theatreCat

THE POOTERS RIDE AGAIN, PUB STYLE

I had some misgivings, since I know the 1892 book by George and Weedon Grossmithalmost by heart: born in an age whose Punch-ish humour does not always chime with us (oh, those heavy servant-girl cartoons!) , it stands apart and remains one of the greatest bits of understated comic writing ever. The only stage production I have known to come near its glory was years ago at the Old Vic , when Judi Dench and Michael Williams played the Pooters. Never forgot how – even from the very back stalls – you could see Dench, without seeming to move a muscle, allowing her face to fall from hopeful wifely expectancy to resigned disgruntlement.

But I sought this out because Mary Franklin’s Rough Haired Pointer company did such a beautiful job before on The Young Visiters, so had proved her sense of 1890’s period and inventive small-cast staging – in that case a ramshackle, toybox style with rolling screens and outfits as crazily makeshift as a nursery dressing-up box. And after an awkward start (piano chords kept too long and loud in the first scene, becoming oppressive) this one more than lived up to expectations. The cast – four young men – are set in clothes looking artfully like drawings – as does the set, by Karina Nakaninsky and Christopher Hone – so there is immediately a sense of old illustrations coming to life.

Narration is mainly by Pooter – Jake Curran, who alone remains in one character – and sometimes by others, following the book with occasional refreshing, barmy breakouts. With unfussed, minimal props and hats Geordie Wright is Cummings, and the maid, and the ironmonger, and – memorably – Daisy Mutlar, a potential daughter-in law from hell. George Fouracres is another group, notably and memorably Mrs James of Sutton and the equally horrendous Our Girl Lillie Posh. I did wonder why the single-sex casting, but on the other hand the sad fact is that no female simpers and flounces better than young men do.

Which brings me to the greatest joy. Jordan Mallory-Skinner, also credited with the music and soundscape, spends most of the play as Mrs Carrie Pooter. And the boy is a riot. He has no wig – merely a fetchingly brushed quiff – and a simple long skirt. But his air of injured, hopeful wifehood, his folded, appalled face, his tight-lipped control, is so continuously painfully funny that I could hardly take my eyes off him. The Mansion House scene is a joyful thing indeed. Some performers just have – well, funny bones. No other way to put it. The other three all do excellent work, but the memory that lingers is of Mallory-Skinner momentarily lightening as Pooter makes some gallant gesture, and sinking – Dench-like – back into gritted disappointment. Beautiful.

http://www.kingsheadtheatre.com to 14 Feb
rating: four

DROWNING NOT WAVING – TWO WOMEN ADRIFT

Lancashire Ivy is waiting for a bus to Manchester, refined Joan for a taxi to a psychiatric clinic. Neither is happy, and nor are their menfolk. Ivy’s longsuffering foil is Vic the barman.; Joan’s a terminally irritated husband. Both women are played by Lynne Miller, both men by Jack Klaff.

 
These two unconnected one-act plays by James Hogan appeared first in another theatre as near-monologues: showcases for a versatile actress in the style of Alan Bennett’s “Talking Heads” . (Sorry: Mr Hogan must be sick of that comparison). But now rewritten and tenderly directed by Antony Biggs, they become two-handers giving the men more red meat. On which nourishment Klaff flourishes with an assured virtuosity to equal Ms Miller’s.

The first play shows us Ivy, waiting to leave the glum hotel where a cut-price wedding is tinkling away overhead. She is sacked after forty years as that old-fashioned thing, live-in hotel staff. She is a-boil with resentment at the management (“I know too much, that’s why they want me out”), and at a newly arrived “little Miss Button-Missing” flaunting her cleavage in her old domain. Someone’s broken her favourite saucer, too, and there is still no sign of her one-night sweetheart from four decades ago, to whom she hopefully writes “care of the Merchant Seaman’s Association”.

Miller plays it with an entertainingly resentful vigour, parried by poor Vic with his barman’s jacket and his racing paper. He has been told to see her off the premises without her disrupting the wedding. There are some fine exchanges as they reminisce about bygone glories and dead seaside-rep stars (“Why do terrible things happen to nice people?”- “YOU needn’t worry..”). But we always feel the tide ebbing, uncertain ageing, a threnody for bygone life.

In the second playlet Miller as Joan is something altogether more disturbing, more Beckettian than Bennettian. With her husband – Klaff also changing tone and class to be a fretful, irritable pedant-cum-carer – she is deep into injury time in a dissolving, haunted marriage. She has some undefined psychiatric illness: thwartedly female, delusional about her artistic abilities and allure. A holiday in Venice has brought their joint lives to a crisis. He cannot bear her wittering devotedly about a white-suited gigolo tour guide “Signore Dottore Marcello di Eduardo”, and she cannot abide his religiosity – which seems to have got him sacked as a schoolteacher – or his snobbish insistence on correcting her pronunciation as she veers around art, poetry, and a troubling obsession with 15c Venetian tortures.

Whether he is psychologically her anchor or her jailer is uncertain. Their spiky duet is skilfully written and paced and more than skilfully performed, but maybe – call me a wuss – a bit too painful for pleasure . Stays with you, though: if you’re a woman in middle age it’s the shudder as someone steps on your grave.

Box office: 020 7287 2875 Email: info@jermynstreettheatre.co.uk
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk To 24 Jan

Rating: three   

NOEL COWARD’S CHRISTMAS SPIRITS St James Theatre SE1

“I’ll sing of home and love and work,
Of Magna Carta and Dunkirk
And Christmas bells and charity and pride…”

Who is this, melding private and patriotic sentiment to salute Christmas unembarrassed, heart on sleeve? It is Noel Coward writing to a friend, resolving in the depths of the London Blitz to stay put, work on cheer-up propaganda, and finish – for all his misgivings about the theme in such a deadly time – his “ghost play”, Blithe Spirit. On a hunch close to cabaret genius, this gorgeous little show has been devised and drawn from centuries of threatened Christmases.

Its creators are Nick Hutchison, who directs, and musical director Stefan Bednarczyk. Who also plays Coward himself, alternately twinkling and troubled, sitting at his piano or roaming around his Belgravia sitting-room on Christmas Eve, 1940. Behind him is the famous Blitz photograph of St Paul’s rising from the clouds; planes and the crump! of bombfall remind us where and when we are. Struggling with Blithe Spirit, Coward summons up his invented Madam Arcati – the marvellous Issy Van Randwyck in floating garments and green tights – and she in turn conjures the mediumistic maidservant from that play, Edith (Charlotte Wakefield). Between them, without gimmick or explanation, they call up Christmas words and songs from the centuries.

Not least Coward’s own: Bednarzyck’s strength is in not attempting imitation or pastiche of the master ’s delivery but in re-creating them for himself, skilful and expressive whether in the yearning sentiment of London Pride or the brisk humour of “Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans”. There are Coward letters and diaries too, and that remarkable poem about the bombers, Lie in the Dark and Listen, with its guiltily appalled awareness of the young bomber crews overhead :

 
“City magnates and steel contractors, factory workers and politicians, soft lysterical little actors, Ballet dancers, reserved musicians – safe in your warm civilian beds, Life is flying above your heads”…

Yet the delight is not all Coward; he and Arcati and Edith are but the conduits , as from the cast flow songs by Maschwitz and Berlin, Novello and Jerome; words by Ogden Nash and Samuel Pepys and Ben Jonson and John Clare and Dickens and that greatest of the world’s writers, Anon. Sometimes you laugh, sometimes hairs stand up on the back of your neck as you channel the fear , frivolity and fragile goodwill of the ever-threatened festival: banned by 17c Puritans, despoiled by greed, redeemed by moments like the Christmas Truce (yes, that’s there too). The brilliance of the presentation and choice is that even the best-known passages – like Scrooge or Dylan Thomas – emerge suddenly fresh and new.

In short, it’s a wonderful piece of theatre, magically magpie and delivered with full heart. And on the tables there are clove-stuck oranges: breathe them in deep, drink mulled wine, it’s proper Christmas.

box office 0844 264 2140 stjamestheatre.co.uk
to 23 Dec. Some matinees.
rating five   

PETITE BUT PERFECT PANTO. Oh yes it is. 

 
To start with, he’s a real kid: a young goat. Matthew Kellett, a cheery figure with furry chaps, horns and ears poking through his cowboy hat, is the favourite of economically squeezed rancher Buckaroo Dan (Joanna Marie Skillett, a girl) and pally with raunchy twerking 6ft 2 barmaid Nell (John Savournin, a bloke. Panto tradition must be respected). Evil Mumford (Bruce Graham) is out to kill Billy and ruin the ranch, assisted by his rudely named Indian slave Pocabeaver (Nichola Jolley). The Sheriff (Amy J Payne, another female, naturally) is in love with Nelly.
Actually, we all are , by the time she hits her first big number. For this is none of your yowly amplified panto-pop: all of them are opera trained singers: Royal Academy, Guildhall, Northern, D’Oyly Carte, you name it. People have been telling me for years that I ought to see Charles Court Opera at work, and at last I made it.

 
And frankly, if you want a boutique small-scale panto, this is the classy one. Though the definitive classiness of the singing (snappy lyrics in nicely borrowed tunes ranging from House of the Rising Sun to In The Navy) does not prevent them from spirited pantomimic daftness. Kellett the goat turns out to be a mean tap-dancer, there is an arresting scene where they milk a buffalo (a truly enormous one, heaven knows how they fit it in the tiny wings), Nelly gets to fling dung at us, there’s a pie fight, a singalong, everything you need.

The small children were beside themselves (though it was a bit loud for the year-old baby, these big voices don’t hold back) and the energy, musicality and disciplined daftness had adults whooping and cheering from a Islingtonian-cum-international audience. As for the barbershop quartet of puppet spirit-wolves who resolve the treasure hunt, words fail me. And there is even a fine Budget-week moral when they find it…wealth isn’t everything. Not when it’s cursed. Lovely: no wonder they sell out. Still some tickets though…

Box Office: 020 7704 6665  to 10 Jan
http://www.rosemarybranch.co.uk
rating: four  

…AND MISCHIEF THEATRE GETS IT TRIUMPHANTLY RIGHT

 
My latE Dad hated the theatre, for the kindest and most dignified of reasons. He preferred cinema : in live performance he feared that someone would get something wrong and “Show Themselves Up”. But he did like a good joke, and enjoyed silent-movie pratfalls; so I wish I could take him to see Mischief Theatre. Where with masterful precision, cast and crew make everything does go wrong for their fictional avatars; theatrical peril and pomposities alike are pitilessly defined, ambition meets its nemesis, props misbehave and sets collapse, extravagant gestures freeze into helpless stares, and jagged interpersonal relationships poke through the rubble.

I have had a soft spot for this gang ever since the short version of The Play that Goes Wrong, fresh from a drama students’ lark in a pub. It set me raving in the Times,whereon the producer Kenny Wax nipped round to check, and took it on. It lengthened, grew a bigger and even more technically tricksome set, toured, and has now settled up West in the Duchess, filled houses, covered costs, and extended well into 2015.

 
So last year I hurried to see the same writers and cast do Peter Pan Goes Wrong, with the same idea of an inept am-dram company. I gave it a reckless Christmas five, though it wasn’t perfect yet. Now here’s a return tour, with a new cast (the originals being busy in the Duchess) and a new director, Adam Meggido (of Showstoppers). And it’s better, leaner, more inventive. Authors Jonathan Sayer and Henries Shields and Lewis made a wise decision in sticking close to JM Barrie’s original text with its fey sincerity and faery whimsy, rather than attempting a panto. Indeed a good running joke is that the “Director” – Laurence Pears – who plays Hook becomes glaringly enraged whenever the audience, on nicely subtle prompts, shouts BEHIND YOU or O NO IT ISN’T. “It’s a traditional Christmas vignette! It’s not a panto” – “Oh yes it is!” we cry. The cast utter Barrie’s Wendyish lines under hideous duress as harnesses, props , scenery, and (memorably) costumes let everyone down .

This new cast is very good at doing suppressed panic with edges of miserable resignation; particularly enchanting in deliberate awfulness is Leonie Hill as Wendy, all stage-school overacting and worryingly inappropriate dance moves. Naomi Sheldon plays Mother, the maid and Tinkerbell with a sort of panicky determination, suitable to her fake biography as Annie the promoted ASM; and Cornelius Booth is the heavily bearded co-director and emergency substitute infant Michael.
Sound effects tapes played in error fill the stage with back-bedroom revelations about how much the directors despise the crocodile and only cast him because his uncle is funding it (Matt Cavendish is so nicely woebegone and put-upon that he gets a cheer every time he comes on).

 
Mischief’s trademark physical courage and skill are deployed in the botched flying scenes (including one unexpected moment of audience participation),in hairsbreadth-timed musichall head-bashes, and in the unfortunate electrocution of Tinkerbell, whose light-up tutu trails a mains lead. Some of the jokes I remembered, but under Meggido many physical ones are brand new and excellent. So is the chorus of genuine children, who relentlessly sing a jolly song during a dangling medical crisis overhead. They too get their comeuppance: Italia Conti mothers, look away…

Joy was pretty much unconfined, in one of the most technically challenging and funniest shows of Christmas. There is certainly a challenge to the touring theatres in the fearful culmination, in which the revolve -with a collapsing seesawing pirate ship – becomes unstoppable and reveals dozens of small vignettes of conflict, repair and dissolution, And am glad to report that they list a lot of understudies. Some of that stuff must really hurt. But down in the stalls, we’re very, very happy.

Guildford till Saturday; then touring!      
http://www.mischieftheatre.co.uk

rating: five   

GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES LURKS HAPPILY AT THE BACK OF THE CLASSROOM

There is nothing funnier in the world than kids swearing. This play gets us as close to that as possible without without social services getting involved.
Class 4N are a trial class. They are the fortunate guinea pigs being tested with a new
child-led style of teaching. At the head of the classroom sits Badger Be Good whose bland morality tales will guide the children painlessly into compliant adulthood. “It shouldn’t even have any capitals” remarks one of the children. The walk into the theatre is one of the first thrills. You arrive at a devastatingly realistic looking primary school classroom. The detail is outstanding. Chloe Lamford’s nudges gasps from all who enter and mutters of “shit, look!” from one patron to another.
The play, like setting, is uncanny. The story is disjointed and sinister – a form of something we think we know. Children sing, plot and tell spooky tales of what happened to the kid who ate too many super-green smoothies. Middle class parents of the world look away now.  Amanda Abbington is the prim powerhouse Sali Rayner. She is the creator of this scheme and the kind of ball-clenchingly terrifying person who is both an educator and a star of ITV1. Think Mary Portas but with ‘thinking stools’ and felt tips. She is fierce and delightfully patronising to the children but they bite backfz. “She is called Sali which is a normal name but she puts an ‘i’ at the end to make her interesting”.

However the Guardianista wares she’s come to peddle are not welcomed by the kids. The kids say they are ‘stressed’ and the headteacher talks of ‘phases’ and ‘logs’. It stinks of an educationalist with a plan.  The kids start by playing along, but eventually rise up. Their teacher Ms.Newsom (nicely frantic by Ony Uhiara) breaks down and leaves. The quasi-corporate headteacher (snappily played by Nikki Amuka-Bird) desperately tries to keep the school afloat whilst the pleasingly no-nonsense northern Mrs Bradley (charmingly brought by Corrie’s Julie Hesmondhalgh) gives the children brief freedom.

The real joy here is how horrible the child Louis can be. Or “King Louis” as he manipulates his classmates into calling him. Brilliantly played the night I went by Bobby Smalldrige (a new acting dynasty name if I ever heard one), he is calmly and terrifyingly in charge. He cuts through a terrific amount of bullshit and looks barely 6.

But although Molly Davies’ play is politically fierce, sassily spoken and expertly staged by Vicki Featherstone, it suffers from a lumpy structure. It runs for 1 hour with an extra 45 minutes weighing it down. There are far too many scenes which cloud the gems and its neat politics get lost in setup and explanation.  Faulty but joyously original. Educational policy made punchy drama – no easy feat!
Box Office: 020 7565 5000 to 20 Dec
Supported by the Jerwood Charitable  Foundation
Rating: four   

NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS:  600 YEAR OLD SEX CRIME COMES TO TRIAL

It is the year 1399. In dim light, great John of Gaunt lies on his funeral bier awaiting burial in St Paul’s. Before him Geoffrey Chaucer and his resentful amanuensis Adam Scriven conduct a quarrel. It resolves into a trial of the old man for a rape which took place nearly twenty years earlier. His patron is dead, and Adam feels that celebrity has protected the poet for too long so this is the time for a reckoning of the old sexual crime. Years before, powerful friends and money meant he got away with it Topical, eh?

 
This is a two-night curiosity, past now, but an interesting experience to share the great Inn’s “Revels” on a night they took the form of a play presented by two veterans of the form: author Garry O’Connor (who wrote the novel Chaucer’s Triumph, about the real historic case) and director Nigel Bryant. The gilded and grand Great Hall stuffed with lawyers , plus a few of us legal ignorami, plays the jury. And once we had pronounced the defendant Not Guilty, it was revealed that on the first performance the night before, he was found Guilty. Which denotes, at least, a remarkable achievement of balance.

Or possibly a different audience attitude to changing legal rules It seems that in the 14c a man could not be convicted of “Raptus” if the woman got pregnant, because it was rather prettily believed that only her enjoyment could create a child. And it does transpire in O’Connor’s version that Cecilia Chaumpaigne, the supposed victim, was having a voluntary affair with Chaucer, but was just furious that he approached her during a naked bathe at a time she knew she was fertile.  All sorts of issues, human and legal, arise out of the attempt to untangle questions of human behaviour in the least rational of its activities.

Anyway, we let him off, but the story – told by himself, his wife, Adam, and the girl (briefly joined by the corpse of Lord John reviving from the bier) has an ancient, intricate humanity which fascinates, though it is more like a radio play than a fully-staged drama. Chaucer is Ian Hogg of the RSC, giving it all the depth of likeable fallibility and self-awareness one would expect in the feeling and mischievous author of the Canterbury Tales; Scriven as Stephen Tomlin radiates a skinny furious energy, and Alice Bird’s Cecilia is his strong, sharp, self-willed lover and accuser. Sarah Neville as the scornful Mrs Chaucer is a professional, but the two others (including the roused corpse of the grandee) are lawyers.

Altogether, a play which could either grow into full theatre, or work on radio. And I like Chaucer’s prescient sideswipe at the future porn industry – “Are they who feed on filth any better than those who commit it?”