress, on a bare stage whose floor and backdrop are gold bars, mirroring the auditorium and making us visible witnesses to the case of Antonio, the shipowning speculator, and his deal with Shylock the Jew. A gilded pendulum swings constantly at stage level; the three caskets descend too, 65 feet from the grid on wires , bald as geometry diagrams – cube, cone, cylinder .
Jessica’s window is right up there too, high over the blank gold. Lancelot Gobbo, face-painted and inevitably annoying (not Tim Samuels’ fault, it’s the least engaging Shakespeare’s clown), makes his entry sitting among us and shouting up. The Prince of Aragon shakes hands with the front row with bonhomous posh confidence before getting the caskets wrong. Young Christian Venetians swagger like Bullingdon-boys , mock old Shylock, steal his daughter and his money , cringe when he turns on them and cheer when Portia’s chop-logic strips him of all dignity.
It is a production full of jarring unease, its text mined with sharp intelligence by Findlay (fresh themes sprang up from lines I had never noticed before). Antonio (Jamie Ballard) sets the tone, staring alone from the stage as we settle, confiding his neurotic, edgy depression to a fully lit house, a man in trouble. The coxcomb Salerio comes on with a cowlick quiff like a raven- haired Tintin to josh with him: street-boy Gratiano romps with “skipping spirits”. But it is Jacob Fortune-Lloyd’s handsome Bassanio with whom, Findlay makes snoggingly clear, Antonio is in love. Ballard handles brilliantly the Merchant’s borderline-hysterical agreement to the loan which will take his lover away to chase Portia, pledging “my purse, my person, my extremest means”. Yet having warmed us to him in his loneliness and need for his preening bisexual pal, Ballard jerks us back to discomfort by spitting in the old Jew’s face even as he borrows his money.

Shylock, inspired casting, is Makram J.Khoury: Palestinian, patriarchal, heavily accented, standing out from the brash youngsters in Semitic appearance and venerable age. He makes them seem small, petulant, vicious: but we know what he is going to want with his knife and this jars against our sympathy. His “Hath not a Jew eyes?”, addressed to the jeering lads, is electrifying, a real plea; it is mirrored in the court scene by Portia’s directing ‘The quality of mercy” right at him. It is as if the play, the very audience, pleads with each to be human, and fails.

Findlay finds in her Portia, too, a troubling ambiguity. Patsy Ferran (last seen as Aharrrr-Jim-lad in Findlay’s NT Treasure Island) at first seems permanently set to “sprightly”, but with her transformation into lawyer finds a sharp authority and something oddly nasty in her shrill taunts. It gives a raw, undeniable depth of disillusion to that final rom-com conclusion which always sits so oddly. After the tense trial , Antonio’s dissolution into unforgettable moaning terror and Shylock’s“I am not well” , the sourness endures. Portia is the boss , and like us has little faith that Bassanio won’t stray. Even more strikingly, hearing that Lorenzo inherits Shylock’s remaining fortune makes his stolen bride Jessica flee the stage in distress. Convert she may be, but her father’s humiliation shadows any happiness.
Gobbo (reduced now to candle-monitor) dresses the stage with dozens of flames reflecting in the gold; dissonant religious chants sound above. We are not convinced that all is resolved, nor should it be. Findlay’s achievement is in making that unease clear, sharp and decent: where nobody comes out well, nobody deserves to be happy,
box office 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org to 2 Sept
Live in cinemas on 22 July   Rating :  four  4 Meece Rating

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May 22, 2015 · 9:11 am

THE ONE DAY OF THE YEAR Finborough, SW10

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS STIRRED BY  REMEMBRANCE
In quiet England we stand in silence. In Australia, at least in this play, they shout it from the rooftops and down it from the bottle. ANZAC day – a day to remember Galipoli. A tragic loss. I had genuinely never heard an intelligent discussion on the purpose of remembrance until tonight.

Pride beams from father Alf – a slurry, sweaty, hilarious but not in the least bit cartoonish Aussie alpha male – but talk of ‘waste’ drips from his freshly educated son, Hughie. Deep-rooted pride and freshly-potted disgust – war years and university years – are pitted against each other with the arrival of a girlfriend. She has yachtING friends, pearls and, like all well-bred folk, a flagrant disregard for manners or feelings. ‘Ideas’ have been brought to the kitchen table for the first time. They saved all this money to send him to university and this is their superficial prize.

Mother and father (Alf and Dot), played with steamingly raw and touchingly real emotion by Mark Little and Fiona Press, see all the ambition and hope they transplanted into their son dashed. A family of ‘no hopers’ ,and their one sprout of hope has turned against them. Alan Seymour’s play struggles to get a grip of this argument at first. The dialogue slides past without you noticing as no one really says anything other than platitudes about class, family and ANZAC day. The set’s simplicity and the twinkly inter-scene piano music gives it the whiff of something to doze to.

But as the arguments start it takes hold, as pride and ambition’s tangible effect is rolled out. Hughie, played simply but very well by James William Wright, ties all this nicely together as the arbiter of argument and reconciliation. You see his frustration, but behind it his thanks as well. Some flatter lines persist, but feel fuller in this talented cast’s mouths. The director, Wayne Harrison, keeps it moving though, perfectly driving the shoebox space, trapping us as tensions rise. It is easy at first to mistake the play’s simplicity as spare padding from a slow week of Neighbours. It feels very kitchen-sink, but it has far more to say. A war-career that will never be topped is clung to, a lack of purpose realized, family support rediscovered , a history is properly appreciated. A beautiful and delicate knit.
Until 13th June. Box Office: 020 7244 7439
rating: four   4 Meece Rating

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May 21, 2015 · 11:43 pm

McQUEEN St James’ Theatre, SW1

A DESIGNER, A DREAM, A DANCE, A DREAD 
“What is it about men with watching eyes…?” asks the ghost of Isabella Blow, she of the troubled soul and hilariously witty hats. One such man was the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who like his friend and patron finally killed himself. At one point in this fantastical, flawed, but sincere and spectacular play by James Phillips he demonstrates those watching eyes. He invites a crass journalist interviewing him (usual stuff – misogyny, violent perverse imagery, commercial priorities) to describe a nearby woman. She snaps “Thirtyish. Blonde hair. Five foot seven” but he goes off on a page-long riff, lovingly reading character, vulnerability, needs and dreams into the tilt of her head and the angle of her shoulder and leg. And suddenly you are moved to respect the eye of an artist who sees and imagines and wants to give that woman a transformation and a strength. The real McQueen’s sister – who has approved this evocation of the artist – says that he wanted people to be “frightened” of the women he dressed: he had, in childhood, seen her beaten up by an abusive man. Beauty to him was not fragility but power.

The play is not a biography but an imagining, based on the designer’s idea of a woman coming down from a tree in the garden and being empowered by a dress. It uses dramatic projections and marvellous balletic interludes of head-bandaged dancers who are sometimes alive,sometimes mannequins, creating very McQueeny tableaux of pompadours, shiny tutus, wrestling, skeletons, men in weird corsets etc (David Farley designs; Christopher Marney choreographs, and all the music is from the designer’s real shows). In ninety minutes Phillips whirls us through one night in London as McQueen remembers his tailoring apprenticeship, the moment when crazy, visually brilliant Isabella Blow bought up his entire graduation collection, and the experience of coming out front-stage to wave, spent and nervous at the end of his own spectacular shows , “A bloke in the worst clothes in the room, trying to stop his hand from shaking”.
At the heart of it is a very fine performance by Stephen Wight as “Lee” – McQueen’s real name : shaven-headed and booted, a tired, creatively blocked, drunk and druggy at a low point. The girl Dahlia (Dianna Agron from Glee) is less successful, which is not entirely her fault. Phillips has created her as American, gabby, self-absorbed, suicidal and, truth to tell, very annoying. Especially in the long opening scene: it takes great skill to write scenes where a kooky girl invades and challenges a troubled gay man: Breakfast at Tiffany’s it ain’t. There’s one funny line when she mocks him for responding to an intruder by ringing Philip Treacy (“a milliner?” – “He makes very aggressive hats” protests McQueen). But as Dahlia drones on about her loneliness and depression and how she “doesn’t get” Shakespeare and feels like Lee’s twin soul, you itch to slap her.

Things improve the less we see of this mouthy muse – a good scene with his old tailoring boss, and a moving, credible encounter with poor Isabella Blow. But Dahlia becomes central again when we learn that she is, in fact, suicidal and that it is his art (and a fabulous winged gold coat) which may save her, because “There is beauty..Survive the night!”.
The interlude with her, after Blow and being aware of McQueen’s final end, borders on the perilous territory of suicide-glamorizing. It only just dodges it, thanks to the solidity and sincerity of WIght’s performance. Not least in his encomium to his mother: “Brave like a lion. Faces life every day and doesn’t back down She is real. We should learn to live from people, yes?” Yes.

box office 0844 264 2140 to 6 June http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk
rating three   3 Meece Rating

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May 19, 2015 · 11:20 pm

FANNY AND STELLA Above the Stag, Vauxhall SW8

BOYS IN BUSTLES:   SWAGS AND SWAGGER IN VICTORIAN LONDON
“The Unnatural History and Petticoat Mystery of Boulton and Park” cries the Victorian poster. “Men in Women’s Clothes – with Decision of the Magistrate”. In 1871, 143 years before Grayson Perry rolled up at the Palace to get a CBE dressed as “mother of the bride” they were a sensation: two lads of 22 and 24 arraigned for their habit of extending their rather ropey theatrical careers into cross-dressing in public places “with intent to commit a felony”.

To be honest, there s little doubt that the ‘felony’ was a part of their lives (cue a rousing opening chorus of “Sodomy On The Strand!” but intriguingly, a quarter-century before the Oscar Wilde conviction, they got off, after a year’s bail and six-day trial. And so did their more malely clad companions and lovers. Frederick, or “Fanny” Park’s father was a longsuffering judge (whose other son did hard labour for feeling up an unwilling policeman). And a combination of legal chicanery, skimmed-over medical evidence and dismissal of love letters as “boyish” meant that the jury spent less than an hour out.

Somehow, the pair slipped through the loophole between official Victorian propriety and the equally Victorian weakness for larky young men and music-hall romps. They were, after all, arrested in the Strand Theatre and appeared next morning in Bow Street Magistrate’s Court still in evening gowns. Irresistible. And a gift of a subject. Glenn Chandler (creator of Taggart on TV) attacks it with relish, writing the play-with-songs as if the pair are telling their story at a working men’s club, brilliantly hosted by Phil Sealey in a superbly curled moustache and sideburns. He is repeatedly forced into doing walk-ons as judge, aged solicitor, Scottish landlady etc. Mark Gee Finch, lanky and beaky, is Fanny / Edward; bouncily pretty Robert Jeffery is Ernie/ Stella. Both are competent singers and dancers as they break into a shuffle or belt out cod musichall numbers like “Has anybody seen my Fanny?”; and both are a delight to look at whether as elegant males or pie-frilled, bustled, oddly dignified laydeez. Alongside them James Robert Moore plays their dissolute protector, Lord Arthur MP and bankrupt; Christopher Bonwell is Louie, who loves Ernie but wishes he’d dress male and not embarrass him; and Alexander Allin the American consul, also in pursuit.

Jeffery and Bonwell are given most opportunity to express the genuine emotional difficulties of the situation before arrest: Stella particularly, pressed to get back in the closet and dress as a man, explodes “I want to be what I want to be!”. But you don’t go to this show in search of Cage-aux Folles sorrow and ambiguity, or the deep seriousness of The Act. Nor, really, even very much indignation. It’s done for larks, and the Above the Stag audience (next show, RENT BOY THE MUSICAL) whooped with glee at the discreet but explicit medical examination in the prison scene. The attempt of the MC to treat evidence as “of a medical nature and unfit to print” is undermined by a reporter howling out its precise nature.
The second act is best, after the arrest; the lads’ relationships being not that interesting earlier on, and the knife-edge peril of their daily excursions not clear until the actual arrest (Sealey springs into action as a detective). The two best songs by Chandler and composer Charles Miller come late too: a lovely alphabet riff on the Writ of Certiorari which saves them, and a rip-roaring praise of the mother’s evidence that her lad (Stella) is theatrical not – um – felonious. And it’s good to see Above the Stag relocated with a swish and a swagger to these arches in Vauxhall, and for this show decked out beautifully by David Shields’ design: it becomes an ornate music-hall in which characters enter and exit through huge wardrobes. Closets, geddit?
Box Office: http://www.abovethestag.com to 14 June
rating three    3 Meece Rating

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May 15, 2015 · 8:04 pm

THE ANGRY BRIGADE Bush Theatre W12

AN OLD ANGER, SPEAKING TO TODAY

We are short of good political playwrights: they tend to hail from the left and be either depressingly prosey or brainlessly ‘bouffon’ (ISLANDS at this very theatre is a memory to purge). But now we have James Graham. A self-described political ‘geek’, he does not start from partisan anger , though there is in his work great humanity and seriousness. Rather his shtick is fascination with ideas: how they grip people, and get them enmeshed in the complex political and pratical world and go awry. THIS HOUSE was set in the painful hung parliament of 1974; TORY BOYZ centred on a gay, working-class northern Conservative researcher; THE VOTE celebrated the oddity of the polling-station. This time he looks at 1971-2, and Scotland Yard’s hunt for the “Angry Brigade” anarchists. Marvellously retro (he’s talkin’ bout my generation – Mateus Rosé and grungy people in squats grinding on about how women having to do ironing is “The most violent act imaginable” . But in the modern age of Occupy and the Russell-Brand tendency, not to mention jihadis, it is also thrillingly topical.

Graham has researched and reimagined both the police operation and the lives, writings and ideas of the young bomb-makers who targeted banks, police, a minister’s home, the Post Office Tower and the 1970 Miss World pageant. The result, directed with vigour and toughness by James Grieve, is a marvellous play: as rich in ideas as a pudding in plums, compassionate and serious and dryly funny and fascinating. Produced by Paines Plough and the Theatre Royal Plymouth, it has toured and is reworked and cast for the Bush. Two acts use the same four players: first we meet a Scotland Yard unit led by an abruptly promoted DS Smith (Mark Arends) because the bosses feel that only young people can get into the mindset of the terrorists, who fit no familiar criminal template.

He is joined by Morris, snarky and bored (Harry Melling, always good value) and two WPCs who find difficulty not saluting (Pearl Chanda and Lizzy Watts). They read the rebels’ favourite tracts, listen to their music, at one point go into a surreal orgiastic dance of excitement as deduction gets close. Melling and Watts double as witnesses and suspects, and overhead projections show the printed, cardboard threats of the Brigadeers.
There are funny moments – as when “Camden” is breathed with horror as a place where dodgy types hang out – and good aperçus like Morris’ grasp that “the political spectrum is not a line from left to right, it’s a circle . When you go as far left as communism, which believes in equality and classlessness, the tyranny required to enforce such a change moves it all the way back to right-wing fascism” . An anarchist under questioning complains that the British police don’t fight back. “Other countries, we charge, they charge back. But you lot, you stand there rigid in your lines, smiling…the lines will hold. They’ve held for centuries, Nothing to see here’. (ah the nostalgia!)

After the interval the same four play the central Brigade group, holed up in an East London house, three middle-class and one – (Melling again) a working-class Northerner. Each is reacting to a different childhood rage. The interplay is tense, touching, mixing weakness, sincerity, anger, quailing doubt , arrogance, and anarchic nonsense (“Why do there have to be walls?”). No spoilers, but it moves towards an inevitable end when young lawbreakers and young enforcers must meet. Rising manic energy, a bomb-crashing of steel filing cabinets and wild careering through the auditorium are delicately interwoven with tenderness, doubt and sadness. It’s brilliant.

BOX OFFICE 020 8743 5050 to 13 June.
rating    four     4 Meece Rating

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May 14, 2015 · 11:48 pm

HIGH SOCIETY Old Vic SE 1

A SWELL PARTY…

Joe Stilgoe the piano man holds the stage as we settle, receiving a fusillade of unhelpful audience requests (“Bolero! Summertime! Pink Panther! Prokoffiev’s ninth!” – that last from Andrew Marr, cheeky monkey). Brilliantly, he delivers them simultaneously, singing Summertime over Bolero chords, and getting audience participation in Fever. Crafty to set a cabaret mood  before we get down to business with “Come see the rich of Oyster Bay / On this their daughter’s wedding day!” as the silver piano sinks ingeniously into the floor.

Some of us needed persuading: for all the glory of Louis Armstrong, Sinatra and Bing, I never enthused about the 1956 film : Grace Kelly draped on that yacht crooning True Love felt like being pelted with marshmallows. Didn’t even like the play The Philadelphia Story, one of Kevin Spacey’s first productions here. Caring about the romantic troubles of the East Coast plutocracy is not automatic: so what if Tracy is marrying the wrong man, misses her first husband and gets drunkenly entangled with an undercover reporter? Brittle high-society needs Coward wit or period distance not to irritate.

But this – Spacey’s last hurrah as Artistic Director – is a different beast from film or play: Arthur Kopit’s book has access to extra Cole Porter songs, with all their bitter-sentimental ambiguities and yearnings. Director Maria Friedman has cast it cannily and enlists Nathan Wright’ s athletic, joyful storming, whirling choreography and fabulous Tom Pye designs (I am a bit of a pushover for people tap-dancing on silver pianos, it’s a weakness). So once it gets going – the first act, to be brutal, still needs a trim – Friedman finds the real gold, an emotional reality in the wayward heroine, in the tough lovelorn girl reporter (Annabel Scholey) and even in the repentant adulterous paterfamilias. Above all, Kate Fleetwood as Tracy eschews all temptation to easy ingenue charm, evoking a tough egg who has been round the block a few times and is well on the way to being a discontented rich-bitch. So when she sings “Once upon a Time” and softens, melting into memory of sailing days with Dexter – the True Love – there is suddenly real feeling. He lean on the orchestra rail above, she watches a model cutter glide slowly across the floor (poor sail-trim, but pretty). And in the second half, Kopit brilliantly places Cole Porter’s “It’s all right with me” as a serious dramatic moment.

All the singing is bang on: Rupert Young is Dexter, hampered by the essential dullness of any romantic hero, Jamie Parker has wicked fun with Mike, Jeff Rawle totters and taps gloriously as daft Uncle Willy and and Richard Grieve as Kittredge the wrong-groom looks pleasingly like Michael Howard, with an apt air of pained dignity. And the ensemble is tremendous, the formal maids and butlers a character in their own right.
The Vic is still “in-the-round’, a beloved Spacey innovation, and the arena – with cast dashing in from all directions – gives an unexpected warmth and immediacy . We are a circle of witnesses to a lantern-lit night by the pool, to awful hangovers (Fleetwood hilarious as a drunk, and even better as an appalled morning-after bride shoved anyhow into her wedding dress) . Most spectacular of all, we are sitters-out, enthralled, at the tremendous ball. That Act 2 opener is fifteen minutes of explosive, butterfly-bright spectacle not to be missed: what with the firework light effects, the tap routines, the multicoloured taffeta explosion, double-bass-twirling and crazy brush-percush, and what I can only describe as a bout of competitive homo-erotic piano duetting. Well, you had to be there. As Tracy says about the yacht, it’s designed with care, built with love, and emerges “easy to handle, quick on the helm”. Fit for Kevin Spacey’s last sail into the Old Vic sunset. We thank him.
box office 0844 8717628 http://www.oldvictheatre.com to 20 August

Rating four    4 Meece Rating

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May 14, 2015 · 12:03 am

COMMUNICATING DOORS Menier, SE1

IN WHICH THE OLD LION OF SCARBOROUGH TACKLES A TIMELESS PHILOSOPHICAL CONUNDRUM…
…Which is to say, the question of whether time-travel would enable you to change the past, hence the present, via parallel universes of possibility. Sir Alan Ayckbourn confected this odd , ultimately enchanting tale of thriller-noir skulduggery by a greedy financier and his murderous sidekick.  Thanks to a hotel-suite closet proving to be a portal into the past in twenty-year increments, doughty female practicality from two doomed wives and a leather-clad tart overcomes evil and safeguards the future. Except, naturally, for the preposterous baddie, played by David Bamber with a camp menace equalled only (Ah, memories!) by Kenneth Williams doing his send-up of Charles Boyer in GASLIGHT in Round the Horne.

In classic Ayckbourn mode it begins with a slow burn, establishing – by way of a dying man improbably hiring a dominatrix to witness his confession – a back-story which is destined to be disrupted by time-travellers from twenty and forty years earlier (pay attention there at the back! Actually, don’t bother: Lindsay Posner’s direction and Ayckbourn’s courteous clarity keep matters perfectly comprehensible, even once the time capsule cupboard starts rotating).

The play speeds up no end once scientific impossibility and determined women take over control: for it has three of the larkiest imaginable female comedy drama roles.
Rachel Tucker is the prostitute Poopay, condemned at first to be merely stroppy, baffled, horrified and nearly throttled. Not enough to work on at first, but when she meets wife no. 2, twenty years back from her own time, the glorious female interaction around which the play rotates can really begin. The catalyst is Imogen Stubbs as the middle-aged Ruella , fabulously scoutmistressy with an underlying warmth. This is the sort of formidably pragmatic Good Woman who on being invaded by a terrified whore from the future takes it in her stride with prison-visitor breeziness, and commands her to assist in preventing the murders. “None of this feeble attitude! Shape up, girl!”. Between them and the portal success seems achievable, but comes up against that philosophical puzzle about whether being dead in one time-frame necessarily means a chap won’t turn up in another one wearing leather murdering-gloves and a younger wig (grand barnet-work from Richard Mawbey the wigmeister, as men and women change decades in no time at all).

The youngest woman of the three is another incomparable dramatic comedienne, Lucy Briggs-Owen, a heroine of mine after lately lighting up evenings from Srtatford to St Martin’s Lane. Her second posh-airhead appearance is – well, nonpareil. I eschew spoilers, though there are at least four indescribable scream-and-giggle shocks and a magnificent three-woman physical cliffhanger not to be missed. No complaints about the men either: Robert Portal morphs over forty years from evil dodderer to dashing newlywed, and Matthew Cottle – also time-travelling – blinks and gapes for England as the hotel security man with a nervous dread of women and potential “lesbianity”. And talking of security, the 2020 bits are set in a London of gun battles on the Strand and precarious peace talks between warring boroughs. Sir Alan’s little joke, circa 1994: but hey, getting closer all the time…

Box office 020 7378 1713 to 27 June
rating four   4 Meece Rating

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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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